# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 11 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #501–550 of 11995 published in 2026-08, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 11995-paper 2026-08 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/11 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/10.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/12.md) ### Beyond Churn: Predicting Financial Fragmentation in Retail Banking with Temporal Machine Learning Authors: Ananyaa Chopra, Brandon Xu, Brendan Yuen, Lauren Zung, Sarabroop Aulakh Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30364v1 Retail banking attrition is usually represented as a terminal binary event, even though client relationships often weaken earlier through partial movements of deposits, investments, and recurring activity to external financial institutions. This paper defines that preceding state as financial fragmentation and presents an end-to-end temporal machine-learning system for predicting it before complete disengagement. Using anonymized multi-source data from a large retail bank, the framework predicts whether a valid external transfer or investment event will occur within 90 days. The study uses 595,220 client-month observations, with 346 engineered features combining monthly client profiles, balances, product relationships, prior flow-of-funds behavior, macroeconomic conditions, and competitor activity. A four-stage XGBoost cascade estimates (1) whether an external outflow will occur within 90 days, (2) the expected amount, (3) the originating product, and (4) the destination financial institution. The primary classifier achieved a test precision-recall area under the curve of 0.823. At the validation-selected threshold, it produced 86.4% precision, 75.1% recall, and an F1 score of 0.803. Ranking test observations in descending Stage 1 fragmentation score, the top 1% of clients yielded 95.3% precision, while the top 5% captured 78.7% of observed outflow cases. The amount model placed 94.9% of predictions within an adjacent amount bucket. Destination prediction reached a macro-F1 of 0.81 across 27 classes; source-product prediction achieved a weighted F1 of 0.92. By moving the analytical focus from terminal churn to earlier fund migration, the proposed approach provides a practical foundation for proactive, explainable, and economically informed client-retention decision support. --- ### Will the User Ever Know? Covert Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents Authors: Yunseok Lee, Yunji Kim, Woojin Lee Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30362v2 As LLM agents take real-world actions through tools, indirect prompt injection (IPI) has emerged as a serious threat. The standard metric, Attack Success Rate (ASR), counts whether an injection succeeds but ignores what the user notices in the agent's final response. Looking at successful injection traces, we find two distinct outcomes: the agent executes the injection while returning an otherwise normal response, or reports the injected action in its final response, giving the user a chance to notice. We call these covert and overt successes. From the user's perspective, we decompose ASR into the Covert Success Rate (CSR), counting successes leaving no trace in the final response, and the Overt Success Rate (OSR), counting successes the user can detect. To understand what drives the gap, we analyze successful trajectories and find that the agent's behavior after the injection separates covert from overt: covert traces hand control back to the user task before ending, while overt traces end at the attack itself. This split follows from the ReAct format, where the final response summarizes the most recent action. Building on this observation, we propose ICoA (Induced Covert Attack), an IPI attack designed to induce covert outcomes by steering the agent back to the user task after executing the injection. Across four target models on AgentDojo, ICoA achieves the highest CSR, with gains of 3.79-12.01 percentage points over the strongest baseline. --- ### Seeing the Unseen: Camouflaged Object Detection Beyond the Visible Spectrum Authors: Avi Gupta, Trasha Gupta Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30355v1 Recent advances in camouflaged object detection (COD) have led to substantial progress in challenging low-visibility scenarios, with pioneering studies demonstrating notable success in localizing objects in camouflaged scenes. Despite these achievements, existing approaches predominantly rely on conventional three-channel RGB imagery, thereby constraining the available visual information to a limited spectral range. Multispectral images offer a wide range of information about a scene by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures. Hence, by leveraging multispectral images for COD, we introduce a novel approach to detect camouflaged objects from the corresponding multispectral inputs. In particular, we propose an end-to-end framework, \textbf{\textit{MSFormer}}, that takes a multispectral camouflaged image as input and predicts a binary mask for it. Additionally, we also provide empirical justification for integrating multispectral bands for this complex low-vision task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms existing methods. --- ### Co-Annotator: Expert-Distilled ViT and VLM for Visual and Documentation Guidance in Age-Related Macular Degeneration Authors: Ziheng "Leo" Li, Benjamin Freeman, Akshay Raman, Kavin Aravindhan Rajkumar, Xinxin Fang, Rishabh Srivastava, Steven Feiner, Kaveri A. Thakoor Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30352v1 Clinical AI often optimizes predictive performance without engaging how clinicians decide where to look and what to write. We present Co-Annotator, which distills expert gaze and dictation into two guidance components: a gaze-aligned Vision Transformer producing fixation-aligned areas of interest (AOIs), and an ontology-bounded vision-language model (VLM) that pre-fills editable biomarker summaries for retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT). We first collect expert gaze and dictations (US1) to train the models, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy and biomarker generation. We then deploy the system with ophthalmology residents: a controlled resident study (US2) confirmed each modality is safe and independently beneficial, with AOI guidance producing lasting perceptual efficiency gains through post-guidance carryover and VLM guidance more than doubling biomarker documentation breadth. In a combined deployment across two academic institutions (US3), providing both modalities simultaneously produced efficiency gains that substantially exceeded either modality alone: correct diagnoses per minute increased by 40% and comment editing time fell by 67%, without compromising diagnostic accuracy. Notably, neither modality improved efficiency during guidance in US2, which makes the in-guidance efficiency gain under combined guidance in US3 the more striking result. Expert-distilled multimodal guidance can remove two distinct clinical workflow bottlenecks at once (visual search overhead and documentation burden) without compromising the diagnostic accuracy clinicians already achieve. --- ### Answer Probing-Guided Search for Diverse Solution Exploration of LLMs Authors: Yi Fang, Que Shen, Chengpeng Li, Boyi Deng, Wei Shi, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Fengli Xu, Dayiheng Liu Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30345v1 Generating multiple diverse and high-quality solutions is valuable for many applications, such as code-test generation and drug discovery. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to converge on a single high-confidence solution during inference, limiting exploration of alternative valid solution paths. Existing test-time methods promote diversity through tree-like search and prune semantically similar branches using response-level semantic embeddings. However, we find that such embeddings are easily confounded by linguistic and stylistic similarities, making it difficult to distinguish genuinely distinct solution paths. To address this, we introduce Answer Probing, which probes the potential answer an LLM would reach from an intermediate reasoning path. We demonstrate that the hidden states of probed answers more effectively differentiate distinct solution paths than semantic embeddings, and the perplexity of probed answers serves as a practical proxy for reasoning correctness. Based on these findings, we propose Answer Probing-Guided Tree Search (APTS), which guides the tree search by the probed answers' hidden state similarity and perplexity. Experiments on three reasoning tasks across two LLMs show that APTS consistently enhances solution diversity, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. --- ### Proximity3D: Shape from Capacitive Proximity on Sensing Manifold Authors: Hao Chen, Chenming Wu, Chun Ping Lam, Xiangjia Chen, Guoxin Fang, Charlie C. L. Wang, Yeung Yam, Juncong Lin, Chengkai Dai Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CG, cs.GR, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30344v3 Most shape reconstruction methods assume measurements defined over planar sensing domains, such as RGB images or depth maps. In this paper, we use a curved capacitive textile as a shape sensor, treating its surface as a non-planar sensing manifold. Each scan is represented as a capacitive proximity field on this manifold, induced by the interaction between the curved electrode layout and nearby object geometry. We introduce a multi-view feedforward reconstruction model that aggregates these fields across known sensor views and recovers the observed object shape. Simulated and physical experiments demonstrate robust reconstruction from capacitive proximity signals acquired on curved sensing surfaces, pointing toward a new route to robotic near-field geometric awareness via embodied sensing. --- ### CapFrame: Text-Instructed Viewpoint Grounding in 3D Gaussian Scenes via Geometric Pseudo Labels Authors: Jirong Li, Satoshi Ikehata, Shuhei Kurita, Ikuro Sato Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30342v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables photorealistic