# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 43 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #2101–2150 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/43 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/42.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/44.md) ### LEX-EC: A Lexical Evidence-Channel Audit Framework for Zero-Shot LLM Personality Classification in Black-Box Settings Authors: Brittany Harbison, Ashok K. Goel Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24435v2 Large language models may easily assign personality labels from text, but model interpretability remains an open problem. To address this gap, we introduce LEX-EC, a reusable black-box audit framework combining prevalence and agreement diagnostics with controlled lexical ablation to distinguish marginal-distribution effects from trait-associated signal recoverable under restricted evidence. Using this framework, we illustrate how various text genres may exhibit sharply different profiles: free-form essay text contains the broadest, but still weak, signal; in graduate student introductions, an observable Extraversion association weakened after masking; and single Facebook statuses yield little stable evidence even in a trait-balanced sample, indicating a possible lower bound of content or length. Masking topical and demographic content weakened some associations while leaving others detectable from function words, affective terms, and cognitive-style vocabulary. Linguistic prompting shifted model self-explanations but did not eliminate topical content. LEX-EC jointly evaluates classification prevalence, item-level association, chance-corrected agreement, persistence under lexical restriction, and prompt sensitivity in model-generated explanations. Across datasets, models, and prompts, LEX-EC characterizes how trait associations may vary with available lexical evidence, introducing a novel application of lexical methods to black-box interpretability in personality labeling. --- ### DraftExpert: Expansion-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for End-Device MoE Inference Authors: Dengke Han Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24434v1 Large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are attractive for end-device deployment because only a small subset of experts is active per token, but their routed expert weights often exceed accelerator memory. We target latency-critical single-user settings where routed experts are staged on demand from CPU memory to a GPU or from Flash to a mobile NPU. In this setting, self-speculative decoding faces a new bottleneck: increasing the draft expert set improves accuracy but triggers extra expert loading, while cheap small-footprint drafts have low acceptance; moreover, verifying a multi-token block activates the union of target experts and is no longer close to one target step. We propose DraftExpert, an expansion-aware self-speculative decoding framework for expert-offloaded MoE inference. DraftExpert trains one lightweight accelerator-resident draft expert per layer by self-distilling residual, logit/token, and router-agreement signals from the frozen target MoE. At inference time, it uses a fixed-footprint shared+top-1+draft-expert drafter together with confidence--expansion truncation and target-expert prefetching, while final tokens are still exactly verified by the target model. On DeepSeek-V2-Lite and Moonlight-16B-A3B across CPU-GPU and Flash-NPU offload, DraftExpert improves decode throughput by 1.45x on average, raises draft acceptance to 84~87%, and achieves 86~88% prefetch hit rates. --- ### InterOCF: Spatio-Temporal 2D-3D Interaction for Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting Authors: Qi Zhang, Xinquan Yu, Kaiyi Zhang, Hui Huang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24431v1 Camera-only 4D occupancy forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to predict future 3D semantic scenes solely from historical multi-view images, which is critical for driving safety. Even though current methods have achieved good performance, the strong spatial-temporal modeling between the input multi-view frames is still underexplored, which limits the performance of those methods in future 4D forecasting. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework, InterOCF, for 4D occupancy forecasting that jointly models temporal dynamics in both 3D voxel-based representations and multi-view segmentation sequences, while explicitly incorporating feature interaction between the 2D and 3D branches. Our framework incorporates three core components: 1) A 3D Spatio-Temporal (3DST) module that learns volumetric dynamics from historical voxel states to predict future voxel states; 2) A 2D Spatio-Temporal (2DST) module employing an auxiliary multi-view temporal segmentation forecasting task to enhance temporal semantic dynamics; 3) A Spatio-Temporal Interaction Modeling (STIM) module that enables feature interaction between 2D and 3D representations. Experiments on the nuScenes, Lyft-Level5, and nuScenes-Occupancy datasets show that InterOCF consistently outperforms existing baseline approaches. --- ### Let Me Look at You: Advanced Facial Expression Modeling for Conversational Speech Synthesis Authors: Yifan Hu, Shuwei He, Rui Liu, Haizhou Li Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CL, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24430v1 Conversational Speech Synthesis is a fundamental component of human-computer interaction, aiming to generate contextually appropriate, expressive, and empathetic speech. However, facial expressions encode subtle and rich affective cues that are crucial for empathetic speech interaction, whereas existing approaches often overlook this important modality. In addition, the lack of large-scale natural conversational datasets with both speech and visual modalities also limits the development of visual affect understanding in conversational settings.To address these limitations, we propose FacialTalker, a facial-expression-aware CSS framework built upon a large language model backbone. To efficiently encode facial expressions, we propose AUTokenizer, a single-codebook visual tokenizer that discretizes each frame-level facial expression into a compact token, trained with supervision from combinations of facial Action Units. We further introduce a dual direct preference optimization (DualDPO) strategy, which extends the DPO by jointly imposing preference constraints on both visual and speech token sequences, to enhance the model's understanding of facial expressions and speech semantics in multimodal conversational contexts. Moreover, we construct VSDD-1K, a large-scale multimodal dialogue dataset collected through a fully automated pipeline from real-world Internet conversations, comprising over 1,033 hours of synchronized speaker videos and speech, with more than 85\% of frames containing valid faces. Extensive objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that FacialTalker consistently outperforms strong baselines in facial-expression perception and speech synthesis quality, generating speech that is more natural, expressive, and better aligned with the conversational context. The results also validate the effectiveness of our training strategy and dataset construction pipeline. --- ### Context Is King: How In-Context Specification Shapes the Geometry of Concepts Authors: Elad David, Max Fomin Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24425v1 Large language models place structured concepts on geometrically faithful manifolds: weekdays lie on a circle, months on another, usually taken to be a fixed world-model the network stores and looks up. We show that context is king: the structure a model actually uses is set by the in-context specification. A declarative rule fixes not only which relations the geometry encodes but its topology type: the same tokens form a cycle or a branching tree on command, built even on arbitrary, meaning-free tokens with no prior to inherit, which a relabeled stored shape cannot do. When the specification conflicts with a strong pretrained prior, the context-set geometry dominates it in capable models, read from the same activations (representational similarity 0.6--0.9 to the imposed structure versus near-zero to the prior), across the priors we test and both families we study (Gemma, Qwen). Activation patching shows the map is causally used, not a probe correlate: swapping one entity's activation for another's makes the model answer with the other entity's successor under the imposed order. A rough map forms readily, present even in small and base models; what scale gates is using it cleanly: clean dominance and the causal crossover emerge only in the larger models (up to Gemma-31B and Qwen-27B) and weaken or reverse below, so a mechanism present in a large model can be absent in a smaller one of the same family. Whether the model builds this geometry anew or reconfigures a stored one we leave open; operationally, the geometry it uses is the one the context specifies. --- ### MAViE: A Multi-scale Adaptive Vision Encoder for Fine-grained Visual Perception and Efficient Multimodal Reasoning Authors: Shaofei Lei Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24424v1 Vision-language models commonly project all tokens produced by a pretrained vision encoder into a large language model. However, final-layer features can discard text, local attributes, and spatial relationships, while high-resolution inputs substantially increase context length and inference latency. We introduce \method, a Multi-scale Adaptive Vision Encoder. \method uses position-dependent gates to fuse shallow, intermediate, and deep features from a vision Transformer, preserving global semantics while enhancing edges, text, and local structure. It then performs question-conditioned token routing according to question relevance, local information content, global semantics, and spatial coverage, with a token budget that adapts to image complexity. To mitigate compression loss, we further introduce full-to-compressed representation distillation and a spatial diversity regularizer. In an illustrative simulation under a unified 7B language-model framework, \method reduces the average number of SigLIP-SO400M visual tokens from 729 to 146 (approximately 80.0\%) and improves the mean score on VQAv2, GQA, TextVQA, ScienceQA-IMG, and MMBench by 2.2 percentage points, while reducing single-image time to first token from 228\,ms to 129\,ms. We provide the full model design and evaluation protocol. All reported numbers currently serve only as placeholders for paper organization and experimental design; formal claims require real training runs, independent replications, and official benchmark evaluation. --- ### IJCB-AFMFR 2026: Competition on Adapting Foundation Models for Face Recognition Using Synthetic Training Data Authors: Tahar Chettaoui, Guray Ozgur, Eduarda Caldeira, Arturas Nakvosas, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Sébastien Marcel, Rishabh Shukla, Aditya Takkar, Rushil Khullar, Lalak Yadav, Gourav Gupta, Anant Gupta et al. Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24422v1 This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Adapting Foundation Models for Face Recognition Using Synthetic Training Data (AFMFR), held at the 2026 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2026). The competition received a total of eight valid submissions from four distinct teams across two complementary tracks: a Full Data Track, in which participants adapt the CLIP ViT-L/14 foundation model using large-scale synthetic identity data, and a Limited Data Track, designed to reflect more resource-constrained adaptation regimes. All training data was generated exclusively using IDPERTURB. Submitted solutions are ranked based on verification and identification performance across a diverse suite of benchmarks, including LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB-30, CALFW, CPLFW, IJB-B, IJB-C, and TinyFace, using the Borda count method. Fairness evaluation is additionally conducted on the RFW dataset across four demographic groups. The results demonstrate that adaptation of the CLIP foundation model with synthetic training data substantially improves over the off-the-shelf model and, in several cases, surpasses the baseline. Notably, full fine-tuning with Sub-Center ArcFace (DMSTI-Neurotechnology) leads the Full Data Track, while rank-stabilized LoRA adaptation (Idiap-BSP) proves most effective under limited-data conditions. --- ### Frequency-Based Reservoir computing Authors: Arthur S Powanwe Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24420v1 Reservoir computing has emerged as an efficient machine learning framework for predicting time series generated by dynamical systems. In contrast to other machine and deep learning approaches, a reservoir computing trains only the output layer via linear regression, leaving the reservoir (recurrent layer) untrained. This simplification makes reservoir computers easier to train and more amenable to experimentation. However, because current reservoirs consist of networks of randomly connected nodes and require the optimization of numerous hyperparameters, a framework that precisely explains how reservoir computing operates and how it can be optimized remains missing. Here, we propose a frequency-based reservoir inspired by the brain's oscillatory dynamics and its hierarchy of timescales. The frequency-based reservoir can be interpreted as an ensemble of independent oscillatory units, each processing a portion of the input's frequency content. This allows us to understand the reservoir's internal behavior by modeling it as a single unit driven by an external input. Borrowing from the theory of a nonlinear oscillator forced by complex periodic inputs, we found that units of the frequency-based reservoir selectively amplify and store specific input frequencies, which are then used for prediction. The frequency-based reservoir performs as well as or better than equivalent random reservoirs. Furthermore, the frequency-based approach can be optimized to improve short-term prediction, a property that random reservoirs lack. Finally, we show that the frequency-based reservoir can also predict complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Our results show that reservoir computing can be designed using brain properties and theoretical insights borrowed from the physics of forced nonlinear oscillators. --- ### Failures Reveal What Metrics Miss: An Evidence-Driven Agent for Recursive Refinement of ECG Classifiers Authors: Jinliang Deng, Yiming Niu, Yibo Pan, Zhiqi Shao, Qin Luo, Yongxin Tong Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24419v1 Deep models have substantially advanced 12-lead ECG classification, yet their refinement still relies heavily on human experts to inspect failures and iteratively revise classifier designs. Recent LLM-based agents have demonstrated the potential for automated model design, but when guided only by aggregate performance metrics, they lack insight into why individual cases fail and how the classifier should be revised. We present RecursiveECG, an evidence-driven LLM-as-Designer framework in which an LLM serves as an offline model designer that refines ECG classifiers based on concrete failures and objective ECG evidence. To ground failure diagnosis in executable evidence, Criteria-to-Measurement Compilation converts curated ECG criteria into validated deterministic functions that produce reproducible, reference-backed measurements for individual ECGs. Building on these measurements, Evidence-Grounded Failure Review analyzes failed and comparator cases by jointly considering raw waveforms, measurements, and model outputs, enabling the LLM to diagnose classifier limitations and formulate targeted revisions. Candidate revisions are executed and re-evaluated under a fixed problem contract, and only evidence-supported updates are retained. The resulting predictor is frozen after refinement and requires no LLM inference during deployment, while an audit trail links each accepted revision to its supporting evidence. Across PTB-XL, Georgia, and CPSC2018, RecursiveECG consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 10.0%. Extensive ablation and transfer studies further validate the effectiveness of its evidence-grounded refinement process. --- ### Occluded Oculus: Operationalizing Stylistic Obscurement Authors: Robert Dilworth Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24411v2 What did it take for Hermes, the devout messenger of the Olympian gods, to slay Argus Panoptes, the multi-eyed giant of Greek myth? As the perfect guardian, Panoptes' legion of ever-watchful eyes proved difficult -- but not impossible -- to defeat. The centerpiece of Hermes' strategy was obfuscation and sabotage. Posing as a shepherd, Hermes sealed each of Panoptes' eyes -- eyes that would otherwise have alerted the fearsome giant to Hermes' plot -- and vanquished him. The moral of the story: when a challenger must surmount a formidable foe -- one far greater in stature and vastly more equipped -- crafty maneuvers are not merely advisable but indispensable for victory. In this work, the "challenger" is a collective leveraging adversarial tactics to overcome the "multi-eyed giant" of stylometric systems and surveillance apparatuses. To successfully claw back the privacy siphoned by the multi-eyed giant, the challenger must carefully evaluate their plan of attack, $\textit{TraceTarnish}$, and determine what does and does not work to anonymize the authorship of text. To that end, we conduct an ablation study of $\textit{TraceTarnish}$ to better understand which module -- Translation, Obfuscation, Imitation, or Injection -- best confounds a stylometric system. Our results indicate that the most effective approach was Injection, meaning that inserting zero-width Unicode characters, homoglyphs, and intentional misspellings neutralizes the indefatigable eyes long enough to claim the head of the all-seeing giant. --- ### Accuracy potential of visual localization exploiting high-end street-level imagery Authors: Jonas Meyer, Stephan Nebiker, Pascal Theiler, Norbert Haala Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24409v1 Accurate and reliable pose information with respect to a reference frame is increasingly demanded across applications such as autonomous navigation, surveying, robotics, and augmented and mixed reality. Visual localization can serve as a complementary positioning modality to GNSS, whose applicability and accuracy are often limited. Yet, the accuracy potential of visual localization has not been systematically investigated against survey-grade demands. This is mainly due to the lack of publicly available, large-scale outdoor datasets with ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. In this work, we address both gaps. We introduce a scalable visual localization pipeline that employs precisely georeferenced, high-resolution street-level imagery directly as the scene representation. It combines prior-guided reference candidate selection with on-the-fly local Structure-from-Motion reconstruction and PnP-based pose estimation. We further present the FHNW Muttenz dataset, a real-world dataset covering a contiguous 10 km street network mapped in two mobile mapping campaigns approximately 1.5 years apart. It consists of high-resolution reference imagery and query sequences acquired by four different cameras across five representative scenes. All images are precisely co-registered, yielding 6-DoF ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. Using this dataset, we evaluate the accuracy potential of visual localization. Our experiments demonstrate median pose accuracies in the range of 1-5 cm for translation and 0.05-0.1° for rotation, reaching as low as 1 cm and 0.03° under favorable conditions. These results show that visual localization can complement survey-grade GNSS positioning, paving the way for 3D geospatial data acquisition using consumer devices and fully automated georeferencing approaches. The dataset is publicly available at: https://fhnw-muttenz-vl-dataset.github.io/. --- ### Mixture-of-Thought-Tokens: Unifying Perception and Reasoning for Free-form Multimodal Grounding Authors: Tianyi Gao, Han Fang, Tianyi Ding, Hao Li, Xin Wei, Hongbo Sun, Xiaodong Dong, Ye Yuan, Jinglin Xu, Kongming Liang, Hao Sun, Jingmin Xin Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24407v1 Multimodal Large Language Models have made great progress in grounding tasks, yet existing methods still struggle to unify precise localization and complex reasoning. For one thing, text-based methods rely on coordinates or index prediction, severely limiting the perceptual capabilities of the model for dense visual objects. Meanwhile, latent token-based methods employ special tokens without inherent spatial references and use a decoding mechanism that lacks thinking steps, weakening high-level reasoning capabilities. Consequently, developing a unified framework that excels in both perception and reasoning remains challenging. To address this, we propose Mixture-of-Thought-Tokens (Motto), a new free-form multimodal grounding method that bridges the perception-reasoning gap, enabling MLLMs to empower diverse, arbitrary grounding queries. Specifically, we introduce Spatially-Grounded Thought Tokenization to explicitly align special tokens with spatial locations for clear spatial correspondence and visual interpretability. We further design a Context-Adaptive Chain-of-Tokens that dynamically switch grounding modes within an interleaved reasoning chain, achieving robust grounding across tasks of varying complexity. In addition, we construct PR-Bench, a new referring expression comprehension benchmark to evaluate the perception-reasoning gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Motto achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse free-form grounding tasks. --- ### K-Survival Means Authors: Abdallah Alabdallah Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24405v1 In this work, we propose K-SurvMeans, a