# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 77 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #3801–3850 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/77 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/76.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/78.md) ### Physics-Aware Complex-Valued State Space Model with Scattering-Prior Feature Modulation for PolSAR Image Classification Authors: Fangyan Zhang, Fan Zhang, Shiqi Zhou, Jun Ni, Carlos López-Martínez, Qiang Yin Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19787v1 Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification is a representative task for physics-aware GeoAI, where land-cover semantics are closely coupled with electromagnetic scattering mechanisms. Many existing complex-valued networks can preserve amplitude-phase information, but they are often limited in long-range spatial dependency modeling and usually incorporate polarimetric priors only as input-level or shallow auxiliary features. As a result, physical knowledge is insufficiently used to guide deep feature evolution. To address this issue, this paper proposes CV-SSMNet, a physics-aware complex-valued state-space network with scattering-aware feature modulation for PolSAR image classification. The proposed method builds a complex-valued state-space model (CV-SSM) in the original complex domain to capture long-range spatial dependencies while preserving polarimetric amplitude-phase coupling. Meanwhile, seven physically meaningful scattering priors, are encoded as FiLM-style modulation signals to adaptively recalibrate complex-valued representations during feature evolution. CV-SSMNet further integrates multi-scale complex convolutions, branch-wise CV-SSM encoding, prior-guided recalibration, and lightweight global context aggregation, enabling physically guided representation learning from local scattering structures to global spatial context. Experiments on three L-band benchmark datasets and an additional P-band BIOMASS evaluation demonstrate that CV-SSMNet achieves competitive accuracy, improved regional consistency, and better boundary preservation, supporting the effectiveness of embedding polarimetric scattering mechanisms into complex-valued long-range GeoAI representation learning. --- ### A Structure-Adaptive Random Feature Method for High-Dimensional Elliptic PDEs Authors: Jiale Linghu, Hao Dong, Yangshuai Wang Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19786v1 Random-feature methods reduce high-dimensional elliptic PDE collocation to linear coefficient problems, but full-dimensional trial spaces overlook lower-dimensional structure. We introduce the Hierarchical Analysis-of-Variance Random Feature Method (HA-RFM), which selects coordinate blocks using closed Sobol indices of the PDE residual, identifies oblique low-rank features from fitted-predictor gradients, and couples all retained features in one regularized least-squares solve. Under structural and stability hypotheses, we establish an $L^2$ error bound that links solution and residual truncation to finite-width approximation and regularized finite-sample fitting, and we derive guarantees for width and structure recovery. The resulting width is polynomial in the dimension at fixed interaction order, with dimension-independent higher-order contributions under uniform structural control. Residual screening achieves exact recovery of the prescribed three-pair support, while fitted-predictor gradients recover oblique directions through dimension $50$. In random-ridge tests, less than $1\%$ additional width reduces errors by factors of $14$-$39$ over coordinate blocks and $34$-$100$ over equal-width full-dimensional RFM. Semilinear computations extend HA-RFM through dimension $100$, while dense and distributed interactions delineate the coordinate families required for broader structure. --- ### A Multiclass Quantum Aligned Centroid Kernel Authors: Kilian Tscharke, Pascal Debus Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19782v1 Kernel methods are powerful tools in machine learning but commonly used full-Gram kernels face three key limitations: (1) quadratic scaling with training set size; (2) the use of fixed, non-trainable kernels; and (3) the absence of an intrinsic formulation for multiclass classification. We present McQuack, a trainable quantum kernel method for multiclass problems that achieves linear scaling in the number of training samples. This is accomplished by replacing the full training-set Gram matrix with a trainable sample-to-(class-centroid) fidelity matrix. We evaluate the model in simulation and on 124 qubits of two IBM devices, across more than 150 datasets. In simulation, McQuack outperforms existing "pure" quantum baselines, while results from hardware inference -- obtained without training -- achieve performance similar to an RBF kernel. Finally, we study the trainability of the model and observe no evidence of barren plateaus in our experiments with up to 13 qubits, and highlight the importance of parameter initialization for successful optimization. --- ### WASABI: Whole-graph Assignment-based Stabilizer for lAne topology By Inter-frame tracking Authors: Tetsuhiro Uchida, Myu Sasaki, Kensho Nakajima, Yasuhiro Shimada, Toru Saito Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19781v1 Autonomous driving requires understanding the road as a graph of drivable lanes and their connectivity, beyond the ego lane alone, to follow routes through intersections and reason about cross- and merging-traffic. Recent perception models infer such lane topology, i.e., lane segments together with their inter-lane connectivity (LCLC), from onboard sensors over a 360-degree BEV view. Due to neural perception's imperfections, their outputs retain structural instabilities such as missed detections, lost or incorrect LCLC, over-detection, and label flicker. This paper presents WASABI, a real-time post-processing pipeline that stabilizes lane topology outputs both within and across frames by treating lane segments and their LCLC connectivity as joint tracking targets, under onboard real-time constraints (10 Hz / 20 ms / up to 200 input lanes). The pipeline integrates segment tracking with connectivity, noise-robust topology-aware refinement, and a resource-constrained real-time design. On internal validation data (16 sequences), WASABI improves LCLC detection F1 from 0.834 to 0.948 (+0.114, +13.6%) and reduces centerline lateral error from 2.50 m to 0.95 m, while reducing detection false-positives by 24.6%. Temporal-stability metrics on the same data show LCLC toggle rate reduced by 63.3% and boundary-label flicker rate by 30.2%, confirming across-frame stabilization beyond per-frame accuracy. --- ### Frequency-Hierarchical Active k-Space Sampling for Diagnostic MRI Authors: Ruru Xu, Kian Anvari Hamedani, Zhikai Yang, Ilkay Oksuz Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19779v1 Active sampling for accelerated MRI must distribute a tight sampling budget across spatial frequencies that carry very different kinds of information. Low frequencies hold most of the anatomical context; high frequencies carry the fine details that drive pathology assessment. Existing active samplers either treat both regions identically or restrict the action space to entire Cartesian rows, which forces a poor compromise at high acceleration. We propose HieraSample, a task-driven framework built around this hierarchy. A cosine-annealed curriculum lowers the acceleration factor from 20x to 4x across 80 acquisition steps while keeping a fully-sampled low-frequency disk at every step; a Mamba-based policy then picks individual high-frequency coordinates from features extracted by dual disease and severity classifiers. The reward is the per-sample reduction in class-weighted cross-entropy after each action, so a positive reward corresponds directly to a more confident correct prediction. On the fastMRI+ knee benchmark, HieraSample matches the fully-sampled oracle on ACL diagnosis from 4x to 10x acceleration, and improves on a recent Cartesian baseline by as much as 20.4 AUC points on ACL severity. --- ### Look Before You Edit: Attention-Guided Camera Placement and Multi-View Alignment for 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing Authors: Jaeyeon Park, Taeho Kang, Youngki Lee Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19777v1 Text-driven 3D scene editing with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) typically applies a 2D diffusion editor to views rendered from fixed training cameras, limiting both the spatial coverage of edits and the user's freedom to target specific objects in complex scenes. We present LB-Edit, a framework that addresses two coupled problems: where to place editing cameras for localized edits, and how to make per-view edits agree with one another so that the 3D scene remains consistent after fine-tuning. First, Attention-Guided Editing Camera Placement (ACP) probes the diffusion model's self- and cross-attention at multiple candidate camera distances to find where attention is well-contained in the region of interest, then places a compact, geometrically diverse editing camera set at that attention-optimal distance. Second, Multi-view Attention Alignment (MAA) steers the editor toward the same edit across views along two axes: it aligns appearance by sharing self-attention features via token-level correspondence, and aligns spatial location by lifting cross-attention maps onto the 3D Gaussians as a shared 3D attention field, suppressing both appearance and spatial drift. Experiments on multi-object and single-object scenes show that our method achieves the highest user preference in instruction fidelity, multi-view consistency, and editing locality, using as few as 5 editing views and reducing latency by up to 7x over existing methods. --- ### RPPNet: Perceptually-Grouped Rhythm-Pitch Primitives for Long-Term Structure Melody Generation via Boundary-Aware Modeling Authors: Tieyao Zhang, Yuke Liu, Jiaxing Yu, Xinda Wu, Kejun Zhang, Genfang Chen Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19776v1 Existing symbolic music generation models typically