real-time novel view synthesis, yet placing a virtual camera to capture a desired frame remains largely manual. Existing language-guided approaches in 3D scenes mainly focus on object-centric grounding, determining what to observe but rarely controlling how it should appear in a single frame, such as subject orientation or frame layout. To address this limitation, we introduce a new task, Text-Instructed Viewpoint Grounding (TIVG), which aims to identify a 6-DoF camera pose in a 3D Gaussian scene whose rendered frame aligns with a text instruction. To solve this task, we propose CapFrame, a partially differentiable framework that converts language into geometric pseudo labels for camera pose optimization. CapFrame follows a Retrieve-Translate-Refine pipeline: it retrieves relevant views and ranks them through a Question-Evaluation process with MLLMs, translates the instruction into orientation and layout pseudo labels, and refines the camera pose via differentiable optimization with layout and orientation losses in 3DGS. Experiments on 38 real-world scenes with 135 instructions indicate that CapFrame produces viewpoints better aligned with texts than heuristic viewpoint search and adapted trajectory generation baselines, validated by VLM metrics, MLLM judges, and user studies. Code is available at: https://github.com/jirongli/CapFrame --- ### Coarse composition suffices: tabular in-context learning for multi-activity antimicrobial peptide profiling Authors: Anuj Pal, Raunak Kumar, Dhruvi Solanki, Parikshit Pareek, Juhi Singh, Jitin Singla Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30337v2 Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) often act against multiple pathogen classes, making multi-label activity prediction a more realistic screening target than binary antimicrobial classification. The ESCAPE benchmark formalizes this setting, but leading approaches typically rely on multimodal, structure-conditioned deep models that are costly to train and tune. We show that a simple, sequence-only pipeline can match and surpass these methods by combining 330 interpretable sequence descriptors with TabPFN, a tabular foundation model that performs in-context prediction in a single forward pass without gradient-based training or hyperparameter search. On ESCAPE (82,359 peptides; five labels), a label-powerset TabPFN model achieves mAP-5 = 77.8%, improving on the previously best reported 72.1%. A probabilistic classifier chain is the first method to match or exceed the best published average precision on each of the five labels simultaneously. The gains persist under the prior state-of-the-art single-fold training protocol, indicating they are not a training-set-size artefact, and are largest for remote homologues (+11.2 points below 30% sequence identity). Ablations further show that predicted structure is unnecessary at inference and that performance is not driven by any single descriptor family: ten global physicochemical scalars recover 91% of full-feature performance. Finally, explicitly modelling label dependence yields targeted benefits for scarce activities and supports ranking which activity to assay next from partial positive evidence. --- ### Beyond Ranking Accuracy: Evaluating LLM-Cited Feature Rationales for Next Basket Repurchase Recommendation Authors: Yanan Cao, Anay Dombe, Murali Mohana Krishna Dandu, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Sinduja Subramaniam, Yogananth Mahalingam, Evren Korpeoglu, Kannan Achan Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30333v1 Next-basket repurchase recommendation is commonly formulated as a ranking task: given a customer's purchase history, the system ranks previously purchased items that may be needed again. In production settings, however, ranking accuracy is only one component of recommendation quality. Customers may also benefit from concise evidence about why an item is recommended now. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential way to surface such evidence through feature-based, human-readable rationales grounded in interpretable behavioral signals. We construct repurchase features spanning cadence, frequency, recency, user behavior, and item popularity, and evaluate LLMs on two public grocery datasets and one proprietary retail dataset. We investigate (1) whether off-the-shelf LLMs can use these features as next-basket scorers relative to heuristic and supervised rankers, and (2) whether LLM-cited features carry outcome-grounded ranking signal. For the latter, we compare LLM-cited features with model-specific attribution methods under a cross-model feature-masking protocol that measures ranking degradation after masking selected features. Our results show that LLM scores are not competitive with supervised rankers, suggesting that off-the-shelf LLMs should not be used as standalone repurchase recommenders. However, changes in prompt and evidence representation can improve outcome-grounded feature-masking results in some settings even when ranking performance does not improve; the effect is dataset-dependent and does not consistently match attribution baselines. These findings suggest a practical role for LLMs as validated explanation components rather than primary rankers, with rationale quality evaluated separately from ranking accuracy. --- ### Learning PDE Time-Stepping with Neural Cellular Automata Authors: Esha Saha, Hao Wang Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30328v1 Classical numerical solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) are computationally expensive to solve repeatedly across varying initial conditions, motivating the need for learned surrogates. In this paper, we propose a trainable Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) based surrogate model for learning long time PDE dynamics. Rather than mapping an entire initial field to a full trajectory in one shot, our proposed model learns a small, local, homogeneous update rule that is applied identically and repeatedly at every grid cell, mirroring the locality of differential operators. We benchmark this framework against three baselines: PDE - Net, a modified physics-informed neural network (PINN), and a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), on five canonical PDEs (heat, advection, Burgers, Allen - Cahn, and Fisher - KPP), evaluated at temporal domain two times beyond the training temporal domain. The proposed model achieves the lowest long-horizon relative errors on the majority of the experiments. --- ### Do Small Models Use the Law You Give Them? Measuring Context Use on a Bilingual Bangladesh Legal Benchmark Authors: Moniruzzaman Mahadi, Abrar Mohammed Tanzim Alam, Sayma Siddika Monalisa, Mir Mohammad Asif Abdullah, Swakkhar Shatabda, Md Adnan Arefeen Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30327v1 Fine-tuning can improve legal question-answering accuracy without improving how models use law supplied in context. We study this distinction in bilingual Bangladeshi legal QA, where observed errors can arise from answer scoring, retrieval, or failure to use relevant law. We construct a hierarchy-preserving statutory corpus, 2,165 reviewed bilingual fine-tuning examples, and a 150-item supplied-law control. We evaluate six instruction-tuned models: Llama-3.2-1B, Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3.5-0.8B, Qwen3.5-2B, Qwen3.5-4B, and Gemma-4-E2B, with three LoRA seeds per model. To separate effects, we combine constrained option-letter scoring, cyclic option rotation, and controlled removal of the governing provision. On 398 Bar Council outputs, an exact-line parser attributes an accuracy gain of 50.0\% to the Qwen3.5-2B seed-42 adapter, whereas option scoring yields only $3.0\%$. For Gemma-4-E2B, the two scoring methods favor different systems. When the governing provision is guaranteed to be present, five of six reference models improve by $14.7\%-19.3\%$ under the four-order criterion. Removing that provision reduces accuracy by $8.0\%-15.3\%$ for models and by $13.8\%-14.9\%$ points for their adapters. However, difference-in differences estimates show no increase in reliance on the governing provision after fine-tuning. Results show that legal adaptation claims require separating scorer, retriever, and model effects. Our Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bangladesh-legal-qa-11E3 --- ### Parallel Time-Band Mixing with Learned Observation-Adding for Robust ASR Front-Ends Authors: Xingyu Shen, Runze Wang, Wei-Ping Zhu, Benoit Champagne Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30326v1 Speech enhancement is often used as a front-end for robust ASR, yet recurrent temporal and cross-band modules introduce sequential dependencies that reduce parallel efficiency. In this paper, we present a sequence-parallel band-split enhancement front-end built on a Parallel Time-Band Mixer (PTBM) block that eliminates within-block recurrent unrolling. PTBM integrates intra-band temporal mixing and per-frame cross-band attention within a unified parallel architecture, enabling efficient contextual modeling across both time and frequency dimensions. The system retains the mask-plus-residual reconstruction interface and introduces learned Observation-Adding (LOA) to suppress ASR-sensitive artifacts without development-set tuning. Experiments on DNS Challenge and CHiME-4 with frozen Whisper back-ends show that the proposed front-end consistently reduces word error rate relative to recurrent band-split baselines while requiring only 0.96 M parameters and 0.58 GMAC/s for the front-end network. --- ### Sequential Trajectories and Simultaneous Blending: Multi-Emotion Modeling for Instruction-Following TTS Authors: Yan Zhou, Yun Hong, Yang Feng Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30325v1 Natural-language instructions enable flexible control of synthesized speech, yet emotional TTS systems primarily model a single utterance-level affect, leaving multi-emotion control underexplored. We study two complementary multi-emotion TTS tasks: emotion trajectory, which spans several ordered affective stages, and emotion blending, in which multiple emotions coexist throughout an utterance. These tasks expose a supervision mismatch: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) does not explicitly evaluate emotion