# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 34 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #1651–1700 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/34 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/33.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/35.md) ### OmniQEC: discovering practical quantum error-correcting codes by an AI scientist Authors: Ge Yan, Shanchuan Li, Pengyue Ma, Qixin Zhang, Pingchuan Ma, Jianping Wang, Min-Hsiu Hsieh, Yuxuan Du Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25865v1 Quantum error correction (QEC) is indispensable for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, discovering QEC codes that remain effective is challenging, as logical performance depends on the interplay between code structure, hardware, syndrome extraction, and decoding, which often impose competing requirements. Here we introduce OmniQEC, an efficient AI scientist for discovering QEC codes suited to deployment on modern quantum processors. OmniQEC formulates QEC design as an iterative discovery process in which an orchestrator, implemented by advanced large language models (LLMs), coordinates code generation, code-level screening, syndrome-extraction synthesis, and decoder-based circuit evaluation. At its core, OmniQEC combines a self-evolving reasoning mechanism with a slow--fast synergistic workflow: a fast loop explores candidates using inexpensive code-level proxies, whereas a slow loop performs physically grounded circuit-level evaluation and feeds the resulting evidence back into the search. We evaluate OmniQEC across four qLDPC construction families, three LLM backends, and $14$ total-physical-qubit budgets per backend. The discovered codes show steadily improving logical-error suppression with increasing physical-qubit budgets and outperform the BB codes with $(\!(72,12,6)\!)$ and $(\!(144,12,12)\!)$ under complete-implementation budgets of 98 and 240 physical qubits, respectively. The discovered codes are hardware-friendly and may be of independent interest for practical QEC implementation. These findings pave the way towards LLM-assisted QEC discovery grounded in physically informed code--circuit--decoder co-design. --- ### DRIFT: Direct-Recursive Intervention-Conditioned Forecasting of ICU Physiological Trajectories Authors: Weixin Liu, Juming Xiong, Congning Ni, Yanfan Zhu, Xingtao Lin, Bradley A. Malin, Zhijun Yin Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25864v1 Many time-series forecasts depend not only on prior observations but also on actions specified during the forecast period. In intensive care units (ICUs), future vital signs and laboratory values are influenced by treatments such as vasopressors. However, models that predict the full future sequence all at once make little use of these treatments, whereas autoregressive models can accumulate errors. We introduce DRIFT, a hybrid framework in which a direct model produces the primary forecast and a recursive, action-conditioned model contributes constrained corrections. We evaluate DRIFT on 6,046 admissions from MIMIC-IV and 8,345 admissions from eICU-CRD. Averaged across the 8-, 24-, and 48-hour forecast endpoints, DRIFT reduces mean absolute error for mean arterial pressure (MAP) by 0.673% relative to an action-conditioned Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT-action) on MIMIC-IV and achieves the lowest corresponding error among the compared models on eICU-CRD. Although the overall accuracy improvement is modest, a MIMIC-IV audit restricted to windows in which the supplied treatment sequence was altered showed that DRIFT achieved lower observed-target MAP error than TFT-action at 8 and 24 hours. Treatment-sequence alteration increased DRIFT's MAP error by 0.21-0.26 mmHg more than it increased TFT-action's error, with prediction changes occurring primarily after the supplied paths diverged. In a separate robustness experiment, the MAP advantage persisted under three shared checkpoint-selection rules emphasizing overall endpoint error, MAP error, or both equally. --- ### Open-Ended CT Volume Segmentation with Weak Supervision from Language Authors: Sanjay Subramanian, Junwei Yu, Zirui Wang, Rohil Malpani, Maggie Chung, Adam Yala, Dan Klein, Trevor Darrell Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25860v1 We introduce a method for training a text-conditioned segmentation model for CT scans, which combines voxel-level supervision with coarse but scalable slice-level supervision from reports. We extract, from a large database of scan-report pairs, descriptions of findings with indices of slices where those findings occur. We then finetune a general-purpose 2D image segmentation model, SAM3, with standard segmentation losses from strongly labeled data and with a slice-level classification loss from the extracted weak supervision. Our results on the ReXGroundingCT dataset illustrate that this strategy improves the segmentation dice score: from an 8% relative gain when there are 1000 fully labeled volumes to 22% when there are 250 fully labeled volumes. --- ### Shieldstral Authors: Antonia Calvi, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Giada Pistilli, Guillaume Lample, Maarten Buyl, Maximilian Augustin, Maximilian Müller, Pierre Stock, Tom Bewley, Wassim Bouaziz, Yimu Pan, Abdelaziz Bounhar et al. Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25857v2 We introduce Shieldstral, a 3B-parameter policy-adaptive multimodal safety classifier that matches or outperforms models nearly 7$\times$ its size on text safety benchmarks and sets a new state of the art on multimodal safety classification. Shieldstral formulates content moderation as a binary question-answering task. This simple formulation unifies diverse moderation tasks into a single yes/no problem, enabling heterogeneous safety datasets with divergent taxonomies to be consolidated under one training framework. We present the data construction recipe, covering curation and generation of approximately 54.1M samples and a fine-grained evaluation set to evaluate policy adaptability. Together, these enable a small adaptive model to match or outperform much larger models. --- ### HiSkill: Empowering LLM Agents with Hierarchical Skill Graphs Authors: Yu Hao, Jinxuan Cai, Qi Zhang, Yawen Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Chuan Shi, Cheng Yang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25853v1 Skills have become an important abstraction for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to reuse past experience in long-horizon interactive tasks. However, existing trajectory-to-skill methods often produce flat collections of high-level textual skills that are stored and retrieved independently, leaving skill relations underutilized and maintaining a gap between high-level skills and executable actions. In this paper, we propose HiSkill, a hierarchical skill graph framework that organizes interaction trajectories into a directed graph with skill nodes, AtomicOp nodes, and typed edges. Specifically, the graph connects reusable high-level skills with executable action templates, while also capturing decomposition, temporal transition, compatibility, support, and recovery relations among them. At inference time, HiSkill retrieves a compact task-relevant subgraph and performs subgraph-guided task execution, where a symbolic task state, an active skill, and the retrieved subgraph guide the LLM agent to switch skills, select AtomicOps, and ground executable actions iteratively. Experiments on three interactive environments show that HiSkill outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while reducing inference token consumption, demonstrating the effectiveness of bridging high-level skills and executable action grounding through a hierarchical skill graph. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/HiSkill. --- ### AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decoding Authors: Hong Liu, Rui Cen, Junhan Shi, Guangshuo Qin, Jiebin Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Runzhi Fan, Guoliang Zhao, Ruobing Xie, Kai Zhang, Song Liu, Guanghua Yu et al. Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25852v2 Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference without changing the target distribution, but no single drafting structure performs best across real-world workloads. Autoregressive multi-token prediction (MTP) is a lightweight, stable proposal mechanism, whereas block-parallel diffusion amortizes drafting latency over much longer candidate sequences; the better choice depends strongly on the output distribution. We present AngelSpec, a unified training framework for MTP and block-parallel speculative decoding that addresses this heterogeneity at three levels. At the training level, rather than fitting one universal drafter to a uniform data mixture, we co-specialize structure and data: the MTP drafter is trained on diverse conversational data for high-entropy open-ended chat, and the block-diffusion drafter on code and mathematics data for longer predictable continuations. At the architecture level, we propose DFly, a block-diffusion framework combining a hybrid target-conditioning backbone with a predecessor-conditioned autoregressive head, improving target-feature utilization and intra-block dependency modeling while keeping generation parallel. At the inference level, both acceptance length and verification cost vary with domain, request, online load, and hardware, so DFly treats verification as a shared batch-level resource: it reallocates compute toward high-confidence prefixes across requests and combines expected utility with a profiled cost model to adapt verification depth online. Across the Hy3 series, DFly raises the average accepted length on Hy3-A21B by roughly 30% and attains the highest average throughput at every tested concurrency from 4 to 64, a 1.98-2.40x speedup over autoregressive decoding and 10.5-11.8% higher throughput than DFlash. We release AngelSpec to support training and extending these methods. --- ### Adversarial Deepfake Generation and an Investigation of Purification-Based Adversarial Detection Authors: Junghyun Kim, Seunghyun Kim, Jiyoung Woo Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25842v1 This paper describes the participation of team "Go To Germany" in the ImageCLEF 2026 Deepfake Detection and Generation Task. For the image generation task, we employ FLUX.1-dev with PuLID for identity-preserving face synthesis, combined with a multi-model PGD adversarial attack targeting 