use bars as the basic structural unit. However, human perception of musical phrases often does not align with notated bar lines, leading to long-term structural fragmentation. This paper proposes RPPNet-a two-stage deep learning architecture with variable structural boundaries. It first generates variable-length Rhythm-Pitch Primitive (RPP) sequences, where each RPP encodes note count, rhythm, and contour; then decodes the RPP sequences into concrete notes. The grouping of RPPs is automatically derived from acoustic cues, auditory inertia, and similarity perception based on music psychology. Experiments show that melodies generated by RPPNet are superior in both long-term structure and musicality, with significant improvements across all subjective evaluation dimensions. Ablation studies confirm that the performance gain stems from the structural correctness of the psychological representation, rather than from model capacity. This work offers an interdisciplinary perspective for music generation, integrating music theory, computational modeling, and music psychology. --- ### DRGBT-1K: A Large-scale High-quality Benchmark for Dynamic RGBT Tracking Authors: Zhaodong Ding, Chenglong Li, Zeyu Ding, Futian Wang, Jin Tang Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19772v1 Dynamic RGBT (DRGBT) tracking aims to continuously localize a target when the available sensing modalities and observation platforms vary over time. Compared with conventional RGBT tracking with fixed RGBT inputs and a fixed observation platform, DRGBT tracking is more consistent with real-world collaborative perception systems, where targets may be observed by heterogeneous sensors from different viewpoints. However, existing benchmarks are still insufficient for systematically evaluating tracker robustness under real dynamic modality variations and cross-platform transitions. To address this limitation, we make the following contributions. 1) We construct DRGBT-1K, a large-scale high-quality benchmark for DRGBT tracking. It contains 1,045 sequences captured entirely in real-world scenarios and 795K RGBT frame pairs collected using UAVs and handheld RGBT devices, encompassing diverse real-world scenes, pronounced viewpoint changes, modality variations, and target appearance discontinuities. 2) We provide comprehensive annotations for fine-grained evaluation, including dense bounding boxes, target category labels, challenge attributes, frame-level modality labels and platform labels. DRGBT-1K covers 24 target categories, more than 15 scene types and 15 challenge attributes. 3) We establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating 20 representative multimodal tracking methods, including conventional RGBT trackers, modality-missing RGBT trackers, and DRGBT trackers under a unified evaluation protocol. 4) We release an unaligned version of DRGBT-1K and derive UGVT-1K to support broader research on unaligned multimodal tracking and UAV-ground collaborative tracking. 5) We develop an online evaluation platform for DRGBT-1K and provide a leaderboard that collects all methods evaluated on this benchmark. --- ### An Isotropy-Preserving Spectral Cap for Muon: Theory and Three Case Studies Authors: Jiachun Li Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19771v1 Muon and related matrix-sign optimizers are increasingly used to pre-train large language models, but their effect on the internal geometry of individual weight matrices is not well understood. This preliminary report proposes a unified framework built on a single idealizing assumption -- exact scale invariance of the loss under weight rescaling, which holds approximately in normalization-heavy networks. Under this assumption, plain SGD carries a built-in 1/||W|| brake on its update size, whereas Muon's matrix-sign step removes that brake, so both the Frobenius and spectral norms drift outward faster (t^{1/2} versus t^{1/4}). We further observe that the spectral-norm perturbation has a non-negative second-order term. This implies that a lightweight "spectral cap" -- which projects out only the first-order growth of the single top singular direction from each update -- can control the output covariance W K_X W^T without freezing training: the weight keeps learning through non-top directions, top-direction rotation, and top switching. We relate this cap to the min-entropy (H-infinity) of the singular-value spectrum. We then study three systems trained with Muon: a nanoGPT feed-forward projection, a 64-expert mixture-of-experts router, and the query/key projections of a bf16 FlashAttention block. In each case the cap increases isotropy and, at the margins -- a router collapsing to a single expert, and the near-divergence of one attention head -- prevents a concrete failure, while leaving validation loss essentially unchanged. We emphasize that the scale-invariance assumption is strong and that these small-scale results are preliminary; comments are welcome. --- ### AlphaRoute: Large Language Models as Semantic Optimizers for Multi-Objective Routing Authors: Kabir Murjani, Mishri Bhavsar, Manish I. Patel, Jonti Talukdar Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19768v1 Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) global routing is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem requiring signal net assignment across capacity-constrained 3D grids while minimizing congestion, wirelength, and via transitions. Because traditional heuristics rely on static penalty schedules that fail on complex congestion topologies, we present AlphaRoute: a multi-objective adaptive search framework reformulating rip-up and reroute (R&R) into a dynamic optimization system. We introduce SHAP-based overflow decomposition to isolate per-net congestion, driving targeted subgraph extraction via 3D Dijkstra maze routing and an adaptive PathFinder policy. Crucially, AlphaRoute employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as semantic policy optimizers. Bounded by a deterministic knowledge graph, the LLMs interpret congestion metrics to dynamically adjust penalty parameters. Evaluated on ISPD 2025 benchmarks, AlphaRoute reduces overflow by 98.6% on MEMPOOL. On the constrained ARIANE design, we achieve an overflow of 146,109 (a 29.8x reduction in overflow over the state of the art), yielding a penalized score of S_orig = 0.0538 versus the State-of-the-art (SOTA) 1.780. These results demonstrate that superior algorithmic search geometry can overcome the latency of interpreted Python implementations. --- ### Symbol and Footprint Database for Electronic Components by Agentic Recognition and Generation Authors: Yichen Shi, Yuzhi Liu, Zhuofu Tao, Li Huang, Yuhao Gao, Ting-Jung Lin, Lei Hel Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19767v1 A rich and recognizable component library is the cornerstone of printed circuit board (PCB) design and generation. Traditionally, engineers manually create symbols and footprints and design PCB schematics, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs), we develop SFgen, an agentic recognition and generation flow of symbol and footprint for electronic components. SFgen achieves 86% accuracy for symbol generation and 80% accuracy for footprint generation. We use the SFgen method to create SFnet, a database of symbols and footprints. It now has 1000 components and is expanding constantly, which lays the foundation for automatic generation of PCB designs. --- ### Global Building Area Estimation Products: How Accurate Are They? Authors: Saad Lahrichi, Doa'a Allabadi, Kyle Bradbury, Jordan Malof Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19766v1 Geo-spatial rasters of building footprint area are useful for a variety of tasks, such as monitoring urbanization, improving energy efficiency, and tracking greenhouse gas emissions. There are now multiple global building raster datasets, however there lacks an independent, comprehensive, and fair assessment of their accuracy. In this work, we evaluate the accuracy of four major global building products: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), Microsoft's TEMPO (TEMPO), The Global Building Atlas (GBA), and Overture. As ground truth for assessing their accuracy, we use ORBITaL-Net, a globally diverse dataset of manually labeled building footprints. To ensure fairness, we evaluate products on grids of multiple spatial resolutions, and several conventional performance metrics. Our results indicate that either GBA or TEMPO generally achieves the highest overall accuracy, depending upon the particular evaluation criteria. We also stratify the accuracy of each product by several factors: geographic location, population density, and income groups. The results reveal that product accuracy can sometimes vary significantly with respect to these factors. Notably, all products are significantly less accurate in Africa and Asia. Most products also suffer significant accuracy reduction in high-density urban areas. --- ### Extending a Large View Synthesis Model for Multi-view Panoptic Segmentation Authors: Kwonyoung Ryu, In-Jae Lee, Jonghyun Jin, Hyunjee Lee, Jongmin Lee, Jaesik Park Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19765v1 Large view synthesis models synthesize novel views through cross-view attention without explicit 3D representations, and recent studies have shown that they learn accurate spatial correspondence from RGB supervision alone. We observe that this correspondence generalizes beyond appearance. When non-photorealistic signals such as binary encoded panoptic labels are passed through the model, they are propagated to novel views with consistent spatial structure. These results indicate that the correspondence learned for RGB view synthesis can also propagate view-independent per-pixel labels. From this observation, we present the first work to extend large view synthesis models beyond appearance rendering to 3D scene understanding. We propose a panoptic segmentation pipeline that reuses a frozen view synthesis model to propagate panoptic labels from input views to novel views, without 3D reconstruction or any segmentation-specific training of the view synthesis model. Given