novel extension of K-Means for clustering survival data. The method explicitly uses the survival outcome in the clustering process to optimize cluster centers, thereby maximizing pairwise survival differences between clusters. The objective function encourages the clusters to be well-separated from the survival perspective. Since the resulting optimization problem is non-differentiable, we employ the Particle Swarm algorithm for the Optimization process. To further improve flexibility and mitigate the curse of dimensionality, we extend the framework to operate in a learned low-dimensional latent space obtained via a dimensionality reduction. This allows the method to capture better-separated clusters and enhance optimization efficiency by reducing the search space. Experiments on multiple publicly available benchmark survival datasets demonstrate that K-SurvMeans consistently yields clusters with improved separation in survival distributions compared to existing deep learning-based survival clustering methods. --- ### GenSplatCodec: Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting Compression via One-Step Diffusion Authors: Qiang Hu, Zhenlong Wu, Lei Huang, Zihan Zheng, Xiaoyun Zhang, Wenjun Zhang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24403v1 Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables scalable scene reconstruction without per-scene optimization, yet produces dense Gaussians that are costly to store and transmit. Existing feed-forward Gaussian compression methods formulate decoding as deterministic representation recovery, which becomes inadequate at low bitrates when high-frequency textures and view-dependent appearance are discarded. Although generative models offer a promising alternative, using them as standalone post-processing decouples generation from the transmitted scene structure, thereby compromising cross-view consistency. To address these limitations, we propose GenSplatCodec, a unified feed-forward Gaussian codec that reformulates low-bitrate Gaussian compression as geometry-guided generative decoding. We present a detail-aware feed-forward Gaussian coding scheme within a dual-stream formulation, where the resulting compact Gaussian structural stream is complemented by a lightweight reference appearance stream. We further introduce a geometry-guided one-step generative decoding approach that jointly exploits decoded structural and appearance cues through hierarchical geometry control to reconstruct high-fidelity and view-consistent novel views. Finally, we develop a three-stage optimization strategy that stabilizes the learning of the unified codec and adapts the generative decoder to codec-derived structural and appearance cues. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that GenSplatCodec consistently achieves superior rate-distortion (RD) performance over existing methods. --- ### proxymate: Diagnosis and Adjustment of Proxy Estimates for Reliable Inference Authors: Alexandra N. M. Darmon, Deeksha Sinha, Steve Wilkins-Reeves, Caner Gocmen Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24401v1 Proxy outcomes (such as short-term behavioral signals, model predictions, or surrogate endpoints) are frequently used in place of primary outcomes that are too slow to mature, rare, or challenging to measure directly. But valid inference on a proxy does not guarantee valid inference on the primary estimate as proxy-based estimates can be systematically biased in ways that are difficult to predict, leading to improperly calibrated confidence intervals. We present proxymate, a framework and open-source Python package for proxy validation and adjustment. proxymate organizes into four levels: The Representativity Level (population validity), the Unit Level (measurement quality), the Estimate Level (decision validity), and the Domain Level (cross-domain transportability). Within each level, proxymate provides diagnostic checks, and targeted adjustment strategies that map specific failures to appropriate corrections. At Meta, proxymate has been adopted by many different use cases, spanning experimentation, prevalence estimation, and monitoring use cases, all facing different proxy challenges (limited human review time, long maturation window of outcomes, low detectability) and showcasing the modularity of the framework. Across all products, proxymate assessed and corrected millions of proxy, primary unit comparisons. It has facilitated launches across multiple work streams including enabling quick decision making on thousands of experiments. --- ### Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Adaptive Non-Local Observables Authors: Yu-Ting Lee, Huan-Hsin Tseng, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24399v1 Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) predicts future values of multiple variables from historical data. While quantum neural networks have been increasingly applied to this task, they typically rely on fixed local measurements, which restrict their expressivity. We propose MTSF-ANO, a simple hybrid model for MTSF that integrates variational quantum circuits with adaptive non-local observables (ANO). On the four ETT datasets, MTSF-ANO ranks first or second in MSE in 17 of 20 settings, improving over the strongest baseline by up to 20% on ETTh1, and outperforms or matches its fixed local observable counterpart across all settings. Our ablations show how the quantum circuit design and ANO non-locality affect performance. These results suggest that ANO is a promising direction for quantum time series forecasting. --- ### The SpiNNaker2 chip: a many-core platform for flexible and scalable brain-inspired computing Authors: Stefan Scholze, Johannes Partzsch, Sebastian Höppner, Florian Kelber, Andreas Dixius, Marco Stolba, Sirine Arfa, Marc Berthel, Georg Ellguth, Jim Garside, Hector A. Gonzalez, Stephan Hartmann et al. Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.ET, cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24396v1 In deep learning, efficiency gets more and more important to compensate for the ongoing growth in model sizes and applications. Neuromorphic hardware has long been advocated as an upcoming alternative to deep networks, taking inspiration from the brain for achieving unprecedented energy efficiency. However, demonstrations of these gains only recently began to grow in complexity and real-world applicability. With SpiNNaker2, we present a chip that bridges the gap between deep networks and neuromorphic computing and allows for flexible exploration of computing approaches that combine both worlds. It features 152 processing elements equipped with an ARM M4F processor and dedicated accelerators, an extended SpiNNaker routing fabric for scalable event-based communication and a range of external interfaces for system integration, including Gbit Ethernet and an LPDDR4 memory interface. We demonstrate performance and efficiency of the SpiNNaker2 chip for neuromorphic and deep network workloads, as well as novel event-based computing approaches. For deep network workloads, the chip achieves up to 4.5 TOPS in high performance mode and up to 2.7 TOPS/W efficiency in high efficiency mode for INT8 workloads. The chip supports spiking neural networks with >150000 neurons and >1.8 billion synaptic events/s when simulated with a 1 ms time step. Its low baseline power of less than 250 mW allows for efficiency even under varying workload conditions, allowing to explore sparse and event-based modes of computation. All this demonstrates the chip's capabilities as a universal hardware platform for scalable brain-inspired computing and its combinations with mainstream deep network approaches. --- ### Stochastic Counterdiabatic Driving via Biorthogonal Liouvillian Eigenmodes Authors: Sandeep Suresh Cranganore, Sebastian Lehner, Johannes Brandstetter, Max Welling Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: physics.comp-ph, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24393v1 Finite-time driving of stochastic systems generates excess dissipation, causing the evolving probability distribution to lag behind the instantaneous equilibrium, and consequently degrading the convergence of nonequilibrium free energy estimators based on the Jarzynski equality. Escorted free energy simulations address the non-adiabatic lag by engineering control fields $\mathbf{u}$ that eliminate the lag, enforcing the trajectory-wise equality $\mathcal{W}_\mathbf{u} = Δ\mathcal{F}$, and yielding zero-variance estimators. However, constructing the escorting field in closed form remains a challenge, approached variously through flow-field methods, targeted free energy perturbation, or learned diffeomorphisms. In this work, we construct a complementary numerical framework based on gauge-type transforms instead of generalized coordinate transforms for perfect escorting based on the exact spectral decomposition of the time-dependent Fokker-Planck generator. The biorthogonal decomposition of the Liouville operator directly yields a counterdiabatic correction whose action on the instantaneous equilibrium distribution exactly cancels the non-adiabatic lag at arbitrary driving speed in formal analogy with shortcuts-to-adiabaticity techniques such as Berry's transitionless driving for quantum systems. Numerical verification for simulations of an overdamped particle in a time-varying double-well potential and harmonic traps confirms that the counterdiabatic condition is satisfied to machine precision, with the non-adiabatic lag suppressed by roughly twelve orders of magnitude in total variation distance and sixteen orders in KL divergence relative to the unescorted dynamics. As a diagnostic, we demonstrate vanishing dissipated work $\mathcal{W}_{\text{diss}}(t) \approx 0$ for the deterministically propagated Fokker-Planck density across all protocol speeds. --- ### When LLM Defenses Backfire: Characterizing Safety, Performance, and Cost Trade-offs Authors: Tong Zhang, Zexin Li, Simin Chen, Yun Peng Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24392v1 Jailbreak defenses are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs), but they can also introduce secondary costs that weaken model utility. We present a systematic study of these defense trade-offs along three dimensions: performance impact, over-refusal on benign inputs, and inference cost. Rather than treating defenses as a single class, we organize them by operational strategy and examine how different strategies correlate with different side-effect profiles. Across state-of-the-art defense methods, widely used benchmark datasets, and representative open-source LLMs, we find that defenses rarely improve downstream capability, but instead vary in how they trade safety gains against usability and efficiency. In particular, rule-based defenses best preserve task performance, highly conservative self-reflective defenses often increase over-refusal, and multi-round defenses incur the largest runtime overhead. These results provide both a benchmark for evaluating defense side effects and practical guidance for selecting