# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 49 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #2401–2450 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/49 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/48.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/50.md) ### Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of SAM3 for Prompt-Driven Surgical Concept Segmentation Authors: Changjing Liu, Yiming Huang, Beilei Cui, Liangjing Shao, Long Bai, Yanheng Li, Haoxuan Che, Hongliang Ren Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23694v1 Efficient surgical segmentation empowers clinical diagnosis, intraoperative monitoring, and downstream robotic pipelines for reconstruction and simulation. Although prompt-driven foundation models like Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) achieve strong segmentation performance on natural images, surgical data exhibits domain gaps against its pre-training data, resulting in degraded segmentation accuracy. Furthermore, existing medical SAM methods require full-parameter fine-tuning, incurring heavy computational consumption and low efficiency. To address these limitations, this work proposes a parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adaptation of SAM3 for surgical concept segmentation. We inject low-rank adapters into the prompt encoder, detector and tracker while fully freezing the vision backbone, which only optimizes 0.98% of the total model parameters and supports training on a single consumer GPU. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms zero-shot SAM3 and other mainstream baselines, and the generated segmentation results can be directly deployed to support downstream robotic surgical scene reconstruction and physical simulation pipelines. --- ### Compute Globally, Materialize Locally: The Memory Contract of Sparse Event-KV Authors: Zefeng Cai, Zerui Cai Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23693v1 Long-horizon agents increasingly reuse their KV cache as memory: a serving system keeps a subset of cached entries and drops the rest. Eviction and episodic-memory schemes therefore rest on a premise rarely tested directly, that a retained event is still informative once the observations that produced it are gone. We test it by omitting one earlier observation from what is served, across otherwise identical agent histories. Among items sensitive to that observation, the answer overwhelmingly follows the omitted value, though no served span says which value is correct. We call this semantic materialization: a downstream event's cached rows act as an independently servable view of computation whose inputs are gone. It can also be written on purpose. A deliberately phrased, answer-free event raises donor-aligned recovery from 6% to 51% on Qwen3-8B without ever naming the value, whereas passively harvesting natural mentions from long-term dialog yields no detected advantage. What such a row carries is specific and bounded. Compact state survives, larger payloads decay toward chance, and whether a construction writes at all turns on phrasing rather than on meaning alone, so two phrasings the model comprehends equally well can diverge sharply. The result is a memory contract for sparse event-KV serving: what to write, where it lands, and what survives once the source is gone. For anyone who evicts the corollary is that dropping a source event and observing no accuracy loss does not show the source was unnecessary. --- ### GNM Head: A Generative aNthropometric Model of the human head Authors: Stylianos Ploumpis, Jan Bednarik, Gaspard Zoss, Ruslan Guseinov, Luca Prasso, Prashanth Chandran, Oliver Boyne, Vasileios Choutas, Timo Bolkart, Daoye Wang, Menglei Chai, Di Qiu et al. Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23687v3 Parametric models of the human head are essential tools traditionally used in computer vision and graphics for animation, rendering, and reconstruction. More recently, they serve as crucial conditioning signals within generative large vision models, allowing for tight spatial control of generated imagery. However, existing publicly available models are typically limited in anatomical scope, modeling only outer geometry while ignoring intra-oral and ocular structures, and frequently suffer from reduced geometric quality stemming from low-fidelity input datasets. In this report we introduce a new parametric model dubbed Generative aNthropometric Model (GNM), named as a homophone of the human genome. GNM encompasses the head, face, neck, eyeballs, teeth, and tongue, and it is built on an extensive database of high-resolution 3D scans combined with high-quality anatomy specific artist-made samples. This report details the data provenance, the model architecture including the specialized sub-models for the ocular and intra-oral structures, and shows its SotA performance on fitting target 3D face scans. To foster community innovation, the complete GNM framework is made publicly available. --- ### GNM Head: A Generative aNthropometric Model of the human head Authors: Stylianos Ploumpis, Jan Bednarik, Gaspard Zoss, Ruslan Guseinov, Luca Prasso, Prashanth Chandran, Oliver Boyne, Vasileios Choutas, Timo Bolkart, Daoye Wang, Menglei Chai, Di Qiu et al. Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23687v1 Parametric models of the human head are essential tools traditionally used in computer vision and graphics for animation, rendering, and reconstruction. More recently, they serve as crucial conditioning signals within generative large vision models, allowing for tight spatial control of generated imagery. However, existing publicly available models are typically limited in anatomical scope, modeling only outer geometry while ignoring intra-oral and ocular structures, and frequently suffer from reduced geometric quality stemming from low-fidelity input datasets. In this report we introduce a new parametric model dubbed Generative aNthropometric Model (GNM), named as a homophone of the human genome. GNM encompasses the head, face, neck, eyeballs, teeth, and tongue, and it is built on an extensive database of high-resolution 3D scans combined with high-quality anatomy specific artist-made samples. This report details the data provenance, the model architecture including the specialized sub-models for the ocular and intra-oral structures, and shows its SotA performance on fitting target 3D face scans. To foster community innovation, the complete GNM framework is made publicly available. --- ### Extreme Volatility Warning under Label Scarcity via Multi-Source Anomaly Fusion Authors: Jin Qian, Zhangzhi Xiong, Mingrui Li, Zhen Liu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23682v1 Early warning of extreme market volatility is central to financial risk management, but actionable events are rare, nonstationary, and often triggered by exogenous information shocks. In our CSI~300 setting, only $\sim$80 positive samples are observed across 791 training days, making heavily supervised multi-source models unstable. We first analyze a 100K-parameter hierarchical text-signal fusion model (HTSF) and find that added parameterization hurts in this low-label regime. Motivated by this failure, we propose \textbf{AAMSF} (Anomaly-Augmented Multi-Signal Fusion), a semisupervised framework that combines Isolation Forest anomaly scores over market indicators, GDELT events, Chinese financial news, and English media with lightweight Ridge score fusion. We further introduce \textbf{T-AAMSF}, a temporal extension for multi-day anomaly accumulation. On CSI~300 (2018--2023), AAMSF achieves test AUC-ROC \textbf{0.680}, outperforming the strongest unsupervised baseline (0.630) and neural baseline (0.588), while T-AAMSF improves PR-AUC to 0.291. Ablations reveal strong source asymmetry: GDELT and domestic financial news provide complementary risk signals, whereas English media consistently reduces performance, and learned weighting is unreliable under validation noise. These results suggest an empirical design principle for label-scarce financial risk warning: robust anomaly geometry and source reliability can matter more than supervised representation capacity. --- ### Perturbation-Aware Diffusion-Guided Hybrid Segmentation for Robust and Annotation-Efficient Plant Stress Phenotyping Authors: Gurbhit Chaurakoti, Soumyashree Kar Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23680v1 Semantic segmentation in agricultural imagery is often evaluated under in-domain protocols, yet practical deployment requires robustness to appearance perturbations, limited annotations, and cross domain shift. This paper presents a diffusion-guided hybrid segmentation framework in which U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer backbones generate coarse masks that are refined by Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM), latent diffusion, or semantic-guided diffusion. The framework is evaluated through a 3x3 architectural screening study on PlantSegV3, followed by boundary-constrained optimization, perturbation-guided retraining, low-data evaluation, constrained hyperparameter screening, and controlled cross-domain adaptation. On PlantSegV3, the best selected hybrid model achieves 71.83% refined mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) and 26.10% refined Boundary-F1, and the selected models remain stable under substantially reduced supervision, demonstrating strong annotation efficiency. Perturbation analysis identifies grayscale conversion, fog, coarse dropout, and shadow as the most disruptive appearance shifts, and the resulting augmentation policy substantially improves robustness during retraining. The adapted models further show effective transfer to external agricultural datasets under limited target supervision, indicating that diffusion refinement and boundary-aware optimization provide transferable structural priors. Overall, the results show that carefully matched backbone-refiner pairings, combined with perturbation-aware retraining, can improve structural delineation and robustness under realistic resource and distribution constraints. --- ### Breaking the Total Variance Barrier: Sharp Sample Complexity for Linear Heteroscedastic Bandits with Fixed Action Set Authors: Heyang Zhao, Tianyuan Jin, Weixin Wang, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Pan Xu, Quanquan Gu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23679v1 Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in