panoptic labels on the input views, we encode them into binary channel representations and pass them through the same model to render target-view segmentation. On ScanNet, our method achieves segmentation quality on par with Gaussian based approaches requiring explicit 3D reconstruction, while outperforming them in novel view synthesis by more than 7 dB. The label propagation also transfers across datasets, surpassing these approaches on Replica without any fine-tuning. --- ### Convergence-Latency-Aware Adaptive Modulation and Resource Allocation in RIS-Assisted Wireless Federated Learning Authors: Liwei Wang, Wen Chen, Jun Li, Qingqing Wu, Ming Ding, Xusheng Zhu, Qiong Wu Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19759v1 Federated learning (FL) over wireless networks suffers from significant training latency and degraded convergence due to unreliable wireless transmission, especially under blocked propagation environments. Although reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can improve communication reliability, existing wireless FL studies rarely characterize the trade-off between learning convergence and communication delay under modulation-dependent transmission errors. In this paper, we consider a wireless FL system operating under RIS-assisted blocked-link propagation scenarios, and focus on adaptive modulation and sub-channel allocation for convergence-latency aware communication design. By characterizing the effect of symbol errors on uploaded local gradients, we derive a convergence-related upper bound that reveals the impact of symbol error rate (SER) on FL loss decay. Based on this result, we formulate a joint convergence-latency optimization problem, which is cast as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and solve it using a low-complexity hybrid alternating optimization framework. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Speech Commands show that the proposed scheme consistently achieves faster convergence and higher test accuracy than existing adaptive communication schemes, especially in complex tasks and challenging wireless scenarios. --- ### Learning the Arabic Dialect Continuum as a Continuous Space: A Regression Approach to Speaker Origin Prediction Authors: Mohamed Aziz Khadraoui, Adel Ammar, Bilel Benjdira, Zahid Khan, Skander Turki, Wadii Boulila Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19751v1 We present a regression-based approach to Arabic dialect geolocation that models dialectal variation as a continuous geographic space rather than discrete categories. Speaker origin is predicted as continuous latitude-longitude coordinates using a hierarchical neural architecture that fuses frame-level XLS-R-300M and Whisper-large-v3 encoder representations with phonotactic descriptors through a Transformer encoder and a learnable attention-pooled query. A spherical geodesic loss directly optimizes great-circle distance on Earth's surface, avoiding distortions inherent to planar coordinate regression. Under a leakage-free 5-fold GroupKFold protocol grouped by source recording, our model attains a pooled median localization error of 481.2 km. Auxiliary country and city heads reach 64.5% and 45.2% accuracy, respectively. A permutation Mantel test on the learned latent space provides quantitative support for the Arabic dialect continuum hypothesis. To probe true generalization, we further introduce a city-masking protocol in which two cities per fold are removed from training but retained in validation. Under this zero-shot regime, the mean error rises to 1173.3 km, a 1.32x degradation relative to seen cities. Our findings establish continuous geographic modeling as a principled framework for Arabic dialect geolocation and quantify both its strengths and the substantial headroom that remains. --- ### Machine Can Automatically Discover Parametric Functions to Model HEP Data Authors: Ho Fung Tsoi, Dylan Rankin, Cecile Caillol, Miles Cranmer, Sridhara Dasu, Javier Duarte, Philip Harris, Elliot Lipeles Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: hep-ex, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19750v1 In HEP data analyses, finding an adequate function to model binned data has largely relied on a manual process: guess a functional form by intuition, fit, examine, then repeat until successful. We show that this iterative process can be automated by a machine using symbolic regression, which performs a data-driven search over function space without requiring prior knowledge of what an adequate function should look like. We present the SymbolFit package, which pairs symbolic regression with uncertainty modeling to target HEP analysis use cases, and demonstrate it on the CMS and ATLAS Run 2 dijet spectra: 560 independent seeded runs across seven simple fit configurations generated over 1000 functions fitting the spectra with $χ^2/\text{NDF}\approx 1$, and 111 of the runs rediscovered the very dijet and UA2 functions used in published dijet searches. --- ### The World Model Remembers, the Actor Forgets: Dream Rehearsal for Continual Model-Based RL Authors: Gurp Nijjer Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19749v1 Model-based reinforcement-learning agents of the DreamerV3 family forget catastrophically when trained on task sequences, even when an unbounded replay buffer preserves every earlier experience. We ask a question the continual-RL literature has assumed an answer to but never measured: which component forgets? Under never-clear replay, pre-registered component-level probes (n=3 seeds throughout) show that the world model retains essentially everything measurable about old tasks -- reward discrimination (retention ratio ~1.0), value estimates, and termination structure -- while the actor's behavior collapses. Forgetting in this regime is a channel problem, not a memory problem. We demonstrate this by intervention: with the world model frozen and identical imagined rollouts, reinforcement learning in imagination fails to recover a lost skill (0/3 seeds), while supervised self-imitation on the world model's own graded dreams recovers it on 3/3 seeds with zero environment interaction. Interleaved during training, this graded dream rehearsal yields a task-label-free, parameter-constant continual learner: 3/3 four-task chains retained where plain replay passes 0/3, 3/3 eight-task chains, and consistent gains over matched real-episode cloning (paired difference +0.13, bootstrap 95% CI (0.07, 0.24), complete seed separation). The dream-grading step is load-bearing: we characterize two scoring failure modes, provide an offline selection gauge that caught both before they contaminated results, and give a realized-first grading rule that closes them. All experiments were pre-registered with committed protocols; every refuted hypothesis is reported. --- ### Beyond Relevance-Centric Retrieval: Rubric-Oriented Document Set Selection and Ranking Authors: Kailin Jiang, Lei Liu, Jian Xi, Hui Xu, Junlin Liu, Baochen Fu, Bin Li, Vichwang, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19747v2 As large language models and AI agents become the primary consumers of search results, document set quality determines the upper bound of downstream generation. Yet existing evaluation systems remain confined to scoring documents independently and aggregating via nDCG, ignoring inter-document interactions (redundancy, conflict, complementarity) and unable to answer what makes one document set better than another. To address these issues, we propose a complete evaluate-diagnose-optimize framework. We design SetwiseEvalKit, a three-level, nine-dimension document set evaluation benchmark covering both short-form and long-form scenarios, comprising approximately 28K high-quality evaluation rubrics. We systematically evaluate 12 rerankers: even the best method achieves no more than 45% coverage, cross-document coordination dimensions are universally weak, and no single method maintains top performance across both settings. Building on this, we propose Rubric4Setwise, a training-free method that converts rubric-based evaluation criteria into document set selection signals, achieving the best downstream generation performance with fewer documents and search rounds. It is the only method that maintains state-of-the-art results across both scenarios, validating the effectiveness of closing the loop from evaluation to optimization. --- ### EgoRecovery: Acquiring Failure Recovery Ability Through Human Recovery Demonstration Authors: Zuhao Ge, Yuchen Zhou, Weitao Zhou, Minglei Li, Xinyu Li, Chao Wu, Hanwen Zhao, Haotian Wang, Zuxuan Wu, Xiaosong Jia, Yu-Gang Jiang Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19745v2 Robust embodied robots should be able to recover from failures and retry tasks in order to operate reliably in unstructured and noisy real-world environments. Achieving this capability requires training policies on data that captures recovery behaviors. However, collecting such data through robot teleoperation is difficult to scale, as it is time-consuming to induce diverse failure states, perform corrective actions, and reset the environment. This challenge is further exacerbated by the high diversity of failure modes, which demands substantially more recovery data than success demonstrations. In this work, we show that egocentric human data capturing failure recovery processes provides a scalable alternative. By efficiently arranging task-level failure configurations and recording short recovery segments, human operators can generate more than 10x as much valid recovery data per hour compared to robot teleoperation under our protocol. To address the embodiment gap between human and robot, we propose EgoRecovery, a co-training framework for learning recovery behavior, where human recovery demonstrations are aligned to a compact corrective-intent space shared with robot data, which captures the timing and magnitude of correction. Only a small number of robot recovery demonstrations are required to connect this intent to executable robot actions. At deployment, a learned recovery gate predicts when correction is needed from robot observations and activates the corrective