features, while single-emotion rewards provide neither structure-aware feedback for trajectory completion nor pair-aware feedback for blending. We introduce HybridEmo, a post-training framework that initializes both tasks with SFT and then aligns the speech-token policy through Group Relative Policy Optimization using a sample-aware hybrid reward. For trajectory samples, segment-aligned consistency combines average and weakest-stage evidence to preserve the correctness and completeness of prescribed stages. For blending samples, a GMM-based reward combines frame-level support from the union of target-emotion anchors in an offline emotion space with an utterance-level weaker-target margin. Both branches share an ASR reward and are routed within a unified policy. On MultiEmo-Test, HybridEmo significantly improves trajectory correctness and blending intensity, without a noticeable degradation in speaker similarity. Human evaluation prefers HybridEmo to CosyVoice 3 and EmoVoice-0.5B, with nearly balanced preferences against Qwen3-TTS. --- ### Generative multi-domain transfer learning for fault detection in data-scarce wind turbines Authors: Stefan Jonas, Angela Meyer Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30323v1 Normal behavior models have shown promise for reliable fault detection in wind turbines. However, these unsupervised anomaly detection models require sufficient fault-free training data to learn the normal operation behavior of turbines. Under data scarcity, for example in newly deployed wind turbines, these models may result in poor fault detection performance. In this work, we propose a multi-domain generative domain mapping approach based on Star Generative Adversarial Networks (StarGAN) to improve fault detection on data-scarce wind turbines. Our model maps SCADA measurements from a data-scarce turbine to resemble those of several data-rich turbines. By preserving the operational state during translation, faults occurring in a data-scarce domain can be mapped and detected by reliable pre-trained normal behavior models of data-rich domains. Highlighting the benefits of an ensemble fusion strategy, we show that under severe data scarcity our method can produce anomaly scores comparable to models trained on large representative datasets. Our approach can consistently outperform models trained on scarce data when less than 2 weeks of training data are available. With just 2 weeks of accumulated training data, we achieve an anomaly score similarity that is, on average, +16% higher than conventional fine-tuning, and +10% higher than single-source domain mapping. As a step towards unsupervised model selection, we propose a proxy metric that detects poor performance at training time, despite an absence of anomalies. Our study presents the potential and challenges of multi-domain mapping for wind turbine fault detection under unrepresentative training data. --- ### Ignorance or Incompetence? Constructing Knowledge-Gated, Verifiable Tasks for LLM Agents Authors: Hanlin Tian, Minhao Li, Yu Mi, Sihan Zhu, Zhao Yang, Yuxiang Wang, Hongquan Zhu, Qiufei Hu Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30322v1 Professional agent tasks often depend on conventions that are absent from public corpora, yet benchmarks rarely control whether an agent has access to those conventions. We introduce a knowledge-gated task-construction protocol that separates a task instruction from a compact artefact containing private conventions, reference tables, and utility operators. Construction-time provenance, byte-identical task instructions across the provided- and withheld-artefact conditions, leak audits, and executable witnesses make dependence on the artefact explicit and testable. Across fifteen calibration tasks, one frontier agent configuration achieves a 68.0% pass rate with the artefact and 0% without it; on one task, a plausible but incorrect artefact also yields 0% across five trials. Deterministic solvers and rule corpora provide exact ground truth for structured tasks, while named criterion-level rubrics support outputs that cannot be checked by a single executable oracle. A configuration-relative calibration screen retains seven tasks satisfying our five-trial empirical knowledge-gating screen. These experiments validate the behavior of the construction protocol; they do not establish that the retained tasks improve post-training. We publicly release part of the task suite and supporting tooling at https://github.com/DatagridsAI/Knowledge-Gated-Task-Construction. --- ### On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stability Authors: Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, Xiao Li, Yanpeng Li, Yang Xu, Yixuan Wang, Huaqing Zhang, Rui Men, Bochao Mao, Chengruidong Zhang, Fan Zhou, Hao Luo et al. Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30320v1 We describe the architecture and ablations of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters, 6B activated per token, and additional 51B parameters of n-gram embedding tables held off the accelerator. On fourteen pre-training benchmarks the model leads the 397B-A17B predecessor on eight and trails it on the rest by at most 2.6 points, at 1/3 the activated parameters, 1/3 the training tokens, and roughly 1/9 the training FLOPs. Token mixing uses a layer-wise hybrid of Gated DeltaNet (GDN) and global attention, with one full-attention layer in every four; at continued-pretraining time those full-attention layers are replaced by Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA), which scores context at micro-block granularity with a compressed lightweight indexer. The residual stream is widened to four branches and read through an elementwise gate, a design we call the Gated Residual (GR). Capacity is added outside the backbone by a single n-gram embedding layer whose tables are prefetched from host memory. We evaluate every candidate change along three axes: loss together with downstream benchmarks; the cost of the change in training, prefill and decode; and its effect on the optimal hyperparameters and training stability. Loss and downstream accuracy do not always move together: enlarging the n-gram vocabulary lowers loss monotonically while downstream accuracy saturates. The architecture and the Muon optimizer together shift the optimal learning rate and batch size upwards, render batch-size warmup unnecessary, and substantially improve stability under stress tests. Loss, benchmarks, efficiency and stability form one design problem. Solved jointly, they yield a recipe that is simultaneously more efficient, more capable and more stable. --- ### Beyond Token-Level Guidance: Inference-Time Alignment of Specialized LLMs via Cross-Family Representation Steering Authors: Jin Gan, Xin Li, Jun Luo Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30319v1 Large language models (LLMs) finetuned for specialized domains represent crucial high-impact applications. Inference-time alignment improves safety degraded from specialization finetuning without requiring substantial computational resources, complementing finetuning-based methods with an easy-to-use, plug-and-play solution. However, existing inference-time methods fail to reliably improve safety without disrupting domain capability. We identify the root cause as complementary expertise orthogonality: specialized base models and general-domain guidance models have orthogonal competencies, making the guidance signal unreliable for specialized generation. This primarily manifests as stop token interference, where the guidance model's tendency toward continuation overrides the base model's decision to stop, burying correct answers under guidance-induced continuation. To address this problem, we propose CREST, an inference-time alignment method that steers base model hidden representations using safety directions extracted from a guidance model of any family, avoiding token-level structural limitations entirely. CREST improves safety where specialization has weakened it while preserving both domain-specific capability and the safety of already well-aligned models, outperforming baselines by up to 22.2\% on safety benchmarks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/CREST. --- ### Online Estimation of Dynamic Origin-Destination Matrices Using Reinforcement Learning with Link-Flow Propagation Guidance Authors: Donggyu Min, Dong-Kyu Kim Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30317v1 Online dynamic origin-destination (OD) matrix estimation (DODE) calibrates time-dependent OD demand to reproduce observed link-flow trajectories. In online, OD demand should be estimated from current observations and propagated network states while subsequent observations and stochastic dynamic network loading (DNL) outcomes remain uncertain. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising alternative, reducing computational burden by replacing iterative algorithms while being applicable to stochastic environments. However, because the policy is trained offline and deployed online, it must handle varying target link-flow trajectories; since each target trajectory defines the link-flow error used in the reward, the same OD demand vector can require different adjustments, making conventional scalar feedback ambiguous. To address this gap, this study proposes LFPG-RL, which integrates link-flow propagation guidance (LFPG) into proximal policy optimization (PPO). LFPG combines link-flow error sensitivities with the contribution of each OD-time demand component to simulated link flows, transforming aggregate mismatch into OD-specific advantage shaping for PPO actor updates. At deployment, the policy requires only a single forward pass. LFPG-RL is developed and evaluated on 250 weekday trajectories of 15-min link-flow data from a Melbourne arterial network modeled by a link transmission model with stochastic route choice. On held-out trajectories, LFPG-RL achieved an RMSE of 4.69, MAPE of 20.15%, and Pearson correlation of 0.995. These results support the contention that our method is a more efficient and accurate online OD demand calibration method compared to existing ones. --- ### Knowing Beyond the Known: Reinforced Knowledge Specification for Multi-Label Class-Incremental Learning Authors: Aoting Zhang, Dongbao Yang, Chang Liu, Xiaopeng Hong, Can Ma, Yu Zhou Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30316v1 Existing class-incremental learning methods struggle in multi-label scenarios (MLCIL) due to the inherent contradiction of learning objectives arising from co-occurring and incomplete labels. We argue that the core obstacle is the model's ambiguous boundary between known and unknown knowledge, which undermines historical knowledge retention, complicates current task learning, and limits adaptability to future concepts. To address this, we propose KBK (Knowing Beyond the Known), a reinforced knowledge specification framework that explicitly models what is known or not to unify historical, current, and prospective learning. Specifically, to clarify known knowledge, we develop a hierarchical feature purification module that disentangles fine-grained class-specific features from global features, where high-level semantic abstraction is reinforced with low-level visual features. Additionally, an uncertainty-aware recall enhancement strategy suppresses unreliable predictions based on distribution priors, improving the quality of historical recall. For probing the unknown, KBK leverages semantic correlations to synthesize informative unknown features under co-occurring, preserving embedding space for future learning. Furthermore, to mitigate heterogeneous forgetting, we design a category-balanced gradient compensation loss that dynamically reweights gradient backpropagation according to forgetting speeds. Experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness and robustness of KBK, which surpasses prior best methods by 2.7% in Avg. Acc on MS-COCO B0-C10 setting even without any replay buffers. --- ### Context Staircase: Signature-Aligned Dynamics of Token Embeddings under Small Initialization Authors: Junjie Yao, Liangkai Hang, Zhi-Qin John Xu Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30315v1 Token embeddings are the basic representational units that connect discrete tokens with continuous computation in language models. Although modern language models learn embeddings from random initialization through gradient-based training, the dynamical mechanism by which meaningful embedding structures emerge remains unclear. In this work, we identify that the evolving embedding structures are closely related to token-conditioned label and contextual distributions, which we formalize as probability signatures. We observe a progressive learning process, which we term Context Staircase: embeddings learn the low-order statistic signatures of the data before the high-order ones. More specifically, we observe that early in training they align with the simplest, context-free signature linking a token to its label, and as training proceeds, they progressively reflect signatures involving more and more context tokens. We then analyze the gradient flow of embeddings under small initialization to explain this phenomenon, deriving embedding evolution equations for feed-forward and self-attention architectures. We further extend these observations to real language-model training. Finally, we show that these embedding structures play an important role in both task learning and the incorporation of semantic structure into the embedding space. Overall, our results provide a dynamic explanation of how data statistics and architecture jointly shape token embeddings in language models, and reveal an implicit bias in the space of data statistics: training proceeds from simpler, low-order statistical relations toward increasingly complex, context-dependent ones. --- ### One AI Signal, Many Human Judgments: A Bayesian Cascade Analysis of AI-based Credibility Indicators in Online Information Spread Authors: Zhuoran Lu, Weilong Wang, Yangyang Yu, Xinru Wang, Zhuoyan Li, Zhiwei Liu, Sophia Ananiadou Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30311v1 Social media platforms increasingly use AI-based credibility indicators to help users judge misinformation. Unlike individual human-AI decision-making, these indicators are embedded in information spread: users see both an AI prediction and earlier judgments shaped by the same AI, and their own judgments may then enter the public history. Yet how to analytically characterize this process remains under-explored. We therefore introduce a social-learning lens for this setting by extending the classical Bayesian cascade model with the AI indicator as a shared public signal. The resulting Gateway condition compares the evidence from the AI prediction with users' private impressions. Through this view, we show that AI changes what public history means. Crowd agreement may reflect accumulated independent human evidence, or repeated dependence on the same AI prediction. This creates a preservation-correction trade-off: stronger reliance on AI can preserve correct predictions, but can also lock in incorrect ones by blocking corrective private impressions. We calibrate the model using human-subject data on news veracity judgments. Although the AI outperforms human users, the average user weights it below her own impression but above several peer judgments, while individual users vary from discounting the AI to relying on it enough to cascade. Simulations show that over-reliance on a weak AI is especially harmful, and that diversifying AI signals across users can better keep the crowd informative. We conclude with implications for understanding human-AI interaction in information spread and designing misinformation interventions. --- ### Tail-Replay: Escaping the Curse of Linear Attention in Prefix Caching for Hybrid LLMs Authors: Yirui Liu, Ruoling Qi, Xuaner Wu, Penghang Liu, Jian Chen Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30310v1 Hybrid large language models interleave full-attention layers with linear-attention layers to reduce the cost of long-context inference. This structure complicates prefix caching: full-attention key-value caches are token-addressable, whereas linear-attention layers maintain recurrent states that cannot be rolled back to arbitrary prefix boundaries. Existing hybrid prefix caching methods address this mismatch by storing recurrent-state checkpoints. As a result, token-level matches are directly usable only at positions aligned with stored checkpoints, constraining prefix reuse to a discrete set of boundaries. We present Tail-Replay, a prefix caching mechanism that enables unconstrained token-level prefix reuse in hybrid large language models. The key insight is that linear-attention mechanisms such as Gated DeltaNet can be viewed as a structured, lossy compression of the input prefix: gated recurrent updates progressively attenuate the contributions of earlier inputs. Consequently, the recurrent state of a matched prefix can be well approximated by replaying only a short, recent suffix of that prefix. Tail-Replay exploits this property by caching the exact full-attention key-value cache while omitting recurrent-state checkpoints. On a cache hit, it reconstructs the linear-attention states by replaying a short, recent suffix of the matched prefix. As a result, the reuse boundary is determined by the shared tokens rather than by recurrent-state checkpoints. We evaluate Tail-Replay on three Gated DeltaNet-based hybrid models using the LongBench and RULER benchmarks. With only a 5--10\% replay budget, it retains 92.8--99.9\% of full-prefill quality on LongBench and RULER. For serving efficiency, we evaluate time-to-first-token speedups across multiple matched-prefix lengths---8K, 16K, and 32K. The speedup grows with prefix length, reaching $9.1$--$14.3\times$ over full prefill at 32K. --- ### ScenePilot: Grow-and-Repair Policy for Text-Driven 3D Indoor Scene Generation Authors: Jiawei Zhang, Hongsong Wang, Pan Zhou Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30307v1 Text-driven 3D indoor scene generation has advanced from dataset-bound layout modeling to open-vocabulary synthesis with large language and vision-language models. Yet existing methods remain limited: one-pass generators often yield geometrically invalid layouts, heavy post-hoc optimization is costly and unstable, and prompt-only planners lack reusable layout priors for functional grouping and object relations. We propose \textbf{ScenePilot}, a retrieval-augmented \textbf{Grow-and-Repair} framework that formulates scene generation as prior-guided incremental growth with learned rectification. Given a prompt, the Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Planning (HRAP) module retrieves room-, group-, and anchor-level layout priors to support functional group planning. A text-driven base generator then inserts object groups sequentially, while the Reinforcement Multimodal Repair (RMR) module performs lightweight local correction after each insertion and a final global repair after completion. To train this policy, we construct \textbf{SceneReverse-17k}, a repair-trajectory dataset built by perturbing high-quality 3D scenes in position, rotation, and scale, then using inverse operations as executable rectification targets. The policy predicts structured \emph{move--rotate--scale} actions from rendered views, scene state, retrieved priors, and edit history. By combining HRAP with RMR, ScenePilot offers an efficient alternative to one-shot generation and heavy full-scene optimization, improving physical plausibility, functional coherence, and controllability while preserving diversity. --- ### Learning to Restore More: Continual Capability Expansion for Pretrained Image Restoration Models Authors: Hu Gao, Yulong Chen, Lizhuang Ma Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30305v1 Image restoration models are typically trained with a fixed set of capabilities. When new restoration requirements emerge, existing solutions usually train additional models or jointly retrain the original model with both new and historical data. Instead of designing another restoration backbone, we investigate how a trained restorer can continually acquire new capabilities without forgetting those learned previously. We propose RestoreMore, a continual capability-expansion framework that preserves the pretrained restoration model as a frozen capability anchor and learns residual expansion modules for newly arriving degradations. RestoreMore introduces a capability-oriented bi-level