# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 128 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #6351–6400 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/128 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/127.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/129.md) ### Polaris : Multi Agentic System for Conversational Enterprise Analytics Authors: Varuni H K, Soham Sarkar, Jay Kumar, Goutham Krishnan, Tanvi Johari, Avinash Bharadwaj, Santosh Hegde Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14246v1 In today's fast-paced environment, the ability to swiftly access, understand, and act on data is no longer optional; it is essential. Yet most organizations remain data-rich but insight-poor, constrained by the complexity of querying, interpreting, and explaining enterprise-scale information. We present Polaris, a supervisor-led multi-agent framework for conversational enterprise analytics that bridges this gap. Polaris introduces Dynamic Task Coordination (DTC), a decision-theoretic orchestration layer that models agent-task assignment as adaptive bipartite matching, enabling real-time coordination, recovery, and optimization across specialized agents for querying, visualization, and reasoning. By coupling DTC with reason-first, ReAct-style agents, Polaris transforms natural-language queries into coherent analytical workflows that not only retrieve and visualize data but also explain the underlying "why." Evaluation on structured enterprise datasets demonstrates high semantic fidelity and answer relevancy, underscoring the potential of multi-agent orchestration to deliver trustworthy, end-to-end business intelligence at scale. --- ### Body size predicts how long ant workers live - but not how they age or how they die from heat Authors: Alana Moscardi, Rafael da Silva, Gleycon Silva Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: q-bio.PE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14245v1 In social insects, mortality risk comprises distinct components that may not share the same predictors: lifespan duration, senescence trajectory, and thermal vulnerability. We tested these three axes in 18 Australian ant species using paired field-laboratory survival assays (2,363 cohort-day observations; 1,148 workers). Body size predicted duration (Cox HR = 0.67, p = 0.002), while colony size (p = 0.60) and the size x temperature interaction (p = 0.72) showed no detectable moderating effect. A weak but significant size x foraging-rate interaction was detected (LRT p = 0.014), suggesting that intrinsic physiology remains the most parsimonious explanation for the main size-longevity pattern, although ecological context may contribute. Senescence trajectory was associated with circadian niche rather than size: it was steepest in matinal species (Kruskal-Wallis p = 0.009; matinal vs. crepuscular p = 0.002) and was uncorrelated with body mass (Spearman p = 0.32). Thermal hazard plateaued above 20 degrees C (Delta AIC = -38; p < 0.001), with elevated thermal sensitivity in Rhytidoponera (Ectatomminae) above the plateau (5% per degree C, p = 0.015). Circadian regime and lineage identity, not body size, therefore emerge as the most climate-relevant axes, although they are strongly collinear (Cramer's V = 0.85). These results show that body size captures only one dimension of mortality risk and that size-based vulnerability indices may misrank taxa when senescence and thermal sensitivity are decoupled from body size. --- ### Zero-Shot Skeleton-Based Action Anticipation Authors: Hongsong Wang, Pengbo Yan, Yang Zhang, Qiuxia Lai Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14243v1 Action anticipation (AA) aims to recognize ongoing human or humanoids actions from partial observations, enabling robots to predict intentions before the actions are completed. Although skeleton-based AA offers efficiency advantages, existing approaches assume that all action classes are seen during training, which limits their deployment in real-world scenarios where novel actions inevitably arise. To address this gap, we study the new task of Zero-Shot Skeleton-Based Action Anticipation (ZS-SkAA). This task requires recognizing unseen action classes using only limited early-stage skeleton sequences, combining the challenges of partial observations, temporal dynamics, and zero-shot generalization. To establish foundational research for ZS-SkAA, we introduce:(1) A baseline model comprising a spatio-temporal feature extractor and a mutual information estimation and maximization module. This baseline model explicitly aligns partial visual features with semantic class embeddings across modalities by estimating and maximizing their mutual information, enhancing generalization to unseen classes.(2) A benchmark protocol using the NTU RGB+D dataset, which is adapted for rigorous ZS-SkAA evaluation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model as a strong baseline for ZS-SkAA, achieving high zero-shot accuracy on NTU RGB+D. This work establishes ZS-SkAA as a vital research direction for real-world systems requiring generalization to novel actions. --- ### AppleScab-LT: A Longitudinal Real-Field Apple Scab Dataset for Temporal Disease Progression Analysis Authors: Aamir Hilal, Shabir Ahmad Sofi, Neeraj Goel Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14235v1 The development of reliable plant disease monitoring systems is constrained by limited longitudinal datasets capturing disease progression under natural field conditions. Although existing plant disease datasets have advanced image-based recognition, most consist of static images acquired at a single time point, limiting analysis of temporal disease evolution and severity progression. To address this gap, this study presents AppleScab-LT, a longitudinal real-field dataset developed to monitor apple scab progression through repeated observations of individually tracked infected leaves. Guided by a research-question-driven framework, the dataset was systematically developed, validated, and characterized for reliable longitudinal disease analysis. AppleScab-LT was constructed through systematic orchard monitoring under natural environmental conditions, incorporating longitudinal leaf tracking, expert-guided disease verification, polygon-based annotation, leaf isolation, disease severity quantification, and temporal sequence construction. A comprehensive quality assurance framework, including standardized annotation protocols, expert validation, automated integrity checks, sequence-level verification, and temporal consistency analysis, was applied throughout curation. The dataset contains 21 longitudinal leaf sequences, 2,101 high-resolution images, and 264 progressive temporal samples from repeated monitoring of same infected leaves. It captures variability in severity accumulation, progression rates, monitoring duration, and inter-leaf progression. Quantitative disease descriptors based on pixel severity, color-intensity severity, and normalized relative severity provide standardized measurements for temporal disease analysis. AppleScab-LT provides a reliable resource for temporal disease intelligence, disease progression modelling, precision agriculture, and future crop health monitoring --- ### The More Popular, The Harder to Forget: Adaptive Popularity for LLM Unlearning Authors: Anna Borisiuk, Andrey Savchenko, Alexander Panchenko, Elena Tutubalina Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14229v1 Popular facts are memorised more deeply during pretraining and resist removal longer than rare ones, yet existing LLM unlearning methods apply uniform gradient pressure regardless of training-data frequency. We propose the AdaPop (Adaptive Popularity) method, which combines local token confidence with a per-fact popularity-dependent exponent derived from an external proxy (e.g., Wikidata sitelinks, LLM-as-Judge), and automates the forget-retain balance via a dual-ascent controller that adjusts the retain penalty each epoch. Across three model families and two benchmarks, AdaPop leaks ~5x less forgotten content than competing methods under paraphrased queries and ~1.6x less under adversarial reformulations. We support our analysis with internal metrics: under our method, forget-set hidden states move further from the pre-unlearning model's states than under other methods, while retain-set representations remain close. --- ### AutoSchema: Live Schema Grounding for Agentic Text-to-Sparql over Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs Authors: Yiming Zhang, Koji Tsuda Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14228v1 Life science knowledge graphs make large collections of structured data available through SPARQL, but each resource uses its own schema, identifiers, and links. TogoMCP helps language model agents query these resources by providing curated Metadata Interoperability Exchange files. Creating and maintaining these files still requires language model assisted drafting, validation, and manual review. We study \emph{live schema grounding}, where an agent obtains the schema evidence needed for a question directly from the current endpoints. We present \textsc{autoschema}, a general framework for live schema grounding that requires no training. It inspects live schemas, maps entity names in a question to graph identifiers, explores relation paths, and finds possible connections between resources during iterative query construction. We use TogoMCP as our main comparison framework. We evaluate \textsc{autoschema} on Resource Focused Biomedical KGQA, Multi Resource Biomedical KGQA, Longitudinal Biomedical Semantic QA over BioASQ Task B, and Chemistry Knowledge Graph Transfer to a previously undocumented RDF graph. \textsc{autoschema} improves mean factoid accuracy over TogoMCP in the biomedical KGQA tasks and gives consistent gains in the longitudinal BioASQ evaluation. It also reduces iteration budget exhaustion and uses fewer tool calls on average in the core evaluation. The transfer study gives preliminary evidence that live schema grounding can support irregular and previously unseen graphs without first creating a curated schema file. --- ### Attributing Preprocessing Invariance in Spectral Foundation Models Authors: Dongjun Wei, Hongyi Wu Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14227v3 A spectral foundation model should remain useful when laboratories preprocess spectra differently. The standard test trains a classifier