intent only in recovery states. Experiments on real-world recovery tasks show that EgoRecovery improves success from failure starts over robot-only recovery, direct co-training with human recovery data, and direct intent-transfer baselines. --- ### Domain-Adapted Power Curve for Cross-Farm Applications Authors: Ahmadreza Chokhachian, V. Roshan Joseph, Yu Ding Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: stat.AP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19744v1 The wind energy industry relies on accurate power curve models to make power forecast, evaluate turbine performance, quantify upgrade, or support site-planning decisions. In this paper, we focus on site-planning power curves, i.e., we investigate how power curve models trained using turbine data on an operating wind farm can be transferred to a new, undeveloped farm. The traditional wisdom in the wind energy literature relies on distance, layout, or terrain characteristics for making cross-farm power curve transfer. Through the lens of domain adaptation, we propose a more reliable transfer learning approach for cross-farm power curve modeling. In the cross-farm applications, a domain is specified by the temporal environmental variates and spatial terrain variables. Domain adaptation is to find a capable similarity metric to adapt the domain on the new farm to that on the existing farm. Empirical results show that our domain adapted power curve consistently outperforms competing approaches by an appreciable margin for site-planning power predictions. --- ### Efficient Tracking and Understanding Object Transformations Authors: Yihong Sun, Bharath Hariharan Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19743v1 Tracking objects through state transformations is essential for understanding real-world dynamics. However, existing methods are computationally expensive. TubeletGraph recently showed impressive capabilities, but its inference cost (~$4.4$ seconds per object-frame on VOST) precludes any real-time deployment possibilities. We observe that TubeletGraph's overhead arises from building a spatiotemporal partition of the input video: (1) entity segmentation is computed densely for every frame regardless of whether a transformation occurs, and (2) every entity in the scene is tracked, scaling cost with scene complexity rather than the number of transformations of interest. To address both, we propose FluxGraph, a reactive variant that uses SAM2's internal multi-mask disagreement as a lightweight trigger for transformation detection, and removes the need for tracking all entities in the given video. FluxGraph is ~$3.3\times$ faster than TubeletGraph on VOST while improving tracking performance and preserving state graph quality. Furthermore, we also observe consistent speedups of $3.7-10.7\times$ across VSCOS, M$^3$-VOS, and DAVIS17 while maintaining performance. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/YihongSun/FluxGraph. --- ### An Automated Framework for Extracting Reachable Attack Chains from Cyber Threat Intelligence Reports Authors: Wenbo Hou, Ning Hu, Xueping Wang, Jiahao Gu, Wenjian Luo Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19742v1 Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports richly describe real-world attack processes, but their unstructured narratives cannot be directly used for automated attack-path reasoning. Existing CTI extraction methods focus on indicators, entities, or TTP labels without modeling the execution conditions and resulting states of each attack step, so the extracted knowledge supports neither state matching nor reachability analysis across multi-stage attack chains. This paper proposes an automated framework that extracts reachable attack chains by modeling each attack step as an attack unit of preconditions, an attack behavior, and postconditions. A multi-stage pipeline assisted by large language models (LLMs) extracts attack behavior skeletons, recovers their preconditions and postconditions, normalizes them into predefined predicates, and repairs broken dependencies; the resulting units are compiled into Datalog-style rules for attack-goal reachability reasoning. On a dataset of 20 CTI reports containing 334 human-validated annotated steps, our framework achieves higher annotated-step coverage than representative CTI extraction systems in recovering attack behaviors. Moreover, by explicitly generating preconditions and postconditions, it produces attack units that are more complete and consistent than those generated by end-to-end LLM baselines. On the extracted chains, Datalog inference reaches the specified attack goal in 19 of 20 reports, while backward search yields 34 attack paths under the generated rules. The source code and experimental artifacts are available in an anonymized repository. . --- ### Personalized Recommendation Tool Learning via Autonomous Language Agents Authors: Mingdai Yang, Zhiwei Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Yibo Wang, Hao Peng, Philip Yu Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19739v1 Although large language models (LLMs) have recently gained traction in recommender systems due to their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, previous LLM-based agents suffer from hallucination and context-length limitations, and thus are not suitable for full-ranking recommendation tasks. To circumvent these limitations through architectural design rather than modifying the LLM itself, we propose an agent-based recommendation framework, memory-based $\textbf{P}$ersonalized $\textbf{R}$ecommendation $\textbf{T}$ool learning via autonomous language $\textbf{A}$gents (PRTA), in which an LLM acts as a central planner interacting with multiple recommendation models as tools. The LLM-based agent is responsible for high-level reasoning and personalized tool selection, while traditional recommendation models perform full-ranking scoring, leveraging their scalability in modeling behavioral patterns. To support personalized tool selection, we design reflection mechanisms that enable the agent to evaluate and compare tools for each user based on user profiles and candidate ranked lists. Extensive experiments across three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of \modelname over traditional recommendation and LLM-based baselines in improving full-ranking recommendation performance. --- ### An Exploratory Analysis of Pain Localization via Explainable Computational Modeling Authors: Ioannis Kyprakis, Stefanos Gkikas, Eric Nichols, Yu Fang, Manolis Tsiknakis Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19726v1 Automatic pain localization, which involves identifying the anatomical origin of pain from peripheral physiological signals without patient self-report, is a clinically critical but largely unaddressed problem, particularly for non-verbal patients. This paper presents a systematic comparison of classical feature engineering and deep sequence learning for subject-independent three-class pain localization using the AI4Pain 2026 Challenge dataset, which comprises four synchronously recorded wearable modalities: electrodermal activity, blood volume pulse, respiration, and peripheral oxygen saturation recorded from 65 participants under controlled TENS-induced pain. A 115-dimensional hand-crafted feature set spanning time-domain, frequency-domain, modality-specific, and cross-modal descriptors is benchmarked against end-to-end deep architectures. Extremely Randomized Trees achieves the highest macro-F1 of 0.539, outperforming the best deep model by 7.4 percentage points, with EDA spectral features emerging as the dominant discriminators. A consistent 26-point gap between pain detection (F1\,=\,0.815) and localization (F1\,=\,0.552) across all models points to a fundamental ceiling imposed by the anatomical diffuseness of peripheral autonomic pathways at 10-second resolution. --- ### Analytic Distribution of Classifier-Free Guidance for Schedule Design Authors: Enze Jiang, Zheng Ma Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19725v2 Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the default mechanism for conditional generation in diffusion models, but the distribution sampled by its deterministic guided dynamics is not captured by the usual product-distribution heuristic $p_0^ωq_0^{1-ω}$. We analyze CFG through the probability flow ODE and derive exact analytic path-integral representations of the induced distributions for both constant and time-dependent guidance. The resulting formulas show that CFG modifies $p_{t_0}$ by an exponential path-integral correction, and that a time-dependent schedule enters this correction through the weight $ω(t)-1$. This characterization explains how score discrepancies accumulate along sampling trajectories and motivates Distribution-Guided CFG (DG-CFG), a schedule that balances timestep contributions while accounting for signal strength and low-noise score-error amplification. A toy model with analytic scores closely verifies the predicted distributions. Across Stable Diffusion~1.5, Stable Diffusion~2.1, and Stable Diffusion~XL, DG-CFG yields a stronger diversity--fidelity trade-off and robustly mitigates the saturation and quality degradation caused by strong constant or heuristic guidance. Complete NFE experiments on Stable Diffusion~1.5 and Stable Diffusion~2.1 confirm that these gains persist across sampling budgets, while fixed-quality experiments on both backbones show that DG-CFG reaches target metrics with fewer sampling steps. --- ### ReFace: Reorganizing Facial Spatiotemporal Representations for Improved Pain Assessment Authors: Stefanos Gkikas, Yu Fang, Christian Arzate Cruz, Muhammad Umar Khan, Raul Fernandez Rojas Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19722v2 Automatic pain assessment from facial video remains challenging due to the spatial heterogeneity of pain-related facial cues. This study proposes ReFace, a spatial reorganization pipeline that divides facial input into four spatial quadrants before tokenization, rather than processing the entire face as a single region. Evaluated on the AI4Pain dataset, the proposed approach achieves $56.00\%$ accuracy