defenses under deployment constraints. --- ### Regulating for AI Legitimacy Authors: Gilad Abiri Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24391v1 AI systems already govern. They rank speech and allocate attention, filter applicants and triage claims. The dominant frame for AI governance, alignment, asks whether such systems pursue the right objectives safely. It cannot answer a prior question: by what right are those objectives set and enforced? This Article argues that legitimacy is an autonomous regulatory objective, distinct from alignment and not secured by it. Legitimacy here is sociological: the belief among those subject to power that it is exercised rightfully. Performance does not produce that belief. We already have the proof of concept. Social media and search delivered enormous gains on every familiar metric and still triggered a legitimacy crisis, because publics questioned who authorized a handful of firms to set the rules of speech, visibility, and knowledge. It is possible to build a benevolent AI and still face a political crisis over its authority. The Article maps three sites where AI legitimacy falters: opacity, which blocks audiences from forming justified beliefs; private power, where firms exercise public-facing authority without recognizable authorization; and administrative automation, which strains reason-giving, participation, and review inside the state. It then asks what law can contribute. Thin legality (publicity, stability, consistent application) signals non-arbitrariness and buys real recognition, but invites legitimacy-washing when form drifts from practice. Thick legality supplies what form cannot: public authorship of the rules that bind. Three portable principles follow. Integration seats consequential AI rule-setting in venues a polity already treats as authoritative. Familiarity presents rules and reasons in locally credible forms. Contestation guarantees a credible second look with real remedies. --- ### Ambient pressure compensation and robust position control of oil-filled electric joint systems for underwater manipulators Authors: Hongrui Wu, Songhui Wang, Xin Wang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24384v1 Electric joint systems are significant elements of an underwater manipulator for its actuation, drive, and control. Working in an underwater environment, the joints suffer huge ambient pressure. To withstand it, the pressure compensation method is usually deployed, whereas the pressurized oil introduces sealing problems as well as parametric uncertainties and unknown disturbances for the dynamic model of the joint. To tackle these issues, this study proposes a design framework for the underwater oil-filled electric joint. The dynamics of the pressure compensation module is analyzed and the structure of the joint is optimized to seal the internal hydraulic oil. An uncertainty dynamic model of the oil-filled joint is established and a robust position controller is designed based on the structured singular value synthesis (mu-synthesis). Experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed methods. --- ### Bayesian Feature Extraction using Gaussian and Diffused-gamma Priors for High Dimensional Spatio-Temporal Data Authors: Garrett Frady, Dipak K. Dey, Shariq Mohammed Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: stat.ME, q-bio.QM, stat.AP, stat.CO, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24378v1 High-dimensional data with sparse structure and spatio-temporal dependence arise in many scientific domains. We develop a Bayesian feature-extraction framework for spatio-temporal settings that employs Gaussian and Diffused-gamma priors to induce structured sparsity. The modeling framework specifies a general likelihood via Bregman divergence, enabling compatibility with a range of loss functions and measurement models. Posterior computation is carried out via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and we introduce a two-stage feature-extraction procedure based on posterior samples to stabilize selection across space and time. We illustrate the method with a multi-subject electroencephalography (EEG) case study examining the relationship between chronic alcohol exposure and activity in different brain regions. We first fit binary classification models at each time point, then use false discovery rate-controlled screening and subsequent clustering in a two-stage feature-extraction pipeline to identify active brain regions. The analysis demonstrates that our proposed priors improve recovery of sparse features and enhance interpretability in the presence of spatio-temporal dependence. The framework is broadly applicable to high-dimensional, structured problems where accurate feature selection and inference are required. The code to implement the model is publicly available via GitHub. --- ### MXAttention: Data-Free Optimal Scaling and Pre-Normalization Quantization for MXFP4 Attention Authors: Jianlin Yu, Jing Lin, Linghui Kong, Aiyue Chen, Weiyi Sun, Chenyu Zeng, Wangli Lan, Jinxi Li, Zhuo Zheng, Ziyang Yue, Danning Ke, Fei Yi et al. Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24377v1 The quadratic cost of attention is a major bottleneck in diffusion-based video generation models. MXFP4 attention provides a promising path toward efficient inference, but direct MXFP4 quantization often degrades generation quality due to two numerical issues: the clipping-underflow trade-off from power-of-two scaling and the row-wise normalization error introduced in the softmax loop. We propose MXAttention, a data-free post-training quantization framework for MXFP4 attention. MXAttention introduces two components: Universal Optimal Scaling (UOS), which exploits the periodic structure of power-of-two microscaling to derive a distribution-independent optimal scaling boundary Qmax=7.25 without calibration or search, and Pre-Normalization Quantization (PNQ), which quantizes unnormalized softmax exponentials before row-wise summation to preserve normalization by construction. Experiments on Wan2.2 and HunyuanVideo show that MXAttention closes at least 95% of the VBench Imaging Quality gap between OCP MXFP4 and FP16, substantially improves frame-level similarity, and preserves FP16-level generation quality with less than 0.01 absolute degradation on all reported VBench metrics. MXAttention also achieves performance competitive with strong NVFP4-based baselines with negligible overhead when fused into the attention pipeline. The implementation is publicly available in MindIE-SD. --- ### Closed-Loop Validation-Repair for Healthcare Interoperability: A Multi-Model Study of Schema Compliance in Clinical LLMs Authors: Jianru Shen Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24371v1 Healthcare interoperability requires AI systems to produce structured outputs conforming to standardized schemas including ICD-10 for diagnostic coding, CPT for procedure billing, and HL7 FHIR for data exchange. While large language models demonstrate clinical reasoning capabilities, their integration into electronic health record systems faces a critical barrier: schema noncompliance. We evaluate three open-source models, Qwen2.5 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Gemma2 9B, via local deployment across 320 clinical scenarios spanning ten medical specialties, yielding 960 model-scenario pairs assessed under paired baseline and validation-repair conditions. First, schema noncompliance is consistent across the three model families, with baseline compliance rates ranging from 85.9 to 91.6 percent despite varying architectures and training data, suggesting shared gaps in medical training corpora rather than model-specific limitations. Second, 96 percent of validator-detected failures are representation-level format violations such as alternative medical abbreviations and code prefixes, indicating models follow clinical writing conventions but lack awareness of healthcare IT standards. Third, the validation-repair framework achieves 99.0 percent overall compliance, ranging from 98.4 to 99.4 percent across models, with most errors resolving within one or two iterations. Exact McNemar p-values below 0.001 and absolute improvements of 7.8 to 12.5 percentage points across model sizes confirm statistical significance. These results support closed-loop validation-repair as an effective system-level safeguard for healthcare interoperability, improving schema-level readiness for downstream clinical system integration. --- ### Keep It InMind: Benchmarking the Implicit-Association Blind Spot in Agent Memory Authors: Ruizhe Li, Mingxuan Du, Benfeng Xu, Zhendong Mao Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24368v1 Long-term memory systems store what a user says in an external store and retrieve it when a related query arrives. This interface rests on an assumption so natural that it is rarely stated: a memory that is needed will resemble the query that needs it. World knowledge breaks the assumption. A tree-nut allergy should change the answer to a macaron request through their almond-flour ingredient, yet the two texts share no cue a retriever can see. We call this failure mode the implicit-association blind spot and introduce InMind, a 125-task, expert-verified benchmark spanning ten life domains, with 113 tasks grounded in citable public sources. Its paired controls separate three explanations that existing evaluations conflate: the fact was never stored, the model lacks the bridging knowledge, or the fact was stored and never surfaced. The verdict is clean. With the decisive memory placed in context, the backbone answers 84.0 percent of indirect queries; when the same memory must be retrieved, six vector, graph, and agentic memory systems reach at most 14.4 percent, even though they recall the same facts on demand at up to 100 percent. An embedding with eight times the dimensionality raises answer-blind target recall for every system yet leaves the gap essentially intact. A minimal diagnostic probe that keeps memory visible before the query arrives recovers most of the gap, locating the failure in the query-conditioned interface itself and pointing to routing, deciding which facts must stay visible, as the open problem InMind is built to score. --- ### MobiWave: Dispatch-Oriented Graph Wavelets and Drift-Guided Selective Optimization for Autonomous Fleet Rebalancing Authors: Xiao Han, Pinbo Wang, Yuanshao Zhu, Guojiang Shen, Xiangjie Kong Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24365v1 Autonomous fleets enable mobility platforms to coordinate idle vehicles directly, making fleet-wide rebalancing possible. However, two obstacles limit reliable deployment: overlapping regional and local traffic patterns can hide roads that remain useful for dispatch, and mobility drift can make a trained policy unreliable. Existing spatial aggregation mixes these patterns, while updating all parameters from limited recent data is costly and can damage stable knowledge. We propose \name, a framework that connects a dispatch-oriented multi-scale graph wavelet module with