under one pipeline and evaluates under another, taking preserved accuracy as evidence of learned invariance. However, these models normalize each input before any learned parameter is applied. When normalization maps differently preprocessed spectra to the same vector, the encoder receives identical inputs and the measured invariance cannot be attributed to learning. We propose a normalization-only attribution control: compare the encoder against its normalization before interpreting transfer as learned invariance. On six Raman datasets the encoder does not measurably improve transfer over its normalization. A controlled experiment confirms invariance develops only when variation reaches the encoder past normalization. Across three systems, no encoder improves relative retention over its normalization. An audit of eighteen configurations across five modalities confirms the issue is widespread: the normalization-only control should be reported before crediting transfer to the encoder. --- ### Attributing Preprocessing Invariance in Spectral Foundation Models Authors: Dongjun Wei, Hongyi Wu, Yinuo Zou Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14227v1 Preprocessing invariance is an appealing goal for spectral foundation models: a frozen model should remain useful when laboratories preprocess spectra differently. It is usually measured by training a classifier under one preprocessing pipeline and testing it under another, with preserved accuracy read as evidence of learning. We revisit that reading, using a Raman foundation model as a case study. Such models normalize their inputs before any learned parameter is applied. If that normalization maps two differently preprocessed spectra to the same vector, the encoder receives identical inputs, so the invariance cannot be attributed to learning. For a normalization that uses each spectrum's own statistics, this happens exactly when one spectrum is a positive multiple of the other plus a constant. Several standard preprocessing operations take that form. The encoder should therefore be measured against the normalization alone, which has no learned parameters. On six Raman evaluation datasets, the model does not measurably outperform its own normalization. It improves on raw spectra, but so does the normalization alone. Training does improve the encoder over random initialization, and a controlled experiment shows that it learns to ignore a transformation only when that transformation reaches it. A numerical test settles which transformations a given normalization removes. Across released systems in five modalities, most normalizations already remove transformations of that form, and several of those systems claim that invariance as learned. Replicating the comparison on two of them shows no gain either. --- ### RankT2I: A Submodular Framework for Discovering Interpretable and Diverse Semantics in Text-to-Image Models Authors: Ritika Allada, Pinar Yanardag Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14226v1 Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have revolutionized the field of image generation and editing. However, identifying semantics that a T2I model can successfully edit in an image continues to be a challenging task. Most existing approaches require users to manually specify semantics to modify a particular image, a time-consuming process that often involves extensive trial and error. In this paper, we present RankT2I, a novel, training-free, and model-agnostic framework that automates the discovery of editable semantics in diffusion and FLUX-based models. Given a visual domain, we first utilize a multimodal vision-language model to gather a broad set of candidate semantics. We then frame semantic discovery as a set selection problem and use a submodular objective to identify semantics that are relevant, editable, and diverse. Our method helps users efficiently identify a wide range of semantics for text-to-image editing models across several domains while outperforming existing methods. --- ### Extending Occam's inversion with lasso fusion, overcomplete dictionaries, and isotropic total variation regularisation Authors: Anandaroop Ray Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: stat.ML, physics.geo-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14225v1 Occam's inversion is a robust algorithm to perform nonlinear geophysical inversion. It provides the smoothest model within observation noise, thereby discouraging geological overinterpretation. While Occam originally penalised l2 model roughness, l1 can be used to provide models that are visually sharp. However, l1 regularised geophysical inversion has diverged from the larger body of statistics and imaging literature. For example, l1 regularisation with a difference operator (i.e., total variation) in multiple dimensions has two distinct forms, only one of which is invariant to edge orientation -- a distinction often overlooked in geophysics. In one dimension this reduces to the fused lasso problem in statistics. Within the Occam framework, for l2 data norm and l1 model regularisation, we show that lasso fusion through either synthesis or analysis leads to the same 1D problem. We extend the framework to multiple dimensions and to operators such as wavelet transforms in a dictionary, unravelling the mathematics behind three commonly used solvers for l1 regularised problems. These are coordinate descent, iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS), and split Bregman. We use them to solve a sequence of problems that are linear (1D regression, 2D deblurring) and nonlinear (1D airborne transient electromagnetics) including a field data example. We recommend coordinate descent for 1D problems, and IRLS over split Bregman for 2D problems, with IRLS requiring up to an order of magnitude fewer least squares solves. We hope this work will further encourage geophysicists to adopt l1 regularised inversion, by presenting its various forms as a familiar Occam's inversion. --- ### MathForm: Scaling Mathematical Autoformalization with Knowledge Retrieval and Verification-Guided Refinement Authors: Lushi Pu, Weiming Zhang, Xinheng Xie, Zixuan Fu, Bingxiang He, Hengyu Zhao, Hongya Lyu, Xin Li, Jie Zhou, Yudong Wang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14221v1 Autoformalization is commonly framed as translating natural-language mathematical statements into machine-verifiable formal languages such as Lean 4. However, faithful formalization requires more than translation. Models must map mathematical concepts to the complex hierarchy of types and definitions in formal libraries such as Mathlib, while ensuring that generated statements preserve the meaning of the source propositions. Existing approaches struggle because they rely heavily on the model's parametric memory for library-specific knowledge, while common data construction pipelines often resort to filtering single-pass outputs and lack mechanisms for feedback-driven revision. To address these challenges, we introduce MathForm, an autoformalization framework for constructing verified training data through Mathlib knowledge retrieval and verification-guided iterative refinement. Before generation, a retrieval planner gathers relevant definitions and existing formalizations from Mathlib to guide the formalization generator. Generated statements are then revised using compiler diagnostics and semantic-consistency feedback. Using this framework, we construct FormalVerse, a Lean 4 dataset containing approximately 367K verified examples across diverse mathematical domains and sources. We then train MathForm-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Across six benchmarks, MathForm-8B achieves average Pass@8 rates of 88.06% under Syntax Check (SC) and 72.37% under Consistency Check (CC), outperforming multiple specialized 32B autoformalizers. On the challenging FATE-H and FATE-X subsets, it attains CC pass rates of 63% and 37%, exceeding the strongest specialized baselines in both cases. --- ### A Generalized Parallelogram Rule for Proportional Analogies on Riemannian Manifolds Authors: Pierre-Alexandre Murena, Marcelo Hartmann Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14220v1 Analogies are quaternary relations of the form "a is to b as c is to d", usually denoted a : b :: c : d. This notion is formalized in particular with the notion of proportional analogy, which imposes some constraints on the valid analogies. Whereas proportional analogies have been studied mostly in symbolic domains and in vector spaces, their use is limited in non-Euclidean spaces. In this paper, we introduce a proportional analogy relation in Riemannian domains, extending the parallelogram rule used for arithmetic analogies in Euclidean spaces. We illustrate the introduced analogy on various manifolds, such as the sphere, shape spaces and manifolds of probability distributions. --- ### Connected Subspace Clustering: Hardness, a Scalable Heuristic, and an Application to Sea Level Geodesy Authors: Johanna Hillebrand, Jan Höckendorff, Jürgen Kusche, Kelin Luo, Heiko Röglin, Melanie Schmidt, Christian Sohler, Bernd Uebbing Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14215v1 Constrained optimization extends classical optimization by integrating side information, making it widely applicable across scientific and engineering domains. Consider a setting where we measure variables at different physical locations. When grouping these measurements, we often want clusters that are both internally similar and physically coherent. Thus, we have a constrained clustering problem where the constraint models coherence. Motivated by an application in geodesy, where contiguous regions of the sea surface must be identified for principal component analysis, we introduce the Connected Subspace Clustering problem: given high-dimensional points and a connectivity graph, partition them into $k$ connected clusters, minimizing their total squared distance to the clusters' best-fit $m'$-dimensional affine subspaces. We prove that, even for $m' = 0$ and a grid graph with holes, the problem is NP-hard to approximate within $Ω(n^{1/2-\varepsilon})$ for every $\varepsilon>0$, where $n$ is the number of measurements. We then introduce an efficient Lloyd-style heuristic that alternates subspace fitting with an iterative merging procedure to enforce connectivity. Our method returns exactly $k$ connected regions by construction, whereas unconstrained methods leave up to $1{,}966$ disconnected fragments at higher cost. In a study of 160 configurations on global sea level time series, our merging-based repair is the strongest of four strategies in $73.75\%$ of cases, and consistently outperforms competitors such as (connected) Ward's method across all tested cluster counts. The resulting regions isolate signals aligning with climate indices such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole. Although developed for geodesy, the approach applies to other spatially embedded multivariate time series, such as climate fields, remote sensing, neuroimaging, and sensor networks. --- ### APTER: Adaptive Post-Training with Expert-Grounded Rubrics Authors: Xukai Wang, Liangqi Li, Zhiyue Xu, Jingang Zhou, Xiaoyu Shi, Jiansheng Cai, Bo Zhang, Zhe Li, Xu-Yao Zhang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14212v1 As large language models enter professional domains, they must satisfy domain constraints, include critical evidence, and provide complete reasoning rather than merely produce fluent responses. Existing post-training methods often rely on holistic preferences or outcome-level verification, while recent rubric-based methods usually generate rubrics independently for each query. In specialized domains, such unconstrained rubrics may omit critical requirements and vary across samples, hindering the diagnosis and targeted repair of persistent capability deficiencies. We propose APTER (Adaptive Post-Training with Expert-Grounded Rubrics), a framework that integrates structured domain knowledge into fine-grained evaluation, optimization, and diagnosis for specialized complex reasoning. First, expert-grounded rubric construction starts from an expert criteria framework built by domain experts, where each criterion represents a stable professional capability. For each query, APTER selects relevant criteria and instantiates them into query-level rubrics linked to their source criteria, turning reusable expert criteria into executable query-level supervision without reference answers. Second, adaptive post-training uses rubric verdicts as both optimization and criterion-level diagnostic signals. Aggregating low-scoring verdicts by criterion ID reveals persistent deficiencies and triggers targeted supervised fine-tuning updates during reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and medical question answering show consistent gains across both domains. Across three model generations, APTER improves the mathematics and medical averages over the corresponding base models by up to 15.86 and 8.04 points, respectively. Code and rubric datasets are available at https://github.com/AntDT-APTER/APTER. --- ### Training Fair Tabular Foundation Models Authors: Patrik Kenfack, Jesse C. Cresswell, Anthony L. Caterini, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou, Ulrich Aïvodji Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14211v1 Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have emerged as leading methods for tabular predictive tasks, leveraging in-context learning to predict on new data without task-specific training. Despite the increased use of TFMs in high-stakes decision-making, their fairness properties remain largely unexplored. In this work, we incorporate fairness constraints directly into TFM training, enabling fair predictions in a single forward pass. Our approach addresses two key challenges: limited access to sensitive attributes in training data, and the incompatibility of existing fairness techniques with the in-context learning paradigm. We propose FairTFM, a scalable training strategy based on synthetic fairness tasks and a fairness-aware architecture using a gradient reversal layer, which encourages the model to learn representations invariant to sensitive attributes. Experiments on 132 fairness tasks show consistent improvements in fairness while maintaining competitive accuracy. --- ### How Much Do Legal RAG Systems Still Hallucinate? Authors: Souvick Das, Sallam Abualhaija, Domenico Bianculli Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14210v1 Hallucination is a major challenge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems in the legal domain, where ungrounded answers can lead to serious consequences. To better understand this problem, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of hallucination behavior in eight legal RAG systems across two legal corpora, the GDPR (in English) and a national civil law (in French). Using claim-level and answer-level evaluation, we report on hallucination density and severity, analyze performance across question categories and user personas, and validate our findings on an independent set of 142 legal-expert-authored questions. Our results show that hallucinations remain pervasive, ranging from less than 10% of responses for the best-performing systems to nearly half in the worst case. We further find that false-premise questions, containing incorrect assumptions that must be rejected, produce high hallucination rates on the manually-drafted questions. --- ### Adaptive Protection for Evolutionary Feature Construction in Symbolic Regression with Application to Credit Classification Authors: Hengzhe Zhang, Qi Chen, Bing Xue, Lean Yu, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Mengjie Zhang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14209v1 Evolutionary feature construction has shown strong promise in symbolic regression by automatically discovering informative transformations of input features that enhance a simple base learner. However, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to preserve important constructed features discovered during evolution, and valuable genetic material can be lost when genetic operators disrupt effective features. This paper introduces an adaptive protection mechanism that leverages feature importance metrics to selectively preserve constructed features during evolution. The mechanism provides stronger protection for more important constructed features while still allowing less important features to be modified and to incorporate useful building blocks from more important features. We evaluate the approach using multiple feature importance calculation methods and demonstrate its robustness across different base learners. Experimental results on 98 regression benchmark datasets show that the proposed mechanism consistently improves solution quality over baseline approaches, and experiments on two credit classification datasets demonstrate that the method also extends effectively to improve search effectiveness beyond symbolic regression. --- ### MMUSV-Sim: A Perception-Oriented Simulation and Data-Generation Platform for Multi-USV Cooperative Perception Authors: Ziao Li, Jianxiong Ye, Biao Tang, Leping Zhang, Kun Zuo, Siyu Huang, Chenqiang Gao Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14207v1 Cooperative perception among multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) combines complementary observations to extend maritime target sensing beyond the view range and field of a single platform. Developing such systems at scale calls for a unified workflow for configurable multi-USV scenarios, multimodal acquisition, and shared annotations. We present MMUSV-Sim, a perception-oriented maritime simulation and data-generation platform built on Unreal Engine 5 and Project AirSim. It provides island, open-sea, and port environments; configurable weather, time of day, and wave conditions; a diverse vessel asset library; and spline-based multi-vessel motion. MMUSV-Sim acquires RGB, depth, semantic, LiDAR, and radar observations across multiple USVs and captures a common world state for per-agent annotation export. Experiments verify that the configured wave settings produce the intended changes in vessel heave, roll, and pitch, and evaluate the geometric consistency between projected annotations and semantic renderings. In LiDAR-based cooperative BEV vessel detection experiments on the generated multi-USV dataset, Early Fusion achieves an AP@0.5 of 72.74, compared with 45.54 using a single USV. --- ### FreeBalance: Pre-Routing Online Moe Load Balancing via Residual Workload Prediction Authors: Pengfei Chen, Yize Wu, Shouxu Kuang, Ke Gao, Ling Li Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14205v1 Load imbalance poses a major bottleneck to the efficiency of expert parallelism in distributed inference of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. The most heavily loaded rank stalls global execution due to skewed routing distributions, directly increasing latency. While offline expert placement can alleviate persistent imbalance, practical multi-task serving workloads exhibit layer- and batch-dependent routing dynamics, making online load balancing indispensable. Existing approaches rely on routing statistics collected after each MoE router, requiring expert weight load or migration to begin only after routing decisions are available, consequently placing migration overhead on the inference critical path. In this work, we observe that online balancing can instead be largely overlapped with computation before target routing (e.g., attention), if routing distributions can be predicted accurately in advance. Therefore, we propose FreeBalance, a lossless online load-balancing framework that overlaps expert migration with preceding computation stages via residual workload prediction. FreeBalance leverages cross-layer similarities in hidden representations within the residual network to build a lightweight workload predictor. This enables proactive expert migration planning before routing decisions are available, creating substantial overlap between weight transfer and computation-heavy pre-routing stages. Furthermore, a cost model constrains the number of swaps to fully hide the synchronization overhead within the available window. Experiments across models and datasets show that FreeBalance reduces the max-to-mean rank load ratio by 32.8% and end-to-end prefill latency by 13.1%. Specifically, our method hides balancing overhead of an average of 5.1 experts per layer, which would otherwise account for about 8.5% of the critical-path latency. --- ### MINT: A Universal Zero-Shot Predictor for Transaction Data Authors: Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Viktor Drobnyi, Maeve Madigan, Julia Rozanova, David Sutton, Stuart Burrell Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14198v1 Banks analyse sequential financial