12 detectors simultaneously (DiffJPEG-in-loop, MI/DI/EoT, adaptive weighting, two-stage warm-start). Our approach achieved 90% evasion against organizer detectors and 57.6% against participant detectors, with a final generation score of 0.4170. For the image detection task, we combine two complementary detectors - SigLIP+DINOv2 for AI-generated images and GenD-DINOv3 for face manipulations - in a max-probability ensemble, achieving 99.4% accuracy on baseline deepfakes but suffering from high false-positive rates on real images, resulting in a final detection score of 0.6986. Beyond the official submission, we conducted a self-initiated investigation of purification-based adversarial detection, comparing three families of detection signals across six detectors that share a CLIP ViT-L/14 backbone. We find that raw $|Δ\text{logit}|$ under median-3 purification, applied through the EFFORT detector, separates adversarial inputs from clean inputs with AUROC 0.81-0.98 across four adversarial source types - a finding that refutes the simple backbone-preservation hypothesis and exposes a sharp JPEG-quality cliff at Q70 where the signal collapses. --- ### Distributed Constraint Optimization via Online Learning and Iterative Pricing with Application to Large-Scale Satellite Scheduling Authors: Itai Zilberstein, Pranav Rajbhandari, Steve Chien, Tuomas Sandholm Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25835v1 Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) provide a popular framework for distributed decision making under limited communication, but many real-world instances are too large to solve monolithically. We address this challenge from two complementary directions. We revisit the connection between DCOPs and potential games, and adapt modern online learning algorithms for equilibrium finding to DCOPs. We show that these algorithms are competitive with representative incomplete DCOP algorithms. We then turn to decomposition frameworks for large-scale DCOPs, motivated by large-scale decentralized satellite scheduling. We propose a new framework that separates a DCOP into two interacting subproblems: a high-level meta-DCOP for task allocation, and independent local optimization problems for scheduling. To couple the two levels, we develop a novel iterative pricing method that updates the meta-level utilities using feedback from the local optimizers. Combining our online learning methods with our iterative pricing framework, we obtain near-optimal performance on real-world decentralized satellite scheduling problem instances, fulfilling over 99% of observation requests compared with 87% for state-of-the-art baselines. --- ### Lowering the implementation barrier of neutral-atom quantum computing with agentic workflows Authors: Constantin Dalyac, Alexandre Dauphin, Loïc Henriet, Christophe Jurczak Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: quant-ph, cond-mat.quant-gas, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25834v1 Quantum computers are moving from research laboratories to industrial machines accessible via the cloud and integrated into high-performance computing facilities. However, translating theoretical quantum protocols into hardware experiments remains a major bottleneck, requiring expertise across protocol design, compilation, simulation, and cloud execution. Here, we introduce an agentic workflow that automates this pipeline on neutral-atom quantum processors (here two Pasqal QPUs available on the cloud) while keeping the researcher in the loop for critical validation. In three case studies from many-body physics and optimization, the agent went from published paper or patent to a QPU campaign run overnight. In particular, human intervention was crucial to ensure scientific validity: the agent selected an inadequate observable in one experiment and constructed a plausible but incorrect hardware diagnosis in another, with both failures detected only through domain-expert review. Finally, we use a second agent to classify a corpus of 633 Rydberg-array arXiv papers and show that nearly half are implementable on present-day QPUs while identifying specific hardware upgrades needed for the rest. Together, these results demonstrate that agentic workflows provide a practical bridge between theoretical ideas and physical hardware, opening quantum experimentation to a much broader scientific community. --- ### Beyond Static Costs: Learning-Dynamics Aware Loss Functions for Long-Tailed Classification Authors: Varad Shinde, Nikhil Kumar Shrey, Magesh Rajasekaran, Md Saiful Islam Sajol, Harshil Bhargava, Subhajit Sidanta, Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Yimin Zhu Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25830v1 Deep learning models in computer vision face significant challenges when trained on long-tailed datasets, where a few majority classes dominate while many minority classes are severely underrepresented. Such imbalances frequently arise in real-world scenarios such as rare species recognition, manufacturing fault detection, and medical image understanding, leading to biased models that underperform on tail classes. Existing reweighting methods typically rely on static class frequencies to penalize the model, ignoring the dynamic nature of how effectively a network actually learns a class over time. We address this by introducing a novel Learning-Dynamics Aware Loss (LDAL) function that shifts the focus from static sample counts to dynamic learning progress. LDAL framework adjusts class weights continuously by leveraging: (i) the strength of learned feature representations (semantic scale), (ii) the intrinsic learning difficulty of each class, measured via the Shannon entropy of its predictions, and (iii) an inter-epoch regularizer term that tracks prediction shifts between consecutive epochs to stabilize training and avoid local minima. LDAL is purely a objective function which incurs negligible computational overhead while adapting to the feature learning of the model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly surpasses state-of-the-art reweighting loss functions, providing an optimal trade-off between accuracy and generalizability. The source code is available at https://github.com/sdm2026/ldal --- ### Prototype Adaptation for Zero-Shot sEMG Movement Classification Authors: Rui Liu, Benjamin Paassen Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25826v1 Surface electromyography (sEMG) enables the control of prostheses, allowing upper-limb amputees to re-gain some hand function. Most current research focuses on recognizing basic movements for prosthesis control. However, in most daily activities, such as opening a door, combined movements are essential. However, collecting training data for all possible combined movements is time-consuming and requires re-training of the model for any new combination. We propose two novel recognition approaches, Compositional Prototype Interpolation (CPI) and Synthetic Adaptation for Prototypes (SAP), that enable zero-shot learning of combined, novel and unseen movements in Prototype Networks after training only with basic movements. Our methods rest on a linear interpolation assumption in the embedding space, which we study by inspecting the geometry of combined motions in signal and embedding space. In experiments on the NearLab and NinaPro DB3 data sets as well as our newly recorded BasCom dataset, our proposed SAP outperforms prior zero-shot learning methods with accuracy improvements on combined movements of more than 20%. This advantage is maintained in online inference experiments in a user study. --- ### Food Image Segmentation with LLM-Derived Ingredient Labels and Multimodal Fusion Authors: Jui-Feng Chi, Wei-Ta Chu, Sheng-Long Lin Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25820v1 Food image segmentation plays a vital role in health-related applications such as nutrition tracking and personalized health monitoring. However, existing models often underperform on visually similar ingredients and rare food categories. To address this issue, we propose two plug-and-play multimodal modules that enhance the segmentation performance by leveraging ingredient labels inferred from food images using large language models (LLMs). The first module, called LIM-F (Language Injection Module for Features), is designed to pair with any image encoder that produces multi-layer outputs (e.g., Swin Transformer), while the second module, LIM-Q (Language Injection Module for Queries), targets Mask2Former-style Transformer-based decoders. Both modules enable training without the need for pre-aligning images with text by directly injecting semantic ingredient information into the visual analysis pipeline. On the FoodSeg103 benchmark, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, integrating LIM-Q into the Mask2Former decoder with a Swin-L image encoder yields a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 55.0. LIM-F also demonstrates strong generalization and competitive performance, reaching an mIoU of 54.4 under the same model (Swin-L+Mask2Former). Furthermore, its applicability extends beyond Transformer-based decoders, as evidenced by an improvement from 47.7 to 49.8 mIoU when integrated into a CNN-based architecture. Notably, the improved segmentation accuracy is achieved with only a moderate (at most 3.8 GB) increase in the GPU memory consumption during training. Thus, the proposed approach offers a practical and scalable solution for fine-grained food understanding. --- ### SepPrune:A Separator-based Pruning Framework for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Yuchen Wang, Qihui Zhu, Yang Liu, Xiaoyan Sun, Siying Wu Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25818v1 Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as Qwen2.5-VL and InternVL3, generate large numbers of vision tokens for high-resolution inputs, leading to substantial computational cost. Existing vision token pruning methods either depend on cross-modal attention and cannot prune before the prefill stage, or rely on diversity estimation with high computational overhead. We observe that attention scores from both vision and text tokens peak at modality separator tokens, suggesting that these separators bridge the two modalities. Based on this observation, we propose SepPrune, an efficient, training-free, plug-and-play pruning method that uses the separator token as a unified query to rank and select informative vision tokens. SepPrune reuses the LLM's built-in projection parameters and requires no architectural changes. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that SepPrune achieves state-of-the-art performance, retaining 96.3% of the original accuracy while removing 80.2% of vision tokens. --- ### Speculate While You Reason: Teaching Agents to Predict Their Next Tool Call via Joint Agent-Speculator RL Authors: Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Li An, Rohit Jain, Gungor Polatkan, Siyu Zhu, Shiyu Chang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25816v1 Large language model agents often spend substantial wall-clock time waiting for tool call results. Tool-call speculation can hide this latency by predicting and pre-executing an agent's next tool call if the prediction matches the agent's eventual tool call, but existing speculators are typically separate draft models or cached traces that are poorly aligned with the deployed agent's own behavior. We identify this speculator-agent gap and show that the target agent itself is a strong next-call speculator. This points to a simpler design: unifying the agent and speculator within the same model. In this paper, we introduce the self-speculating agent, a single model that both solves tasks in agent mode and predicts its next tool call from partial trajectories in speculator mode, fully reusing prefix KV cache. To enable this dual-mode agent without degrading performance, we propose a joint agent-speculator reinforcement learning method, which derives speculation targets from the agent's own rollouts and alternates agent and speculator updates. Across agentic search QA and conversational tool-use agentic tasks, our method improves average next tool-call Hit@1 from 44.1 to 61.2 for Qwen3-4B and from 48.9 to 66.3 for Qwen3.5-4B, while preserving agent task success. --- ### Freq-RemoteVAR: Next-Frequency Autoregressive Modeling for Remote Sensing Change Detection Authors: Luqi Gong, Rui Xu, Yue Chen, Chao Li, Jingqi Hong, Xuefeng Zhao Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25815v1 Remote sensing change detection aims to identify land-cover changes from bi-temporal images. Most existing methods follow a one-shot dense prediction paradigm, directly regressing a change mask from fused features. However, such approaches overlook the intrinsic frequency characteristics of change patterns. We propose Freq-RemoteVAR, a frequency autoregressive framework that reformulates change detection as a structured generation problem in the frequency domain. Instead of predicting the change mask in a single step, we introduce a next-frequency prediction paradigm, where change information is progressively generated from coarse to fine. We design a frequency-aware mask tokenization strategy that decomposes change supervision into multi-frequency token targets via Fourier transformation and quantization. We develop a Frequency VAR Transformer, which performs causal autoregressive modeling over frequency tokens. The model starts from learned mask queries and progressively predicts frequency-level tokens conditioned on previously generated tokens and bi-temporal image features, effectively capturing long-range dependencies across frequency scales. We introduce Scale-Aligned RoPE Cross Attention (SRCA) module, which aligns frequency-domain mask queries with spatial-domain bi-temporal features under a unified coordinate system, enhancing spatial-frequency consistency during generation. We propose a Change-quality Control module that adaptively modulates the generation process through dynamic normalization, attention biasing, and spatial offset adjustment, thereby suppressing pseudo-change responses and improving robustness. Extensive experiments on CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD demonstrate that Freq-RemoteVAR consistently outperforms existing methods, particularly in challenging scenarios with complex appearance variations and noisy disturbances. --- ### Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Arabic Language Models Authors: Anwar Alajmi, Ayed Salman, Imtiaz Ahmad Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25814v1 The emergence of the recent outstanding capabilities of Arabic Language Models has opened doors for exposing their vulnerabilities. One of the major security risks associated with such Natural Language Processing models is adversarial attacks. These attacks can deceive the model into the wrong prediction, raising critical model security and safety concerns. This study aims to assess the robustness of five state-of-the-art Arabic Language Models under a distinct set of Arabic adversarial attacks applied at various levels of granularity and using different example generation strategies. We also explore a defense technique based on adversarial training to enhance model robustness. The results show that insertion of diacritics can reduce the accuracy of some models by 92% while maintaining a low perturbation distance. For word-level attacks, manipulating Arabic conjunctions preserves high semantic similarity scores, low perturbation distance, and leads to an accuracy degradation of up to 58%. For sentence-level attacks, paraphrasing proves its effectiveness by an average reduction of 76% in the victim models' performance. While adversarial training improves overall resilience, with MARBERT being the most robust and AraBERT showing the greatest relative gains, challenges persist, particularly against character-level noise. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of current defense strategies in morphologically rich languages like Arabic. --- ### Explicit Layer Modeling for Video Object Insertion and Video Layer Decomposition Authors: Kyujin Han, Seungjoo Shin, Sunghyun Cho Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25802v3 Most video editing systems still lack explicit layered video representations, limiting realistic compositing, object reuse, and consistent manipulation. This limitation is particularly evident in video object insertion and video layer decomposition, where existing methods lack direct supervision for foreground layers that capture both objects and their associated visual effects. We introduce TriLayer, a triplet video dataset containing aligned composite--background--foreground videos, where the foreground layers include both object appearance and associated visual effects. With aligned triplet supervision, TriLayer enables explicit supervised learning of layered video representations for the first time. Building on this dataset, we propose DBL-Diffusion, a dual-branch diffusion framework that jointly models scene-level RGB content and RGBA foreground layers through cross-branch interaction during denoising. We instantiate the framework in two tasks: DBL-Insert for layered object insertion, which generates explicit RGBA layers for realistic compositing and flexible post-editing, and DBL-Decompose for video layer decomposition, which recovers foreground and background layers using triplet supervision. Experiments demonstrate that explicit layer modeling substantially improves both insertion fidelity and decomposition quality. --- ### Explicit Layer Modeling for Video Object Insertion and Layer Decomposition Authors: Kyujin Han, Seungjoo Shin, Sunghyun Cho Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25802v2 Most video editing systems still lack explicit layered video representations, limiting their ability to perform realistic compositing, object reuse, and consistent manipulation. This limitation is especially pronounced in video object insertion and video layer decomposition, where existing methods rely on implicit inference or per-scene optimization due to the absence of explicit foreground-layer supervision. We introduce TriLayer, a large-scale triplet video dataset containing aligned composite, background, and foreground videos, where the foreground layers include both object appearance and associated visual effects. This explicit supervision enables models to learn layered video representations directly rather than inferring them implicitly. Building on this dataset, we propose DBL-Diffusion, a dual-branch diffusion framework that jointly models RGB composites and RGBA foreground layers through shared denoising and cross-branch interaction. We instantiate the framework in two tasks: DBL-Insert for layered object insertion, which generates explicit RGBA layers for realistic compositing and flexible post-editing, and DBL-Decompose for video layer decomposition, which recovers foreground and background layers using triplet supervision. Experiments demonstrate that explicit layer modeling substantially improves both insertion fidelity and decomposition quality. --- ### Fine-Grained Food Image Understanding via Target-Aware Data Alignment Authors: Jui-Feng Chi, Wei-Lun Chu, Bruce Coburn, Jinge Ma, Fengqing Zhu Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25794v1 Fine-grained food visual--semantic understanding requires models to capture subtle distinctions across ingredients, cooking methods, doneness, color, texture, and plate composition. Although CLIP-style vision-language models provide a natural framework for this task, their effectiveness is limited when training relies on heterogeneous web-collected image--text pairs. Such data often exhibit a web-to-target domain gap and cross-modal misalignment, where images differ from the target distribution and captions are noisy, multilingual, or weakly grounded in visual content. We propose a data-centric multimodal alignment method for fine-grained food description and recognition. Our method first performs target-aware data selection to identify visually relevant training subsets, then applies VLM-based caption refinement to generate visually grounded, target-style descriptions. Using these curated image--caption pairs, we train complementary CLIP-style retrieval experts and further combine their decisions through a hierarchical VLM-assisted multi-expert decision-level fusion strategy that invokes the VLM only when experts disagree. Experiments show that our data refinement strategy significantly improves retrieval performance over naive web supervision, with VLM-based caption refinement alone yielding an average performance gain of approximately 19%. Our full method also achieves more than twice the retrieval score of pure VLM-based retrieval while remaining substantially more efficient. --- ### FLASH: Efficient Impact Fall Detection with Unified Hypergraph State-Space Model Authors: Tresor Y. Koffi, Youssef Mourchid, Yohan Dupuis Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25791v1 