Drift-Guided Layer-Selective Optimization (DGLS). The first module addresses the representation challenge by separating graph-frequency patterns and weighting each scale according to its value for demand prediction and feasible rebalancing. DGLS addresses the adaptation challenge by measuring Dispatch-weighted Spectral Drift, selecting affected layers within a resource budget, and separating short shocks from persistent changes through a drift-aware fast--slow update. Candidate validation further rejects updates that fail to improve held-out dispatch reward without worsening monitored service or safety constraints. Experiments on both real-world datasets and simluated environments demonstrate the effectiveness of \name\ in comparing with state-of-the-art methods. The source code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MobiWave-40F8/. --- ### HistoGPA: A Context-Conditioned Gene-Prior Attention Framework for Histology-Based Spatial Gene Expression Prediction Authors: Ziang Liu, Xinhai Chen, Yigui Feng, Shuai Li, Qingyang Zhang, Jie Liu Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24364v1 Predicting spatial gene expression from routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images provides a practical complement to experimental spatial transcriptomics. Existing approaches focus on local or multi-scale visual features and often treat pretrained gene representations as fixed priors, although the interpretation of local morphology and the relevance of gene priors depend on tissue context. We propose HistoGPA, a context-conditioned gene-prior attention framework that uses a shared slide-level representation in two parallel pathways: one modulates local morphological features, whereas the other conditions pretrained gene embeddings and retrieves gene-prior information through cross-attention. This design enables each spatial location to retrieve context-adapted gene-prior information using its local morphology, position, and slide context. Across ten cancer types in HEST-1k, HistoGPA achieves the highest macro-averaged gene-wise Pearson correlation coefficient among the compared methods under the same evaluation protocol for both the top-50 and top-1,500 highly variable gene sets. Additional analyses show that HistoGPA better recovers the spatial expression patterns of cancer-associated genes and yields greater agreement between clusters derived independently from predicted and ground-truth expression profiles. Together, these findings motivate a context-dependent view of histology-to-expression prediction, in which local morphological representations and gene priors are jointly adapted to the broader tissue context. --- ### TaoMate: Anchor-Guided Memory Bridging Evolving and Reference States for Real-Time Audio-Video Digital Human Generation Authors: Qijun Gan, Chenwei Zhang, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma, Qiu Shen Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24359v1 Real-time long-form digital-human generation relies on causal models to extend audio-visual content while preserving subject appearance and audio-video synchronization across successive segments. A bounded cache retains local motion and phonetic context but discards older evidence, whereas attending to the complete generated history is computationally expensive and can propagate accumulated errors. We present \method, an anchor-guided persistent-memory framework for few-step joint audio-video generation. The framework preserves an immutable visual anchor, compresses completed video and audio blocks into fixed-capacity dynamic states, and retrieves those states through modality-specific residual attention without extending the active cache. A reference-aware modulation method additionally conditions video features on dynamic and anchor appearance statistics. Anchor-preserving causal-context distillation varies rollout horizon, prefix provenance, and cache-history reliability while keeping the immutable visual anchor unperturbed. By separating persistent memory from stage-local denoising dependencies, \method further admits stage-parallel execution across blocks, accelerating autoregressive inference without pipeline-specific retraining. We evaluate long-form video continuations with appearance, temporal, synchronization, facial, and speech diagnostics. Results show that \method preserves stable appearance across prompt-conditioned segments and strong audio-visual synchronization under autoregressive generation. Our project page is https://taoliveaigc.github.io/TaoMate. --- ### Are Prompt Optimizers Blind? Cross-Modal Visual Feedback for Automatic Prompt Optimization Authors: Haoyue Liu, Xiaoyu Ma, Ye Chen, Yuexian Zou, Xiaoying Tang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24354v1 Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has been widely adopted to adapt vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks without weight updates, yielding promising results. However, on multimodal tasks, the effectiveness of APO is fundamentally bottlenecked by a blind feedback channel: the optimizer reads the question, the prediction, and the gold answer, but never the input image on which the model failed, and therefore cannot diagnose visually grounded errors. As a remedy, we introduce Cross-Modal Visual Feedback (CMVF). CMVF incorporates (1) a failure-conditioned visual diagnosis stage, in which a stronger optimizer VLM inspects each failed image without access to predictions or labels, and (2) an error-aware aggregation stage that compresses these observations into reusable, task-level visual blind-spot patterns that drive the prompt rewrite. Crucially, the image is consumed only during optimization; the deployed artifact is an ordinary text prompt that runs at the same inference cost as any text-only baseline. Extensive results across 12 VQA datasets and 4 target VLMs demonstrate that CMVF consistently ranks first, improving over the strongest baseline on every target by 2.4 points on average, with gains of up to 6.5 points on individual benchmarks. Moreover, the optimizer self-organizes into expert-style visual checklists that transfer across models without re-optimization. --- ### PRISM: Prompt Refinement via Image-grounded Self-rewarding Mechanism for Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Guo Tang, HongJie Luo, Tianxu Wang, Ying Zhang, Hao Wang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24353v1 Text-to-image generation models can synthesize high-quality images from natural language descriptions, but their performance remains highly sensitive to prompt formulation. Existing prompt optimization methods mainly rely on text-side rewriting, prompt expansion, or external reward signals, offering limited image-grounded diagnosis and weak support for learning reusable optimisation policies. In this paper, we propose PRISM, a Prompt Refinement framework via Image-grounded Self-rewarding Mechanism. PRISM closes the prompt-image-feedback loop by interpreting generated images with structured visual diagnosis and scoring them along semantic consistency, aesthetic quality, and human preference alignment. It first initializes a unified VLM through multi-task supervised fine-tuning, and then improves the prompt policy via self-rewarding optimization with a hybrid ideal-point and Chebyshev reward. Extensive experiments show that PRISM improves holistic image quality and fine-grained semantic alignment, while providing interpretable feedback for targeted prompt refinement. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PRISM-FF81. --- ### Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models as Components of Cognitive Computing architecture for Regulatory Knowledge Management Authors: Dariusz Nowak-Nova Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24352v1 The aim of this article is to verify whether integrating large language models (LLMs) with the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture enables their transformation from standalone generative models into components of cognitive computing infrastructure with enhanced epistemic reliability. The study proposes an architectural approach based on locally deployed LLMs operating in on-premises environments without high-end GPU accelerators and examines their applicability in supporting regulatory management processes requiring continuous analysis and interpretation of legal acts. The proposed solution combines local LLMs with external knowledge repositories, creating a hybrid cognitive architecture in which the language model performs semantic interpretation while the RAG layer provides controlled knowledge retrieval, contextualization, and traceability of information sources. The implementation was validated using the Ollama and LM Studio execution environments together with the Polish language models Bielik and PLLuM running on consumer-class hardware. The results demonstrate that augmenting LLMs with RAG significantly improves the factual consistency, domain specificity and normative precision of generated texts while reducing the risk of unsupported content generation. Furthermore, the study shows that integrating RAG introduces auditability, controlled knowledge management and dynamic updating of regulatory information without retraining the language model. The findings indicate that locally deployed LLMs enhanced with RAG should be regarded not merely as text generation tools but as semantic processing modules within cognitive computing infrastructures supporting regulatory compliance and organizational decision-making in environments characterized by high legal and informational volatility. --- ### DeepFaith: Evidence-Grounded LLMs for Faithful Incident Reporting in Multi-Stage APT Defense Authors: Trung V. Phan, Tri Gia Nguyen, Thomas Bauschert Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24348v1 Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are difficult to detect and interpret due to their multi-stage and stealthy nature. While recent autonomous defense systems leverage provenance graphs and learning-based models for detection and mitigation, their outputs remain largely machine-oriented and difficult for analysts to interpret. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising interface for report generation, but often produce hallucinated or weakly grounded content. In this paper, we propose DeepFaith, an evidence-grounded framework for faithful incident reporting in multi-stage APT defense. DeepFaith transforms structured outputs from autonomous defense and explainability modules into natural-language reports that are explicitly aligned with underlying system evidence. The framework integrates a unified evidence representation, evidence-grounded prompting, faithfulness-aware generation, and post-generation verification to ensure that all generated statements are supported. Experiments in a realistic enterprise testbed demonstrate that DeepFaith improves faithfulness from 0.68 to 0.92, reduces unsupported claims from 0.32 to 0.08, and increases temporal consistency from 0.6 to 0.88, while maintaining concise reports and lower error rates than existing template-based and LLM-based solutions. These results show that evidence-grounded generation enables reliable, interpretable, and actionable reporting for security operations centers. --- ### Perturbative-NeuSA: A Structured Spectral Framework for Time-Dependent PDEs Authors: Xianli Zhu, Jia Yin Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24345v1 Neural spectral PDE solvers often learn an entire unresolved vector field even when an inexpensive approximate model can already capture most of the trajectory. Here we introduce Perturbative-NeuSA, a residual formulation that decomposes the target solution into a low-fidelity background and a high-resolution perturbation, so that only the unresolved dynamics is learned. Starting from the exact perturbation equation, the method combines a fixed spectral operator, a background-dependent correction, the background defect in the target PDE, and an optional neural closure. This construction makes the roles of physical structure and neural closure separately measurable. Across 2D Burgers, Klein-Gordon, and heterogeneous 2D wave equations, the deterministic structured solver outperforms the trained NeuSA baseline while requiring no neural-network training. The largest gains occur on Burgers, where the deterministic correction reduces training and extrapolation errors by factors of 24 and 44, respectively. In addition, a Klein-Gordon sweep over seven background resolutions shows that the effect of the closure is conditional: it improves a poor background by 3.6 times, becomes neutral at intermediate resolutions, and degrades a well-resolved background. For the wave equation, however, the closure provides an additional 18% reduction when the remaining residual is interface-localized. Multi-initial-condition diagnostics further show that the useful closure regime depends on the initial-condition spectrum and can disappear in extrapolation when structured correction already captures the dominant Burgers dynamics. Perturbative-NeuSA therefore reframes neural closure as a conditional, diagnosable correction governed by background fidelity, residual organization, and compatibility with the closure model. --- ### Beyond Aggregate Risk: Role-Stratified Conformal Risk Control for LLM Tool Calls Authors: Md Ashikur Rahman, Md Arifur Rahman, Niamul Hassan Samin, Khandaker Rifah Tasnia, Md Hasibul Amin, Sifat Rahman Ahona, Juena Ahmed Noshin Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24343v2 Language-model agents act through structured tool calls whose arguments carry very different risks: untrusted content may legitimately shape an email body but should never set a recipient, account, command, or credential. Existing conformal risk control methods certify a tool call as a whole, so a failure in one rare high-risk field can be averaged away by the many benign arguments around it, leaving the argument that causes harm uncertified. We introduce role-stratified per-field conformal risk control, a calibration layer that wraps any per-field detector and assigns a separate threshold and risk budget to each semantic argument role. We show that aggregate certification pays a price of coarseness, tightening a rare role's effective budget in proportion to how often that role appears, whereas role-stratified calibration certifies each sufficiently sampled role directly with a finite-sample guarantee and pools the rarest roles. Across AgentDojo and InjecAgent with six language models, our method achieves the most consistent role-specific budget compliance among the methods we evaluate under model and attack transfer, detector noise, gradual drift, unseen tool suites, and adaptive attacks, providing formal per-role guarantees under exchangeability or after recalibration. These results suggest that structured tool calls should be certified at the semantic-role level, not the whole action. --- ### Simulating Tenant Responses to Energy Policy Interventions with Transaction-Cost-Aware LLM Agent Authors: Weijie Xia, Stefanie Horian, Hanyue Huang, Queena K. Qian, Jie Yang, Pedro P. Vergara Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24341v3 Recent studies use Large language models (LLMs) to simulate human opinions and decisions by prompting models with demographic, attitudinal, or persona-based descriptions. Yet such simulations rarely model the practical, cognitive, or social frictions that shape how people respond to policy interventions. Perceived transaction cost (PTC) provides a useful lens for modeling the practical frictions that shape policy responses, such as information burden, administrative effort, coordination demands, and perceived uncertainty. We use this lens to develop a friction-aware persona modeling approach for LLM-based simulation. In the context of energy-efficient renovation (EER), tenants are represented not only by who they are demographically, but by how they perceive the costs, benefits, barriers, and uncertainties associated with proposed renovation plans. Using survey data collected from 1,068 citizens in the Netherlands, comprising approximately 40,548 survey question and answer pairs, we compare prompt-only and fine-tuned settings across GPT-3.5-turbo, Ministral-8B-Instruct, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and evaluate supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for local open-weight models. Results show that incorporating PTC-based personas and reasoning consistently improves model performance across both prompt-only and fine-tuned settings, suggesting that PTC-based persona design provides a useful bridge between institutional policy theory and interpretable LLM-based policy simulation. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaweijie1996/socialagent. --- ### Gubernaut: A Deterministic Homeostatic Controller for Affect-Regulated LLM Agents, Validated Across Independent Model Families Authors: Dushyant Sharma Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24339v1 Large language model (LLM) agents inherit reactive failure modes: escalation under provocation, sycophantic drift under flattery, perseveration when stuck. These are failures of propensity, not capability; they concern what a model does under sustained pressure, which training-time alignment reduces but does not eliminate at runtime. This research led to the Gubernaut Cognitive Controller (GCC), a model-agnostic runtime control layer in a Nelson--Narens monitoring--control loop: an object level reads and writes text, while a deterministic meta level reads only the numeric telemetry {intensity, valence, repetition} and returns a regulating posture. Because the meta level ingests zero tokens, no injection channel to the controller exists by construction (an architectural property, not yet adversarially tested); the text-exposed arbiter's compliance is measured, not assumed. We evaluate the GCC with a pre-registered, generate-once/judge-many protocol across a 4x4 matrix of four frontier models (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3), each serving as both a generator and a judge. The regulated arm is calmer in 13 of 16 cells at p<.05 and 15 of 16 by sign; the three sub-threshold cells, including a -0.04 null, all fall on the single near-saturated host. The effect survives a lineage-independent fourth judge family (xAI), strong evidence that it is no artifact of shared judge style. The clearest mechanism is the recovery signature: arousal that integrates under attack and then decays, valence-gated, on de-escalation, replicating across all four families. Transcripts and panels ship with SHA-256 provenance and are re-judgeable; five failure modes are pre-registered. No consciousness claims are made. --- ### Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Complementary View Alignment Authors: Zengyi Wo, Shiyu Zhang, Qiyao Peng, Tianpeng Li, Xuan Guo Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24338v1 Unsupervised graph representation learning aims to derive meaningful node embeddings by capturing both structural and attribute information without relying on labeled data. Existing methods, such as GAEs, have demonstrated effectiveness but typically rely on message-passing mechanisms that assume homophily, leading to performance degradation on heterophilous graphs, where connected nodes exhibit dissimilar features. This homophily bias results in the loss of critical high-frequency components that are essential for identifying heterophilous patterns. To address these challenges, we propose \textsc{AlignGAE}, a novel extension of \textit{MaskGAE} that preserves the full frequency spectrum through complementary view alignment. Our framework introduces a dual-encoder architecture that separately processes structural and attribute information, incorporates node positional encoding to approximate Neighborhood Identity Distribution (NID), and employs dual reconstruction tasks for both edges and node attributes. We further propose theoretically grounded NID alignment strategies that ensure semantic consistency across views while preserving their distinct characteristics. Through comprehensive spectral analysis, we demonstrate that \textsc{AlignGAE} achieves optimal representation properties when the alignment loss converges. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmark datasets validate our approach, showing that \textsc{AlignGAE} outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 18.7\% on heterophilous graphs in node classification, while maintaining competitive performance on homophilous graphs. Our results establish a new paradigm for frequency-aware graph representation learning. --- ### Unequal Trips, Unequal Places: Diagnosing and Mitigating Delay Inequity in Autonomous Vehicle Fleet Coordination Authors: Nicole Hu, Mingtao Zhang, Haoyang LI, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24336v1 City-scale autonomous vehicle fleet coordinators are typically optimized for aggregate travel time, yet fleet averages conceal how delay is distributed across trips and regions. We conduct a distributional audit on three real-city road-network and taxi-demand datasets from Manhattan, Chicago, and San Francisco. The audit reveals pervasive trip-length inequity whose direction depends on the city and coordinator. After accounting for trip length, spatial inequity becomes more pronounced as demand grows and is consistently stronger when trips are grouped by origin rather than destination. These findings motivate SPatially Aware RErouting (SPARE), a budgeted online coordination framework that assigns limited replanning capacity to delayed vehicles and redirects them using recently observed waiting pressure. SPARE provides a per-review decision guarantee and explicitly bounds online route updates. Experiments on all three datasets against six representative baselines show that SPARE delivers the strongest joint efficiency-fairness performance while retaining city-scale scalability. The results demonstrate that bounded congestion-responsive rerouting improves performance and equity without full-fleet