transaction data to perform many tasks, including fraud prevention, credit risk assessment and offer personalization. To improve the predictive accuracy of these tasks, Payments Foundation Models encode transaction sequence data as rich contextual embeddings, which can then be provided to task-specific models as features. However, these Foundation Models are not designed for flexible zero-shot reasoning across novel downstream prediction tasks, limiting their adaptability and utility. Existing LLM-based approaches to zero-shot prediction often fail to fully exploit the predictive signal within transaction data, while relying on costly text serialization or task-specific architectures that scale poorly. To address these limitations, we present the Multimodal Instruction Network for Transactions (MINT), a framework that connects a pretrained transaction sequence encoder to a decoder-only LLM through lightweight embedding injection, transaction-language alignment, and instruction tuning. We find that MINT achieves state-of-the-art predictive question-answering performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution questions, while substantially reducing input tokens, latency, and memory consumption compared to text-serialization baselines. Through comprehensive analyses of representations, alignment strategies, training data, and history length, we establish that compact transaction embeddings are a superior approach to transaction representation than text serialization for multimodal reasoning and zero-shot prediction tasks. --- ### KV Cache Compression Through the Lens of Transform Coding Authors: Hannah Laus, Claudio Mayrink Verdun, Hao Wang, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Felix Krahmer Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14191v1 The key-value (KV) cache stores information from past tokens and is a major memory bottleneck in long-context inference. Existing quantization methods address this bottleneck by representing the KV cache uniformly with lower-precision data types and designing quantization schemes to minimize reconstruction error in the cache itself, without accounting for how that error propagates through attention mechanisms. We prove that, under a white-noise quantization model, the expected attention-aware distortion decomposes into additive key and value contributions that factor across tokens and channels. Building on transform coding and reverse water-filling, which are classical tools from signal processing and rate-distortion theory, we introduce Attention-Aware Transform Coding (AATC), which allocates bits over a calibration set to minimize attention-aware distortion. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, evaluated across LongBench, RULER, GSM8K, MMLU-Pro, and MATH-500, our method achieves near-lossless accuracy at approximately $5.8\times$ compression, whereas each baseline degrades in at least some settings. --- ### Revisiting Energy-based Tabular Anomaly Detection: Energy and Reconstruction are Complementary Authors: Junichiro Niimi Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14186v1 Tabular anomaly detection is dominated by classical density-proxy methods (Isolation Forest, OCSVM, LOF), reconstruction-based detectors (Autoencoders, VAEs), and modern non-parametric scorers (COPOD, ECOD, Deep SVDD), all of which approximate the inlier distribution only indirectly; explicit energy-based models are largely absent. Motivated by the recent revival of EBMs in deep learning (e.g., Energy-Based Transformers, JEPA), we revisit the classical Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) for this task and hypothesize that its mean-field energy combines more effectively with a reconstruction-based score than same-lineage pairs do. We evaluate a two-hidden-layer DBM on two tabular benchmarks spanning distinct domains (UCI Bank Marketing and NSL-KDD) against eight classical and modern baselines across twenty random seeds. The DBM mean-field energy matches the strongest baseline (the Autoencoder) on Bank Marketing and statistically beats it on NSL-KDD, while significantly outperforming the remaining seven on both datasets. When fused with the Autoencoder via rank fusion, the DBM energy yields a statistically significant improvement on both datasets (AUROC=+0.014, p<0.01 on Bank Marketing; +0.002, p<0.001 on NSL-KDD); every non-DBM-derived base model instead fails to improve or significantly degrades the AE-paired ensemble. Our position is that classical EBMs, exemplified by the DBM, deserve a place in the tabular anomaly detection toolbox as a non-redundant complementary view to the reconstruction-based scores that dominate current practice. --- ### Can Language Models Understand mmWave Data? Benchmarking Large Language Models for mmWave Radar-Based Human Understanding Authors: Jeongwan Shin, Jaehyeon Kim, Donguk Ko, Jaeho Choi Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14179v1 Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning and generative capabilities, motivating their use as universal reasoning engines for perception. While modern approaches such as vision-language models (VLMs) have attempted to incorporate reasoning capabilities into visual sensing, the integration of LLMs with the millimeter-wave (mmWave) modality-despite its unique advantages under low light and occlusion-remains largely unexplored. The principal bottlenecks stem from the scarcity of radar language pairs, severe cross-dataset heterogeneity, and the absence of a foundational mmWave encoder. We address this gap through a minimal textualization interface that serializes each mmWave point cloud into concise natural language, allowing off-the-shelf LLMs to operate in a question answering (QA) setting. Building on this, we present mmWave-QA, the first benchmark for language-conditioned mmWave human perception. mmWave-QA aggregates heterogeneous public mmWave datasets and harmonizes them via calibration-aware preprocessing and global taxonomy alignment, while providing natural language QA. Spanning six scenarios and five QA tasks, the benchmark enables standardized evaluation across diverse mmWave hardware and experimental conditions, establishing a foundation for scalable research on mmWave-LLM integration. We further evaluate and analyze LLMs on our mmWave-QA, highlighting their zero-shot reasoning potential for radar perception, as well as their robustness under visual degradation. --- ### LightTeaNet: A Weakly Supervised Lightweight CNN for Multi-Label Tea Leaf Disease Detection and Localization Authors: Naif Haider Chowdhury, Md Rahim, Syed Farhan Hasan, Murad Hasan, Prithwiraj Bhattacharjee Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14178v1 Tea is known as an important crop in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, yet the production of tea is still hampered by the multiple diseases that decrease the quantity and quality. Traditional methods of inspection, which are manual, are not consistent, labor-intensive, and depend on extensive monitoring. This paper introduces a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for weakly supervised multi-label classification and disease localization in tea leaves called LightTeaNet. LightTeaNet learns directly from image-level labels and employs Class Activation Mapping (CAM) to localize disease-affected regions automatically, unlike conventional object detection models such as YOLO, which require extensive bounding box annotations. For Parameter efficiency, the network integrates Depthwise Separable Convolutions, and for enhanced feature discrimination, it integrates Channel Attention. LightTeaNet has achieved a Precision of 0.9615, a Recall of 0.8772, and an F1-score of 0.9179, while it shows mAP@0.50=0.1810 without any manual annotations, which delivers a competitive localization performance in the experimental results. These results validate the model as an interpretable as well as a resource-efficient framework for intelligent disease monitoring in agriculture. --- ### Structure-Guided Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Neural Network for Traffic Flow Prediction Authors: Xuanmian He, Can Li, Wanjing Ma Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14177v1 Deep spatiotemporal models integrating graph convolutions and attention mechanisms have demonstrated excellent performance in network-level traffic flow prediction, owing to their exceptional ability to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Despite their predictive success, deployment of such models in safety-critical urban systems remains constrained by their inherent lack of transparency. Existing post-hoc diagnostic methods often struggle with spurious correlations and fail to unveil the intrinsic decision-making mechanisms governing traffic dynamics, resulting in suboptimal interpretability and limited operational trustworthiness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Structure-Guided Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Neural Network (SGSAN). Departing from traditional architectures that rely on unconstrained adaptive graphs, SGSAN explicitly learns a static Directed Dependency Graph (DDG) to identify the invariant macroscopic propagation paths of traffic states. We further introduce an InfoNCE-based soft-coupling mechanism that anchors the model's dynamic spatiotemporal attention to this structural prior, offering a mechanistic account of the model's decision-making process while ensuring robust forecasting by aligning attention-based reasoning with identified macroscopic dependencies and preventing over-reliance on ephemeral local noise. Furthermore, a decoupled two-stage optimization framework is developed to resolve the fundamental conflict between structural discovery and predictive error minimization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that SGSAN achieves state-of-the-art predictive accuracy while providing built-in interpretability that organically aligns with the physical logic of traffic networks. --- ### Concept Guidance: Precise, Training-Free Latent Control for Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Nikolai Röhrich, Isabell Hans, Felix Krause, Björn Ommer Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14172v1 Text-to-image diffusion models have two major drawbacks that severely limit their practical utility: (1) standard models lack an intrinsic mechanism for continuous, concept-specific guidance (e.g., for precisely controlling