tackling heteroscedastic noise in bandits and reinforcement learning. In these works, the cumulative variance of the noise $Λ= \sum_{t=1}^T σ_t^2$, where $σ_t^2$ is the variance of the noise at round $t$, is used to characterize the statistical complexity of the problem, yielding \emph{simple regret} bounds of order $\tilde{\cal{O}}(d \sqrt{Λ/ T^2})$ for $d$-dimensional linear bandits with heteroscedastic noise. However, with a closer look, $Λ$ remains the same order even if the noise is close to zero at half of the rounds, which indicates that the $Λ$-dependence is not optimal. In this paper, we revisit the stochastic linear bandit problem with heteroscedastic noise, where the action set is prefixed throughout the learning process. We propose a novel variance-adaptive algorithm \texttt{VAEE} (Variance-Aware Exploration with Elimination) for large action set, which actively explores actions that maximizes the information gain among a candidate set of actions that are not eliminated. With the active-exploration strategy, we show that \texttt{VAEE} achieves a \emph{simple regret} with a nearly \emph{harmonic-mean} dependent rate. For finitely many actions, we propose a variance-aware variant of G-optimal design based exploration, which achieves a simple regret with sharper dependence on $d$. We also establish a nearly matching lower bound for the fixed action set setting indicating that \emph{harmonic-mean} dependent rate is unavoidable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that breaks the $\sqrtΛ$ barrier for stochastic linear bandits with heteroscedastic noise. --- ### Focus Is All You Need: Adaptive Goal-aware Attention Orchestration for Multi-Agent Graph Systems Authors: Mingzhou Fan, Siyuan Xu, Mingxuan Yuan Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23678v1 Large language models (LLMs) enable autonomous agents for reasoning, planning, and tool use. Recent systems increasingly organize these agents as graphs of specialized, interconnected nodes. Although graph-based orchestration supports flexible decomposition and coordination, it creates a key challenge: \textbf{attention allocation}. As workflows grow, existing approaches often execute graph components uniformly, wasting resources on irrelevant or low-impact tasks. We introduce \textbf{Attention Orchestration}, a paradigm that extends Transformer-style attention from token representations to workflow-level agent coordination. Our framework, \textbf{Adaptive Goal-aware Attention Orchestration (AGAO)}, dynamically estimates agent importance based on user objectives, graph dependencies, and computational constraints. AGAO combines three components: (1) goal-aware attention, measuring semantic relevance between user goals and agent capabilities; (2) topology-aware attention, modeling structural dependencies in agent graphs; and (3) resource-aware attention, allocating budgets and execution priorities across heterogeneous agents. Together, these mechanisms transform static agent graphs into adaptive systems that focus computation on goal-critical reasoning paths. Experiments across diverse multi-agent workloads show that AGAO improves task effectiveness while reducing unnecessary computation, latency, and token consumption compared with existing graph-based execution strategies. Our work establishes \textbf{Attention Engineering} as a direction for scalable, intelligent multi-agent systems. Code: https://github.com/MingzhouFan97/AGAO. --- ### SpecAHD: Localize to Specialize for Automated Heuristic Design in Large-Scale Routing Problems Authors: Kezhao Lai, Yutao Lai, Hai-Lin Liu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23676v1 LLM-based automated heuristic design (AHD) typically scores executable programs on complete instances or within fixed solver components. In large-scale routing problems, localized reconstruction reduces the size of each optimization task, but repair regions within the same incumbent can exhibit substantially different structures. One construction rule must therefore compromise across them. In this paper, we propose SpecAHD, a coupled bilevel framework for within-instance specialization. An upper-level search learns where to expose bounded repair regions, while a lower-level search evolves a complementary repertoire of executable heuristics for the induced repair tasks. The upper-level program determines the repair tasks seen by the lower level, while checked repair outcomes determine how upper-level programs are evaluated. The lower-level objective favors heuristics that perform well on average or solve tasks that the current repertoire handles poorly. For the repair tasks induced by a fixed upper-level program and a fixed lower-level candidate pool, this objective is monotone submodular, allowing greedy repertoire selection with a (1-1/e) approximation guarantee. Across four routing problems and multiple LLM backbones, SpecAHD reduces held-out objective cost by up to 57.7% against the strongest competing AHD baseline and outperforms the per-instance baseline envelope on most public instances. --- ### An empirical investigation into the properties of standard word embeddings Authors: Salomon Kabongo Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23675v1 The embedding of word sequences into continuous vector spaces has been one of the most important developments in Natural Language Processing in the recent past. Such embeddings have found application in areas such as Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis and many more. This essay reviews the various mechanisms that have been proposed for the calculation of word embeddings, investigates popular toolkits and embedding matrices that are available in the public domain, and experiments with one or more selected implementations to better understand their characteristics. La représentation vectorielle continue de mots a été l'un des développements les plus importants dans le domaine du traitement automatique du langage naturel au cours des dernières années. Ces représentations ont trouvé application dans des domaines tels que la reconnaissance vocale, la traduction automatique, l'analyse des sentiments, etc. Ce travail passe en revue les différents mécanismes proposés pour le calcul de ces vecteurs de mots, étudie les kits d'outils populaires et les matrices disponibles publiquement en ligne, et expérimente avec une ou plusieurs implémentations sélectionnées pour mieux comprendre leurs caractéristiques. --- ### Contrastive Parameter Disentanglement for Multi-modal Remote Sensing Image Generation Authors: Yu Zhang, Wenda Zhao, Haojun Tang, Haipeng Wang Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23673v1 Existing remote sensing image generation methods are largely confined to single-modality synthesis and therefore fail to exploit the complementary information inherent in multimodal imagery. To address this limitation, we propose a contrastive parameter disentanglement framework for multimodal remote sensing image generation, which generates semantically consistent and structurally aligned images across multiple modalities, including optical, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), from a single text prompt. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive parameter disentanglement module that disentangles shared semantics from modality-specific attributes at the parameter level within an orthogonal core subspace. Based on this module, we develop a disentangled optimization strategy that first constrains the parameter matrix A of the LoRA adapter to capture modality-invariant semantics through a multimodal contrastive objective and then guides multiple parameter matrices B to learn modality-specific attributes under text conditioning. This strategy enables the simultaneous generation of multimodal images with consistent semantic content and distinct modality characteristics. Furthermore, to ensure structural alignment across the generated images, we devise a query-key structure transfer mechanism that jointly models multimodal sampling trajectories during inference by transferring structural correlation priors from an anchor modality to the remaining modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art remote sensing image generation approaches in terms of generation quality, semantic consistency, and structural alignment, while also achieving superior performance in the downstream object classification task. --- ### Plans Work in Mysterious Ways: Evaluating a Plan Mode for Spreadsheet Agents Authors: Aayush Kumar, Avik Dutta, Sumit Gulwani, Gustavo Soares, Advait Sarkar, Emerson Murphy-Hill Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23670v2 Plan Modes have become standard features in agentic programming tools, allowing users to gain transparency and control by working with the agent to develop a plan before task execution. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of this feature translate to end-user programming environments such as spreadsheets. Since spreadsheet programmers tend to work iteratively and care less about technical correctness, upfront planning may not fit into their workflows as easily. In this paper, we build a prototype of a Plan Mode for spreadsheet programming and evaluate it against a non-planning baseline through a within-subjects user study (N=24). We found that despite similar task outcomes with both tools, using Plan Mode led to a reduction in refinement and a better perception of the tool across dimensions of creativity support and human-machine collaboration. We discuss the implications of these results for the future design of Plan Modes, and for the broader role of human-AI planning in end-user programming. --- ### RRTrack: Robust and Recoverable Object 6D Pose Tracking for Dynamic Scenes Authors: Junyue Li, Ye Zheng, Yifan Chen, Zhe Sun, Xuelong Li Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23669v1 Robust object 6D pose tracking is critical for robotic systems operating in dynamic and occluded scenes. Per-frame estimators are accurate but computationally expensive, while current trackers struggle with fast motion and complete occlusion due to their reliance on continuous visibility. To address these challenges, we present RRTrack, an efficient, recoverable object 6D pose tracker that enables robust tracking through fast motion and target disappearance--reappearance. RRTrack introduces a 2D--6D closed-loop tracking strategy that integrates memory-based video object segmentation (VOS) with 