on the test set using video only, achieving the highest reported accuracy under the fixed AI4Pain benchmark protocol among the compared methods. Notably, the four-quadrant configuration processes the same total pixel budget as the full-face input, yet achieves higher accuracy, suggesting that spatial reorganization can improve performance under the proposed tokenization design. A single quadrant region, processing just one quarter of those pixels, remains competitive at a fraction of the computational cost. --- ### Koopman Dreamer: Spectrally Constrained Latent Dynamics for Stable World-Model Imagination Authors: Jiaqi Li, Xinglong Zhang, Haibin Xie, Yixing Lan, Wei Pan, Xin Xu Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19719v2 Latent world models improve sample efficiency in continuous control by optimizing policies over imagined latent trajectories, but common neural transitions offer limited direct control over modal persistence and error accumulation in long rollouts. We propose Koopman Dreamer, a Dreamer-style world model with a spectrally constrained deterministic latent dynamics core. Its Koopman-inspired backbone uses two-dimensional rotation--scaling blocks with bounded radii to represent damping, rotation, and near-periodic modes. Linear and low-rank bilinear action terms capture global and state-dependent control effects, while stochastic-state modulation supplies local correction information. To reduce the mismatch between posterior-conditioned training and prior-only imagination, the model combines posterior-conditioned EMA teacher targets with one-step consistency, multi-step rollout, and open-loop observation-prediction objectives. We further derive a multi-step rollout-error bound that separates amplification by the spectral backbone and bilinear interaction from the additive effects of stochastic-state mismatch and modeling residuals, clarifying the trade-off between error attenuation and long-term information retention. Experimental results on proprioceptive continuous-control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite and UAV-LiDAR autonomous navigation demonstrate that Koopman Dreamer improves the stability of long-horizon latent rollouts and achieves stronger closed-loop control performance on tasks that rely on high-quality multi-step imagination. --- ### Lightweight Person-Place Relation Extraction from Historical Newspapers with Dependency Graphs and Proximity Features Authors: Mlen-Too Wesley Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19718v1 The HIPE-2026 shared task introduces person-place relation extraction from multilingual historical newspapers as a new evaluation track, classifying the at and isAt relations between pre-annotated person and location mentions in English, French, and German. Motivated by the cost of processing historical archives at scale, our team (DS@GT HIPE, team 2 in the official results) investigates how far a lightweight, interpretable system can go without any pretrained language model at the relation classification stage. Our approach builds a document-level graph from dependency parses, extracts proximity-based and part-of-speech features for each entity pair, and classifies them with small scikit-learn ensembles or compact Graph Attention Networks, keeping every submitted run under 847K parameters. On the official evaluation (Test A, the newspaper test set), our best run reached a macro recall of 0.5142, ranking 3rd on the Efficiency profile while placing mid-table on Accuracy among the 17 participating teams. Two findings stand out. First, minimum character distance alone captures most of the classification signal; adding further engineered features yields inconsistent gains and sometimes degrades performance, echoing prior evidence that argument distance dominates relation extraction. Second, document-grouped cross-validation is essential on this corpus: pair-level splits inflate scores by 25-37 percentage points because entity mentions recur across documents, a data-leakage effect that grouped cross-validation removes. --- ### A Unified Tokenization Framework for Pain Recognition using Heterogeneous 3D Modalities Authors: Stefanos Gkikas, Christian Arzate Cruz, Valentina Becchetti, Muhammad Umar Khan, Alessandro Giuseppi, Raul Fernandez Rojas Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19716v2 Pain is a complex and pervasive phenomenon affecting a large percentage of the population, and accurate assessment is essential for effective clinical management and intervention. Computational pain recognition systems enable continuous monitoring, support clinical decision-making, and help mitigate pain-related distress and functional decline. This study introduces a unified tokenization framework for heterogeneous 3D modalities in pain recognition that provides a single processing pipeline across behavioral and brain-activity 3D data, without requiring separate architectures for each modality or handcrafted inductive biases. The framework preserves spatial, temporal, and time--frequency structure while mapping diverse inputs into a shared token space. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach effectively processes facial videos and fNIRS data in both raw-signal and spectrogram-based representations. On the AI4Pain benchmark dataset, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency and enabling real-time assessment on both GPU and CPU hardware. --- ### How Fast Can Reward Models Score? A Systems Study of C++ and PyTorch Inference Runtimes for RLHF Authors: Venkata Naga Sai Vishnu Rohit Pulipaka, Anish Katta, Deva Rohit Reddy Peddireddy Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19712v1 In RLHF pipelines, reward scoring blocks policy updates. Slow scoring bottlenecks the entire loop, since no update runs until every rollout gets a score. And yet most setups just default to PyTorch eager mode or torch.compile, no one checks if that's actually fastest. Scoring itself is small. Rollout generation eats far more of a typical RLHF step. But scoring and generation fight over the same CPU and GPU resources, so a faster scoring engine doesn't shrink step time on its own. It mainly frees up capacity generation can use instead. We built a native C++ inference engine on ONNX Runtime. First step: confirm correctness. Output matched the PyTorch reference to 5.7 x 10^-6 on CPU and 4.2 x 10^-3 on GPU, close enough to trust. Then we tested it against PyTorch eager mode, torch.compile, and FastAPI, on both CPU and GPU. CPU was decisive. Our engine beat every baseline, confidence intervals didn't even overlap. GPU gave a different view: we beat PyTorch and FastAPI, but torch.compile came out ahead. Further testing traced the speedup to ONNX Runtime itself, not C++ as a language. And batching strategy mattered more than either the language or the runtime choice, more than we expected. The results are from repeated, independent runs, since single runs just aren't reliable enough to trust. --- ### Point-Selection Fine-Tuning Framework for Robust Point Cloud Classification Authors: Da Li, Chang Ma, Dongfu Yin Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19711v1 Noisy and corrupted points can substantially degrade point cloud recognition performance, especially under challenging corruption settings. In particular, full fine-tuning of 3D pre-trained models may amplify the influence of outliers and overwrite robustness priors learned during pre-training, while naive parameter-efficient adaptation remains sensitive to corrupted tokens. To address this issue, we propose PSFT, a point-selection fine-tuning framework that improves robustness while remaining parameter-efficient. PSFT first estimates point-wise influence from pre-pooling features and adaptively retains minimally influential points to suppress outliers. Based on the selected subset, a prompt generation branch predicts layer-wise prompt tokens and injects them into a frozen backbone for lightweight downstream adaptation. To further mitigate residual noise after selection, we append a lightweight feature filter with bottleneck MLP transformation and Beta-gated residual blending to refine patch-token representations before prediction. Extensive experiments show that PSFT consistently reduces corruption error on ModelNet-C and ModelNet40-C across all tested 3D pre-trained backbones, while achieving the strongest ScanObjectNN-C results with ULIP-2 and Uni3D-B among the evaluated tuning strategies. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/CVChMA/PSFT/tree/master. --- ### Efficient Clustering with Quality Guardrails for LLM-based Recommender Systems at Industry Scale Authors: Longshaokan Wang, Wai Tsang Keung, Punit Ghodasara, Roman Wang, Ali Dashti, Francesc Moreno-Noguer Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19704v2 LLMs can be prohibitively expensive and slow to run at scale, especially for applications that invoke an LLM per sample over millions of inputs. A natural way to scale is to cluster the inputs, run the LLM only on cluster representatives, and propagate the outputs to other cluster members. However, the outputs a member receives are only as good as its match to the representative. Off-the-shelf clustering methods optimize an aggregate objective, targeting average-case quality without per-sample guardrails. As a result, members can be assigned to poorly-matched representatives, and the inherited outputs -- though appropriate for the representative -- may be irrelevant or even unsafe for the member. For example, a parent of a toddler grouped with parents of older children could receive age-inappropriate recommendations. Most clustering methods also scale poorly to millions of inputs in runtime and memory, limiting their use at industry scale. We propose a scalable two-stage clustering algorithm with provable per-sample guardrails: every sample is guaranteed to share a user-specified minimal embedding similarity and exact attribute match with its representative. The algorithm first generates initial clusters with Mini-batch K-Means, then greedily selects representatives within each to satisfy the guardrails. We provide theoretical guarantees, complexity