how aesthetically pleasing an image looks), and (2) they lack reliability for tasks requiring high local coherence (e.g., generating text or human hands). To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel notion of concept-wise mutual information and find large, concept-dependent differences between individual layers, demonstrating that the generation of specific structures is localized in distinct parts of the network. We exploit this insight by reinforcing the impact of concept-relevant layers in Concept Guidance (CoG), a precise, target-specific guidance method that works for models out-of-the-box without additional training, external models, gradients, or prompt engineering. CoG first quantifies each layer's concept-specific impact and then guides denoising using a weighted combination of predictions generated with concept-relevant layers skipped. We demonstrate performance increases across various targets and popular models like PixArt-alpha, SD3, SD3.5, and FLUX.1-dev. Code is available at https://github.com/CompVis/concept_guidance --- ### Classical Limits of Spectral Filtering in Quantum Generative Models Authors: Marco Roth Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14169v1 Spectral filtering has been proposed as a route to regularization in quantum generative models: the quantum Fourier transform exposes the amplitude spectrum of a quantum circuit Born machine, and a diagonal filter suppresses the high frequencies associated with finite-sample noise, an operation whose classical counterpart seemingly requires manipulating an exponentially long amplitude vector. We examine whether this coherent operation produces anything that classical post-processing of samples from the unfiltered model cannot match. Measuring the filter against convolution with a symmetric probability kernel at matched sampling cost, which accounts for the post-selection overhead of attenuation, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the gap between the two to vanish. Magnitude (attenuating) filters obey a dichotomy: at a fixed affordability threshold, the filtered output is either a constant-size Fourier object with an efficient classical sampler, or the passband must widen until no fixed frequency is attenuated and the filter no longer smooths. In neither case does the filter create a quantum-classical separation. Whatever separation survives is inherited from the spectral phase of the input state. Numerical experiments on trained circuit Born machines confirm the classification and show that the deciding phases are invisible to the Born-rule training loss and set by the initialization. Within the diagonal family, pure phase filters remain the only spectral operations exempt from these constraints. --- ### BiasTrace: Linking Reasoning Behaviours to Biased Outputs in LLMs Authors: Varsha Ramineni, Hossein A. Rahmani, Jerome Ramos, Karin Sevegnani, Emine Yilmaz Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14161v1 LLMs exhibit social biases that can produce inaccurate and discriminatory inferences, posing risks in high-stakes applications. While prior work has made progress in measuring and mitigating bias, it largely focuses on final outputs of models, with limited understanding of the mechanisms that produce biased outcomes. Recent advances in LLM reasoning offers a new lens for investigating bias, yet the link between reasoning and bias remains poorly understood. Existing approaches focus primarily on final answer correctness or explicitly biased language, overlooking different behaviours in reasoning that can drive biased outcomes. We introduce BiasTrace, an annotation scheme for labelling reasoning behaviours in model-generated traces and linking them to biased outcomes. BiasTrace captures bias-specific behaviours (e.g., unsupported demographic assumptions) as well as general reasoning patterns that may implicitly contribute to bias (e.g. overthinking). We apply BiasTrace to reasoning traces in bias-sensitive contexts, scaled using validated LLM-as-a-judge methods, producing a large annotated dataset. Our analysis shows that biased outputs often stem from subtle reasoning behaviours rather than explicitly biased language, and that reasoning-level annotations improve bias detection. We further show that BiasTrace behaviours can be exploited for inference-time mitigation. These findings underscore the importance of examining a broader range of reasoning patterns to better understand bias in LLMs. --- ### Removing Temporal Note Redundancy Improves Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Medicine Authors: Chenran Weng, Joo Seung Lee, Malini Mahendra, Anil Aswani Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14157v1 Mechanical ventilation is a critical life-support intervention, requiring dynamic adjustments to ventilator settings as a patient's condition evolves. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising framework for optimizing these sequential decisions, standard approaches rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, missing crucial clinical context recorded in free-text notes. Integrating longitudinal clinical notes into RL state spaces is challenging because notes are heavily inflated by temporal redundancy, such as copy-forward text, templating, and repetitive documentation, which dilutes time-local updates and degrades state representation quality. To address this, we propose a redundancy-aware multimodal state representation framework that explicitly removes duplicated note text over time before policy learning. We evaluate two computationally efficient temporal decomposition strategies for removing duplicated note text: (1) an embedding-space decomposition using singular value decomposition on local history subspaces, and (2) an interpretable sentence-level diff operation that filters out previously documented sentences before text encoding. Using real-world ICU data, we demonstrate that state representations constructed by stripping temporal note redundancy significantly outperform both structured-only and raw-note baselines across multiple off-policy evaluation methods (Model-Based Rollouts, Fitted Q-Evaluation, Weighted Importance Sampling, and Weighted Doubly Robust Evaluation). Our findings show that explicitly isolating new clinical information from repeated note text yields higher-quality state representations and directly improves RL performance for clinical decision support. --- ### Deep Reinforcement Learning solution for pickup and delivery routing problems with time window and capacity constraints Authors: Andrew Soroka, Alex Meshcheryakov, Sergey Gerasimov Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14156v1 The task of constructing vehicles optimal routes for pickup and delivery of goods is one of most promising tasks in the context of global urban population growth. Although this kind of problems with small size can be solved by various classical approaches, a fast (or realtime) route optimizer under the constraints of the real world (such as capacity and time windows constraints) for medium-large size problems still remains a highly challenging task. In this work we, for the first time, successfully applied a deep Reinforcing Learning approach (modified JAMPR model) to solve Pickup and Delivery problem with Capacity and Time Window constraints (CPDPTW). We obtained a robust model that gives a fast optimal solution for problems of small and medium size, and gives fast suboptimal solution for problems of larger (> 200) size. --- ### Towards Efficient Multimodal and Multilingual Opinion Extraction for STI: A QLoRA-Based Fine-Tuning Approach Authors: Sheng Hong, Xuanqi Wang, Jiacheng Wang, Yuwei Wang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14152v1 Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have reshaped semantic analysis. Opinion Extraction (OE) for Science and Technology Intelligence (STI) requires concise core opinions from large information streams. Off-the-shelf models struggle to filter noise from these streams and show limited structured-output reliability in zero-shot multilingual and multi-modal settings. To address information overload and extraction defocus, this study proposes a multimodal core-opinion extraction framework in which visual evidence serves as a contextual anchor for textual judgment. Using VideoLLaMA2 (VL2) and VideoLLaMA2.1 (VL2.1) as the base models, we apply Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on a curated dataset of 2,194 multilingual and multimodal samples. Under the selected Image-Augmented setting, fine-tuned VL2.1 generates structured JSON core-opinion outputs, achieving 64.98% Precision, 42.15% Recall, 51.14% F1-score, and 74.00% sample-level accuracy. Relative to the zero-shot VL2.1 setting, it raises the F1-scores of Spanish and Russian from 4.83% and 0.45% to 46.05% and 51.93%, respectively. The framework further incorporates a Fuzzy Cumulative Prospect Theory-based post-extraction triage module for case-level value assessment, providing a case-level value signal for downstream STI screening. --- ### Leading-Silence Augmentation and Multi-Stage Synthetic Supervision for the Second MLC-SLM Challenge Authors: Kexin Shi, Renhe Sun, Yuge Huang, Ximeng Wang, Jiayi Zhou, Jian Liu, Malu Zhang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14150v1 The second Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model (MLC-SLM) Challenge evaluates two tasks over complete, unsegmented multilingual conversations: speaker diarization and recognition (Task 1) and conversational speech understanding (Task 2). Neither task provides oracle utterance boundaries or speaker labels at evaluation, and Task 2 provides no question-answer training set. For Task 1, we fine-tune VibeVoice-ASR-7B with random leading-silence cropping, consistent timestamp correction, and an exponential moving average (EMA) training strategy. For Task 2, we construct synthetic question-answer pairs through multimodal candidate generation, silent-audio filtering, and distribution-matched augmentation, and fine-tune Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct for tagged direct answering. On the Task 1 evaluation set, cropping reduces tcpMER from 18.30% to 17.27%, and EMA further reduces it to 16.73%. On the Task 2 evaluation set, jointly applying distribution-matched augmentation and tagged direct answering raises accuracy from 83.0% to 86.0%. --- ### QuaSAR: Quantization Compensation via Stable Activation-Aware