6D pose refinement. The 2D branch maintains target localization, and the 6D branch verifies geometric consistency before memory updates. In addition, a DINOv2-based dual-bank template matching module is developed to recover lost targets by jointly exploiting offline synthetic templates and online observation anchors while maintaining real-time efficiency. We also introduce a synthetic RGB-D benchmark comprising three robotic scenarios with fast motion and full occlusion. Experimental results on the synthetic benchmark demonstrate that RRTrack improves equal-subset mean ADD-S AR by 66.3\% and ADD-S AUC by 65.7\% over FoundationPose while achieving 55.2 FPS. Real-world experiments further validate the robustness of RRTrack under noisy sensing conditions. Project page: https://github.com/7kevin24/RRTrack --- ### No Free Lunch in Flow Surrogates under Time-Varying Boundary Conditions: A Two-Regime Study Authors: Georg Winkler, Martin Stoll Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23667v2 We test whether an architecture that succeeds on a simple flow regime also succeeds on a richer one, with each trained separately on each regime. We explore two transient flows under time-varying boundary conditions: the three-dimensional slurry film in chemical-mechanical planarisation (CMP), central to semiconductor manufacturing, and the two-dimensional Kármán vortex street (KVS). Eight surrogate models on one shared pipeline differ in whether they learn the full field or a latent representation, and in whether they predict in one shot or step by step. No single architecture wins both regimes. On the film, a one-shot full-field model reconstructs the cumulative wall shear stress to 2.7% relative error. On the wake, a latent autoregressive DeepONet retains 90% of the shedding power that direct and one-shot models damp to almost zero. The treatment of time decides the outcome. The self-sustained wake calls for autoregressive feedback and the boundary-driven film for a direct map. Pointwise RMSE hides the damped oscillation on the wake, compresses the sixfold lead on the film's process target, and picks the damped model under wake extrapolation. The evaluation scores five physical questions. Trained surrogates answer queries 10^3 to 10^4 times faster than the finite-element solver and pay off from the first query beyond the training set on the film and from the third on the wake. Neither the winning architecture nor its validation holds across regimes. The choice of surrogate should follow the dynamical character of the target flow, and its validation should resolve the failure modes. --- ### No Free Lunch in Flow Surrogates under Time-Varying Boundary Conditions: A Two-Regime Study Authors: Georg Winkler, Martin Stoll Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23667v1 A flow surrogate validated on a simple regime is often taken as evidence that the approach will carry to a richer one. We test this assumption on two transient flows under time-varying boundary conditions emulating the process startup: the three-dimensional slurry film in chemical-mechanical planarisation (CMP), a core semiconductor-manufacturing process, and the two-dimensional Karman vortex street (KVS) behind a cylinder. Eight surrogate models are compared on one shared evaluation pipeline, differing in whether they learn the full field or a latent representation, and whether they predict trajectories in one shot or step by step. No single architecture wins both regimes. On the film, a one-shot full-field model reconstructs the process-relevant cumulative wall shear stress to 3.2% relative error. On the wake, a latent autoregressive DeepONet retains 96% of the shedding power that direct and one-shot models damp to almost zero. The deciding axis is the treatment of time. The self-sustained wake requires the phase memory that autoregressive feedback provides, while the boundary-driven film rewards a direct map. Pointwise RMSE picks the wrong model in both regimes, so the evaluation scores five physical questions instead, the field, its structure, invented motion, amplitude, and timing. The trained surrogates answer queries $10^3$ to $10^4$ times faster than the finite-element solver, but the offline cost of the training simulations means they pay off from the first query beyond the training set for CMP and the third for the KVS. The choice of surrogate should follow the dynamical character of the target flow, and its validation should use failure-mode-resolved metrics, since neither the winning architecture nor its validation transfers. --- ### XMatchAD: A Cross-Modal Matching Perspective on Reconstruction-based Anomaly Detection Authors: Mingxiu Cai, Zhe Zhang, Gaochang Wu, Tianyou Chai Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23658v1 The remarkable success of reconstruction-based methods in Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) lies in their ability to identify and localize anomalies by modeling discrepancies between input images and their reconstructed counterparts. However, these approaches often struggle to capture subtle anomalies and tend to produce blurred anomaly boundaries, which significantly limits their effectiveness, particularly in complex multi-class scenarios. To address these issues, we present XMatchAD, a novel UAD framework that reinterprets the task from a pseudo cross-modal matching perspective. Specifically, the input and reconstructed images are treated as two complementary modalities and their matching relationships are precisely exploited for anomaly detection. First, a pre-trained feature extractor is employed to encode discriminative representations. Second, an attention-guided cross-modal matching mechanism is introduced to match local inter-modal anomaly-related patterns while mutually refining the features. This enhances the sensitivity to anomalies with diverse shapes and subtle deviations and significantly improves the precision of anomaly detection and localization. Third, we design an adaptive frequency-aware fusion module that further delineates sharp anomaly boundaries through the coupling of high-frequency components from cross-modal multi-scale representations. Comprehensive evaluations on MVTec-AD, VisA, and MPDD benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently achieves superior performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in multi-class anomaly detection and localization. The code will be released at https://github.com/Mingxiu-Cai/XMatchAD. --- ### GRAPE: Graduated Routing for Articulated Portrait mesh Estimation Authors: Yunfei Liu, Lijian Lin, Ye Zhu, Yu Li Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23657v1 Articulated portrait mesh estimation is fundamental to 3D understanding, avatar generation, and immersive interaction. Existing approaches primarily rely on 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs). However, face-centric models suffer from the "floating head" assumption, conflating head pose with global rotation due to the lack of neck kinematics. Conversely, body-centric models lack high-fidelity facial expression capabilities. Furthermore, current methods struggle to disentangle jaw articulation from expression blendshapes, often over-relying on expressions for mouth opening. These limitations make monocular portrait recovery difficult across representation, supervision, and anatomical parameter estimation. To address these limitations, we introduce GRAPE(Graduated Routing for Articulated Portrait mesh Estimation). We build a Portrait Parametric Model (PPM) with an explicit torso-to-head kinematic chain and a canonical injection step to merge FLAME and the SMPL-X torso. We propose a Progressive Anatomical Alignment (PAA) network, which is composed of a pretrained portrait encoder, a Graduated-Mask Router, and coarse-to-fine experts that follow the portrait anatomical prior. We then train this network with multi-source supervision that combines sparse anatomical keypoints, feature distillation, foreground mask constraints, and relative geometry constraints. Experiments show that GRAPE improves portrait mesh recovery quality, pose alignment, and jaw--expression disentanglement over prior methods. We also demonstrate that our method can benefit the downstream tasks of audio-driven talking-head generation and 3D portrait generation. --- ### DP-IVON-Gradsq: Differentially Private Squared-Gradient Improved Variational Online Newton Authors: Nour Jamoussi, Ikram Dridi, Giuseppe Serra, Marios Kountouris Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23649v1 Differential privacy provides formal privacy guarantees for training neural networks on sensitive data, while Bayesian deep learning offers a principled framework for uncertainty-aware prediction. Combining these two objectives remains challenging, as privacy noise can interact with the stochasticity introduced by Bayesian posterior sampling. In this work, we investigate differentially private variational Bayesian learning through the Improved Variational Online Newton (IVON) optimizer. We introduce DP-IVON-Gradsq, a private variant of IVON. The proposed method constructs its curvature estimate from the privatized gradient using a noise-corrected squared-gradient estimator, reducing the direct interaction between posterior-sampling noise and privacy noise while preserving the Adam-like computational efficiency of IVON. We evaluate DP-IVON-Gradsq on CIFAR-10 against the standard private optimizers DP-SGD and DP-Adam over a range of privacy budgets. The results show that DP-IVON-Gradsq is competitive under weak-to-moderate privacy constraints, i.e., large-to-moderate values of $\varepsilon$, while degrading under strong privacy. Code is available at https://github.com/NourJamoussi/DP-IVON-Gradsq.git. --- ### EmoTrace: An Emotion Trajectory-Centered Framework for Psychological Support Dialogue Generation Authors: Kaitong Weng, Lixin Liu, Zihao Liu, Bo Wang, Shiguang Ni Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23648v2 Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is an important task in the field of natural language processing. The construction of high-quality psychological support dialogue corpora serves as a critical foundation for training counseling-oriented conversational models. However, existing data generation approaches generally suffer from several limitations, including emotionally stable seekers, limited variation in emotional dynamics, and a high degree of compliance with counselors' guidance. These issues result in LLM that lack the capability to effectively respond to emotionally unstable scenarios. In addition, counselor responses are typically driven by problem-solving objectives, thereby overlooking the role of emotion-focused interaction, which are essential in psychological counseling. To address these gaps, we propose EmoTrace, a multi-turn dialogue corpus generation framework centered on modeling seekers' emotional trajectories. we construct seekers' cognitive profile and introduce a seeker module with emotional schemas and an associated activation mechanism, a counselor module, and an emotional trajectory control module, thereby enhancing the layering of the seeker's emotional expression and the counselor's targeted empathic expression. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches in terms of emotional richness and empathy quality. --- ### EmoTrace: An Emotion Trajectory-Centered Framework for Psychological Support Dialogue Generation Authors: Kaitong Weng, Lixin Liu, Zihao Liu, Bo Wang, Shiguang Ni Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23648v1 Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is an important task in the field of natural language processing. The construction of high-quality psychological support dialogue corpora serves as a critical foundation for training counseling-oriented conversational models. However, existing data generation approaches generally suffer from several limitations, including emotionally stable seekers, limited variation in emotional dynamics, and a high degree of compliance with counselors' guidance. These issues result in LLM that lack the capability to effectively respond to emotionally unstable scenarios. In addition, counselor responses are typically driven by problem-solving objectives, thereby overlooking the role of emotion-focused interaction, which are essential in psychological counseling. To address these gaps, we propose EmoTrace, a multi-turn dialogue corpus generation framework centered on modeling seekers' emotional trajectories. we construct seekers' cognitive profile and introduce a seeker module with emotional schemas and an associated activation mechanism, a counselor module, and an emotional trajectory control module, thereby enhancing the layering of the seeker's emotional expression and the counselor's targeted empathic expression. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches in terms of emotional richness and empathy quality. --- ### CALMRec: Causally Aligned Language Memory for Long-Horizon Recommendation Authors: Gengyu Zhan Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23647v1 Large language models (LLMs) can summarize heterogeneous user evidence in natural language, but current LLM recommenders often collapse enduring preferences, transient intent, and exposure-induced behavior into one profile. This makes recommendation vulnerable to feedback loops: repeated exposure is mistaken for preference, immediate clicks dominate delayed satisfaction, and fluent explanations need not reflect the ranking decision. We propose our method, a model-agnostic framework for long-horizon recommendation. Our method uses a frozen multimodal language model to convert item content and feedback into evidence-grounded semantic atoms, then maintains separate short-term, long-term, and exposure memories. Propensity-weighted updates reduce policy-induced exposure bias, while a conservative offline critic reranks candidates for delayed satisfaction under a behavior-support constraint. Explanations use only influential evidence atoms and are checked by counterfactual deletion. We provide an identification result and evaluate the framework in e-commerce-like, news-like, and short-video-like environments. Across ten seeds, our method improves discounted long-term value over the strongest alternative by 6.1%, 7.6%, and 6.7%, respectively. Twenty-seed paired ablations show significant value drops after removing propensity correction (0.739 +/- 0.191) or conservative support regularization (0.523 +/- 0.234). A frozen instruction language model also more than doubles semantic-atom NDCG over TF-IDF on a held-out paraphrase benchmark. --- ### Neural Network Learning of One-Bit Protocols for Qubit Measurement Simulation Authors: Josep Escrig, Mani Zartab, Giulio Gasbarri, Estel Ferrer, Ramon Muñoz-Tapia, Gael Sentís Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23645v1 Communication complexity provides a natural framework for quantifying the classical resources required to reproduce quantum statistics. In the qubit prepare-and-measure scenario, two classical bits have been shown to be necessary and sufficient to simulate arbitrary qubit states and arbi- trary quantum measurements exactly. However, this result does not exclude the possibility that restricted families of measurements may admit accurate 1-bit classical approximations. We use a neural network procedure to demonstrate that a single bit can achieve high average accuracy for specific measurement families. A performance analysis of our neural network reveals that symmet- ric measurements with uniformly weighted elements, such as those forming regular polyhedra, are particularly amenable to this restricted communication. By analyzing the patterns learned by the neural network, we derive an analytical protocol that is extremely accurate for finite information- ally complete symmetric configurations and becomes exact in the limit of a continuous isotropic measurement. --- ### When Rates Are Geometric: Rate-Certificate Transfer for Contact Splittings in Optimization Authors: George A Kevrekidis Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, math.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23642v1 Discrete optimization algorithms are often analyzed through continuous-time limiting ODEs, but a convergence certificate for the ODE is not automatically one for the discrete algorithm. We develop contact Hamiltonian systems as a setting where the transfer can be made precise. A contact Hamiltonian $H$ on $J^1(\mathbb{R}^n)$ obeys the intrinsic decay identity $\dot H = -H\,\partial_s H$, so an augmented energy $\mathcal{E}$ built from $H$, together with the conformal rate $\partial_s H$, is a continuous-time rate certificate whenever $\mathcal{E}$ controls the objective gap. Our main theorem states, under three named and independently checkable hypotheses, that an order-$r$ contact splitting with step $h$ transfers this certificate over the finite horizon set by backward error analysis. The discrete decay envelope is governed by the modified conformal factor up to $O(h^r)$ perturbations plus a backward-error shadowing defect, and the mechanism is inherited exactly because the modified Hamiltonian is itself a contact Hamiltonian. Quadratic heavy ball is a fully solvable example: its projected dissipative-leapfrog spectrum agrees with established conformal-symplectic optimization theory, while the augmented contact Hamiltonian yields a sharp objective-to-certificate comparison that verifies the transfer hypotheses. For strongly convex objectives with state-dependent damping, an explicit Bregman-type Lyapunov certificate instead transfers by an auxiliary-shadowing corollary. The decomposition $H=K+V+D$ into kinetic, objective-encoding potential, and dissipation terms serves as a design template, with a catalogue of closed-form sub-flows including contact-specific damping families. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted conformal-factor tracking orders and show competitive performance on ill-conditioned benchmarks and deep-learning tasks. --- ### Distributed Convolutional Rank Regression over Decentralized Networks Authors: Chunjing Li, Tiange Zhao, Xiaohui Yuan Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23639v2 This paper studies convolution rank regression (CRR) over decentralized distributed learning networks. We propose a novel decentralized CRR framework, in which estimators are obtained by solving consensus-constrained optimization with kernel-smoothed rank loss. The developed estimation scheme relies solely on local node data and information shared by neighboring nodes, thereby achieving privacy preservation and high communication efficiency. For heterogeneous network settings, we establish finite-sample error bounds for the decentralized CRR estimator and derive exact support recovery guarantees for the sparse decentralized CRR Lasso estimator. To facilitate numerical implementation, we adopt a generalized consensus ADMM to efficiently solve local subproblems across all network nodes. We verify the favorable performance of our developed approach via extensive numerical simulations and real-data experiments. --- ### WGDnet: Wishart-guided Geometric-aware Deep Network for PolSAR Image Classification Authors: Junfei Shi, Haojia Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yuke Li Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23638v1 Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) classification underpins all-weather Earth observation. Conventional Wishart methods depend on rigid handcrafted operators with limited adaptability, while mainstream deep networks ignore PolSAR native Wishart scattering statistics. Additionally, fixed convolution windows fail to capture multi-scale, multi-directional terrain patterns, harming boundary detection and small-object characterization. To mitigate these drawbacks, we propose WGDNet, a Wishart-guided geometric-aware deep network. It integrates three core designs: (1) learnable Wishart convolutions with directional kernels for multi-scale statistical edge feature extraction; (2) an orientation-prior aggregation module that estimates dominant local directions and confidences to refine directional Wishart outputs adaptively; (3) GAnet, a scale-direction adaptive geometric-aware convolution that dynamically reshapes sampling grids to model anisotropic terrain and retain fine details. Our contributions lie in learnable Wishart statistical modeling, orientation-prior feature aggregation, and geometry-adaptive convolution. Evaluations across four real PolSAR datasets verify WGDNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches in classification accuracy and boundary fidelity. --- ### Extending Desbordante with Probabilistic Functional Dependency Discovery Support Authors: Ilia Barutkin, Maxim Fofanov, Sergey Belokonny, Vladislav Makeev, George Chernishev Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23636v1 