analysis, and benchmarks against common methods on internal and public datasets. Our method delivers per-sample guardrails while running substantially faster and scaling to data sizes where most standard methods become intractable. We demonstrate its impact in a real-world deployment clustering 38 million customers, reducing downstream LLM cost and runtime by 50-fold while preserving personalization. This unblocked the launch of a persona-based recommender system that delivers significant gains in revenue and engagement in an A/B test. --- ### Efficient Clustering with Provable Guardrails for LLM Inference at Scale Authors: Longshaokan Wang, Wai Tsang Keung, Punit Ghodasara, Roman Wang, Ali Dashti, Francesc Moreno-Noguer Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19704v1 Scaling LLM-based applications to millions of users is bottlenecked by the inference cost and latency of modern foundation models. A natural fix is to cluster the inputs and call the LLM only on cluster representatives, letting other members inherit the output -- but this is only safe if each member is measurably close to its representative. Existing clustering methods do not offer such per-sample quality control at scale: none jointly guarantee a minimal within-cluster similarity, exact matching of categorical attributes, and scalability to tens of millions of samples. We propose a two-stage algorithm that generates initial clusters with Mini-batch K-Means, then greedily selects representatives within each initial cluster -- a step equivalent to the Johnson-Chvatal heuristic for Set Cover over alpha-balls in embedding space. The algorithm enforces the similarity and attribute guardrails exactly by construction, and runs in $O(nd + n^2 d/K)$ time and $O(nd + n^2/K^2)$ memory for $n$ samples, feature dimension $d$, and $K$ initial clusters -- linear in $n$ when $K$ grows proportionally with $n$. We provide benchmarks against common clustering methods on internal and public datasets: our method not only delivers per-sample guardrails but also runs 10-1000x faster and scales to data sizes where most standard methods become intractable. Deployed on 38 million customers for a persona-based recommender, the clustering method cut downstream cost and latency by 50-fold while preserving personalization and unblocked the production launch. --- ### SafeGen: Goal-Conditioned Video Diffusion of Safety-Critical Scenarios for VLM-Based Autonomous Driving Authors: Jiangfan Liu, Zexuan Cui, Tianyuan Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Zonghao Ying, Yaoyuan Zhang, Jiakai Wang, Xiaoqi Jiang, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19701v1 VLMs are increasingly deployed in AD systems, creating an urgent need for rigorous safety evaluation under rare yet safety-critical scenarios. Among these, interactions with vulnerable road users represent a major source of real-world failures. However, existing safety-critical scenario generation methods predominantly rely on simulator-based pipelines, which suffer from a substantial sim-to-real gap and often fail to capture realistic, diverse, and unforeseen human-vehicle interaction dynamics. We present SafeGen, a goal-conditioned diffusion framework for safety-critical scenario generation in VLMADs. Our key insight is to formulate scenario generation as a goal-conditioned diffusion process, where a predefined catastrophic end-state serves as a strong supervisory signal, guiding the generation of temporally coherent video trajectories that naturally evolve toward safety-critical outcomes. Building on this formulation, we introduce Context Grounded End State Reasoning, which leverages VLMs to analyze benign driving contexts and infer latent vulnerabilities in human-vehicle interactions, producing structured end-state specifications that induce high-risk scenarios. Conditioned on these targets, we further propose End State Conditioned Video Evolution, which grounds semantic threats into physically plausible visual dynamics. Specifically, we instantiate high-risk agents within the scene via depth-aware geometric projection, followed by boundary-conditioned diffusion to generate intermediate frames with consistent motion patterns and temporal coherence. Extensive experiments across 3 VLMADs demonstrate that SafeGen increases the Judge Overall Score, a metric using a VLM judge to evaluate VLMADs' understanding and decision-making, by 24.25% on average compared to SoTA baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning a VLMAD improves performance in real-world driving scenes by an average of 15.9%. --- ### Did Alice Do Wrong? Cross-Cultural Differences in Student Perceptions of Generative AI Use in University Computing Education Authors: Brian Harrington, Irina Zlotnikova, Gayathri Nadarajan, Samuel Ekundayo Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19699v1 The rise of generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted urgent debates surrounding academic integrity and ethical use. This study examines cross-cultural differences in student perceptions of GenAI use, comparing responses from students at Canadian and South Korean universities. Using a scenario-based survey administered in Fall 2024, we analyzed how students judged the ethicality and rule compliance of AI-assisted coding practices. Results reveal that Canadian students were consistently more likely to perceive the use of GenAI as both unethical and against institutional policies compared to Korean students, despite functionally identical institutional policies. Statistical analysis, including Mann-Whitney U tests and correlation coefficients, demonstrated significant differences across nearly all scenarios. Analysis of the factors used in generating scenarios indicated that the amount of AI-generated code incorporated into assignments most strongly influenced ethical judgments. Findings were interpreted through Hofstede's cultural dimensions framework, suggesting that cultural factors such as power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance significantly shape students' ethical reasoning regarding GenAI. Our results contribute to the growing body of evidence emphasizing that equitable AI integration in education must be culturally responsive, taking into account diverse conceptions of academic integrity. We advocate for the development of nuanced AI-use guidelines that are sensitive to local cultural contexts while upholding fundamental principles of academic honesty. This study highlights the need for ongoing cross-cultural research to inform ethical AI policies and support responsible GenAI use in global higher education settings. --- ### PhenSPINE: A Standardized Benchmark for Spine Pathology Diagnosis Authors: Duong Ngoc Vu, Hai Son Nguyen, Trong-Nghia Nguyen, Bien Tran Van, Trang Mai Xuan, Huan Vu, Thien Van Luong Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19696v1 The accurate diagnosis of spinal pathologies depends heavily on radiological interpretation, yet automated systems are hindered by the lack of diverse, high-quality benchmarks. In this study, we present PhenSPINE, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging dataset comprising 16,813 images from 250 patients, curated to facilitate advanced deep learning research. We propose a robust diagnostic benchmark that integrates state-of-theart convolutional backbones with a Positional Encoding mechanism to explicitly model the anatomical context of intervertebral discs. Evaluating across four standard MRI sequences, our experiments demonstrate that the Sagittal T2-weighted sequence offers the most robust diagnostic value, achieving a superior Macro F1-score of 50.31%. We find that multisequence fusion strategies yield inferior performance compared to this single-sequence baseline, as the images across sequences in our dataset are significantly compromised by noise interference from surrounding anatomical regions. This work establishes a robust baseline and offers critical insights into sequence selection for spine analysis. --- ### NavVerse: Benchmarking Indoor-to-Outdoor Embodied Navigation in Continuous Robot Simulation Authors: Junzhe Wu, Yue Hu, Zeyu Han, Po-Hsun Chang, Yinan Dong, Behrad Rabiei, Maani Ghaffari Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19695v1 Robots deployed in delivery, campus, and emergency-response settings often need to navigate from buildings to streets within a single continuous episode. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate indoor and outdoor navigation separately, and many abstract away robot execution, leaving exit finding, boundary traversal, adaptation, and kinodynamic failures underexplored. We introduce NavVerse, a physics-enabled benchmark for indoor-to-outdoor embodied navigation. NavVerse contains 100 indoor scenes, 50 urban outdoor scenes, and 50 indoor-to-outdoor scenes, and 10,000 episodes spanning Object Navigation, Vision-and-Language Navigation, and Place Navigation tasks, where agents search for semantic points of interest such as restaurants or banks. Agents are evaluated through executable robot interfaces using task-success, path-efficiency, and safety metrics. Zero-shot experiments with RL, VLA, and modular baselines show that current agents remain far from solving cross-context navigation: end-to-end VLAs obtain the highest zero-shot success, while the modular method provides the strongest safety profile. PlaceNav further reveals a clear drop from outdoor to indoor-to-outdoor scenes, indicating that adaptation remains major bottleneck. --- ### Data-Poisoning Audits for Causal Effect Estimation Authors: Kwangho Kim Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19692v1 Observational causal analyses increasingly pool records across sites, vendors, and collection systems, creating vulnerability to append-only attacks in which plausible records are strategically selected to alter a reported treatment effect. We develop a data-poisoning audit for augmented inverse-probability-weighted estimation. The analyst specifies a finite catalog of feasible records, an append budget, and nested source capacities, and the adversary selects a feasible subset to maximize movement in a