Rank Truncation Authors: Lin-Fa Lee, Yi-Yu Chang, Kuo-Hei Yeh Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14149v1 Recent training-free post-training quantization methods restore model accuracy through closed-form residual compensation. To constrain additional model storage overhead, several existing methods gate layer selection by goodness-of-fit, retaining only those layers whose compensation yields a positive residual fit score and discarding the rest. In this paper, we show that, under the low-bit W4A4 setting, this gating mechanism fails to distinguish poorly predictable quantization error from numerical solver failure. Rank-deficient input activations yield severely ill-conditioned or numerically singular Gram matrices, causing the closed-form solver to become unstable and produce spuriously negative fit scores. Consequently, existing goodness-of-fit gates misclassify affected layers as uncompensable and discard them. Many of these discarded layers can nevertheless provide substantial error recovery when their compensation is computed using a numerically stable solver. To address this problem, we propose a parameter-free truncated pseudoinverse solver which removes collapsed directions prior to inversion. On ViT-B with the W4A4 setting, our training-free method achieves 81.42\% top-1 accuracy, outperforming prior post-training methods and fine-tuning-based baselines. Combined with joint low-rank and quantization compression, the proposed method reaches a deployable operating point of 80.26\% accuracy at 54.7 MB, providing a well-balanced trade-off between model size and accuracy. --- ### SCVIB: Editable State-Conditioned Visual Instance Binding forMulti-Turn Personalized Localization Authors: Xiongtai Yang, Ziyan He, Tao Wang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14148v1 We introduce editable state-conditioned visual instance binding, a multi-turn localization setting in which several support-defined instances are introduced across turns and protocol-defined state events determine the final target. We instantiate this setting as SCVIB, comprising 1,050 manually verified support--query base pairs and 1,500 episodes spanning five visual domains, three difficulty levels, and four target-state dependency groups. Direct Seq-free inference reaches only 60.13\% Joint@0.5, indicating that resolving the final reference does not ensure effective use of the corresponding visual evidence for query-side localization. We address this gap with TT-VG (Transition-Tree Visual Grounding), which combines a Target-State Transition Tree (TSTT) with Visual Evidence Grounding Adaptation (VEGA). TSTT compiles the visible interaction into protocol-defined events, executes them over versioned target states, and resolves the final-query reference to the corresponding support evidence. Adapted on trajectory-derived same-instance pairs, VEGA performs support-conditioned grounding of the resolved instance using a Visual Evidence Package. TT-VG reaches 70.27\% Joint@0.5; under matched target resolution, VEGA exceeds the strongest comparison method by 16.20 points. Gains over direct inference are largest on Counter-Recency and Rollback, which require routing to non-latest or restored support evidence. Together, these results establish SCVIB as a controlled testbed and highlight the effective use of resolved support evidence for query-side same-instance localization as a central challenge in multi-turn personalized localization. --- ### CSG-Mamba: A Convolutional Scoring Gating Vision State Space Network for Endoscopic Polyp Segmentation Authors: Yuliang Wang, Jiaqi Wu, Jiaye Song, Shuxia Ren Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14146v1 Accurate polyp segmentation is critical for computer-aided colonoscopy, yet endoscopic images often contain low-contrast boundaries, mucosal texture interference, specular highlights, and device-dependent appearance shifts. Vision State Space Models (SSMs) provide efficient long-range modeling with linear complexity, but existing Vision Mamba segmentation models typically convert 2D features into 1D scanning sequences, which may weaken local geometric continuity and over-smooth irregular contours. We propose CSG-Mamba, a convolutional scoring gating Vision State Space network for endoscopic polyp segmentation. Built on a VM-UNet-style asymmetric U-shaped encoder-decoder, CSG-Mamba inserts a Convolutional Scoring Gating (CSG) module at the semantically rich bottleneck. CSG generates a local spatial score map through pointwise and large-kernel depthwise convolutions and recalibrates state-space features by multiplicative gating. Experiments with three random seeds show that CSG-Mamba achieves 0.9220 Dice and 15.87 HD95 on Kvasir-SEG, and 0.7418 Dice and 0.6570 mIoU on CVC-ColonDB, outperforming the baselines on most overlap and recall metrics while maintaining competitive boundary accuracy. --- ### Self-Supervised Visual On-Policy Distillation Authors: Yijiang Li, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Bingyang Wang, Ke Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Di Fu, Philip Torr, Nuno Vasconcelos Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14144v1 Visual on-policy distillation relies heavily on an informative teacher-student asymmetry, through either a larger, stronger teacher or privileged supervision, such as reference answers or ground-truth regions of interest. This raises a fundamental question: where can informative asymmetry come from when nothing privileged is available? We answer this by inverting where the asymmetry comes from. Rather than adding privileged information to the teacher, we subtract information from the student. This asymmetry creates the same effective learning signal for free as a teacher with access to information unavailable to the student, without ground-truth annotations, rewards, or a separate stronger teacher model. Building on this principle, we introduce Self-Supervised Visual On-Policy Distillation (S$^2$VOPD), a simple yet effective method that constructs on-policy learning signals from asymmetric augmented views. S$^2$VOPD distills the teacher's distribution conditioned on the original image on-policy into the student distribution conditioned on a strongly augmented view of the same image. We systematically explore a broad design space of visual augmentations and uncover that (1) asymmetry matters: all four augmentation families improve performance, while symmetric self-distillation degrades it; (2) strength matters: performance peaks at a moderate strength; and (3) the gap must remain task-consistent: augmentations that completely remove the question-relevant evidence can induce large but uninformative discrepancies. Across six fine-grained perception benchmarks, S$^2$VOPD improves Qwen3.5-4B from 70.7% to 77.4%, above all open-source models compared, up to Qwen3-VL at 235B, and surpasses GPT-5.4. While holding training data the same, it recovers 96% of the improvement achieved by methods with privileged information. Website is at https://williamium3000.github.io/s2vopd --- ### PISA: A Pseudo-Individual Source-Domain Feature Adaptation Framework for Test-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Authors: Ziyan He, Xiongtai Yang, Tao Wang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14142v1 Open-vocabulary object detection test-time adaptation (OVOD-TTA) aims to address the performance degradation that pre-trained base models suffer when encountering image-domain shifts. Existing source-free OVOD-TTA methods rely either on refined test-time information for re-scoring or on pseudo-labels for self-training, leading to significant accuracy degradation when initial predictions are poor. Meanwhile, most conventional source-domain estimation methods recover abstract, sparse representations suitable for the classification task, but fail to capture the dense, concrete features required for detection. To address these issues, we propose PISA, a novel source-free OVOD-TTA method that can be seamlessly integrated into open-vocabulary visual backbones. The core components of our method are the Corruption-Invariant Feature Extractor (CIFE), the Feature Alignment Module (FAM), and a multi-scale alignment framework (BAA). To capture detection-suitable features, we develop CIFE to exploit the invariance of CLIP's visual features across corrupted images, ensuring robustness against various corruptions. We further develop FAM and BAA for the pre-training and adaptation to transform the corruption-invariant features into pseudo-individual source-domain features that are close to the original source-domain features. In this way, dense and concrete pseudo-individual source-domain features are used for supervision instead of unreliable pseudo-label signals. Experiments on the corrupted VOC-C, COCO-C, and LVIS-C benchmarks across three base models demonstrate that PISA substantially improves both the localization precision and the category recognition accuracy of the original models. Notably, PISA achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring access to source-domain data, surpassing existing methods by 3.92% in AP@50% on COCO-C. --- ### Smart routes: a system for development and comparison of algorithms for solving vehicle routing problems with realistic constraints Authors: Andrew Soroka, German Mikhelson, Alexander Mescheryakov, Sergey Gerasimov Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14140v1 The problem of route optimization with realistic constraints is becoming extremely relevant in the face of global urban population growth. While we are aware of approaches that theoretically provide an exact optimal solution, their application becomes challenging as the problem size increases because of exponential complexity. We investigate the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRPTW) and compare solutions obtaining by exact solver SCIP with heuristic algorithms such as LKH, 2-OPT, 3-OPT, the ORTools framework, and the deep learning model JAMPR. We demonstrate that for problem of size 50 deep learning and classical heuristic solutions became close to SCIP exact solution but requires less time. Additionally for problems with size 100, SCIP exact methods around 13 times slower that neural and classical heuristics with the same route cost and on around 50% worse for the first feasible solution on the same time. To conduct experiments, we developed the Smart Routes platform for solving route optimization