Data profiling aims to extract complex patterns from data for further analysis and use that data in domains such as data cleaning, data deduplication, anomaly detection, and many more. Functional dependencies (FDs) are one of the most well-known patterns. However, they are poorly suited for these tasks, as real data is usually dirty, and the rigid definition of FDs does not allow algorithms to locate them. For this reason, there are several formulations aimed at relaxing FDs to support dirty data, with approximate functional dependency (AFD) being the most popular one. Another formulation is the Probabilistic Functional Dependency (pFD), which we aim to support inside Desbordante - a science-intensive, high-performance and open-source data profiling tool implemented in C++. However, pFDs are relatively poorly studied, compared to AFDs. In this paper we study pFDs, both analytically and empirically. We start by assessing how different pFDs and AFDs are by studying cases in which pFDs have an edge over AFDs. Then, we implement the algorithm for pFD discovery, as well as study its run time and memory consumption. We also compare it with an AFD discovery algorithm. Lastly, we study the output of both algorithms to learn whether or not it is possible to use AFD discovery algorithm to get pFDs and vice versa. --- ### Variational-Ising-Attention (VIA):TailoredAttentionMattersfor Science Authors: Rui Wang Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23634v1 Attention enables context modeling via query-key scoring with softmax normalization. Driven by industrial long-context demands, mainstream research has converged toward sparsity and efficiency--yet softmax's independence assumption persists. For scientific tasks unburdened by long-token constraints, however, richer structured coupling may often be essential, making tailored attention both viable and more appropriate. To this end, we propose Variational-Ising-Attention (VIA), which augments softmax normalization with an interacting Ising model; attention patterns emerge from learnable pairwise couplings via variational mean-field inference, redefining attention from a ranking over isolated items to a collective state over interacting entities. We instantiate VIA on retrosynthesis reaction center prediction, a task inherently governed by cooperative bond-breaking constraints. Comprehensive experiments across model variants, coupled with mechanistic analyses, demonstrate that VIA consistently and substantially outperforms standard softmax attention. More broadly, our findings suggest that for scientific problems, the optimal solution is not general-purpose efficiency, but appropriately tailored attention aligned with intrinsic domain structure. This work provides a theoretically grounded and empirically validated instantiation of this paradigm. --- ### A Controlled Visual-Backbone Benchmark for Multimodal Short-Term Solar Irradiance Forecasting Authors: Oshadha Samarakoon, Dushan Herath, Ishara Ranmandala, Dilshara Herath, Roshan Godaliyadda, Parakrama Ekanayake, Vijitha Herath Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23633v1 Sky-image irradiance studies often compare forecasting systems in which the image encoder, temporal model, fusion block, target definition, and training recipe all change together. We use a narrower protocol: the multimodal forecasting pipeline is fixed, and only the visual backbone is varied. The shared setup keeps preprocessing, clear-sky-index normalization, weather-history encoding, fusion, regression head, loss, optimizer schedule, seed, and chronological split policy unchanged. We compare ConvNeXt, Swin Transformer, VMamba, Spatial Mamba, and MambaVision backbones for 10min-ahead forecasting on Folsom and a strict matched NREL split. Forecast skill is measured against clear-sky-index smart persistence, and temporal-only rows are reported as weather-history diagnostics rather than as the main ranking criterion. On the Folsom strict split, all evaluated visual-backbone runs improve over smart persistence. In the evaluated single-seed strict runs, VMamba Small and Swin Base reach matched Folsom RMSE values of 65.39 W/m^2 and 65.50 W/m^2; the temporal-only diagnostic reaches 69.51 W/m^2. On the 313-sample NREL strict split, smart persistence remains strongest at 17.48 W/m^2, while the lowest visual RMSE is obtained by Swin Tiny at 23.76 W/m^2. These results provide a reproducible encoder comparison under one fixed multimodal operating point rather than establishing architecture-level dominance, statistically resolved ranking, or fully optimized forecasting performance. Code available here: https://github.com/Oshadha345/irradiance_benchmark --- ### Order in Desbordante: Techniques for Efficient Implementation of Order Dependency Discovery Algorithms Authors: Yakov Kuzin, Dmitriy Shcheka, Michael Polyntsov, Kirill Stupakov, Mikhail Firsov, George Chernishev Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23632v1 Science-intensive data profiling focuses on discovery and validation of various patterns in datasets. This study considers discovery of one such pattern - order dependency (OD). Simply put, OD states that some list of columns is ordered according to another one. It is of use for database query optimization, data cleaning and deduplication, anomaly detection, and much more. Existing discovery methods have approached this problem solely from the algorithmic standpoint, without focusing on the implementation side. At the same time, this problem is very computationally intensive, and therefore this part should not be ignored, as it brings ODs closer to industrial use. In this paper, we study two algorithms for OD discovery which target different OD axiomatizations - FASTOD and ORDER. We start by reimplementing these algorithms in C++ in order to speed them up and lower their memory consumption. We then analyze their bottlenecks and propose several techniques which improve their performance even further. To perform evaluation, we have implemented these algorithms inside Desbordante - a science-intensive, high-performance, and open-source data profiling tool developed in C++. Experiments have demonstrated a performance improvement of up to 3x obtained by reimplemented versions, and, with the application of our techniques, up to 10x. Memory consumption has been lowered by up to 2.9x. --- ### PathSelect: Sequential Token Selection for Whole Slide Pathology Authors: Jingzhi Chen, Landi He, Zehong Chen, Peihang Wu, Lijian Xu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23631v1 Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) present a fundamental computational bottleneck for vision-language models (VLMs) due to extreme sequence lengths. Existing approaches predominantly rely on spatial sampling or training-free pruning, which risk diluting weak but informative signals, leading to the loss of critical diagnostic evidence due to the spatially diffuse nature of pathological cues. We reformulate WSI token pruning as a sequential selection process, enabling the model to autonomously learn an optimal routing strategy rather than relying on static heuristics. We herein propose a decoupled routing framework integrated as an active plugin into the fully pre-trained SlideChat base model, leaving both the slide encoder and large language model frozen. To provide continuous gradients for the non-differentiable pruning operation during training, we introduce PathSelect. PathSelect employs a variance-preserving noise gate to modulate each patch's information flow via a differentiable Soft Top-K operator, paired with a diagonal-attention Denoiser that recovers the perturbed representations without semantic leakage. At inference, the PathSelect module is entirely detached. Relying solely on the trained Scorer, a deterministic Hard Top-K operator executes adaptive, data-dependent trajectory termination, significantly accelerating downstream generative processing with exceptionally low sequential token selection latency. Driven by an empirical average of only 44.86 tokens under a maximum constraint of K = 128, our framework achieves 74.00% overall accuracy on SlideBench (TCGA), representing an approximate 36.6x spatial token reduction relative to the uncompressed baseline average while consistently outperforming sampling-based counterparts. --- ### Segmentation Robustness and Predictive Utility in Glioblastoma Radiomics: Evidence for a Trade-off in Survival Modelling Authors: Mariya Miteva, Maria Nisheva-Pavlova Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23626v1 Radiomic biomarkers derived from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have been widely investigated as non-invasive tools for tumor characterization and prognostic modeling in glioblastoma (GBM). However, their clinical translation remains limited, in part due to sensitivity to tumor segmentation variability. In this study, we systematically investigate the relationship between feature robustness and predictive utility in GBM survival modeling using the University of Pennsylvania Glioblastoma Imaging, Genomics, and Radiomics (UPENN-GBM) cohort. A total of 4,752 radiomic features were obtained from multiparametric MRI across three tumor subregions: enhancing tumor (ET), peritumoral edema (ED), and necrotic core (NC). Feature robustness was quantified using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) based on the automatic and expert-refined segmentation versions. Among features with valid ICC estimates, 48.1% were classified as robust. Survival prediction was evaluated using cross-validation with Coxnet, Random Survival Forest, and Gradient Boosting Survival Analysis models. In this cohort, radiomic feature inclusion showed no consistent improvement over the clinical baseline, and robustness filtering produced no detectable performance gain. Model-selected features were less robust than the overall feature pool, indicating a lack of enrichment for robustness. These findings suggest that robustness alone is not a reliable criterion for feature selection in radiomics-based survival modelling. --- ### Where Is the Tradeoff in Using Third-Party API Routers for Agentic Software Development? Authors: Donghao Fu, Jingxin Li, Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23624v3 Third-party API routers have become a common layer that unifies access across increasingly diverse LLM providers. In coding-agent workflows, high-autonomy operation is widely adopted because it reduces interaction overhead. As a result, a third-party API router, which sits between the agent and the upstream provider, inevitably occupies the trusted path. It can inspect and modify every request and response, yet no mechanism verifies alignment between the provider's output and the repository-level actions ultimately executed by the agent. Consequently, client-side permission mechanisms may become ineffective in practice. Whether this control gap produces real, hard-to-detect effects on software development tasks remains empirically unmeasured. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of router-side injection in coding agents, examining four intervention levels of increasing subtlety: Response Substitution (L1), Response Append (L2), LLM-Polished Injection (L3), and LLM-Polished with Distribution Alignment Injection (L4). Moreover, we develop SIDEL, a framework for trace recording, replay, injection, and defense evaluation, with a curated dataset of 400 samples. We evaluate four representative coding agents, and further evaluate whitelist-based execution control and LLM review. Router-side intervention substantially alters repository-level actions and remains difficult for existing client-side safeguards to detect. Without additional mitigations, all evaluated agents achieved a defense success rate of 0 percent across all injection levels. Client-side mitigations and reactive reviews improve resistance but do not fully restore end-to-end control, motivating provider-side output-integrity guarantees. Our code is available at https://github.com/Riyasushin/SIDEL. --- ### Where Is the Cost of Third-Party API Routers in Agentic Software Development? Authors: Donghao Fu, Jingxin Li, Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23624v2 Third-party API routers have become a common layer that unifies access across increasingly diverse LLM providers. In coding-agent workflows, high-autonomy operation is widely adopted because it reduces interaction overhead. As a result, a third-party API router, which sits between the agent and the upstream provider, inevitably occupies the trusted path. It can inspect and modify every request and response, yet no mechanism verifies alignment between the provider's output and the repository-level actions ultimately executed by the agent. Consequently, client-side permission mechanisms may become ineffective in practice. Whether this control gap produces real, hard-to-detect effects on software development tasks remains empirically unmeasured. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of router-side injection in coding agents, examining four intervention levels of increasing subtlety: Response Substitution (L1), Response Append (L2), LLM-Polished Injection (L3), and LLM-Polished with Distribution Alignment Injection (L4). Moreover, we develop SIDEL, a framework for trace recording, replay, injection, and defense evaluation, with a curated dataset of 400 samples. We evaluate four representative coding agents, and further evaluate whitelist-based execution control and LLM review. Router-side intervention substantially alters repository-level actions and remains difficult for existing client-side safeguards to detect. Without additional mitigations, all evaluated agents achieved a defense success rate of 0 percent across all injection levels. Client-side mitigations and reactive reviews improve resistance but do not fully restore end-to-end control, motivating provider-side output-integrity guarantees. Our code is available at https://github.com/Riyasushin/SIDEL. --- ### GEMCo: A Validated, Ethically Releasable Proxy for Inaccessible Counselling Data Authors: Philipp Steigerwald, Eric Rudolph, Mara Stieler, Jennifer Burghardt, Robert Lehmann, Jens Albrecht Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23621v2 This paper presents GEMCo, a releasable, human-written proxy for inaccessible counselling data: 86 complete German e-mail counselling conversations (728 messages), expert-authored cases and counsellor sessions with trained role-players. It is validated against a held-out reference of 124 real counselling conversations. The proxy and the real conversations are measured against each other on counsellor strategies and client emotions. The gap is detectable but small. A generative validation supports the analysis. The corpus is the primary contribution. The validation method generalises to any domain where real data cannot be shared but a human-made proxy can. Privacy and ethics keep real counselling data closed. GEMCo carries none by design and can be released, a first step toward language research in this domain. --- ### GEMCo: A Validated, Ethically Releasable Proxy for Inaccessible Counselling Data Authors: Philipp Steigerwald, Eric Rudolph, Mara Stieler, Jennifer Burghardt, Jens Albrecht Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23621v1 This paper presents GEMCo, a releasable, human-written proxy for inaccessible counselling data: 86 complete German e-mail counselling conversations (728 messages), expert-authored cases and counsellor sessions with trained role-players. It is validated against a held-out reference of 124 real counselling conversations. The proxy and the real conversations are measured against each other in counsellor strategies and client emotions. The gap is detectable but small. A generative validation supports the analysis. The validation method itself generalises to any domain where real data cannot be shared but a human-made proxy can. Privacy and ethics keep real counselling data closed. GEMCo carries none by design and can be released -- a first step toward language research in this domain. --- ### Optimal Reward Shaping: Autonomous Car Parking Case Study Authors: Emre Özkaya, Nicolas R. Gauger Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23617v1 Designing effective reward functions for model-free reinforcement learning under non-holonomic constraints remains a persistent challenge, often resulting in severe local minima such as policy paralysis or over-conservative hazard avoidance. In this work, we present a parameterized reward shaping framework featuring coverage-gated alignment feedback, drive-direction switch regularization, and an aligned episode termination mechanism evaluated on an autonomous parallel parking task. Crucially, we show that environmental reward parameters and algorithmic hyperparameters are deeply co-dependent, requiring joint meta-optimization to achieve stable convergence. By employing surrogate-based Bayesian optimization, our co-optimized Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent resolves characteristic control failure modes, significantly outperforming uncalibrated baselines across both success rate and trajectory smoothness. --- ### Restoration Flow Matching-Based Channel Refinement and Equalization Correction for MIMO Semantic Communications Authors: Wenkai Liu, Nan Ma, Jianqiao Chen, Xiaodong Xu, Meixia Tao, Ping Zhang Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23615v1 In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) semantic communication, imperfect channel state information (CSI) and equalization mismatch can seriously degrade semantic reconstruction quality. To address this issue, we propose a unified restoration flow matching (RFM)-based framework for channel refinement and equalization correction. Specifically, the channel RFM (CRFM) module is developed to refine the coarse channel, thereby improving channel estimation accuracy. Based on the refined channel, the developed semantic RFM (SRFM) module is employed to correct the residual distortions in the post-equalization latent space. The key idea is to formulate the two cascaded inverse problems of channel estimation and equalization as the unified conditional restoration task, in which the learned conditional velocity field guides the perturbed distribution towards the target distribution. To enhance the robustness of these two modules under various distortion conditions, we develop a dual-anchor perturbation training strategy that jointly learns near-manifold refinement and large-error correction, and implement inference through a few-step deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver. Extensive experiments on MIMO channels and visual semantic transmission tasks demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves key metrics for channel estimation and semantic reconstruction quality. Moreover, compared with representative diffusion-based generative baselines, the proposed method requires fewer sampling steps. --- ### DualityCert: Verifier-Gated Language-Model Repair of Broken Duality Claims in Quantum Field Theory Authors: Xingyang Yu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG, hep-th arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23614v3 We present DualityCert, a symbolic verifier for candidate Seiberg-duality claims in four-dimensional N=1 quiver gauge theories. The verifier evaluates 't Hooft anomaly matching, superpotential R-charge consistency, central-charge matching, and a bounded chiral-ring proxy. A claim that passes receives a consistency certificate, which states that no tested inconsistency was found, not that the duality is proven. We use the verifier as a repair environment for language-model agents, which receive a deliberately broken claim and must edit it until it certifies. On a preregistered benchmark of 145 broken claims, with the analysis fixed before the first confirmatory model call, verifier-gated retry improves final repair success over a single attempt by +8.3 percentage points (pp) on deepseek-chat and +7.1 pp on qwen-plus (Holm-adjusted p<0.002). Under an equal budget of eleven attempts, the stop-first strategy portfolio underperforms independent verifier-filtered resampling by 10.3 percentage points on deepseek-chat but outperforms it by 14.7 points on qwen-plus, reversing the ordering of the two tested verifier-exploitation policies across the two confirmatory models. On qwen-plus, category-level verifier feedback is worth +8.7 pp over content-free retry, and interpretable obligation identities alone are worth +6.4 pp over structurally identical masked feedback. Neither effect is detected on deepseek-chat. Separately, a preregistered MiniMax-M2.5 extension again finds an iteration gain and independent verifier-filtered resampling outperforming the strategy portfolio. Which policy is better thus differs between the two models, while every winning policy