prespecified direction. With preprocessing and nuisance fits held fixed, we propose a greedy scan that computes the exact finite-sample worst-case movement at every append budget. To account for nuisance refitting, we go on to derive a total-influence score combining each record's direct contribution with its effect through the propensity and outcome models. We further obtain a conservative finite-budget bound for the fully refitted estimate. Extensive simulations validate the exact result and show that total influence improves local refit prediction, while multisite and public-data analyses demonstrate material sensitivity at small append budgets. By translating adversarial data-composition risk into movement curves and critical budgets, the framework supports more reliable causal reporting and the design of source-level safeguards. --- ### SLPO: Scaling Latent Reasoning via a Surrogate Policy Authors: Runyang You, Zhiyuan Liu, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19691v2 Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become the predominant recipe for eliciting test-time scaling in explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoners. Yet this scaling path remains computationally costly, since every intermediate step must be decoded as a language token. Latent reasoning instead carries intermediate computation as continuous vectors and already matches or surpasses explicit CoT at far shorter horizons. Despite this promise, latent reasoners remain largely imitation-bound, while explicit CoT has already moved past imitation via outcome-reward RL. Latent trajectories lack a tractable per-step likelihood and an adaptive stopping interface under fixed thinking budgets, so outcome rewards cannot elicit latent test-time scaling. We introduce Surrogate Latent Policy Optimization (SLPO) to bring outcome-reward RL to autoregressive latent reasoners: an empirical surrogate policy density over latent transitions for trajectory-level credit assignment, and a correctness-supervised stopping head that outcome-reward optimization refines into a variable-horizon policy. Across continuous and soft thinking settings, SLPO improves Pass@$k$ under parallel sampling and allocates longer latent computation to harder instances with higher deterministic accuracy. --- ### Optimal Recalibration of an Online Predictor Authors: Lunjia Hu, Kevin Tian, Chutong Yang Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.DS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19689v1 We study the problem of recalibrating an online predictor (KE17, OKS24): given an arbitrary "hint" sequence of forecasts, the learner must output new predictions that are calibrated while incurring small excess error relative to the original forecasts, under a proper loss. We give an online algorithm that achieves $(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2)$-recalibration for Lipschitz proper losses in $T \approx \varepsilon^{-3}$ rounds, using an imbalanced extension of the recent simultaneous Blackwell approachability reduction framework of (HTY26). We show that this tradeoff is optimal by proving a matching lower bound for recalibrating against the squared loss. We also prove a companion $\mathcal{K}_2$-recalibration theorem that obtains the same tradeoffs up to a logarithmic factor. As our main application, we show how our recalibration algorithms can be combined with the online refinement method of (FH23) to obtain simultaneous $\varepsilon$-calibration and $\varepsilon^2$-calibeating for smooth proper losses at the same asymptotic rate, improving upon prior works that achieved these properties separately or with a worse $\varepsilon$ dependence. In particular, the $\mathcal{K}_2$ variant answers a question of (CHJL26) on simultaneously achieving near-optimal calibeating and calibration rates. We also derive extensions to settings with multiple hint sequences. Finally, we empirically evaluate our algorithms on a classification dataset undergoing distribution shift. --- ### Multi-Mask Diffusion Language Models for Few-Step Generation Authors: Sijin Chen, Yinuo Ren, Heyang Zhao, Ziheng Cheng, Quanquan Gu, Lexing Ying Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19686v3 Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising family of language generators, but achieving high-quality few-step generation remains challenging. In MDMs, all forward trajectories collapse to a single fully masked state, leaving no terminal entropy for consistency-style few-step generation. While recent few-step alternatives based on uniform-state diffusion avoid this degeneracy, it becomes harder to distinguish clean tokens from noise than MDMs, which usually harms modeling quality and training efficiency. In this work, we propose a multi-mask diffusion model (MultiMDM) that preserves the masking structure towards few-step generation. In the forward process, each clean token is first pushed towards a designated mask and then gradually mixes over the mask set. As a result, the backward process has a drafting capability by predicting a designated mask before refining to a clean token. We derive a closed-form ELBO training objective for MultiMDM that supports continual training from pretrained MDMs. In addition, we formulate a purely discrete-state consistency distillation scheme, with a shared-Gumbel coupling to reduce pathwise entropy. Experiments on pretraining and distillation show that MultiMDM provides an effective foundation for principled few-step generation. --- ### Multi-Mask Diffusion Language Models for Few-Step Generation Authors: Sijin Chen, Yinuo Ren, Heyang Zhao, Ziheng Cheng, Quanquan Gu, Lexing Ying Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19686v2 Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising family of language generators, but achieving high-quality few-step generation remains challenging. In MDMs, all forward trajectories collapse to a single fully masked state, leaving no terminal entropy for consistency-style few-step generation. While recent few-step alternatives based on uniform-state diffusion avoid this degeneracy, it becomes harder to distinguish clean tokens from noise than MDMs, which usually harms modeling quality and training efficiency. In this work, we propose a multi-mask diffusion model (MultiMDM) that preserves the masking structure towards few-step generation. In the forward process, each clean token is first pushed towards a designated mask and then gradually mixes over the mask set. As a result, the backward process has a drafting capability by predicting a designated mask before refining to a clean token. We derive a closed-form ELBO training objective for MultiMDM that supports continual training from pretrained MDMs. In addition, we formulate a purely discrete-state consistency distillation scheme, with a shared-Gumbel coupling to reduce pathwise entropy. Experiments on pretraining and distillation show that MultiMDM provides an effective foundation for principled few-step generation. --- ### Nuclear Quantum Effects as a Denoising Problem Authors: Weizhou Wang, Jonathan Weare, Aaron R. Dinner Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: physics.chem-ph, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19680v1 Nuclear quantum effects are rigorously captured by imaginary-time path integrals, which map the quantum Boltzmann distribution onto a ring polymer of classical replicas. Yet the nuclear masses, the coupling to the environment, and the boundary conditions of the path remain hard-wired in the simulation or the trained model, even though this quantum context enters the path measure only through a quadratic action known in closed form. Here we show that a denoiser trained on classical Boltzmann statistics alone, composed at sampling time with an analytic Gaussian component carrying the entire quantum context, yields the quantum Boltzmann distribution of the nuclei. Such a composition exists and is exact whenever the training noise does not exceed the intrinsic quantum uncertainty of the target ensemble, and it is invariant across all quantum contexts admitted by this bound. We show exact transfer across temperature, isotopic mass, dissipation strength, and the boundary conditions of the path in theory and in numerical experiments, without retraining. The last yields the end-to-end displacement and momentum distributions of a tagged nucleus from open imaginary-time paths. The same invariance extends in principle to the permuted boundary conditions of bosonic exchange, with the identical denoiser. In this view, the noise of generative modeling and the quantum fluctuations of the nuclei are two faces of the same quadratic structure. --- ### Reference-Free Evaluation of Reasoning in Open-Ended Question Answering Authors: Guneet Singh Kohli, Yuxiang Zhou, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Gregory E Dean, Maria Liakata Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19678v1 AI-generated answers in high-stakes domains are often fluent but difficult to verify, especially when they contain multi-step reasoning rather than a single final answer. We propose a reasoning-based, reference-free framework for auditing LLM-generated outputs. The method decomposes a generated reasoning trace into segments, labels local premise-target relations using Natural Language Inference (NLI), and organizes these relations into a hypergraph. A deterministic backward AND-OR search then assigns segment-level audit labels that indicate how each segment is grounded within the generated response. We evaluate the framework in two settings: deductive mathematical reasoning with Hard2Verify, and open-ended medical reasoning with UroReason, a new physician-annotated benchmark of LLM reasoning traces from real clinical cases. Across these settings, our NLI-hypergraph audit provides a more reliable reference-free evaluation signal than direct LLM-as-judge baselines. In the clinical setting, state-of-the-art LLM judges often fail to identify problematic reasoning segments, over-accepting fluent but weakly grounded responses. Our results show that QA evaluation should account for how inferential relations compose across