problems, which includes exact, heuristic, and deep learning models, and facilitates convenient integration of custom algorithms and datasets. --- ### SPARGen: Unifying Spatial Perception and Reasoning through Native Multimodal Generation Authors: Jinsheng Quan, Jianhua Li, Siyi Xie, Xuanke Shi, Kewang Deng, Zukai Chen, Feifei Shao, Lei Yang, Quan Wang, Yawei Luo Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14138v1 Spatial perception and reasoning from visual observations require recovering geometric structure, establishing correspondences, and understanding spatial relations. Existing approaches typically address these capabilities separately using task-specific architectures or external geometric modules, limiting knowledge transfer among complementary representations of the same physical scene. We introduce SPARGen, a unified multimodal framework that casts 3D reconstruction, dense correspondence, and spatial reasoning as instruction-conditioned generation tasks. SPARGen serializes compact structured and linguistic outputs as token sequences while generating dense geometric fields in image-aligned forms, enabling spatial supervision to jointly shape shared representations within a native multimodal generative model. Experiments across benchmarks for 3D reconstruction, correspondence, and spatial reasoning show that SPARGen achieves competitive performance across heterogeneous spatial tasks within a single native multimodal generative framework. --- ### HiCo-GS: Hierarchical Context Aggregation and Geometric Consistency for Octree Gaussian Splatting Authors: Wei Zhang, Shengkai Yu, Shiqiang Gong, Qi Zhang, Qiang Li, Qi Wang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14136v1 Octree-based anchor Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a scalable representation for city-scale novel view synthesis, where multi-level anchors adaptively capture scene content from coarse building structures to fine architectural details. However, we identify a fundamental limitation in existing methods: cross-level feature isolation, where each level's anchor features are optimized independently with no inter-level communication, causing color drift on building facades and over-smoothing in textured regions. We present HiCo-GS, a high-fidelity reconstruction framework with two complementary modules. Cross-Level Context Aggregation (CLCA) enables bidirectional hierarchical prior injection by leveraging the octree's spatial containment structure to aggregate per-level context vectors into parent-self-child triplets, fused via a lightweight MLP with residual connection. Coarse-level structural priors flow down to inform fine-level anchors, while fine-level detail statistics feed back to prevent over-smoothing, at negligible computational overhead. Depth-Normal Geometric Consistency (DNGC) regularization enforces agreement between rendered normals and depth-derived normals through an alpha-weighted consistency loss, complemented by edge-aware smoothness losses with progressive warmup that exploit the strong planar priors ubiquitous in urban geometry to suppress floating artifacts. We further introduce the China-Pagoda dataset comprising 8 ancient Chinese pagodas with over 1,200 images each, featuring dense ornamental carvings, curved multi-layer eaves, and repetitive fine-grained textures. Extensive experiments on Mill19, UrbanScene3D, MatrixCity, and China-Pagoda demonstrate that HiCo-GS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and substantially cleaner geometry across real-world and synthetic urban benchmarks.Code: https://github.com/WZ-CS/HiCo-GS. --- ### AgilePE: Autonomous UAV Pursuit-Evasion via Self-Play Reinforcement Learning Authors: Wenhao Tang, Tianyang Chen, Zhejun Cui, Boyuan An, Jiayu Chen, Ruize Zhang, Huidong Liu, Tianyue Wu, Qingmin Liao, Fei Gao, Yu Wang, Chao Yu Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14135v1 Autonomous pursuit-evasion is a fundamental challenge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), requiring rapid decision-making under tightly coupled dynamics and continuously changing opponent behaviors. Traditional rule-based or differential-game approaches often struggle with high-dimensional aerial interactions and agile maneuvering. We present AgilePE, a complete system for autonomous UAV pursuit-evasion via self-play reinforcement learning. AgilePE integrates agile low-level control, competitive policy optimization, and sim-to-real deployment in a unified framework. The policy directly maps onboard state observations to Collective Thrust and Body Rates (CTBR) commands, enabling end-to-end agile maneuvering without intermediate trajectory planners or waypoint controllers. For training, we use competitive self-play with Prioritized Fictitious Self-Play (PFSP) and a diversified opponent pool, enabling agents to improve against historical policies while stabilizing optimization and reducing policy oscillation. This process leads to the emergence of sophisticated pursuit and evasion strategies. For real-world deployment, we develop a hardware-aligned simulation pipeline that models actuator-response dynamics, communication latency, and domain randomization. The learned policies transfer zero-shot to real quadrotors without task-specific tuning. Real-world experiments reproduce pursuit-evasion tactics observed in simulation, including rapid dodging and flanking, and demonstrate interactive two-agent zero-shot deployment. --- ### Act2Intention: A Benchmark For Developing Active Mobile Agents Through Inferring User Intention from GUI Actions Authors: Xiaokai Yan, Jingtao Ding, Yong Li, Zhiwen Yu Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14132v1 Mobile GUI Agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in human-computer intelligence. However, current research primarily focuses on reactive task execution while lacking a comprehensive understanding-prediction-execution process for user intentions, which are the core requirements of active agents. In this paper, we propose the Act2Intention framework that builds an active mobile agent by integrating understanding, predicting user intentions, and executing decisions. First, we construct the Act2Intention Bench through data collection and validated generation, comprising 72,511 intentions and over 700,000 actions across 52 apps, thereby establishing the first benchmark for evaluating proactive agents via continuous intention-action trajectories. We further develop the Act2Intention Agent, achieving proactive services through Proactive-oriented Intention Understanding, Personalized Proactive Intention Prediction, and Experience-guided Intention Execution. Experimental results show that supervised fine-tuning on Act2Intention Bench yields absolute improvements of +32.0 Acc-S, +10.25 Acc-S, and +6.9 SSR points over non-fine-tuned counterparts under the same agent framework for intention understanding, prediction, and execution, respectively. This success underscores the necessity and value of the Act2Intention Bench, which establishes a standardized platform for developing and evaluating proactive agents and consequently paves the way for research on intention-driven human-computer interaction. --- ### AlignFace: Human-Aligned Face Similarity Metric with Interpretable Concept Relations Authors: Ying Huang, Wencan Zhang, Brian Y. Lim Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14130v1 Computer vision models for generated facial content, such as face editing and privacy protection, increasingly affect people, requiring similarity metrics that serve as faithful proxies for human perception. While perceptual evaluation has progressed from signal-based heuristics to representation-based metrics, current approaches are limited to behavioral modeling without cognitive alignment. They rely on implicit and spurious relations while assuming a universal observer, failing to account for inherent variations across diverse human populations. This leads to inaccurate evaluative models of stakeholders and misleading guidance for generative model debugging. Rather than treating perception as a black box, we leverage scientific findings from cognitive psychology of human face similarity perception: dependence on facial featural and configural attributes, nonlinear psychophysical response scaling, and own-group biases. We introduce the FACETS dataset and propose AlignFace, an interpretable, human-aligned, face similarity metric that encodes these cognitive principles through ante-hoc modeling. It employs visual-language modeling (VLM) to encode paired face images and text-based attributes, gated cross-attention (CA) to extract attribute-specific facial difference representations, concept bottleneck modeling (CBM) to constrain reasoning via interpretable face attributes, and neural generalized additive model (GAM) to model their nonlinear influence. Experiments found AlignFace significantly improves alignment with human subpopulation perceptions compared to baseline metrics, including recent domain-free learned perceptual metrics. By bridging learned representations and human cognitive processes, this work enables more transparent and aligned perceptual evaluation metrics for face images. --- ### BGA: A noise-immune neural distillation framework for malicious signature extraction in high-entropy encrypted flows Authors: Sheng Hong, Yixuan Huang, Weiwei Jiang, Junyuan Zhang, Jiacheng Wang, Ruijian Jiao Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14126v1 To mitigate attention dilution in high-entropy TLS 1.3 flows, we propose BGA, a noise-immune neural distillation framework for encrypted threat intelligence.The methodology first employs Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to decouple high-discriminatory control-plane features - specifically industrial setpoints - from stochastic cryptographic noise. To resolve the extreme class imbalance within a corpus of 86,878 flow records, a Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) module, enforcing the 1-Lipschitz constraint, is integrated to synthesize high-fidelity minority samples, elevating the detection recall of rare Malicious State Command Injections(MSCI) attacks by 43.2%. At its core, the BGA architecture integrates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) for temporal dependency extraction and an Adaptive Gated Multi-Head Attention mechanism. This gated unit functions as a neural filter to dynamically suppress encryption artifacts