replanning. --- ### Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System Authors: Phuong Le Huy, Nam H. Nguyen, Quan V. Dang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24332v1 Common chunking strategies in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often create redundant chunks. These redundant chunks make the vector database bigger and slow down retrieval. A common fix is cosine-similarity thresholding. This method reduces each chunk to a single vector, then compares vectors using a similarity score. But a single vector can lose the fine-grained, token-level detail needed to tell a true duplicate apart from a chunk that just shares the same topic. We propose Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication (CACD). CACD checks each new chunk against an in-memory pool of chunks already kept, using a cross-encoder instead of a single pooled vector. This keeps token-level detail all the way to the final comparison. CACD combines three parts: the cross-encoder comparison itself, a New Information Score (NIS) that measures how much of a chunk is not explained by a candidate already kept, and a majority vote across several candidates rather than a single best match. NIS is calculated from the attention entropy of the cross-encoder. We tested CACD against five existing filtering methods, nine chunking strategies, and 18 configurations, all on the full SQuAD 1.1 validation set. In our experiments, CACD removes 9.75% of chunks on average. This drop rate is close to other semantic-level methods, and much higher than exact-match filters, which barely remove anything. In these experiments, CACD also processes each configuration in 51.0 seconds on average, about 27% faster than the strongest baseline, NERExact (69.6s), and about 7x faster than cosine-similarity filtering (356.7s). These results come from a single dataset, so we present them as an early comparison, not a general claim. Code for the baseline evaluation and for CACD is available at https://github.com/lehuyphuong/rag_bench and https://github.com/lehuyphuong/cacd_dedup. --- ### DynaCalKV: Key-Value Cache Compression via Head Grouping and Adaptive Rank Allocation Authors: Tan T. Nguyen, Quan V. Dang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24331v1 As the inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires handling long context windows, the Key-Value (KV) cache initially appears to address this challenge but eventually becomes a significant bottleneck as the context window continues to grow. Low-rank compression has recently been studied as an effective approach to reduce KV cache memory while maintaining model performance. However, only a few existing methods treat the Key and Value caches differently, despite their distinct roles. Moreover, these methods typically employ fixed attention-head grouping, which may not fully exploit the structural similarity among attention heads. In this paper, we propose an improved low-rank KV cache compression framework. For the Key cache, we dynamically group attention heads based on Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity and allocate the rank budget adaptively under a parameter budget. For the Value cache, we adopt the same approach as ReCalKV, refining the low-rank decomposition through offline calibration to improve reconstruction quality. Experimental results on three instruction-tuned LLMs show that our method reduces the number of Key cache parameters while maintaining competitive accuracy. We further observe that the proposed strategy is particularly effective for Multi-Head Attention (MHA) models, whereas it should be applied more conservatively to Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) models, especially in long-context settings. --- ### MEGA-CL: A Molecular Foundation Model for Generalizable ADMET Prediction through Graph External Attention and Contrastive Learning Authors: Tinghui Jin, Kedu Jin, Ying Li, Guanghui Ren, Jingzhi Xue, Shiyu Zhou, Xiaoli Dai, Li-bin Wei, Xijing Chen, Di Zhao, Jinfeng Liu Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24314v1 Predicting the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) properties of small molecules remains a major challenge in drug discovery. Here, we present MEGA-CL, a foundation graph neural network framework for universal molecular ADMET prediction. MEGA-CL integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with a multi-head external attention mechanism and an enhanced message-passing architecture, enabling simultaneous modeling of local chemical substructures and global inter-graph relationships while mitigating over-smoothing effects commonly observed in deep graph networks. Across 13 benchmark datasets and 21 downstream ADMET tasks, MEGA-CL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. In particular, the framework demonstrates robust performance on challenging regression tasks, including clearance (CL) and steady-state volume of distribution (VDss), while maintaining strong generalization ability in independent external validation. Clinically relevant predictive accuracy was achieved, with more than 75% of predictions falling within a 3-fold error range. In an external evaluation on 18 novel compounds derived from recently approved FDA drugs, over 50% of human liver microsome clearance (HLMC) predictions were within a 2-fold error range. To further assess its practical applicability, MEGA-CL was prospectively evaluated on three preclinical drug candidates using in vitro hepatic microsomal metabolism assays and CYP450 inhibition assays guided by model predictions. The predicted HLMC values for all candidates were within 2.5-fold of the experimentally measured values, and 73.3% of CYP450 inhibition endpoints (11/15) were correctly classified. These results demonstrate the potential of MEGA-CL as a generalizable framework for accelerating in silico ADMET evaluation and early-stage drug candidate optimization. --- ### Energy Constrained Hierarchical Underwater Monitoring via Local Multi-Agent RAG Authors: Mohamed Amine Janati, Laurent Gautier, Stéphane Barbot Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV, cs.MA, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24313v1 Marine life monitoring is limited by strict energy constraints, poor underwater connectivity, and the high cost of transmitting raw multimodal data from remote deployments. This paper proposes a low-consumption underwater monitoring architecture that combines always-on edge sensing with selective high-performance local reasoning. The system follows a hierarchical master--satellite design in which ultra-low-power MAX78000/MAX78002 microcontrollers continuously monitor visual and acoustic signals, while an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX is activated only for scheduled processing, event-driven analysis, or researcher interaction. Once active, the Jetson executes a fully local multimodal pipeline for data ingestion, visual target extraction, embedding-based indexing, species identification, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and automated reporting. BioCLIP/OpenCLIP embeddings are used to organize mission data, marine taxonomic references, scientific documents, and operational metadata in local ChromaDB collections. A dedicated identification layer combines visual similarity search, centroid-based classification, and supervised classifiers to support adaptive species recognition. A LangChain-based multi-agent framework coordinates query routing, structured analysis, energy management, hardware reconfiguration, and report generation. The architecture is evaluated through visual and acoustic monitoring case studies. The proposed system bridges ultra-low-power continuous sensing with local multimodal intelligence, enabling underwater stations to produce structured, researcher-ready knowledge while compressing local data for flexible acoustic, optical, or satellite transmission, minimizing both energy use and communication overhead. --- ### CONSISTRE: A Unified Consistency-Aware Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models Authors: Mingxuan Sun Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24312v2 Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations among multiple entities across extended contexts while maintaining consistency across predicted triples. Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities in information extraction, their predictions are typically generated independently for each candidate triple and may violate fundamental relational constraints such as transitivity, symmetry, and functional uniqueness, leading to contradictory and unreliable outputs. We propose CONSISTRE, a unified consistency-aware framework for DocRE that addresses this limitation through two complementary tracks. The first operates at inference time for black-box LLMs, combining constraint-aware prompting, constraint-based verification, and iterative self-reflection to refine predictions without task-specific fine-tuning. The second injects consistency knowledge into smaller open-source models via a knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning pipeline: reasoning traces from a powerful teacher are distilled into a student via supervised fine-tuning, followed by GRPO alignment using a composite reward that jointly optimizes extraction performance and relational consistency. Together, the two tracks cover both API-accessible and locally deployable scenarios under a unified consistency formulation. Experiments on DocRED show that both tracks outperform their baselines, with the inference-time track achieving competitive F1 using off-the-shelf black-box LLMs and the training-time track substantially narrowing the gap between 7--8B open-source models and state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs at a fraction of their inference cost. Ablation studies confirm that explicit consistency modeling mitigates relational contradictions and enhances the reliability of LLM-based DocRE across both deployment paradigms. --- ### CONSISTRE: A Unified Consistency-Aware Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models Authors: Mingxuan Sun Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24312v1 Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations among multiple entities across extended contexts while maintaining consistency across predicted triples. Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities in information extraction, their predictions are typically generated independently for each candidate triple and may violate fundamental relational constraints such as transitivity, symmetry, and functional uniqueness, leading to contradictory and unreliable outputs. We propose CONSISTRE, a unified consistency-aware framework for DocRE that addresses this limitation through two complementary tracks. The first operates at inference time for black-box LLMs, combining constraint-aware prompting, constraint-based verification, and iterative self-reflection to refine predictions without task-specific fine-tuning. The second injects consistency knowledge into smaller open-source models via a knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning pipeline: reasoning traces from a powerful teacher are distilled into a student via supervised fine-tuning, followed by GRPO alignment using a composite reward that jointly optimizes extraction performance and relational consistency. Together, the two tracks cover both API-accessible and locally deployable scenarios under a unified consistency formulation. Experiments on DocRED show that both tracks outperform their baselines, with the inference-time track achieving competitive F1 using off-the-shelf black-box LLMs and the training-time track substantially narrowing the gap between 7--8B open-source models and state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs at a fraction of their inference cost. Ablation studies confirm that explicit consistency modeling mitigates relational contradictions and enhances the reliability of LLM-based DocRE across both deployment paradigms. --- ### Rethinking the Generation Order of Block Diffusion Language Models Authors: Kai Syun Hou, James Kwok Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24306v1 Diffusion language models enable flexible arbitrary-order generation, but existing sampling methods are mostly designed for early masked diffusion models (MDMs). In this work, we study sampling for recent block diffusion language models (BDLMs). We show empirically and analytically that these models are naturally more aligned with left-to-right decoding than MDMs. Based on this observation, we propose Parallel Autoregressive Decoding (PARD), a simple training-free sampling method that preserves left-to-right unmasking structure while allowing parallel token commitment. Extensive experiments show that PARD consistently outperforms existing parallel samplers in generation quality, while achieving substantial speedups over pure AR decoding with only a small quality gap. --- ### Teacher Knows It Best: Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Tipping Points in Networked Langevin Dynamics AI Sycophancy Authors: Sayantari Ghosh, Saumik Bhattacharya, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: physics.soc-ph, cs.AI, math.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24304v1 We formulate a statistical physics framework to model a networked stochastic dynamical system exhibiting bistability, driven by additive noise and social conformity. We apply this model to understand and mitigate AI-induced delusional spiraling-a phenomenon where algorithmic sycophancy from Large Language Models continuously reinforces inaccurate beliefs within a socially interacting society. By partitioning the network into a majority of regular agents and a minority of "aware" nodes (Teachers) placed at topological hubs, we use a degree-weighted mean-field approximation to reduce high-dimensional coupled Langevin equations into a single macroscopic drift equation. We provide a closed-form analytical derivation for the deterministic critical tipping time through a saddle-node bifurcation. We validate this analytical boundary using finite-size scaling and demonstrate a universal data collapse across diverse network topologies. Finally, we optimize an intervention strategy under a strict budget constraint that balances the topological footprint against driving velocity. We prove mathematically that under certain conditions, a highly concentrated, rapid intervention targeting massive hubs strictly outperforms a distributed, slow approach to rescue the network. --- ### Multiview Multi-Person Human Mesh Recovery Under Large Scenes with Occlusions Authors: Qi Zhang, Tao Yu, Jiechao He, Antoni B. Chan, Hui Huang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24302v1 Human mesh recovery (HMR) aims to recover 3D human meshes from images. Most existing HMR benchmarks and methods focus on either multi-person reconstruction from a single view or single-person reconstruction from multiple views, where the number of subjects and the scene scale are relatively limited. Such settings are insufficient for real-world applications with large scenes and severe inter-person occlusions. To address this limitation, we introduce a large-scale synthetic benchmark for multiview multi-person HMR, termed MVMP-HMR. The proposed dataset contains 15 complex scenes with up to 50 camera views and 30 interacting persons, featuring large spatial coverage and severe occlusions, which significantly increases the difficulty of human mesh recovery. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a multiview multi-person whole-body human mesh recovery model, referred to as MVMP-HMR model. The model first fuses multiview features into a scene-level 3D feature volume, and then leverages pelvis joints predicted by a 3D pose estimation network to extract person-specific queries from the 3D feature volume. These human queries are cross-attended with the 3D feature volume and integrated to decode each person's 3D mesh. Moreover, we introduce two novel losses--the orientation loss and the 3D joint density loss--to alleviate orientation and pose ambiguities under severe occlusions. Experiments demonstrate that existing state-of-the-art HMR methods struggle on the proposed MVMP-HMR benchmark, while our method consistently outperforms prior SOTAs in large-scale scenes with severe occlusions. --- ### Self-Authored Verification Is Unreliable in Heuristic Self-Improving Agents Authors: Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Yingqi Wang, Yueshan Wang, Dakui Wang Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24300v1 Self-improving agents accumulate capability by repeatedly rewriting procedural policies, controllers, or heuristic rules. They typically rely on self-authored tests or metrics to decide whether to accept subsequent edits. The agent controls both the optimized object and its verifier. As a result, self-assigned scores can remain near perfect while real deployment performance degrades or stays low. We study this problem through the verifier--deployment gap. This gap refers to the discrepancy between an agent's self-authored verification signal and a sealed deployment evaluation that the agent cannot observe or access. We ask how self-authored verification fails under iterative policy-and-test rewriting, how the failure changes with capability, and how little exogenous trust is sufficient to prevent real regressions from being deployed. To address this problem, we introduce a Sealed Exogenous Acceptance Loop (SEAL). SEAL retains self-authored tests but compares each candidate with the incumbent through a fixed harness-side audit. The agent cannot author or inspect the audit, receives only accept/reject, and the whole incumbent state is retained after a clear regression. Our experiments show that this problem often appears in heuristic learning settings. These settings require trial-and-error discovery of the target objective. We further find that failures of self-written verification are stratified by capability. Weaker agents tend to damage previously acquired strategies behind easy self-tests. Stronger agents are more stable, but they still mismeasure the deployment distribution. Standard self-written constraints do not reliably close this gap. In contrast, SEAL outperforms unprotected baselines across six models and three random seeds. Reliable self-improvement need not abandon self-verification, but it requires at least one deployment-acceptance signal outside the agent's control. --- ### UMI3D: Robust 3D Generation on Unconstrained Multi-Image Inputs via Simultaneous Focus Cross-Attention Routing Authors: Zefan Qu, Zhenwei Wang, Gerhard Petrus Hancke, Rynson W. H. Lau Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24298v1 Recent 3D foundation models can generate high-quality assets from a single image, but degrade markedly on unconstrained multi-image inputs, often producing distorted geometry, over-smoothed textures, and chaotic colors. We argue that this failure stems not from limited model capacity, but from a mismatch between single-image cross-attention and the multi-image setting: existing models lack a principled way to decide which image each 3D voxel should trust at each denoising step. Revisiting recent single-image 3D foundation models, we show that explicitly routing each voxel to its most informative image is sufficient to unlock strong performance on inconsistent multi-image inputs. Based on this observation, we propose UMI3D, a training-free and plug-and-play framework that restructures cross-attention for unconstrained multi-image 3D generation. Its core, Simultaneous Focus Cross-Attention (SFC-Attn), activates all conditioning images at each denoising step while allowing each voxel to focus on the single image that best explains it. To enable this routing, we derive the Voxel Reference Score (VRS), a model-intrinsic metric for voxel--image affinity that requires no external matching, segmentation, or correspondence models. Extensive experiments show that UMI3D unlocks the multi-image potential of single-image 3D generation frameworks across diverse tasks. Project Page: UMI3D-Project.github.io. --- ### Superpixel-Based QUBO for Scalable Quantum-Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Mohammad Chalhoub, Mahdi Chehimi, Laia Domingo, Omar Alhussein, Ahmed Farouk, Saif Al-Kuwari Published: 2026-07-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.NI, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24288v1 Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) has emerged as a powerful framework for medical computing problems. Binary decision variables naturally represent clinical choices, making QUBO formulations well-suited for quantum annealing hardware. However, a fundamental scalability challenge limits practical deployment: problem size grows rapidly with input dimensionality, creating computational bottlenecks that restrict applications to simplified scenarios. This paper addresses this challenge through hierarchical problem reduction, as demonstrated in medical image segmentation, where pixel-level QUBO formulations create over 65,000 variables for a 256x256 image, forcing existing approaches to downsample to 42x42 resolution and discard 97% of pixel information. A superpixel-based QUBO framework is proposed using simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) to group pixels into perceptually meaningful regions, then formulate segmentation as QUBO over a region adjacency graph (RAG) combining min-cut and smoothness objectives. Validation on INbreast mammography breast cancer images demonstrates a 4.2% improvement in segmentation quality (mean IoU 0.76 vs 0.73) with 33 computational speedup (0.67s vs 21.97s) and a 97.3% reduction in problem size (1764 to 48 variables), all achieved while processing full-resolution images rather than downsampled versions. The reduced problem size also fits well within current quantum annealer connectivity limits, removing the embedding overhead that has historically blocked direct deployment of pixel-level QUBO segmentation on quantum hardware. ---