routing mechanism at multiple feature stages. The first routing level identifies restoration capabilities relevant to the current input, while the second selects and combines a sparse set of complementary degradation experts. This design enables newly introduced tasks to selectively reuse historical restoration knowledge and progressively enriches the expert bank available for subsequent restoration tasks. Extensive experiments on a wide range of restoration benchmarks demonstrate that RestoreMore consistently acquires new restoration abilities while preserving and improving previously learned capabilities. --- ### Lazy Grounding: Attacking Search Agents with Factual Evidence Authors: Yulin Zhang, Yukun Huang, Sanxing Chen, Tianyi Lin, Ziang Yang, Xunjian Yin, Bhuwan Dhingra Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30303v2 Search agents mitigate hallucination by grounding their answers in retrieved web results. However, retrieval-based approaches also introduce an attack surface: agents may cite misinformation from poisoned search corpora containing false or malicious documents. We demonstrate that, in some cases, search agents' reasoning and responses may be steered by completely factual but distracting information. We refer to this failure as lazy grounding. We expose lazy grounding by injecting nearby evidence from answer-changing rewrites of benchmark questions into the search corpora. Each document contains factual evidence that supports a neighboring rewritten question but is retrieved for the original question. Across 12 model-benchmark pairs, the attack causes the accuracy of search agents' responses to drop by 5.9 points on average and by up to 17.3 points, while inducing nearby-answer adoption in every setting. The effect is even stronger when nearby evidence appears later or is more answer-shaped. Our results show that robust search agents must defend against not only misinformation but also the misapplication of factual evidence. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/frankyzha/lazy-grounding. --- ### AIA$^{2}$: Attribute-Agnostic Imbalance Augmentation for Subgroup Robustness Authors: Hanshu Rao, Guangzeng Han, Xiaolei Huang Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30297v1 Attributes describing data content and context can induce diverse imbalance patterns that go beyond label imbalance alone. However, existing studies primarily address label imbalance while overlooking data attributes, such as topics and demographics, which can induce meaningful subgroup structure while causing model degradation on underrepresented subgroups. We propose Attribute-Agnostic Imbalance Augmentation (AIA$^{2}$), a framework for improving model robustness under varying subgroup imbalances without explicit subgroup annotations. AIA$^{2}$ automatically discovers varying imbalances via latent semantic distributions, obtains slices with both learning difficulty and subgroup imbalance deficits, and deploys a large language model (LLM) for subgroup-aware imbalance augmentation. We have evaluated AIA$^{2}$ on 5 popular corpora with rich domains and their attribute values, covering social issues and diverse topics. Results show improved performance on the lowest-performing subgroups and consistent gains over competitive baselines. Ablation studies confirm complementary contributions from each component, and additional analyses show that AIA$^{2}$ provides a practical and consistent way to improve worst-group robustness under data subgroup imbalance. Code is available at https://github.com/trust-nlp/AIA2-Subgroup-Robustness. --- ### CateKV: On Sequential Consistency for Long-Context LLM Inference Acceleration Authors: Haoyun Jiang, Haolin Li, Jianwei Zhang, Fei Huang, Qiang Hu, Minmin Sun, Shuai Xiao, Yong Li, Junyang Lin, Jiangchao Yao Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30295v1 Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in handling long-context tasks, but processing such long contexts remains challenging due to the substantial memory requirements and inference latency. In this work, we discover that certain attention heads exhibit sequential consistency in their attention patterns, which can be persistently identified using a coefficient-of-variation-based algorithm. Inspired by this observation, we propose CateKV, a hybrid KV cache method that retains only critical token information for consistent heads, thereby reducing KV cache size and computational overhead, while preserving the majority of KV pairs in adaptive heads to ensure high accuracy. We show the unique characteristics of our algorithm and its extension with existing acceleration methods. Comprehensive evaluations on long-context benchmarks show that, while maintaining accuracy comparable to full attention, CateKV reduces memory usage by up to $2.72\times$ and accelerates decoding by $2.18\times$ in single-sample inputs, and boosts throughput by $3.96\times$ in batch scenarios. --- ### Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Memory for Streaming Video Understanding Authors: Xinru Jiang, Lin Zhao, Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Janet Wang, Chenrui Ma, Haolin Li, Yanzhi Wang, Yifan Gong, Octavia Camps Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30294v1 Streaming video understanding requires answering questions at arbitrary times over a continuously growing visual stream. The central challenge is to compactly remember long-range history while effectively retrieving question-relevant evidence. We propose Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Memory (D-HSM), a training-free framework that represents distant history as structured textual memory while preserving the recent frames as visual tokens for fine-grained perception. Specifically, D-HSM turns selected historical video chunks into typed textual observations and stores them in an entity-centered hub-and-spoke memory, with entities as hubs and related evidence as spokes. When answering a question, D-HSM dynamically retrieves a compact question-aware memory subset, expands it through hub-and-spoke links, and combines it with the recent visual window for frozen-VLM answer prediction. Extensive experiments on both streaming and long video benchmarks show that D-HSM consistently and substantially improves VLM backbones and outperforms other state-of-the-art online and offline video understanding baselines. --- ### BCPPO: Bachelier-Inspired Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization for Tail-Risk-Aware Safe Reinforcement Learning Authors: Dongsheng Hou, Yanqiao Chen, Yuhan Rui Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30283v1 Expected-cost constraints can still permit rare, high-cost events. Monte Carlo conditional value at risk (CVaR) gradients can be noisy at high confidence, whereas critics that model an outcome distribution add complexity. We propose BCPPO (Bachelier-Inspired Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization), a proximal policy optimization (PPO) method. Separately initialized cost-prediction networks (critics), trained with random sample masks, produce disagreement that marks predictions sensitive to which state-action regions occur in the training data and to critic training. A Bachelier formula for the expected amount above a reference level converts this disagreement into a smooth policy-update penalty. Gradients from this penalty do not alter the critics, so temporal-difference (TD) critic learning is unchanged. A saturation-aware controller adjusts the mean-cost penalty and stops accumulated error from growing while that penalty is clipped. Deployment retains only the policy network. The disagreement penalty is neither a tail-event probability nor a guaranteed error bound, and it provides no safety guarantee. Across 175 runs with shared tasks, costs, budgets, training steps, and evaluation seeds, no comparator attains both higher mean return and lower mean CVaR than BCPPO in any task. On Push1, BCPPO has no lower return and no higher CVaR than every comparator, with at least one strict gain. These results support a practical balance among reward, caution around cost predictions that vary across trained critics, and policy-only deployment. --- ### SELECT: SELEctive Context Transfer for Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation Authors: Avi Gupta, Saurabh Yadav, Koteswar Rao Jerripothula, Tammam Tillo Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30281v1 Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation (CISS) is fundamentally challenged by catastrophic forgetting and background shift, where learning new concepts degrades performance on previously seen classes. While existing methods attempt to balance stability (retaining old knowledge) and plasticity (learning new knowledge), they often fail to leverage prior knowledge effectively. These approaches typically rely on indiscriminate knowledge transfer or ambiguous initializations, which can dilute crucial semantic information. To overcome this limitation, we propose SELECT, a novel approach for Selective Context Transfer, which instead grounds each new class in a small set of semantically similar past classes. Its core is a Context Transfer Attention mechanism that aggregates the learned tokens from similar classes into a structured initialization for the new class. To ensure this transfer does not corrupt the borrowed representations, we add a controlled noise perturbation and a margin-based context-transfer loss that enforces separation between the new class token and its source tokens. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and ADE20K show that SELECT consistently outperforms prior work, achieving mIoU of 2.2% on VOC and 2.8% on ADE, providing an effective handle on the stability-plasticity dilemma. Code is available at https://github.com/avigupta2798/SELECT. --- ### Motion-Saliency Complementary Masked Modeling for Point Cloud Video Understanding Authors: Wei Wang, Yiding Sun, Yuyan Wang, Zhuoyue Zhang, Zhengqiao Li, Dongfu Yin, Chen Li Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30279v1 Point cloud video representation learning is crucial for 3D dynamic scene understanding. In this paper, we propose MoSaiC, a novel Motion-Saliency Complementary masked modeling framework for self-supervised point cloud video representation learning. MoSaiC couples three components: Curriculum Motion-Saliency Masking (CMSM), which guides the masking process toward motion-salient tokens under a curriculum schedule; Normal-Flow Motion (NFM) modeling, which supervises the local rigid rotation of each token in the Lie algebra so(3) as an explicit geometric motion target; and Cross-view Token Consistency Prediction (CTCP), which enforces consistency between two complementary masked views at the token level. Together, these components allow MoSaiC to effectively capture both appearance and motion dynamics. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks, including action recognition, temporal action segmentation, and point-level semantic segmentation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. --- ### SimCRAFT: Distilling Remote Sensing Agents via Synthetic Trajectories and Contextual Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning Authors: Haoran Wang, Jing Yao, Xu Yang, Zeqing Wang, Yang Zhang, Pedram Ghamisi, Zhengchao Chen Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30277v2 The unprecedented surge in Earth observation data volume and diversity has exposed a critical bottleneck for traditional manual workflows, catalyzing the emergence of Remote Sensing (RS) Agents. However, the practical deployment of these advanced agents is severely hindered by their heavy reliance on large-scale general-purpose LLMs, which lack deep domain expertise and impose prohibitive infrastructure demands. To resolve this, we propose SimCRAFT, a model-agnostic framework that distills sophisticated RS orchestration capabilities into a compact 7B-scale model. Addressing data scarcity, we first pair a multiagent synthesis engine with a Mock Execution Engine that checks schema correctness, inter-tool dependencies, and sensor/tool compatibility, producing SimRS-14k, a large-scale, constraint-validated workflow planning corpus. Second, we propose Contextual Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (CRAFT) that finetunes the model to reason analogically by adapting retrieved Standard Operating Procedures to novel queries under a noise-robust objective, generalizing RAFT to multi-step RS workflow planning without mechanical copying. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SimCRAFT-7B significantly outperforms openweights LLMs and rivals advanced closedsource models and specialized RS agents, while reproducing across three 7B backbones. This work contributes a competitive open-weights baseline for lightweight RS intelligence, enabling efficient autonomous deployment under resource-constrained or resource-conserving conditions. --- ### Strengthening Recursive Constructions for Zero-Error Shannon Capacity Authors: Ravi Tandon Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG, math.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30273v1 The exact Shannon capacity is unknown for every odd cycle beyond the five-cycle $C_5$, making odd cycles a central open problem in zero-error information theory. Improving the known lower bounds requires constructing large independent sets in strong powers of these graphs. Recent AI-assisted work has produced a rapid sequence of improvements: building on the construction of Itty et al., Gao developed a recursive product construction for combining structured independent sets, and Buys, Polak, and Zuiddam (BPZ) subsequently strengthened this through a richer recursion framework. We continue this line of AI-assisted exploration and introduce a heterogeneous refinement of these constructions. The central observation is that the usefulness of an intermediate construction depends not only on the size of its current main independent set, but also on the auxiliary structure it carries into subsequent recursion. Consequently, different parts of that auxiliary structure need not use the same independent set, and different occurrences in a recursion need not use the same intermediate representation. We formalize this for Gao's binary product and derive explicit propagation rules showing how heterogeneous choices strengthen the resulting gadget while leaving its current code size unchanged, then extend the principle to the more general BPZ framework, tailoring constructions to the distinct roles they play within the recursion. Applying these refinements to the seven-cycle $C_7$, we obtain an independent set in $C_7^{\boxtimes 500}$ yielding $Θ(C_7)\ge 3.25883262\ldots$, improving the best known lower bound. Beyond the numerical gain, the results illustrate a general principle for recursive zero-error constructions: intermediate structures with the same dimension and current code size can have different downstream value depending on where and how they are used in the recursion. --- ### Dec-BFTRL: Squre-Root Regret for Decentralized Online Upper-Linearizable Optimization under Separation Access with Application to Continuous Submodular Maximization Authors: Yiyang Lu, Mohammad Pedramfar, Vaneet Aggarwal Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: math.OC, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30271v2 We study decentralized online optimization of upper-linearizable payoffs over an action set under efficient separation access, with applications to online continuous diminishing-return (DR) submodular maximization. We propose Decentralized Barrier Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (Dec-BFTRL), and evaluate each agent's played action against the average of all local objectives. Each agent maps an internal iterate to a feasible action through an approximate gauge projection, communicates only a cumulative surrogate-gradient dual state, and invokes the local HybridNewton procedure to approximately minimize its post-communication BFTRL potential. For every agent, we achieve expected network-aggregate regret of $\widetilde O(\sqrt{T})$. Over $T$ rounds, each agent uses $T$ neighbor-mixing steps and $\widetilde O(T)$ separation-oracle calls. We give four wrapper instantiations covering three DR-submodular maximization problems. --- ### Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts Authors: Jaehee Kim, Ji Hoon Chung, Seoyoon Park, Unsol Kim, Kyungwon Park, Ji Hak Kim, Yi-Jun Chen, Hansaem Kim Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30270v1 Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks largely overlook this requirement, focusing instead on explicitly encoded context or perceptual recognition, and thus underex- plore context-dependent pragmatic understand- ing, particularly in high-context languages such as Korean. We introduce READI, a multimodal benchmark for evaluating ISA understanding through integrated reasoning over visual con- text and dialogue. READI models graded in- directness grounded in pragmatic theory and formulates the task as vision-based pragmatic question answering (V-PQA), supporting cross- lingual evaluation in English and Korean. Ex- periments show that even state-of-the-art multi- modal models struggle with visually grounded indirect speech acts, with performance declin- ing as indirectness increases, underscoring the need for benchmarks that explicitly target con- textual pragmatic reasoning. --- ### Centering before Pruning: Lightweight Geometry Correction for Diversity-Based Visual Token Pruning in LVLMs Authors: Shunjie Wen, Jaeyeon Lee, Dong-Wan Choi Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30263v1 Large vision-language models (LVLMs) incur substantial inference costs due to their long and highly redundant visual-token sequences. Diversity-based pruning mitigates this cost by selecting token subsets based on pairwise cosine similarity. We find, however, that similarities between raw visual tokens are strongly concentrated in the positive range, limiting their ability to distinguish non-redundant tokens. A natural way to improve this resolution is to center token features before computing cosine similarity. Centering indeed reveals a substantially richer pairwise structure, yet unexpectedly degrades pruning performance when used alone. We show that this apparent contradiction arises because the raw geometry does more than represent pairwise diversity: it also implicitly favors globally distinctive tokens, which tend to contain semantically informative content. Centering better resolves subset diversity but loses this useful token-wise preference, revealing that diversity and distinctiveness are entangled in the raw geometry. Based on this analysis, we propose the \textbf{Cen}tered Geometry \textbf{Prune}r (Cen-Prune), which measures subset diversity using centered cosine similarity while retaining raw-space distinctiveness as a complementary token-wise preference. This lightweight, plug-and-play correction leaves the underlying selection mechanism unchanged and incurs negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple image- and video-understanding benchmarks and LVLM architectures demonstrate that Cen-Prune provides robust improvements in overall performance across existing diversity-based pruners. --- ### Multivariate Scientific Data Compression with Learned Cross-Variable Latent Decorrelation and Autoregressive Entropy Modeling Authors: Liangji Zhu, Anand Rangarajan, Sanjay Ranka Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30262v1 Scientific simulations generate collections of physical fields with heterogeneous statistics and dependencies, yet learned compressors often encode those fields independently or rely on a shared encoder without explicitly modeling the structure that remains in latent space. We present CAESAR-LDAR, an error-controlled multivariate learned compressor that augments a shared CAESAR-V backbone with two complementary mechanisms: a trainable orthogonal transform that reorganizes dependence across aligned latent channels, and a causal autoregressive hierarchical prior that captures local spatial structure left after transformation. Orthogonality is maintained through a matrix-exponential parameterization, making the transform exactly invertible without an additional penalty. A common residual-correction stage is applied uniformly to all variants to enforce the requested reconstruction tolerance. Experiments across combustion, climate, and turbulence data show that the two mechanisms are useful in different regimes. Latent