# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 131 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #6501–6550 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/131 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/130.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/132.md) ### Information-Theoretic Decoupled Prompt Tuning for Continual Learning Authors: Yunfei Zhang, Wen Wen, Tieliang Gong, Weizhan Zhang Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26257v1 Continual learning (CL) aims to incrementally acquire knowledge from sequential data while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Recently, prompt tuning has attracted increasing attention as an efficient approach for adapting pre-trained models to CL tasks. However, existing prompt design paradigms commonly suffer from retrieval dependence and classifier bias, which make model adaptation sensitive to prompt selection and bias predictions toward newly arrived classes. To address these challenges, we propose Decoupled Prompt Tuning for Continual Learning (DPT4CL), which decouples the CLIP textual prompt into a task-shared prompt distribution and class-specific prompts. The task-shared prompt distribution is derived by optimizing an Information Bottleneck objective to facilitate cross-task knowledge transfer and alleviate classifier bias, while class-specific prompts enhance inter-class separability without relying on explicit prompt retrieval. Furthermore, we establish a unified excess risk bound from an information-theoretic perspective, providing theoretical support for the robust generalization and forgetting mitigation of the proposed framework. Extensive experiments on standard CL benchmarks demonstrate that DPT4CL achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Cloudfly-Z/DPT4CL --- ### PACE-dLLM: Elastic Block Decoding via Confidence Cliff Estimation for Diffusion Language Models Authors: Xiaocheng Lu, Shuhan Guo, Ziyue Ma, Jie Zhang, Jian Liu, Jingcai Guo, Haoxuan Che, Song Guo Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26249v1 Diffusion language models (dLLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have become competitive with autoregressive (AR) LLMs in generation quality while supporting native parallel decoding. A standard acceleration strategy is block-wise decoding, where each forward pass predicts a block of length B and commits high-confidence tokens. However, B couples two distinct decisions: the look-ahead horizon and the number of tokens to commit. Existing accelerators address this limitation through indirect heuristics, such as volatility tracking, delimiter detection, and learned scoring. In contrast, we show that the required information is already encoded in the model's own per-step confidence: in-window confidence typically follows a context-dependent cliff, whose saturation point directly identifies the appropriate look-ahead horizon. We propose PACE-dLLM, which fits this parametric cliff in closed form at each step, sets the next horizon by its saturation point, and uses an independent confidence threshold for token commitment. Under a saturated-yield abstraction, we show that the cliff-anchored horizon is the smallest horizon attaining maximal useful per-pass yield: fixed horizons that undershoot it incur a worse asymptotic NFE rate, while overshooting adds no useful yield. On four reasoning and code benchmarks, PACE-dLLM achieves the best average accuracy on both open-source dLLM backbones, with average wall-clock speedups of 5.23x on LLaDA and 3.06x on Dream (up to 8.52x on math) over the unaccelerated semi-AR baseline, advancing the quality-throughput Pareto frontier. --- ### Can You Delete a Year of Market Data? Machine Unlearning Against Exact Retraining Oracles Authors: Junyi Ye Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, q-fin.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26242v1 When a data license expires, deleting stored records does not remove influence encoded in a trained forecaster. Machine unlearning seeks to remove this influence without retraining. We benchmark temporal unlearning with 3,200 paired references trained on all data and oracles retrained without the requested period. The grid covers five architectures, four rolling folds, five deletable years, and three experimental deletion levels on an S&P 500 volatility panel. The 2020 COVID crisis year produces the largest memorization gap for every architecture. Removing it improves all three deployable models in every fold, with the largest improvement in the 2022 bear market, while the two non-deployable models respond inconsistently. The target for approximate unlearning is the oracle, not low predictive accuracy on the deleted period. In one Transformer cell, an oracle that never trained on 2020 still predicts it at an information coefficient of 0.51, compared with 0.55 for the reference; pushing predictions toward noise reduces test skill. Across twelve deployable architecture-method pairs, only TSMixer with the hinge method remains near the oracle in every fold, closing 74-118% of the reference-to-oracle gap without a measurable loss of test skill. Method rankings vary across architectures and rolling windows. Audit separation rises with prior memorization but can remain small after exact deletion. The window-level loss comparison reaches at most 0.69, and treating stock-level windows as independent inflates the absolute t-statistic by a median factor of 1.9. These results call