Falls represent a critical public health challenge, and accurate detection of the impact moment when an individual hits the ground is crucial for timely intervention. Existing skeleton-based methods rely on graph neural networks modeling only pairwise joint connections, failing to capture multi-joint coordination characteristic of fall impacts, while transformer-based temporal models suffer from quadratic complexity limiting real-time deployment. We propose FLASH, a novel framework integrating single-matrix hypergraph representations with Mamba's selective state-space models through adaptive feedback mechanisms for efficient impact detection. Our approach constructs biomechanically-grounded hyperedges to model functional joint coordination while leveraging Mamba's linear-time complexity to capture temporal dynamics. Experiments on UP-Fall and UMAFall datasets demonstrate that FLASH achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with real-time inference capability and strong zero-shot cross-dataset generalization, while significantly reducing computational cost compared to dual-representation and transformer-based methods. The model provides interpretable feedback through learned attention patterns aligned with biomechanical principles. Code is available at https://github.com/Tresor-Koffi/FLASH-Impact-Fall-Detection. --- ### SpectONet: A Physics-Guided Spectral Deep Operator Network for Euler-Bernoulli Beam Dynamics Authors: Shivani Saini, Ramesh Kumar Vats, Arup Kumar Sahoo Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25790v1 This paper proposes a novel physics-guided spectral deep operator network, termed SpectONet, for solving Euler-Bernoulli beam (EBB) vibration problems. The proposed framework integrates the operator-learning capability of DeepONet with physics-informed constraints and Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto (CGL) sensor placement. Unlike conventional DeepONet frameworks, which commonly employ uniformly distributed sensors, SpectONet uses nonuniform spectral sensor locations with a higher concentration of points near the domain boundaries. This sampling strategy improves the finite-dimensional representation of boundary-sensitive structural responses while requiring only a limited number of branch-network inputs. The governing beam equation, together with the associated initial and boundary conditions, incorporated into the training objective to promote physically consistent and generalizable predictions. Numerical experiments on three synthetic EBB vibration problems and a real-world bridge vibration dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Comparisons with strong baselines such as, Vanilla DeepONet, PI-DeepONet, PINN, and CNN-UNet show that SpectONet consistently achieves lower prediction errors across all considered evaluation metrics. In particular, SpectONet achieves at least \(64\%\) improvement over the considered baseline models across the three synthetic problems and at least \(37\%\) for the real-world problems. These results demonstrate that SpectONet provides an accurate, computationally efficient, and physically consistent operator-learning framework for structural vibration analysis. --- ### Towards Faithful Sentimental Image Captioning via Evidence-Aware Multi-Agent Reasoning Authors: Tiecheng Cai, Zexian Yang, Chao Chen, Shanshan Lin, Xiangwen Liao Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25789v1 Sentimental Image Captioning (SIC) requires balancing emotional expression with visual fidelity. Existing methods often struggle with this trade-off, leading to hallucinations due to insufficient local grounding and the lack of sentimental verification mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose SEA-Cap, a Sentiment-Evidence-Aware Multi-Agent System for faithful and evidence-grounded sentimental image captioning. SEA-Cap incorporates a Sentiment Evidence Miner that extracts structured, local affective cues to shift sentiment control from global attributes to verifiable object-level evidence. Leveraging this evidence, our framework orchestrates a collaborative workflow where a Generator, Hallucination Checker, and Arbitrator iteratively refine captions via a shared blackboard. By explicitly auditing generated content against mined visual evidence, SEA-Cap ensures both sentiment accuracy and factual consistency. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that SEA-Cap effectively mitigates hallucinations and achieves state-of-the-art performance. --- ### GeoMFD: Continual Drone-View Geo-Localization with Geometry-Aware Adapter and Margin-Field Distillation Authors: Zhongwei Chen, Hai-jun Rong, Tao Zhang, Xianfeng Nie, Xiangbao Zhang, Guoqi Li, Zhao-Xu Yang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25788v1 Existing drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) methods are mainly developed under a static training paradigm, where models are optimized for fixed environments with all training data available in advance. However, this paradigm is difficult to extend to real-world deployment, where drones may encounter diverse environments and require multiple environment-specific models, resulting in additional storage and model-selection costs. Directly adapting a single model to new environments also risks distorting previously learned cross-view embedding geometry and causing forgetting. To address these challenges, we formalize the continual drone-view geo-localization (C-DVGL) setting and propose GeoMFD, a geometry-aware continual adaptation method for DVGL. GeoMFD combines a cold-start bootstrapping strategy (CBS), a geometry-aware adapter (Geo-Adapter), and margin-field distillation (MFD) to balance adaptation and cross-view geometry preservation. CBS initializes a stable embedding space, Geo-Adapter enables environment adaptation through controlled residual corrections, and MFD preserves similarity margins between positive pairs and hard negatives to alleviate cross-view geometry forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoMFD effectively mitigates forgetting and achieves competitive performance with environment-specific DVGL methods using a single continuously updated model. --- ### Variance-Reduced Conditional Gradient Methods under Markovian Sampling for Nonconvex Composite Optimization Authors: Zhaojun Peng Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25785v1 We study stochastic composite nonconvex optimization over a compact convex set when gradient samples arrive along a single trajectory of a fixed ergodic Markov chain. Existing single-trajectory variance-reduction theory covers smooth unconstrained objectives; we address the projection-free composite setting using the generalized Frank-Wolfe gap. We propose MC-ALFCG, which combines a momentum conditional-gradient method with coupled capped multilevel Monte Carlo estimation and per-iteration clipping. The deepest nested average uses consecutive states from the same trajectory, yielding conditional bias $O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}/T)$ uniformly over the starting state, while coupling controls the gradient-difference second moment through the iterate displacement. Clipping enforces the pathwise bounds needed by the adaptive analysis. We reduce the Markovian recursion to its independent-sampling counterpart under $σ^2\mapsto 2ΛG_σ^2$ and $L^2\mapsto 2ΛL^2$, where $Λ=O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}\log T)$. For positive centered noise, the tuned method achieves expected sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2G_σ+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^{5/2}G_σ^2)\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^5\varepsilon^{-2})$. The exactly noiseless specialization achieves $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ with mixing-time-free constants, while a mixing-time-oblivious variant achieves $\widetilde{O}(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^6\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^3\varepsilon^{-2})$. All guarantees are in expectation under a fixed transition kernel. Controlled numerical studies examine dependence sensitivity, a nonconvex composite instance, and clipping behavior. --- ### A Unified Benchmark and Modality-Adaptive Network for Day-and-Night Drone-View Geo-Localization Authors: Songtianhao Xu, Zhongwei Chen, Zhao-Xu Yang, Weifeng Wang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25778v1 Most existing drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) benchmarks contain drone imagery captured under a single illumination condition and lack geographically aligned visible drone images, infrared drone images, and satellite images from the same locations. To evaluate the generalization capability of DVGL methods under challenging illumination conditions, some methods train models on a visible benchmark and test them on an independent infrared benchmark. This protocol essentially constitutes transfer between datasets, which makes it difficult to systematically evaluate DVGL across daytime and nighttime conditions within a unified benchmark. To address this limitation, we construct IRCHN,a real-world DVGL benchmark designed for localization across different illumination conditions. IRCHN contains 26,460 images collected from 8,820 geographic locations across four representative scene categories, including farmland, coastline, forest, and urban areas. Each location provides one visible drone image, one infrared drone image, and one corresponding satellite image, which enables unified evaluation of DVGL methods across different illumination conditions and sensing modalities. We further propose the Modality-Adaptive State-Space Transport Relation Network (MASTR-Net), a DVGL framework tailored to localization under varying illumination conditions. MASTR-Net integrates modality-adaptive feature enhancement, bidirectional selective state-space relation modeling, and soft optimal transport relation alignment to jointly reduce modality gaps and view-induced structural discrepancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MASTR-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on IRCHN for localization under varying illumination conditions and achieves competitive performance on two infrared benchmarks, IR-VL328 and CVGL-RGBT. Code: https://github.com/SongtianhaoXu/MASTR-Net --- ### WorkSurface-Bench: Benchmarking Enterprise Agents on Multi-Surface Knowledge Routing Authors: Hao Liang, Meiyi Qiang, Sizhe Qiu, Linzhuang Sun, Wentao Zhang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25765v1 Enterprise agents often need to integrate heterogeneous knowledge sources: documents for narrative facts, tables for computation, and dependency graphs for file relationships. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate retrieval or tool use without distinguishing whether an agent first selects the appropriate knowledge sources. We introduce WorkSurface-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating this capability as surface routing. It contains 1,151 atomic tasks derived from persona-scoped Workspace-Bench-Lite workspaces, spanning document, table, graph, and cross-surface questions. Its reference answers are auditable: table answers are reproduced through executed DuckDB queries, document answers are grounded in verified text spans, and graph answers are traced to source dependency annotations. We evaluate four model backbones across six controlled agent settings, yielding 27,624 protocol-error-free trajectories. Under gold-constrained tool access, agents achieve 98.7-99.8 Route F1, while Answer remains only 56.1-75.3 percent, showing that correct surface selection is necessary but insufficient for task completion. Matched interventions further show that surface hints improve Answer for three of four models, whereas removing irrelevant tools primarily improves routing and efficiency. In an independent three-annotator audit, all 200 sampled tasks pass all six quality criteria by majority vote, with 192 receiving unanimous judgments on every criterion. We release the dataset, construction pipeline, scoring code, and agent harness at https://github.com/haolpku/WorkSurface-Bench. --- ### WALoMA: A Multitask Wireless Foundation Model via Adaptive Low-Rank Masked Autoencoders Authors: Madi Makin, Asmaa Abdallah, Abdulkadir Celik, Ahmed M. Eltawil Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25763v1 This paper proposes a multitask wireless foundation model via adaptive low-rank masked autoencoders (WALoMA), a unified multi-task foundation model for sixth-generation (6G) wireless physical layer architectures, to address the limitations of specialized, task-specific deep learning models and the practical challenge of scarce labeled wireless datasets. By leveraging concepts inspired by foundation models, the proposed framework adopts a masked autoencoder (MAE) paradigm to learn from unlabeled channel data, to significantly reduce reliance on extensive annotations. The model treats wireless channel state information (CSI) as a universal modality and learns transferable representations through self-supervised channel reconstruction. Key architectural novelties include the use of 2D positional encoding (PE) to explicitly preserve the spatial-frequency relationships between antennas and subcarriers, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The framework's efficacy is demonstrated across five downstream tasks, achieving individual scores of 96.47\% for LoS/NLoS classification, 80.45\% for beam prediction, 85.78\% for channel interpolation, 99.12\% for channel estimation, and 77.18\% for channel charting. Consequently, numerical results show that the proposed model achieves a composite score of 87.80\%, significantly outperforming the 59.90\% achieved by the large wireless model (LWM) baseline while training an average of only 14.68\% of total parameters, and maintaining strong performance even under extremely limited labeled data conditions. --- ### An Embarrassingly Simple Rule-based Visiting Circulation Approach to Trip Destination Prediction Authors: Eng-Shen Tu, Yong-Han Chen, En-Chao Liu, Hao-Yun Keng, Cheng-Te Li Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25751v1 In this paper, we propose the Rule-based Visiting Circulation (RVC) model in tackling the challenge in the IEEE Big Data Cup 2022: Trip Destination Prediction. Given trips containing travel information, personal attributes, origin zones, and their features in the training metropolitan areas, the task is to predict the destination of every trip in a targeted metropolitan area whose destinations are not given at all at the training stage. We highlight the challenges in this destination prediction task -- having no knowledge of the destinations in the targeted metropolitan area. We provide insights from the datasets, in which revisiting behaviors and the relationships between origins and destinations play a crucial role in individuals' trips. Hence, we design a simple but comprehensive method, rule-based visiting circulation, which directly utilizes the origin information and individuals' trip behaviors to determine the destinations in the targeted metropolitan area, i.e., requiring no learning from the four training areas. Experimental results on both offline evaluation and leaderboard submission consistently exhibit the proposed RVC can significantly outperform supervised learning methods and other heuristics. The RVC method eventually brings us to second place in the competition leaderboard. --- ### Detecting CSAM Text-to-Image LoRAs From Weights Authors: David Demitri Africa, Cate Heine, Nadine Staes-Polet, Kimberly Mai Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25750v1 Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning has made it cheap and easy to customize open-weight image generation models for specific tasks, including the production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Existing moderation relies on metadata or generated outputs, but metadata can be deceptive and generating outputs may itself be unacceptable or illegal. We show that a safer signal lives in the weights. The top-left singular vectors of a LoRA's updates form a compact, inference-free fingerprint ($u_1$) of its strongest learned change. Using human-subject age as a benign proxy for CSAM, we find that $u_1$ identifies what a LoRA was trained on, generalizes across base models, and abstains on unrelated benign content. The signal is robust to additive weight noise, rescaling, and precision reduction. These results indicate that harmful LoRAs could be screened directly from their weights without relying on metadata or generating harmful outputs. --- ### Loss Invariance Determines What Concept Layers Encode: Volume Grounding in Echocardiography Authors: Hyunkyung Han, Min Jung Kim Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25748v1 Objective: Concept bottleneck models route prediction through interpretable intermediate variables, and their validity is normally judged by how accurately those variables are predicted. We ask whether that judgement is sufficient, using left ventricular volumes as the concepts underlying ejection fraction estimation from echocardiographic video. Methods: A video transformer encoder was trained on a publicly available echocardiography dataset. End-systolic and end-diastolic volumes formed a concept layer from which ejection fraction was computed analytically, with no residual path to the output. We compared training under an ejection fraction objective alone against training with additional supervision of the volumes in millilitres, and evaluated both on 1276 held-out studies. Results: The concept bottleneck did not increase ejection fraction error relative to direct regression, at 6.89 against 7.13 mean absolute error. Without volume supervision, however, the spread of predicted volumes collapsed to 0.1 millilitres against reference spreads of 35.7 and 45.7 millilitres, while correlation was partly preserved. We show that this follows from an invariance property of the objective: ejection fraction is a ratio and is unchanged when both volumes are rescaled, so the loss determines the concept layer only up to scale. Supervision in absolute units reduced volume error from 89.8 to 25.8 millilitres at a cost of 0.4 in ejection fraction error. Conclusion: Concept accuracy alone can conceal a concept layer that carries no physical scale. Significance: Interpretable intermediate variables in clinical models should be validated against the invariance structure of the training objective, not only against prediction accuracy. --- ### Image Quality Dependent Degradation for AI Systems Authors: Yannick Kees, Elena Hoemann, Frank Köster, Sven Hallerbach Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25736v1 Perception is one of the primary applications where neural networks outperform conventional algorithms. One example is AI systems for automated driving, which can detect pedestrians based on image data and avoid them accordingly. A substantial challenge with these AI systems is that their output depends heavily on the quality of the input images. For example, if an image is of inferior quality due to heavy contamination, such as noise or darkness, accurate predictions are hardly feasible. Additionally, various types of errors can occur, each with varying relevance to the trustworthiness of the underlying AI system. In particular, it may be more critical not to detect an existing person than to detect a person where there is none. Therefore, we want to show that we can still avoid the most critical errors in situations of inferior image quality. To achieve this, we aim to establish a fail-degraded system by lowering the network's confidence threshold based on the estimated image quality, enabling it to detect objects more cautiously in uncertain situations. Additionally, we present a novel method for estimating the quality of incoming images by comparing them to the training data using normalizing flows. We will also conduct experiments applying our method to state-of-the-art object detection. In summary, we will present a design strategy for AI-based systems in automated driving that can deal with poor-quality input data without resorting to fallback solutions. Such measures enhance trust in AI-based systems and lead to an increased provision of the AI component. --- ### A systematic evaluation of machine learning classifiers for event-by-event background rejection in LAFOV PET scanners Authors: Konrad Klimaszewski, Michał Obara, Mateusz Bala, Beatrix C. Hiesmayr, Lech Raczyński, Roman Y. Shopa, Wojciech Zdeb, Wojciech Krzemien Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25732v1 The introduction of LAFOV PET scanners brings significant sensitivity gains but also a substantial increase in the background rate from accidental coincidences, phantom-scattered and detector-scattered photons. While machine learning methods have been applied to background reduction in PET imaging, they target specific background components in post-processing