decorrelation helps most when substantial linear cross-channel dependence survives the nonlinear encoder, whereas autoregressive modeling remains effective when the remaining structure is primarily local or spatial. Their combination provides the strongest or near-strongest rate-distortion performance across the evaluated datasets. The global transform adds little computational overhead, while autoregressive coding introduces a larger throughput tradeoff. More broadly, the results suggest a practical design principle for multivariate scientific compression: exploit global cross-channel dependence when it is measurably present in latent space, and use local probabilistic context as a complementary mechanism across a wider range of data regimes. --- ### Estimating Population-Risk Curves Along Nonconvex Gradient Flows from the Training Sample Authors: Mingzhi Song Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30261v1 We estimate the conditional population-risk curve of a realized smooth nonconvex gradient flow from the training sample. Flow approximate leave-one-out (Flow-ALO) propagates a deletion response and evaluates omitted observations at approximate deleted paths. The risk-curve error decomposes into response approximation, exact-LOO fluctuation, and deletion-to-full risk transfer. On each fixed finite horizon, bounded centered training-loss gradients, a one-sided Hessian lower bound, locally Lipschitz Hessians, and a strict tube-closure condition yield an explicit $(n-1)^{-2}$ bound for the deletion-response error. Bounded evaluation-loss gradients transfer the deletion-response bound to the score without requiring the Hessian to be invertible. Direct first-order jackknife cancellation and exact-LOO concentration control deletion-to-full risk transfer and fluctuation, respectively, completing recovery of the conditional population-risk curve. For bounded smooth two-layer mean-field networks training both layers, the score-error bound is uniform in width. --- ### Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure Authors: Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30260v1 While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two domains remains contested. We investigate the syntax-prosody interface through an information-theoretic lens, quantifying the interaction between prosodic features and syntactic representations as their mutual information. We provide a general-purpose framework for estimating this quantity over large speech-text corpora using multimodal language models. Our framework is structure-agnostic and modular, insofar as it can be used to measure the contributions of individual prosodic features or components of structure. We evaluate the syntax-prosody relationship for two features (word duration and inter-word pauses) across two domains--read audiobooks and spontaneous conversations--both in English. Our results demonstrate that prosody contains measurable syntactic information, with prosodic features reducing syntactic uncertainty in spontaneous conversations by up to 10.2%. Our findings offer new empirical support for several theoretical accounts of the syntax-prosody interface. --- ### Stratified Consistency Distillation for Natural Language Formalization Authors: Zhichao Hou, Ferhat Erata, Joe Lilien, MohamadAli Torkamani Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30258v1 Neurosymbolic reasoning has shown promising success in addressing complex reasoning tasks by combining large language models (LLMs) and symbolic solvers. While this approach shows promise, a fundamental challenge remains: improving the accuracy of translations from natural language to logical formulas. Current methods predominantly rely on prompt engineering, which is difficult to scale across different domains and input formats. Drawing inspiration from the success of fine-tuning in other model adaptation and alignment applications, we propose a fine-tuning-based Stratified Consistency Distillation approach: (1) We generate K logical translations per input using a frontier LLM and cluster them by semantic equivalence (2) Based on the entropy level, we apply majority voting (low entropy), LLM-as-a-Judge (medium entropy), or unification/abstention (high entropy), and (3) fine-tune a smaller model using the selected pseudo-labels. Our experiments show significant and consistent improvements in both Pass@K and our novel Equivalent Logical Similarity metrics, demonstrating the potential of advancing logical translation through consistency distillation. --- ### Beyond Surface Forms: Symbolic Edits as a Test for Logical Reasoning with LLMs Authors: Ramya Keerthy Thatikonda, Wray Buntine, Ehsan Shareghi Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30256v1 Logical reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a critical capability, as it reflects a system's ability to correctly deduce hypotheses from a given context using faithful deductive processes. However, LLM reasoning has often been shown to be sensitive to small surface-level variations in problem formulation, raising questions about whether models truly follow the underlying logical structure. Studying this behavior is challenging because the symbolic components of logical problems, such as operators and predicates, are difficult to systematically manipulate in natural language. We introduce a tool-driven framework for generating controlled, label-preserving edits to logical reasoning problems. Our method operates on symbolic representations of first-order logic and constraint satisfaction problem tasks, enabling targeted modifications to logical operators and other structural components before translating them back into natural language. Using this framework, we evaluate various LLMs under cumulative and individual operator edits and analyze their behavior in response to these changes. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that LLM reasoning behavior under controlled operator edits is inconsistent, regardless of model size or family: models sometimes adapt correctly to structural changes but often fail to track their logical consequences. The results from this automated stress test enable an evaluation of language models across different dimensions and help measure the reliability of their reasoning. --- ### Exact Recovery Thresholds for Weighted Data Selection in Vector-Valued Linear Regression Authors: Guangjian Zhang Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30254v1 We resolve the threshold part of Question 4 of the COLT 2025 open problem "Data Selection for Regression Tasks" of Hanneke, Moran, Shlimovich and Yehudayoff. In vector-valued linear regression with square loss $\ell_{(x,y)}(W)=|Wx-y|_2^2$, where $x\in\mathbb{R}^d$, $y\in\mathbb{R}^m$ and the learner is the empirical risk minimizer of minimal Frobenius norm, we prove that the minimal budget of weighted examples that recovers the full-data loss on every finite dataset is exactly $n^*(d,m)=(m+1)d$. We further determine two more values of the weighted selection profile $F_w(d,m,n)$: at the near-threshold budget, $F_w(d,m,(m+1)d-1)=1+\frac{1}{dm^2}$, and at the spanning budget, $F_w(d,m,d)=d+1$ for every $m$, while $F_w(d,m,n)=\infty$ for $n<d$. For the smallest open intermediate cell $(d,m)=(2,2)$ we prove $F_w(2,2,3)\in(13/8,15/8)$ and $F_w(2,2,4)\in(5/4,3/2)$, reduce the conjectured exact values $13/8$ and $5/4$ to a finite moment problem on the circle with at most seven atoms, and establish strong structural evidence for the conjecture. The upper-bound techniques (a fixed-basis conic compression lemma, a determinant-facet rigidity theorem for maximal certificates, and sharp sparsification lemmas for zero-mean weighted point systems) are of independent interest. As a byproduct we correct an erroneous claim circulating in a recent unrefereed preprint, exhibiting an explicit dataset with $m=2$ on which no weighted selection of $2d$ points recovers the optimal loss. All results are new only for $m\ge 2$; the scalar case $m=1$ is due to Hanneke et al. --- ### Strong Drafts Need Compact Memories: Long-Context Speculative Decoding with Compressed KV Cache Authors: Tong Yuan, Chengxi Liao, Zeyi Wen Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30252v1 Long-context LLM applications such as document summarization and multi-turn agents require generation from prefixes spanning tens of thousands of tokens, making decoding latency a major bottleneck. Speculative decoding (SD) reduces latency without changing model outputs, but its speedup depends on both accepted draft tokens and draft-step latency: Lightweight drafts are fast but lack the capacity to capture long-range dependencies, whereas strong independent drafts recover acceptance but incur growing KV-access cost at long prefixes. We introduce memory-augmented drafting for long-context SD, equipping a strong independent draft with compressed draft-side KV memory: A lightweight adaptor constructs and incrementally updates this memory to retain distant information and exact recent context. The target verifier retains its full KV cache and applies the standard accept/reject rule, preserving SD's lossless guarantee. Experiments on Llama~3.1-8B and 70B targets at prefix lengths up to 32K show that our method reduces draft-side memory by over 70%. It achieves speedups of up to 2.08x and 3.33x , respectively, over autoregressive decoding. --- ### Generating Workflow DAGs from Natural Language with Non-Reasoning LLMs Authors: Anand Iyer, Bhanu Khetharpal, Srinivas Upadhya, Ramkumar Rajagopal Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30250v1 This paper addresses the problem of translating natural-language routing rules written by business administrators into executable workflow graphs for enterprise contact centers. Each target is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of conditional actions with parallel branches, hit-first fallback chains, and per-branch Boolean predicates, encoded in the JSON dialect of a commercial routing platform. We show that neuro-symbolic decomposition enables lower-cost, non-reasoning large language models to generate complex workflow DAGs at production-relevant quality without expensive extended-reasoning models. Our central diagnostic is an emission-density bottleneck: on a 635-rule benchmark of manufactured