for an explicit deletion scope, oracle validation for the relevant architecture and window, and power-aware auditing. --- ### Graph Learning for Cross-Subject, Cross-Population EEG Emotion Decoding and Model-Derived Spatial-Spectral Neural Signatures Authors: Dongyi He, Bin Jiang, Xiangkai Wang, Yun Zhao, Hongjie Yan, Wai Ting Siok, Nizhuan Wang Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22103v1 Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a noninvasive means of capturing emotion-related neural dynamics, yet reliable EEG emotion decoding lacks models that can both generalize to unseen individuals and populations while preserving neural interpretability. To address these challenges, EmoDiPyraTrans is proposed as a development-regularized differential graph Transformer that models temporally ordered relative power spectral density graphs through adaptive graph recurrence, differential attention, and multiscale fusion. The framework was evaluated at three connected levels. First, cross-subject evaluations on SEED, FACED, MAHNOB-HCI, DEAP and DREAMER yielded participant-mean accuracies of 0.928, 0.645, 0.714, 0.617 and 0.671, respectively; the model ranked first among the evaluated methods for accuracy and positive-class F1 on all five datasets. Across seven ablation protocols, differential attention was the only component whose removal reduced both metrics in every case, whereas removing maximum mean discrepancy reduced accuracy throughout. Second, DEP-EEG distinguished within- from cross-population positive-versus-neutral decoding. Accuracy was $0.802$ within healthy controls, 0.704 within participants with depression and 0.591 under healthy-to-depression transfer. Mixed-population development produced $0.581$ accuracy and the highest positive-class F1 (0.498), indicating that greater population diversity alone did not remove the transfer gap. Third, channel- and frequency-resolved analyses on SEED identified a distributed frontal, temporal, central and parietal pattern, an alpha-centred low-to-mid-frequency preference and a six-channel subset that preserved near-full performance. --- ### Machine Unlearning for Speech Question Answering in Large Audio-Language Models Authors: Zhe Liu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13195v1 Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently shown strong capabilities in speech understanding and question answering (QA), but they also inherit privacy risks from large-scale training data, including the unintended memorization of sensitive information. In this work, we study machine unlearning for speech QA in LALMs, a setting that is more challenging than prior work on text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) due to the tight coupling between acoustic perception and factual knowledge. We present and evaluate multiple unlearning strategies, including gradient ascent, task arithmetic, and alignment-based fine-tuning methods that enforce safe refusal responses, to remove private knowledge while still preserving performance on core capabilities. Through extensive experiments on speech QA datasets, we show that these unlearning methods can reduce the privacy leakage rate by up to 80% while maintaining near-neutral performance on non-private speech QA and general speech understanding benchmarks. --- ### Cross Lingual Transfer in Tulu Legal Comprehension: Script-Dependent Improvement and RAG-Induced Knowledge Conflict Authors: Sindhu Shetty, Spurthi Setty, Natan Vidra Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28645v1 Low-resource languages without an adequate training corpus often use a related, higher-resource language as a scaffold for comprehension. Still, there is a need to develop rigorous evaluation methods to identify when models fail in cross lingual low-resource environments. Using the legal domain as a backdrop, three models (Llama3, Hex-1, Sarvam) were tested on the ability to classify legal complaints written in a low resource Dravidian language (Tulu). Transliterating queries across Dravidian scripts allowed models to gain a preliminary understanding of speakers' complaints without the use of wide scale training, though the level of comprehension was heavily script dependent (with Kannada - another relatively low-resource language - producing the strongest positive trend). Retrieving from a corpus of Kannada legal papers across a RAG framework caused mixed results. Some models had a weak positive trend in comprehension under certain conditions, but when models failed, it was often across two axes: fact substitution (fixating on specific passage excerpts that skewed reasoning) and confabulation (hallucination that had no basis in either query or corpus). Within low resource domains, results identify the model's parsing of information and subsequent reasoning as the source of reasoning failure, rather than corpus contents. Script-dependent comprehension and RAG robustness also seem to travel together. This is further supported by the reasoning-trace analysis and a statistical-honesty framework deployed - techniques that are more broadly applicable to low-resource multilingual RAG evaluation. --- ### A Multi-Framework Comparison of Outline Stages in Long-Form Generation with LLMs Authors: Yifan Song Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26177v1 Long-form generation exposes fundamental limitations of large language models. Even 70B-parameter models exhibit length collapse at 16k-token outputs, and multi-chapter