rather than event-by-event classification on the raw data. In this work, we formulate coincidence classification as a supervised multi-class problem and evaluate XGBoost, AdaBoost and Neural Network classifiers as pre-reconstruction filters, using Monte Carlo simulations of the Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra scanner with NEMA IEC and anthropomorphic XCAT phantoms. We investigate two feature sets: a 4-feature representation based on the Attenuation Factor, photon time difference, energy sum, and energy difference, and an extended 6-feature set that incorporates topology-based variables. A systematic robustness study via cross-phantom inference reveals that the 4-feature models generalise significantly better across different phantom geometries, with XGBoost suffering an accuracy loss of only 0.04 compared to 0.13 for the 6-feature variant. Our best models achieve accuracies of up to 0.74 and 0.69 for the NEMA IEC and XCAT phantoms, respectively, outperforming traditional geometry-based cuts. However, we show that this compact feature set not only provides limited suppression of in-phantom scattered coincidences, but it also can lead to non-trivial spatial patterns. With scattered coincidences being the dominant background component in clinical conditions, this suggests that while the method serves as an effective and geometry-agnostic replacement for traditional cut-based selection, meaningful further gains in image quality will require either larger input representations or dedicated treatment of the phantom-scattered component. --- ### Shared Voxel-Map-Based Cooperative Indoor UAV Guidance with a Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic Controller Authors: Thomas Hickling, Dylan Wynne, Yu Su, Nabil Aouf Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25728v1 This paper presents a cooperative indoor UAV guidance framework that combines a shared voxel-map world model with a multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) controller. Multiple drones fuse 360 LiDAR observations into a common world-frame occupancy map, which is converted into a compact bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and provided to each agent as an ego-aligned local crop. This integrate-in-world, act-in- ego design enables consistent multi-UAV spatial fusion whilst retaining decentralised continuous control. The policy combines BEV map features, near-field obstacle observations, and compact goal and peer-state information within a centralised-training, decentralised-execution framework. In simulation, the learned controller achieves a 90.3% success rate in corridor navigation, outperforming Astar planning, an artificial potential field controller, and a prior guidance method. To address residual sim-to-real mismatch, the simulation-trained policy is further adapted using offline imitation fine-tuning from real-world data. Real-world experiments in GNSS-denied indoor environments demonstrate stable two-UAV cooperative operation across increasingly chal- lenging obstacle layouts. The results show that shared voxel-map representations provide an effective and scalable spatial substrate for learned cooperative indoor UAV guidance. --- ### Nudging Sustainable Choices through LLM-Generated Recommendation Explanations Authors: Haya Halimeh, Dietmar Jannach, Oliver Müller Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25726v2 Recommender systems mediate everyday consumption, offering a promising channel for encouraging sustainable choices. Prior research shows that explanations influence users' perceptions of recommendations and can support more informed decisions. We argue that explanations can also serve as behavioral nudges by foregrounding sustainability information at the moment of choice. This study investigates how different behavioral framings of sustainability information in recommendation explanations affect user choices and perceptions. Using generative AI, we generate sustainability-aware explanations by drawing on nudge theory and validate them through human evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge audits. Building on this foundation, we conduct two randomized studies (N = 529) in a low involvement domain (instant coffee) and a high involvement domain (hotel bookings), in which participants choose among preference matched recommendations accompanied by these explanations. Our results show that, across both domains, merely disclosing sustainability information in explanations does not change choices, whereas framing that information or invoking a descriptive social norm significantly increases sustainable selections and eases decision-making. Notably, perception and behavior diverge, as plain disclosure improves explanation evaluations without translating into more sustainable selection behavior. Our work demonstrates how LLMs can generate theory-grounded explanations at scale, pointing toward practical explanation-based interventions for social good. We conclude by discussing implications for adaptive explanation design with generative AI. --- ### Optimization with Dynamic Constraint Learning (DCL) Authors: Ezgi Oztekin, Figen Oztoprak, S. Ilker Birbil Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25719v1 We propose Dynamic Constraint Learning (DCL), a data-driven framework for constrained optimization when constraint functions are unknown and cannot be queried during optimization. At each iteration, the method learns a local surrogate from nearby data and solves a subproblem within a data-supported trust region. Compared with offline global constraint learning, the approach uses local surrogates that adapt to the data distribution during optimization and can achieve solution quality comparable to that of global models while using simpler local models and smaller optimization subproblems. We demonstrate the performance of DCL on a synthetic test problem and two case studies from the literature. --- ### Tools Are Not Islands: Set-Level Tool Retrieval for LLM Agents via Query-Conditioned Hyperedge Prediction Authors: Xinyi Hong, Pinjun Dong, Xinyang Yu, Binyan Jiang Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25718v2 Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on invoking external tools to complete real-world tasks. Tool retrieval, which selects a small task-relevant subset from a library of thousands of tools before the agent acts, has therefore become a critical component of LLM agent pipelines. However, existing retrievers either score each tool in isolation or assemble the tool set sequentially, so the joint utility of a candidate set is never evaluated as a whole. In this paper, we propose HYSET, short for HYperedge-based SEt-level Tool retrieval. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we formulate tool retrieval as query-conditioned hyperedge prediction on a tool co-invocation hypergraph, under which the tool set itself becomes the unit of scoring and most existing retrieval paradigms reduce to restricted instances; (ii) we capture size-dependent tool compatibility through cardinality-specific interactions; and (iii) we design HYSET as a pre-selection module requiring no modification to the downstream agent. Experiments on ToolBench demonstrate that HYSET consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both tool retrieval performance and end-to-end task success. Beyond the in-domain setting, HYSET further supports zero-shot/few-shot transfer, generalizing to held-out tools/categories and unseen domains with minimal supervision. --- ### SpeechLLM Meets Federated Learning for End-to-End ASR: English and Italian Case Studies Authors: Mohamed Nabih Ali, Daniele Falavigna, Alessio Brutti Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25716v1 Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems across distributed data sources, yet its application to large-scale speech language models (SpeechLLMs) remains unexplored. This paper presents the first systematic study of federated training for SpeechLLM-based end-to-end ASR systems. We design a communication-efficient federated optimization strategy tailored to the unique challenges of SpeechLLM architectures, addressing high-dimensional parameter spaces, gradient communication overhead, and computational constraints in distributed settings. Through extensive empirical evaluation on monolingual ASR tasks in English and Italian, we demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our federated approach compared to centralized training baselines across diverse acoustic conditions and speaking styles. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study analyzing the impact of different speech encoder architectures on monolingual English ASR performance within the federated framework, providing insights into optimal model configurations for decentralized training. Our results achieve competitive word error rates while reducing communication costs, establishing practical foundations for federated SpeechLLM deployment in real-world multilingual scenarios. --- ### Impact Detection in Fall Events: Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks Using 3D Skeletons Data Authors: Tresor Y. Koffi, Youssef Mourchid, Mohammed Hindawi, Yohan Dupuis Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25710v1 Fall represents a significant risk of accidental death among individuals aged over 65, presenting a global health concern. A fall is defined as any event where a person loses balance and moves to an off-position, which may or may not result in an impact where the person hits the ground. While fall detection systems have achieved good results in general, impact detection within falls remains challenging. This study proposes an efficient methodology for accurately detecting impacts within fall events by incorporating 3D joints skeleton data treated as a graph using Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layers. By pinpointing impact moments, our approach enhances precision by distinguishing between false falls and actual impacts, contributing to better healthcare resource allocation. Our methodology, evaluated using the improved 3D skeletons UP-Fall dataset, achieves accuracy exceeding 90\% across various fall scenarios. We have made this improved dataset publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/12773013 to facilitate further research. --- ### From Deterministic to Generative Deep Learning for Urban Air Quality Reconstruction from Sparse Observations Authors: Abhishek A. Sabnis, Mihai Mitrea, Lya Lugon, Karine