while amplifying malicious signatures. Extensive evaluations on CIC-IDS-2018 and Edge-IIoT benchmarks demonstrate a performance ceiling exceeding 95.2% across all key metrics. Furthermore, noise-injection stress tests confirm BGAs superior structural resilience with a 8.57% performance margin over vanilla Transformers, while its ultra-low inference latency of 0.2820 ms (estimated 1.6920 ms via theoretical scaling for ARM) indicates a high potential for real-time feasibility on heterogeneous industrial edge gateways, providing a promising architectural baseline for future hardware implementation. --- ### Traj-LeWM: Path-Aware World-Model Planning via Latent Trajectory Cost Authors: Xiaodi Huang, Ziyi Ding, Jingtian Wan, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Jiayu Chen, Zhang Zhang, Tao Huang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14125v1 LeWM is a lightweight visual world model that learns latent dynamics end-to-end from pixels and ranks candidate action sequences by the distance between their predicted endpoints and the goal. However, LeWM has two limitations. First, during training, it learns local next-step transitions without evaluating complete trajectories relative to the task goal. Second, during planning, it ranks candidates solely by predicted endpoint distance. Because model predictions may differ from actual execution outcomes, the candidate whose predicted endpoint is closest to the goal may not perform best when executed in the environment. The evolution of the complete predicted trajectory can therefore provide complementary information beyond endpoint distance. To address these limitations, we propose Traj-LeWM, which retains LeWM's local-dynamics objective and endpoint score while introducing a goal-conditioned latent trajectory cost (LTC) that aggregates trajectory-level information as a complementary signal. During training, LTC-based trajectory-preference supervision complements next-step prediction in shaping the shared representation. During planning, LTC is combined with endpoint distance to incorporate intermediate-path information into candidate ranking. With joint endpoint-plus-LTC scoring, Traj-LeWM outperforms LeWM on Push-T, OGBench-Cube, Reacher, and Two-Room by $3$, $14$, $7$, and $7$ percentage points, respectively. Controlled experiments and ablations further verify the complementary roles of trajectory-level representation shaping and path-aware candidate ranking. --- ### Reinforcement Learning-Based Production Scheduling in an Industry-Based Coating Scenario Using the Digital Model Playground Authors: Arne Kröger, Ralf Buschermöhle, Wilhelm Hasselbring, Henrik Wilbers Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14122v1 Production scheduling in complex manufacturing environments is challenging when sequence-dependent setup times, stochastic disturbances, and due-date constraints must be addressed simultaneously. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have shown promising results in research, most studies rely on simplified benchmark processes, limiting their industrial relevance. This paper demonstrates the applicability of RL-based scheduling in an industry-inspired coating process that reflects practical complexities such as sequence-dependent setup times, machine breakdowns, and variable utilization. The open-source Digital Model Playground (DMPG), a discrete event simulation framework, is used to model the scenario and to train RL agents. Two standard algorithms, Deep Q-Networks and Proximal Policy Optimization, are benchmarked against conventional dispatching rules to illustrate feasibility and to provide a transparent testbed for further research. Results indicate that RL-based scheduling achieves balanced improvements across key performance indicators, with PPO delivering the most robust performance. The main contribution of this work is to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice by validating RL-based scheduling in a realistic, shareable scenario and by providing a reusable open-source framework for future studies. --- ### Overcoming Shortcut Learning in Graph Neural Networks through Active Explanation Guidance Authors: Taraneh Younesian, Steve Azzolin, Antonio Longa, Francesco Ferrini, Vincenzo Marco De Luca, Stefano Teso Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14121v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can solve prediction tasks by unintentionally exploiting shortcuts---that is, edges, nodes, and features that correlate with but are not causal for the prediction---which compromise their reliability in out-of-distribution tasks. We introduce XIGL, an architecture-agnostic human-in-the-loop strategy for removing such shortcuts from GNNs. Our key insight is twofold. On the one hand, reliance on shortcuts can be detected by inspecting GNN explanations. On the other hand, once made aware of such shortcuts, sufficiently expert users can provide tailored corrective feedback, which helps deconfound the model. XIGL supports any query strategy; however, since corrective feedback can be expensive to acquire, we develop an active learning strategy for prioritizing explanations that are more likely to display shortcut behavior, lowering annotation and cognitive costs. We showcase the effectiveness of XIGL, including both existing and proposed explanation-based strategies, on several GNN architectures. Our implementation is available online. --- ### From Fixed Grids to Moving Particles:A Transferable Latent Operator for Fluid Dynamics Authors: Meng Li, Chuqi Chen, Zhengqing Gao, Xi Zhou, Xiao Sun, Yang Xiang, Huaxi Huang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14120v2 Lagrangian modeling is vital to fluid dynamics, as it characterizes particle transport and complements the Eulerian representation. However, Lagrangian trajectories are less commonly available than Eulerian fields, while most neural operators are trained and evaluated primarily in the Eulerian representation. This mismatch motivates a new learning problem: can a model trained solely on Eulerian observations generalize zero-shot from Eulerian field prediction to Lagrangian particle rollout, without Lagrangian supervision or task-specific adaptation? To address this problem, we propose the Transferable Latent Operator (TLO), which learns a unified flow representation shared by Eulerian field prediction and Lagrangian particle rollout. TLO decouples latent flow evolution from coordinate-dependent decoding: querying the evolving latent representation at fixed spatial coordinates yields Eulerian fields, whereas querying velocities at particle positions and recursively updating these positions enables Lagrangian rollout. Across five fluid-dynamics benchmarks, TLO consistently outperforms existing neural operators in both Eulerian field prediction and zero-shot Lagrangian rollout, with further gains from limited Lagrangian fine-tuning. --- ### Learning to Run Power Networks: Effective AlphaZero-inspired Topological Control Authors: Lukas Zetto, Benjamin Schäfer, Qiong Huang Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14114v1 As the integration of volatile renewable energy sources increases the strain on modern power grids, the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for autonomous topological reconfiguration has emerged as a promising research field to keep strained grids stable and operational. Compared to traditional redispatching measures, topological actions offer a cheaper and more cost-effective way to manage grid congestion. However, their implementation is hindered by a vast combinatorial action space and strict operational constraints. This paper investigates the effectiveness of model-based AlphaZero-inspired approaches that utilize Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for proactive grid management. We systematically evaluate how reward functions, observation density, and search guidance influence an agent's survivability. Our results demonstrate that the optimized AlphaZero approach achieves a peak survivability of 98.43%, significantly outperforming the proximal policy optimization (PPO) variant. We find that conducting the MCTS without guidance from a prior learned policy or value function can enhance training efficiency, and that a straightforward binary survival reward provides more effective search guidance than complex, multi-objective functions. Our findings demonstrate that while AlphaZero is a powerful framework for topological control, pure reinforcement learning is not sufficient; rather, an effective and reliable system requires a 'minimalist' integration of domain-specific heuristics, binary rewards, and a restricted observation space of line loads. --- ### Fixed-Budget Gaussian Volume Encoding with Structure-Aware Allocation Authors: Michael R. Martin, Joseph Insley, Victor A. Mateevitsi, Silvio Rizzi, Kwan-Liu Ma Published: 2026-08-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.GR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14112v1 Scientific simulations often produce scalar volumes faster than they can be stored, transferred, and loaded, while in situ reduction must use only a limited share of simulation resources. This work encodes scalar fields as anisotropic Gaussian primitives under a fixed budget. The complete primitive set is allocated analytically from local field structure, including position, orientation, and shape, then refined directly against the scalar field without densification, pruning, or count changes. The selected budget determines encoded storage before refinement and, together with the iteration schedule, provides a controllable refinement-time budget. In a controlled benchmark, truncation-aware field evaluation reduces encoding time by up to 51x; 1.4 million Gaussians encode a billion-voxel volume in at most four minutes on one desktop GPU, with reduced-iteration refinement completing in under one minute. Across five datasets spanning 2.1 million to 1.1 billion evaluated voxels, compression-useful configurations achieve 15.0-38.7 dB PSNR at compression ratios from 2.2x to over 40,000x. Pre-encoding structure statistics characterize fields for which one-shot allocation yields limited gains from additional capacity. Because primitives retain scalar attributes rather than baked appearance, a single compact model serves every subsequent visualization state - supporting post-hoc transfer-function, colormap, lighting, and viewpoint changes without re-encoding. ---