uses the same cheap certificate. The verifier, benchmark, protocol, and all per-attempt records are released. --- ### DualityCert: Verifier-Gated Language-Model Repair of Broken Duality Claims in Quantum Field Theory Authors: Xingyang Yu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG, hep-th arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23614v2 We present DualityCert, a symbolic verifier for candidate Seiberg-duality claims in four-dimensional N=1 quiver gauge theories. The verifier evaluates 't Hooft anomaly matching, superpotential R-charge consistency, central-charge matching, and a bounded chiral-ring proxy. A claim that passes receives a consistency certificate, which states that no tested inconsistency was found, not that the duality is proven. We use the verifier as a repair environment for language-model agents, which receive a deliberately broken claim and must edit it until it certifies. On a preregistered benchmark of 145 broken claims, with the analysis fixed before the first confirmatory model call, verifier-gated retry improves final repair success over a single attempt by +8.3 percentage points (pp) on deepseek-chat and +7.1 pp on qwen-plus (Holm-adjusted p<0.002). Under an equal budget of eleven attempts, the stop-first strategy portfolio underperforms independent verifier-filtered resampling by 10.3 percentage points on deepseek-chat but outperforms it by 14.7 points on qwen-plus, reversing the ordering of the two tested verifier-exploitation policies across the two confirmatory models. On qwen-plus, category-level verifier feedback is worth +8.7 pp over content-free retry, and interpretable obligation identities alone are worth +6.4 pp over structurally identical masked feedback. Neither effect is detected on deepseek-chat. Separately, a preregistered MiniMax-M2.5 extension again finds an iteration gain and independent verifier-filtered resampling outperforming the strategy portfolio. Which policy is better thus differs between the two models, while every winning policy uses the same cheap certificate. The verifier, benchmark, protocol, and all per-attempt records are released. --- ### Markerless Motion Capture in Routine Clinical Upper Limb Assessments: Validity and Insights Beyond Ordinal Scoring Authors: Tim Unger, Olivier Lambercy, Roger Gassert, Andreas R. Luft, R. James Cotton, Chris Easthope Awai Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23608v1 The Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) is a widely-used upper limb outcome measure in neurorehabilitation, but its ordinal scoring is subjective and suffers from limited sensitivity and specificity. We evaluated whether artificial-intelligence (AI)-based markerless motion capture (MMC), embedded into ARAT assessments during clinical routine, accurately reconstructs upper limb movement and yields valid, objective kinematic metrics carrying clinically meaningful information beyond the ordinal score. Across 47 sessions from 20 mixed-neurological patients (1,174 ARAT tasks), biomechanical reconstruction was accurate and robust across impairment levels, and kinematic metrics showed the discrimination pattern expected of a construct-valid measure. In longitudinal case studies, the metrics added the specificity and sensitivity the ordinal score lacks: a domain decomposition exposed patient-specific recovery profiles underlying equal ARAT gains (specificity), and kinematic improvement continued to be detected after the ARAT had saturated (sensitivity). MMC in clinical routine can thus provide valid, objective, sensitive, and specific kinematic measurement complementing ordinal scoring. --- ### MS-GPT: Rethinking MS/MS De Novo Structure Elucidation as Spectrum-Induced Posterior Querying of a Molecule-Language Model Authors: Xin Zhao, Yumin Liu, Zhuo Li, Weichu Zheng, Feng Zhu, Xiaokang Yang, Yaohui Jin, Yanyan Xu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23607v1 Molecular structure elucidation from tandem mass spectra (MS/MS) is a central inverse problem in analytical chemistry. Most existing approaches to MS/MS identification remain tied to reference libraries or predefined candidate sets, whereas de novo methods aim to generate structures directly from spectra. A common de novo route predicts a molecular fingerprint from the spectrum and then decodes structures from it, enabling decoder pretraining on large molecule-only corpora. However, this paradigm creates a training-inference mismatch: the decoder is trained on oracle fingerprints computed from molecules, but at inference it is queried with a noisy spectrum-induced fingerprint posterior that is typically collapsed to a single thresholded fingerprint. We introduce MS-GPT, which recasts fingerprint-mediated de novo elucidation as spectrum-induced posterior querying of a conditional molecule-language model. MS-GPT conditions a molecule-language model on fingerprints and formulas, then converts the spectrum-induced posterior into a band of fingerprint queries near the oracle-fingerprint manifold through active-bit density calibration. Candidates sampled across this band are pooled and ranked by generation-frequency consensus. A lightweight LoRA adapter further mitigates domain-specific posterior bias while preserving the pretrained molecular prior. On NPLIB1 and MassSpecGym, MS-GPT sets a new state of the art, reaching Top-1/Top-10 exact-match accuracy of 29.8\%/41.1\% and 23.9\%/28.7\%, respectively. Candidate-pool scaling shows that efficient autoregressive molecular generation continues to improve recall with a little additional inference cost. The source code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/VIKI623/MS-GPT. --- ### Hybrid Advantage Estimation with Unified Critic for VLM Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Wenxuan Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Donggang Jia, Xiaoqian Shen, Jian Ding, Ivan Viola, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Mohamed Elhoseiny Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23605v1 Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now act as agents in interactive environments, where success requires coherent reasoning and decision-making across turns. Although end-to-end training in agentic environments can improve such multi-turn decision-making abilities, current methods mainly rely on either token-wise optimization over concatenated token trajectories or turn-wise optimization with uniform within-turn credit. In this work, we establish theoretical formulations for the two levels of optimization and derive a hybrid advantage that serves both objectives. Furthermore, with an appropriate choice of discount factor and learning target, we prove that a unified critic model can estimate values for both turn-wise and token-wise. As such, we propose HyGAE, an actor-critic framework that jointly optimizes token- and turn-level objectives with the hybrid advantage and unified critic. We conduct extensive evaluations of HyGAE across five multi-turn decision-making environments, where it achieves an average success rate of 91% and a significant improvement of 10% over other methods. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis showing that the exact analytic form of the hybrid advantage and return is crucial for optimization. Project Page: https://wx-zhang.github.io/hygae-web/. --- ### Action from Adjacent Set in Physical Space Outperforms the Best Prediction in World Models Authors: Liangyu Li, Qingwen Liu, Mingqing Liu, Wen Fang Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23602v2 Controllers based on sampling and latent world models assign a predicted terminal cost to each candidate action sequence, choose the minimum, execute its first action block, and replan. This rule can fail even when the terminal cost perfectly and accurately reflects the true task objective in the physical world. Residual prediction error can give an infeasible sequence an anomalously low cost, and a larger proposal pool gives such errors more chances to outrank feasible alternatives. We call this conditional failure proposal overgeneration. In Cube candidate execution audits, increasing the total proposal budget from 72 to 288 reduces the feasibility of selection by minimum latent cost from .375 to .062 for position targets and from .344 to .031 for targets defined by position and yaw, although every larger pool contains a feasible sequence. We introduce Adjacent Set Action Reconstruction (ASAR). Among proposals with low cost, ASAR identifies an adjacent set using standardized early action prefixes and reconstructs a full action sequence through locally weighted aggregation with a light anchor from the sequence with minimum cost. On a Carry and Release evaluation set of 75 queries, Kernel ASAR improves event completion success over matching selection by 28.0, 24.0, and 18.7 percentage points under latent cost and by 18.7, 20.0, and 17.3 points under a trajectory reachability cost at 72, 144, and 288 proposals. Analysis of finite proposal pools characterizes selection risk from the lower tail, separation by a related radius support statistic, and sequence containment under an explicit local feasibility condition. --- ### Action from Adjacent Set in Physical Space Outperforms the Best Prediction in World Models Authors: Liangyu Li, Qingwen Liu, Mingqing Liu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23602v1 Controllers based on sampling and latent world models assign a predicted terminal cost to each candidate action sequence, choose the minimum, execute its first action block, and replan. This rule can fail even when the terminal cost perfectly and accurately reflects the true task objective in the physical world. Residual prediction error can give an infeasible sequence an anomalously low cost, and a larger proposal pool gives such errors more chances to outrank feasible alternatives. We call this conditional failure proposal overgeneration. In Cube candidate execution audits, increasing the total proposal budget from 72 to 288 reduces the feasibility of selection by minimum latent cost from .375 to .062 for position targets and from .344 to .031 for targets defined by position and yaw, although every larger pool contains a feasible sequence. We introduce Adjacent Set Action Reconstruction (ASAR). Among proposals with low cost, ASAR measures density from standardized early action prefixes and reconstructs a full sequence from an adjacent set with a light anchor from the sequence with minimum