synthetic data, models select the correct graph nodes with high accuracy but increasingly misconfigure attributes and Boolean grouping as the number of interdependent nodes emitted in one pass grows. We therefore move combinatorial graph construction from the model into a deterministic compiler driven by a compact intermediate representation, with a learned registry-selection front end that focuses generation on relevant vocabulary. Across four models, the full system reaches approximately 89% LLM-judge validity, approximately 90% exact-match condition accuracy, and 99-100% valid JSON while using roughly half the per-rule prompt tokens of a monolithic prompt. On GPT-5.3-chat, the method improves judge validity by 24 percentage points and achieves statistical equivalence to a reasoning model's out-of-the-box quality, although an approximately 8-point frontier gap remains. We also present a deployment path and transferable lessons for structured-generation applications. --- ### OPUS: A Simple yet Effective Unified Framework for Open-Vocabulary Detection Authors: Xiaoyan Wei, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Wei Zhang, Yong Dai, Yi Zhang, Wei Ge Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30247v1 Recent unified open-vocabulary detection (OVD) supports heterogeneous prompts, including text queries, visual exemplars, and their combinations, but often rely on increasingly complex designs such as heavy cross-modal fusion, staged training, and iterative annotation pipelines. We revisit whether such complexity is necessary in the era of stronger foundation models. Our finding is that unified OVD can be made substantially simpler with semantic-rich visual representations and scalable grounding supervision. We present OPUS (\textbf{O}pen-vocabulary, \textbf{P}rompt-\textbf{U}nified, \textbf{S}imple), a unified detector supporting text, interactive visual, generic visual, and mixed prompting within one framework. OPUS adopts a simple three-part design. Its model architecture combines a semantic-rich visual encoder, built on a DINOv3-ConvNeXt-B backbone with efficient hybrid encoding, with a prompt-aware decoder that avoids prompt-specific branches for unified prompt reasoning. OPUS is trained with a one-stage text-visual training strategy with Instance-level Contrastive Alignment (ICA), and is supported by a SAM3-based single-pass data engine for heterogeneous grounding supervision. Experiments on COCO, LVIS-minival, and ODinW35 show that OPUS achieves state-of-the-art Visual-I performance, reaching 68.1/69.2/54.7 AP, while maintaining balanced Text and Visual-G accuracy. OPUS also turns mixed prompting from interference into complementarity, improving over text or visual prompt alone. These results show that simplicity and strong unified prompting capability can be achieved together. --- ### A Borel Concept Class of VC Dimension One with a Non-PAC Consistent Learner in ZFC Authors: Mateus Jesus de Arruda Campos, Gabriel Fernandes, Vinicius de Oliveira Rodrigues Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: math.LO, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30246v1 The fundamental theorem of statistical learning states that, under suitable measurability assumptions, finite Vapnik--Chervonenkis (VC) dimension guarantees that every proper consistent learning rule is probably approximately correct (PAC). Blumer, Ehrenfeucht, Haussler, and Warmuth showed, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, that the "well-behavedness" condition of the concept class cannot be omitted: they constructed a concept class of Borel sets of VC dimension one admitting a consistent learning rule that is not PAC. We show that the Continuum Hypothesis is unnecessary. Working in Zermelo--Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC) alone, we construct a concept class of Borel sets on $(0,1)$ of VC dimension one and a proper consistent learning rule that is not PAC. More precisely, for a suitable Borel probability measure and target concept, the rule has true risk one at every sample size on a set of samples of outer probability one. Consequently, finite VC dimension and Borel measurability of the individual concepts do not suffice to guarantee that every proper consistent learning rule is PAC. The result shows, with no need of extra set-theoretical assumptions, that the additional regularity assumption in the fundamental theorem cannot in general be omitted. --- ### PaperBanana-Interact: Scientific Diagram Refinement with Multi-Turn Human Feedback Authors: Xueqing Wu, Ashwin Balasubramanian, Bingxuan Li, Dawei Zhu, Kai-Wei Chang, Yale Song, Yiwen Song, Rui Meng, Tomas Pfister, Nanyun Peng Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30241v1 Recent efforts have aimed to automate scientific diagram generation from paper content (Lin et al., 2026; Zhu et al., 2026a). However, fully satisfying an author's visual and communicative preferences in a single turn is challenging: in our formative user study (N = 14), all participants requested further revisions after viewing an initial draft, and 86% of them rated the refined diagrams as more satisfactory. Despite the clear demand, the multi-turn workflow remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present MTPaperBananaBench, a benchmark for multi-turn diagram generation containing 292 images annotated with 3,518 user requirements. To reduce expensive human studies and enable scalable benchmarking, we construct a user simulator that, at each turn, identifies unsatisfied requirements and converts k of them into natural language feedback. Evaluating both requirement satisfaction and overall diagram quality reveals two key failure modes shared across baseline multiturn systems: (1) quality drift, where diagram quality progressively declines over turns, and (2) forgetting, where previously implemented features are lost in subsequent turns. To address these issues, we introduce PaperBanana-Interact, a multi-agent system that refines diagrams via an internal critique-and-refine loop. PaperBanana-Interact consistently improves rather than degrades diagram quality across turns, outperforming baselines by 11.9-18.6 points in quality score and reducing forgetting by 3.7-6.2 points. --- ### Motus2: A Self-Evolving General World Model for Dexterous Manipulation Authors: Hongzhe Bi, Zihao Zhou, Yihang Tang, Jingrui Pang, Shuhe Huang, Haitian Liu, Runqing Wang, Shuai Huang, Yichen Wang, Yiming Cheng, Ruowen Zhao, Zhenghua Li et al. Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30237v2 General embodied agents should perceive, predict, act, evaluate, and improve within a unified system. World models have shown great promise in building such agents, yet existing models typically append an action output head to a world simulator, without coupling them into a closed decision-and-learning loop for policy improvement. We present Motus2, a self-evolving general world model for dexterous manipulation. Motus2 advances world modeling through model scaling and data scaling. For model scaling, a single model with shared weights exposes three control interfaces: a policy (world-action model), a simulator (action-conditioned world model), and an evaluator (value model). The policy proposes candidate action chunks, the simulator predicts their visual consequences, and the evaluator assesses the predicted outcomes. Their coupling forms a closed decision-and-learning loop for policy improvement. This formulation uses curated expert demonstrations for action learning, while failed and suboptimal interactions provide valuable evidence for dynamics modeling and value learning. For data scaling, Motus2 progresses from large-scale monocular egocentric data to synchronized stereo egocentric data, followed by robot-domain adaptation with robot trajectories and supplementary human-robot alignment data. Motus2 further studies global-autoregressive and hybrid-memory extensions of its sliding-window context, adds tactile feedback for contact-aware control, and is instantiated on a fully biomimetic platform with stereo vision, dual arms, dual dexterous hands, and tactile sensing. Together, egocentric data scaling and closed-loop general world model scaling provide a general path toward self-evolving dexterous manipulation. --- ### LLM-Based Knowledge Graph Completion Combining Discrete Structural Coding with Similar Entity Information Authors: Jiaqi Wang, Dongying Lin, Yang Yang, Yinan Liu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30235v1 Knowledge graph completion requires models to use both textual descriptions and relational structure. Existing LLM-based methods either encode KG structure as discrete tokens or refine a restricted set of candidate entities, and these two directions have largely been studied separately. We propose CoSC for LLM-based KGC, which combines discrete structural coding with similar entity information. Specifically, an LLM generates an initial candidate entity ranking from discrete structural codes, after which information from entities with structures similar to that of the query entity refines the ranking. Experiments on FB15k-237 show that CoSC outperforms existing baselines on MRR and Hits@10 while remaining competitive on Hits@1. --- ### CoLa-ICD: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Long-Tail Automated Medical Coding Authors: Yihang Cheng, Veronica Liesaputra, Andrew Trotman Published: 2026-08-31 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30234v1 Automatic medical coding assigns ICD codes to clinical notes, but it remains challenging due to long documents, imbalanced label distributions, and diverse terms. These challenges are especially severe for rare codes, which have limited training instances and are easily confused with semantically similar labels. We introduce CoLa-ICD, a knowledge-enhanced framework for long-tail prediction. CoLa-ICD enriches ICD labels with external terms, models dependencies among related codes, and learns stronger alignment between label semantics and clinical evidence for long-tail prediction. Experiments show that CoLa-ICD improves long-tail prediction with larger gains in larger and sparser label spaces and achieves state-of-the-art performance in AUC, F1, and P@k. Our code is available at https://github.com/youwillbethebest/Cola-ICD. ---