Sartelet, Marc Bocquet, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Shupeng Zhu, Sibo Cheng Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25687v1 Full-field reconstruction of air pollution is essential for evaluating pollution exposure and supporting public health decision-making. However, the complex interactions among pollutants, hard-to-predict weather patterns, and limited monitoring station coverage make this a complex task. We apply deep learning techniques to provide fast and accurate reconstructions from sparse observations of four key pollutants: NO2, O3, PM2.5 and PM10. Models are trained on full-field simulation data and evaluated on real-world observations collected from 9 to 28 monitoring stations in the city of Paris. We introduce a diffusion-based generative framework for multi-pollutant reconstruction and benchmark its performance against deterministic deep learning models. Despite noisy observations and strong spatial variability, the models achieve high structural similarity on simulated validation data and produce realistic spatial patterns on real-world observations, as indicated by power-spectrum analysis. We introduce data augmentation methods that enable transfer to real-world observations without retraining, allowing the models to generalise beyond the training period. These findings highlight the potential of ML models for reliable real-world deployment in air pollution reconstruction tasks. --- ### Cognivia: A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Copilot for Evidence-Based Mental Healthcare Authors: Qi Chen, Siria Xiyueyao Luo, Jian Wang, Yuan Shi, Haocong Rao, Xuejiao Zhao Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25681v1 Cognitive distortion amplifies negative emotions and contributes to mental health disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an effective way to address cognitive distortions, but its large-scale application is limited by the shortage of professional therapists. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been explored for mental health applications, existing methods still suffer from limited domain specificity, overly flattering responses, and the absence of well-defined annotations for cognitive distortions. This paper proposes Cognivia, an evidence-based artificial intelligence therapist that integrates automatic cognitive distortion identification and rational response generation. Our framework is built on authoritative CBT texts widely regarded as core paradigms and standard references. It is further augmented with mental health question-answer (Q and A) data, and employs multi-stage prompting and structured generation strategies under the supervision of behavioral science experts. Then we fine-tune a lightweight LLM on this augmented CBT dataset to obtain Cognivia. In addition, we propose the first hierarchical quality evaluation framework for assessing LLM-generated rational responses, developed through collaboration between AI researchers and behavioral science experts. Cognivia is evaluated using lexical metrics, LLM-based Judges with two complementary criteria, and human evaluation by 10 behavioral science experts. It consistently outperforms the baseline methods in cognitive distortion recognition and rational response generation, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/SNOWTEAM2023/Cognivia. --- ### Rashomon Alignment Authors: Moisés Santos, Peter van der Putten, Bernhard Pfahringer, Carlos Soares Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25680v1 We propose Rashomon Alignment (RA), a new measure to assess functional similarity between two models. Existing functional similarity measures are distributional, quantifying differences between outputs of models applied to real-world data. However, these measures can be regarded as ecologically valid only for regions in the input space represented by the available data. We introduce a geometrical perspective on functional model similarity, which estimates it across the entire data space, offering a comprehensive view of decision boundary alignment independent of any specific data distribution. We also propose geometric Rashomon Alignment as a measure of geometrical similarity, which is computed using data uniformly sampled from the instance space. We perform an experimental analysis on more than 90 datasets, examining critical cases where model alignment diverges from predictive accuracy. Our results show that geometrical and distributional alignment provide different and complementary perspectives on the similarity between models and algorithms. RA can be used for multiple purposes, including model selection, ensemble construction, and enhanced interpretability of machine learning models and algorithms. --- ### DynaBridge: Dynamic Summary-Guided Cross-Task Multimodal Fusion for DASS-Structured Mental Health Assessment Authors: Shiyu Teng, Haichen Yu, Jiaqing Liu, Hao Sun, Yu Song, Shurong Chai, Ruibo Hou, Lanfen Lin, Yen-Wei Chen Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25679v1 Multimodal behavioral analysis offers a scalable approach to assessing depression, anxiety, and stress, yet generic fusion models often ignore the psychometric structure of questionnaire labels. In DASS-21, risk labels are derived from ordered symptom items through fixed item-to-subscale mappings. We propose \textbf{DynaBridge}, a dynamic summary-guided cross-task multimodal framework for DASS-structured mental health assessment. DynaBridge encodes acoustic, visual, and textual cues across multiple sessions and augments them with frozen-LLM-generated DASS-aware summaries as participant-level semantic evidence. It predicts ordinal item distributions, reconstructs depression, anxiety, and stress risk evidence from item-level soft scores, and fuses this evidence with direct multimodal risk predictions. A confidence-aware refinement strategy further incorporates high-confidence semantic cues conservatively. On the official AdoDAS validation split, DynaBridge outperforms the official baseline and representative multimodal methods, achieving 0.5012 mean F1 for D/A/S risk prediction and 0.3216 mean QWK for DASS-21 item prediction. These results show the value of bridging multimodal cues, semantic summaries, and DASS-21 psychometric structure. --- ### DecoEvo: Score-Decoupled Co-Evolution of Solver and Rubric-Generator Skills in Text Space Authors: Jiangwang Chen, Zixin Song, Junlin Liu, Shuaiyu Zhou, Haiyan Wu, Haihan Shi, Chenxi Zhou, Hanqing Li, Xiao Yang, Da Zhu, Guanjun Jiang, Hai Wan et al. Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25675v1 Text-space optimization adapts large language models (LLMs) by editing external natural-language artifacts rather than model weights, so the optimized artifacts remain inspectable and the model can be treated as a black box. However, most existing text-space methods keep evaluation fixed. On open-ended tasks, this can become a bottleneck: once the solver improves on the criteria a rubric measures, omitted dimensions remain invisible to the optimization signal. Simply evolving the rubric is also unreliable when updates are selected by the current solver's score, because apparent progress can come from making the rubric easier to satisfy. We introduce DecoEvo (Decoupled Co-Evolution), which co-evolves a solver skill and a rubric-generator skill under decoupled objectives without using gold rubrics during optimization. The solver skill is updated using criterion-level feedback, while the rubric-generator skill is revised through complementary audits of requirement coverage and response discrimination that are independent of aggregate solver score. This separation focuses generator updates on newly exposed solver weaknesses, reducing repeated emphasis on criteria the solver already satisfies. Under each benchmark's official evaluation, DecoEvo outperforms all compared methods across five benchmarks and three LLM backbones, yielding 2.8--5.0\% relative gains over SkillOpt in the five-benchmark average. --- ### AI's Capability in Assisting Scientific Research in Physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology I: Literature Review Authors: Anamaria Hell, Kateryna Vovk, Veena Krishnaraj, Jia Liu, Kosuke Aizawa, Adrian E. Bayer, Linda Blot, Jessica Cowell, Suyog Garg, Jonathan Grée, Ben Horowitz, Masaya Ichikawa et al. Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.CO, cs.CL, gr-qc arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25672v1 We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) can assist with literature reviews for scientific research. We perform a controlled study of eight expert-conceived research projects across the areas of physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Each project has a defined background and goal, and human experts and AI prompters are asked to perform identical literature review tasks in parallel. We compare the relevant literature selected by humans with that selected by mid-2025 LLMs (ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT Deep Research, and Gemini). We find the overlap between human- and AI-selected references to be small ($<$6\%), indicating that AI models do not yet reproduce a competent expert search on their own, though they have the potential to complement literature searches by humans. We then assess the reliability and completeness of AI-generated candidate references, distinguishing two types of hallucination: fabrications (references to nonexistent papers) and metadata mismatches (real papers with one or more incorrect fields). We find that while fabricated references make up 3\% of the AI-generated references, 64\% are real papers with at least one incorrect field (title, author, year, journal, DOI, or link), indicating that the mid-2025 models require systematic verification. However, the performance is significantly improved for the 2026 model ChatGPT Pro 5.5, with a single-project test showing zero fabrication or metadata mismatches. --- ### OmniDelta: Skill-Driven Budget Allocation for Token Compression in OmniLLMs Authors: Haoyang Huang, Wenjie Huang, Tianqi Xu, Hongyaoxing Gu, Kang Tan, Yikai Fu, Yuhao Shen, Tianyu Liu, Baolin Zhang, Jun Zhang, Xinyi Hu, Jun Dai et al. Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25669v1 Emerging Omni-modal Large Language Models (OmniLLMs) enable unified understanding of text, audio, and video, but their long audio-video token sequences introduce substantial memory and inference costs. Existing compression methods mainly focus on selecting important tokens under fixed budgets, leaving the preceding budget-allocation problem underexplored. We show that direct query-to-audio/video similarity is unreliable for inter-modal budget allocation, and that uniform intra-modal budgets can miss key evidence while retaining redundant content. To address these limitations, we propose OmniDelta, a training-free, skill-driven framework that couples intent-aware inter-modal allocation with content-aware intra-modal allocation. OmniDelta first constructs audio and video skill pools to shift the fixed retained-token budget according to query demand, then reallocates modality budgets over audio segments and video frames using local complexity and temporal redundancy. The resulting local budgets can be combined with existing pruning strategies, preserving the total retained-token ratio while changing where the budget is spent. Experiments on four audio-video benchmarks with two Qwen2.5-Omni models show that OmniDelta establishes a new accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier across pruning ratios. At 25% token retention on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, OmniDelta reduces GPU memory by 22.0% and achieves a 1.64x end-to-end speedup over full-token inference. --- ### A Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Thermal Ranking of Low-Cost Wall Materials in Hot-Dry Climates Authors: Muhammad Akbar Khan, Fahim Raees, Ubaida Fatima Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25668v1 Identifying cost-effective indigenous building materials that minimise heat penetration through walls is critical for indoor thermal comfort in low-income rural housing in hot-dry climates, where summer temperatures routinely exceed 45 C. We present a two-stage computational framework for thermal ranking of five low-cost indigenous wall materials: mud brick, clay-straw adobe, lime-stabilised bamboo panel, fired clay brick, and lime-mud composite. First, a validated Crank-Nicolson finite difference method (FDM) solves the one-dimensional transient heat equation with Robin boundary conditions under diurnal solar and outdoor air-temperature forcing, generating 1500 periodic-day solutions across a nine-dimensional parameter space by Latin Hypercube sampling. Second, a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO) with a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) backbone learns the parameter-to-solution operator mu -> T(x,t), enforcing both data fidelity and PDE consistency. The trained PINO attains a relative L2 field error of 5.14e-4 and a 0.201 K mean absolute error on the peak inner surface temperature, preserving the FDM material ranking exactly; PINO trained on 150 FDM samples matches a data-only FNO trained on twice as many, so the physics loss is most valuable when data are scarce. The periodic-day formulation also yields the ISO 13786 time lag and decrement factor, reproduced to within 0.99 h and 0.010. At nominal hot-dry summer conditions, clay-straw adobe achieves the best cost-performance index among widely available materials. A climate sweep, confirmed by FDM spot checks, reveals a regime boundary: under sub-ambient outdoor conditions the ranking inverts to conductive fired clay brick, delineating heat-exclusion and heat-rejection regimes. The framework supports evidence-based material selection for post-flood reconstruction in hot-dry regions. --- ### MyMentorLLM: A psychotherapy GenAI environment with multimodal voice/text patients, trainees and experts for deliberate practice Authors: Rodolfo Rizzi, Alessandro Grecucci, Massimo Stella Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25667v2 Psychotherapists need repeated training and supervision; however, scalability is problematic. We present MyMentorLLM, a multimodal voice- and text-based deliberate-practice environment with 2,100 complete Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) sessions. Each session links a DSM-5-TR-grounded LLM patient (with major depressive, generalised anxiety or borderline personality disorder), an LLM therapist-in-training and an LLM expert supervisor (powered by Gemma-4, Gemini-3.1-Flash-Live and Qwen-3.6). Sessions were analysed for emotional dynamics, therapeutic competence and diagnostic accuracy against human psychotherapy data. Simulated patients expressed disorder-congruent emotional profiles, which therapists mirrored as in human counselling. LLM trainee competence was rated above human levels in most conditions, while native speech-to-speech was closest to human scores. Supervisor feedback improved diagnostic accuracy in 5 of 7 LLM conditions, whereas symptom identification accuracy increased with model size. This work shows deliberate practice can be simulated for CBT training, although patient fidelity, supervisor calibration and harmful feedback require evaluation via a complex systems perspective. --- ### MyMentorLLM: A psychotherapy GenAI environment with multimodal voice/text patients, trainees and experts for deliberate practice Authors: Rodolfo Rizzi, Alessandro Grecucci, Massimo Stella Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25667v1 Psychotherapists need repeated training and supervision by experts; however, scalability is problematic. Here we present MyMentorLLM, a multimodal voice- and text-based simulation environment for deliberate practice, used to generate 2,100 complete Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) training sessions. Each session links a DSM-5-TR-grounded patient (with major depressive, generalised anxiety or borderline personality disorder), a therapist-in-training and an expert supervisor. As an initial implementation, we adopted CBT because its structured procedures and competency-based supervision facilitate standardised simulation and evaluation. Sessions were analysed for emotional dynamics, therapeutic competence and diagnostic accuracy. Simulated patients expressed disorder-congruent emotional profiles, which trainee therapists mirrored as in real human counselling. The quality of supervision differed across LLMs: while most models overestimated trainees' competences, native speech-to-speech was closest to human scores. Supervisors' feedback led to better diagnoses in simulated psychotherapists in 5 out of 7 LLMs, and symptom identification accuracy increased with model size. This work shows that simulation of deliberate practice is possible for CBT training, although patient fidelity, calibration of supervisors, and harmful feedback should be evaluated together. --- ### Generalised Robust Bayes for Joint Inference of Model and Contamination Authors: Masahiro Fujisawa, Masaki Adachi, Takuo Matsubara Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: stat.ME, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25665v1 Generalised Bayesian inference (GBI) has emerged as a compelling robust alternative to standard Bayesian inference, mitigating sensitivity to data contamination by replacing the log-likelihood with a robust loss or divergence. However, existing robust GBI frameworks typically provide only qualitative robustness: while they can make posterior inference less sensitive to contamination, they lack an intrinsic mechanism to quantify the contamination proportion or identify anomalous observations. This paper introduces Hölder-Bayes, a GBI framework for joint inference of the model parameter and the contamination proportion. We construct a generalised joint posterior over both model and contamination parameter by applying the Hölder divergence to a scaled model density. Theoretically, we establish global bias-robustness via the uniform boundedness of the posterior influence function, derive a finite-sample excess-risk bound, and prove a Bernstein--von Mises approximation together with interpretable contamination-induced bias bounds under a heavy-contamination regime. We further show that, for the Hölder posterior, temperature calibration admits a direct interpretation as affine volume scaling of the data space. The resulting posterior yields a self-contained probabilistic mechanism for outlier detection: posterior uncertainty in both the model parameter and the contamination proportion is propagated to observation-level Frequency-of-Detection scores, without requiring an external anomaly-score threshold. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Hölder-Bayes provides robust parameter inference, contamination-level recovery, and uncertainty-aware outlier detection. --- ### Contextual Deconvolution for Variance-Stable Demand Sensing: Kernel-Modulated Operators in Promotional Retail Authors: Mohammad Forouhesh Published: 2026-07-28 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25664v1 Machine learning demand forecasts optimize statistical accuracy yet leave excess operational volatility that inflates safety stock and amplifies the Bullwhip effect. We introduce \textbf{Contextual Deconvolution} (CD), a two-stage estimator that reframes demand sensing as a convex decomposition: a kernel-modulated banded operator separates transient promotion-driven shocks from a smooth structural baseline, and hierarchical partial pooling enables catalog-scale deployment without per-SKU training. The operator is data-derived, not imposed---it reduces to the identity wherever the promotional response is impulsive (most of M5, all of Favorita) and contributes only where genuine multi-day carryover exists, so the gains rest on the structural decomposition itself. Evaluating strictly out-of-sample on 30,490 M5 SKUs and 2,845 Favorita items, with calendar-aware baselines given CD's identical future calendar, we anchor the contribution on a full inventory-cost accounting: CD lowers safety stock, holding cost, and order variance but under-provisions event spikes, reducing total cost only when holding costs exceed $\sim$20\% of stockout costs (95\% CI $(17\%,25\%)$); otherwise it is an operational-stability and inventory-capital layer, not an expected-cost minimizer. Its accuracy contribution is reliability rather than central tendency: across eleven baselines, CD attains the lowest cross-sectional dispersion of per-SKU error and mis-forecasts by more than 200\% on 0.8\% of SKUs versus 9.9--20.6\% for every baseline, ranking first on both in all four M5 draws. Because the Variance Ratio and std-based safety stock are minimized by any sufficiently smooth forecast, we treat them as diagnostics, not objectives. A supporting analysis shows the learned demand operators are non-normal, yet CD's compact parametric kernel matches their operational performance interpretably. ---