a reasoning trace, rather than relying only on final answers or LLMs as verifiers. UroReason will be made available through an API, and our code will be released as open source. --- ### Edge Intelligence in Civil Aviation: Paradigms, Techniques, and Applications Authors: Wenbin Li, Zhongtian Liao, Bolin Liu, Yongjie Zhou, Jingling Wu, Xiaoyong Lin, Jing Chen Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19676v1 Civil aviation is safety critical and its operations, from flight decks and towers to ramps and maintenance, generate massive, heterogeneous data at the network edge. Yet cloud centric deployment of large Artificial Intelligence (AI) models often produces high task latency, lacks offline capability in communication denied environments, and requires centralizing sensitive data, raising privacy and sovereignty risks. Edge AI moves perception, prediction, and decision logic closer to the data producers via compression, collaborative inference, and split learning, thereby reducing latency, bandwidth, and exposure while enabling graceful operation during disconnections. This paper provides a panoramic view and a common understanding of edge intelligence tailored to civil aviation. We firstly articulate the operational motivations for edge AI, and then review recent techniques for edge inference and edge learning. We then introduce the organizational computing paradigms and the respective configurations in civil aviation environments; finally, we describe the emerging applications and the future research trends of edge intelligence in civil aviation. We argue that a refined edge solution can complement cloud foundations to deliver low latency, privacy preserving, and resilient AI services across the civil aviation lifecycle. --- ### FedLSG: LLM-Enhanced Semantic Calibration for Federated Graph Backdoor Defense Authors: Chenyu Zhou, Yabin Peng, Wei Huang, Kunlin Li, Shuaishuai Zhang, Xinyuan Miao Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19674v1 Federated Graph Neural Networks (FedGNNs) are highly vulnerable to backdoor poisoning, yet existing defenses typically rely on rule-based approaches that lack semantic understanding, making them vulnerable to stealthy triggers and harmful to benign structures. To solve this, we present FedLSG, the first framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into federated graph backdoor defense. FedLSG introduces a graph and behavior to text grounding scheme that transforms local graph structures and client update behaviors into semantically rich natural language representations. The framework further adopts a lightweight student-teacher architecture. On the server side, a full scale LLM serves as a teacher, providing global contextual guidance and evaluating client updates during aggregation to identify potentially malicious participants. On the client side, a LoRA-based student is maintained to perform semantic reasoning, to suppress the influence of edges associated with backdoor triggers. By enabling semantic interpretation of both graph patterns and client behaviors, the framework adaptively incorporates rule-based signals into message passing and client aggregation for defense. Experiments demonstrate that FedLSG significantly improves resistance to backdoor attacks without compromising graph integrity. --- ### A Unified Variational Framework for Deep Weakly Supervised Image Segmentation Authors: Yin King Chu, Lingfeng Li, Sung Ha Kang, Jianping Zhang, Xue-Cheng Tai Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19669v1 We propose a unified variational framework for image segmentation under sparse pixel-level supervision. Our method is based on a simplex-constrained Potts model with a smooth perimeter regularizer, yielding a convex, smooth energy functional that can be used as a training loss in weakly supervised deep learning paradigms or optimized efficiently using iterative methods. Sparse labels are incorporated into the data fidelity term by constructing a fuzzy membership function via a function extension problem in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), which can effectively capture inhomogeneous intensity statistics. The derived discrete loss for training standard networks demonstrates robustness and consistent improvements over non-training and partial cross-entropy (PCE) baselines in experiments, achieving comparable performance without requiring ground-truth segmentation images. --- ### Leveraging ECRAM for Edge Continual Learning Authors: Nabila Tasnim, Haoran Liu, Qing Cao, Saugata Ghose Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.AR, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19661v1 Several edge computing platforms, such as autonomous vehicles and smart sensing devices, need to adapt to dynamic environments in real time by learning from new data in the field. Continual learning has emerged as a promising solution for edge training, by incorporating techniques that successfully combine a highly summarized version of previously trained data (to avoid catastrophic forgetting) with recently sensed data. However, as is the case with other ML algorithms, continual learning generates significant data movement between general-purpose CPUs/GPUs and memory, impacting the suitability of continual learning for edge platforms. In-memory computing (IMC; also known as processing-using-memory) can curtail this waste and make continual learning feasible at the edge, but it faces two unique challenges: (1) IMC architectures make use of noisy computation operations that significantly harm training accuracy; and (2) IMC architectures have poor and often incomplete support for resource-efficient training. To address these challenges, we propose CLASP (the Continual Learning Acceleration System Platform), which to our knowledge is the first end-to-end system with IMC acceleration for continual learning. The hardware and software of CLASP are co-designed to support a wide range of continual learning algorithms, through software-visible assembly-level instructions that can be incorporated without constraints into ML-based algorithms. CLASP is designed around a back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible ECRAM device that we fabricate, which can overcome the challenges of IMC-based training using other emerging memory devices. We show that CLASP with ECRAM approaches the accuracy of in-GPU training, while delivering a speedup of 67x and energy savings of 132x for learning without forgetting and experience replay using MNIST. --- ### Expert-Guided Forecast Editing for Time-Series Foundation Models Authors: Hung Le, Minh Hoang Nguyen, Manh Nguyen, Huu Hiep Nguyen, Dai Do Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19659v1 Time-series foundation models can forecast across heterogeneous domains without task-specific training, but their forecasts are fixed once produced and cannot directly incorporate task-specific expert feedback. We study expert-guided forecast editing: a frozen foundation model generates candidate future trajectories, and an expensive expert evaluator scores them to guide forecast revision. Under a tight query budget, two natural strategies sit at opposite ends: best-of-$N$ purely exploits the foundation model's predictive distribution, while optimization approaches mostly explore the forecast horizon as an unstructured high-dimensional vector. Each extreme is individually sub-optimal. We introduce \textbf{DEFT}, an expert-guided forecast editing framework that balances the two by first exploiting the foundation model's predictive samples in a decomposed trend--seasonal space, then exploring around them via component-wise refinement. DEFT queries the expert only on complete trajectories, then reuses scores for the trend and seasonal components that appeared in the queried recombinations. This lets each expert query provide structured component-level feedback while keeping the foundation model frozen. We compare DEFT against direct search approaches, including best-of-$N$, cross-entropy methods, and Bayesian optimization, under matched expert-query budgets. Across two forecasting benchmarks consisting of 78 datasets, three time-series foundation models, four feedback types, and seven query budgets, DEFT consistently improves the effectiveness of expert guidance. A molecular-dynamics case study further suggests that the same principle extends to more physically grounded feedback, supporting the hypothesis that sparse test-time guidance should be spent balancing prior exploitation with structured exploration. --- ### PerfAgent: Profiler-Guided Iterative Refinement for Repository-Level Code Optimization Authors: Ryan Deng, Yuanzhe Liu, Bastian Lipka, Yao Ma, Xuhao Chen, Tim Kaler, Jatin Ganhotra Published: 2026-07-22 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19653v1 Large language model (LLM) agents now perform well on correctness-oriented repository-level tasks, including SWE-Bench issue resolution and feature implementation in real codebases. However, they still struggle with repository-level code optimization, which requires preserving behavior while improving runtime performance. Passing tests is not enough in this setting; a patch must preserve behavior, implement code optimization, and approach expert speedups. Current agents often miss bottlenecks hidden behind abstraction layers and native extensions, stop after shallow speedups, or insufficiently test the code patches that thus may silently break edge cases. We present PerfAgent, a profiler-guided, verifier-in-the-loop workflow that gives an off-the-shelf coding agent the feedback needed to find real hotspots, improve beyond the first passing patch, and use profiler evidence rather than timing alone to decide what to optimize next. On two challenging optimization benchmarks, GSO and SWE-fficiency-Lite, PerfAgent more than doubles the rate of expert-matching patches over OpenHands with GPT-5.1, improving from 19.6% to 39.2% on GSO and from 26% to 74% on SWE-fficiency-Lite. It also surpasses an oracle best-of-five baseline at substantially lower cost, showing that the gains come from better feedback rather than additional test-time sampling. ---