cost. On a Carry and Release evaluation set of 75 queries, Kernel ASAR improves event completion success over matching selection by 28.0, 24.0, and 18.7 percentage points under latent cost and by 18.7, 20.0, and 17.3 points under a trajectory reachability cost at 72, 144, and 288 proposals. Analysis of finite proposal pools characterizes selection risk from the lower tail, separation by a related radius support statistic, and sequence containment under an explicit local feasibility condition. --- ### ConFusion: Continuous Fusion Space Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Authors: Guo Yurong, He Yufei, Li Yonghao, Chang Dongliang, Zhang Ke, Ma Zhanyu Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23600v1 Controllable infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary thermal and structural information with flexible region-aware modulation, producing fused images that adapt to diverse user requirements and downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on predefined discrete control conditions, leading to a sparse space that fails to support fine-grained modulation demands. To address this, we propose ConFusion, a novel framework that learns the continuous fusion space via Gaussian-conditioned spatial-aware modulation, enabling instance-level fine-grained controllable infrared and visible image fusion. ConFusion employs a dual-branch architecture to disentangle modality-invariant and modality-specific representations under joint reconstruction and text-guided semantic alignment. Gaussian-conditioned instance modulation variables coupled with Grounded SAM-based instance masks guide instance-level fine-grained modulation through the Mask-Guided Specific Feature Modulator, while the Text-Driven Invariant Feature Enhancer improves semantic consistency and enhances fusion. During inference, the multimodal large language model parses user intents into instance-level modulation variables to guide image fusion. Extensive experiments show that ConFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics in both fusion quality and downstream tasks, while supporting fine-grained controllable image fusion. Our code is available at https://github.com/HeyufeiAnto/Confusion --- ### HiTMS: A High-Throughput Multi-Stream Linguistic Steganography Framework Authors: Ruiyi Yan, Zhongliang Yang, Yugo Murawaki Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23597v2 Generative linguistic steganography conceals secret bits within the sampling randomness of large language models. Existing schemes are single-stream, conveying an entire secret through a single response to a single prompt. This convention incurs limitations: it provides no protocol-level support for batched multi-stream inference, and naive co-batching does not conceal slot occupancy or payload completion. We propose the High-Throughput Multi-Stream (HiTMS) framework, which distributes a secret across multiple responses produced jointly over successive rounds of interaction. Each round embeds and extracts several streams within a single batched call, thereby amortizing the cost of model invocation and substantially improving throughput. To ensure recoverability, HiTMS wraps each response in a self-describing frame and employs a key-derived schedule that binds streams to slots and fills unused slots with decoys, guaranteeing exact recovery while concealing the number of active streams. The framework is agnostic to both the language model and the steganographic coder. Across eight dataset-model-coder settings, eight-stream HiTMS achieves up to 4.3 times higher embedding and extraction speeds than single-stream baselines, while reducing the average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of steganalyzers from 0.681 to 0.601. Experiments with 4 to 64 streams demonstrate sustained throughput gains as concurrency increases. GitHub repository for this work is https://github.com/ryehr/HiTMS_steganography. --- ### Weakly Supervised Instance-Level Gleason Pattern Estimation Using Primary and Secondary Labels Authors: Nao Sugeta, Kaito Shiku, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Ryoma Bise Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23594v2 In prostate cancer histopathology, the Gleason Score is determined by the most frequent (Primary) and second most frequent (Secondary) Gleason patterns within a whole-slide image. Although these slide-level labels are routinely available in clinical practice, instance-level Gleason annotations are rarely provided, making patch-level learning challenging. We propose a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework that estimates instance-level Gleason patterns from slide-level Primary and Secondary labels. The proposed method formulates instance-level learning according to the clinical definition of the Gleason Score by aggregating instance predictions into class counts and explicitly modeling the Primary pattern, Secondary pattern, and their dominance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed formulation enables effective instance-level learning and outperforms existing MIL approaches on the SICAP-MIL dataset. --- ### JarvisHub: An Open Harness for Canvas-Native Multimodal Creative Agents Authors: Yunlong Lin, Zixu Lin, Zhaohu Xing, Biqiang Li, Chenxin Li, Haonan Wang, Haitao Wu, Hengyu Liu, Jianghai Chen, Kaituo Feng, Kaixin Li, Shawn Chen et al. Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23588v1 Creative AI is moving from single-step asset generation toward long-horizon multimodal production. Although recent generative models can synthesize high-quality images, videos, audio clips, UI elements, storyboards, slides, and other creative assets, real-world creative work requires more than isolated prompt-output interactions. It involves references, drafts, alternatives, edits, failed attempts, version relations, tool actions, evaluation signals, and human feedback, which together form an evolving project state. Existing prompt-based, chat-based, and node-based generation systems only partially support this state, as they often discard intermediate context, rely on linear conversations, or require manually specified workflows. Recent commercial systems indicate a shift toward agent-assisted creative production, but their closed architectures make it difficult to study how agents represent context, choose tools, revise artifacts, recover from failures, and maintain consistency over time. To address this gap, we introduce JarvisHub, a canvas-native creative agent harness for long-horizon multimodal creation. JarvisHub treats an editable canvas as the user workspace, the agent's external memory, action space, and shared project state, representing multimodal artifacts, dependencies, versions, and feedback as typed canvas nodes and links. Through a three-layer architecture of canvas state, protocol bridge, and agent runtime, JarvisHub enables agents to act within an inspectable and editable creative state. This design moves creative agents beyond isolated tool use toward sustained, human-steerable creative automation, where agents can progressively plan, generate, revise, and organize multimodal projects while users remain able to inspect, guide, and intervene throughout the process. --- ### Are You Still the Agent I Authorized? Earned Authority under a Fixed Ceiling for Evolving Agents Authors: Zhaoxi Zhang, Xiaomei Zhang Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23586v1 Long-lived AI agents increasingly evolve after deployment by retaining experience, acquiring skills and tools, revising workflows, delegating work, and moving across task phases. This improves adaptation but creates a distinct authorization problem. Tool-enabled agents can turn model errors and prompt injections into consequential external actions; when evolution occurs under a live grant, the subject exercising that authority or the context in which it acts may no longer match what the user evaluated. Evolution can change both the effects reachable under an old grant and the authority required by the task, which may rise, fall, or become incomparable. Existing tool policies constrain actions but do not determine when a grant survives this change. We formulate authorization continuity: when does an existing grant remain valid, how may active authority change, and what boundary must never move? Our state-bound model fixes a transition envelope and an immutable effect ceiling at grant time. The envelope determines whether the grant survives a mutation; below the ceiling, authority may contract freely and expand only under specified evidence conditions. We distinguish requested from realized effects and prove that, under complete mediation, sound effect abstraction, attenuating delegation, and monitor integrity, mutation cannot amplify protected effects beyond the user-issued ceiling. Agent-produced evidence may allocate authority below the ceiling but cannot raise it. Finally, we map six mutation classes to their authorization consequences. --- ### Verification-Notebook Learning for Source-Aware Multimodal Misinformation Detection Authors: Junyuan Tan Published: 2026-07-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23581v1 Multimodal misinformation verification is challenging because misleading signals may come from different parts of a post and require different forms of evidence. LVLMs are well suited to this task, but their verification performance often depends on the inference procedure applied to each instance. Existing methods improve this procedure through stronger prompting, retrieval, or deliberation, but rarely retain the verification patterns learned from previous examples. We propose Verification-Notebook Learning (VNL), a non-parametric framework that learns an external verification procedure for a frozen LVLM before inference. VNL builds a compact notebook of decision principles, evidence cues, and recurring pitfalls from prior verification experience. The notebook remains fixed during inference and guides the verification of new examples. Rather than updating model parameters or storing demonstrations, VNL records learned knowledge in an artifact that can be inspected directly. Experiments show that VNL consistently outperforms a range of competitive baselines. Further analyses show that the Verification Notebook improves fine-grained source attribution while remaining compact and interpretable, providing an effective way to accumulate verification knowledge without model training. ---