stories frequently trigger the attribute drift characteristic of the ``lost-in-the-middle'' effect. The ``outline-first, write-later'' paradigm has gained wide adoption, yet existing research evaluates the final writing rather than the outline itself, conflating two evaluation objects that should be decoupled. We construct a unified head-to-head benchmark covering 7 representative long-form generation frameworks across 3 generation granularities -- single-chapter, multi-chapter, and whole-book -- and propose an anchor-based LLM-as-a-judge protocol that directly assesses outlines against the source text on a 5-point anchored scale. Across 21 framework-granularity cells, no single framework dominates; performance depends on the match between a framework's intrinsic output form and the target granularity. SuperWriter ranks first in the length-constrained single-chapter mode, but this advantage degrades in whole-book mode. The outline-side ranking correlates only moderately with the writing-side ranking, supporting the outline--writing decoupling principle. Compute constraints limit the writing-side evaluation to a subset of cases; follow-up experiments will expand the sample size and add cross-model evaluators to enable stronger statistical inference. --- ### Semantic Variability of Replies Across LLMs: Implications for Designing Conversation-Based Assessment Authors: Jiangang Hao Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24920v1 This study examines whether LLM-generated replies remain semantically consistent when the underlying LLM changes. Using messages from real collaborative conversations, we compared the semantic similarity of generated replies across LLMs under two conditions: with and without preceding chat history. Results show that model choice and conversational context both affect response similarity and alignment with human replies. These findings indicate that prompting and conversational context alone may not be sufficient to preserve response consistency across LLMs, highlighting the need for infrastructure and design strategies that can maintain stable and comparable responses amid the rapid and continuous evolution of LLMs. --- ### Composable Trust Infrastructure for Manufacturing Knowledge Graphs: Cross-System Provenance, Temporal Reasoning, and Decision Traceability Authors: Grama Chethan Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21418v1 Manufacturing knowledge graphs that integrate data from heterogeneous industrial systems face a trust deficit: consumers cannot determine whether queried data is valid, whether it was valid when a decision was made, where it originated, or how it was acted upon. We argue that four trust capabilities -- SHACL validation, PROV-O provenance, domain-aware bi-temporal versioning, and graph-native decision objects -- compose through shared correlation identifiers to produce emergent trust properties that no single capability delivers alone. We present a composable trust infrastructure that integrates these four capabilities into a unified RDF architecture. Capabilities compose through shared entity URIs, ingestion activity identifiers, and temporal correlation keys, enabling compound queries spanning all four dimensions. An experimental ablation confirms that removing any single capability causes exactly three of six composition queries to fail, demonstrating that all four are equally load-bearing. Analysis of higher-order compositions reveals four emergent three-way properties and one irreducible four-way property (full-chain auditability, 31ms execution). The infrastructure is validated on a testbed integrating eleven industrial sources -- OPC UA, TIA Portal, eClass, AAS, ISA-95, ISA-18.2, SAP S/4HANA, Teamcenter, Opcenter EX, Insights Hub, and SCM -- under an 89-class ISA-95-aligned ontology. The unified graph contains 8,743 triples across five named graphs, stitched by 81 owl:sameAs identity edges. Evaluation uses simulated but structurally realistic data from purpose-built emulators; data structures and cross-system linkage patterns are representative of real industrial installations. --- ### Retrieval-grounded robot program generation and simulation-based correction via Model Context Protocol Authors: Zhichao Zhou, Siyuan Chen, Omkar Salunkhe, Ebru Turanoglu Bekar, Johan Stahre, Anders Skoogh Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21417v1 Flexible manufacturing requires industrial robots to be reprogrammed rapidly as product variants change. This paper presents a language-model-based workflow that generates, validates, and iteratively corrects ABB RAPID robot programs from natural language task descriptions. A dual-stream retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline grounds code generation in verified technical documentation and production templates, reducing domain-specific errors produced by ungrounded language models. A custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) server connects the language-model client directly to ABB RobotStudio for automated code upload, simulation execution, and diagnostic feedback. The evaluation combines a 30-query retrieval benchmark, scoped code-generation checks, and RobotStudio case studies in a simulated pickand- place manufacturing cell. The simulation loop exposes execution failures that static and semantic checks alone cannot catch, including suction release-height errors, unreachable placement targets, and configuration-dependent recovery motions. The results show how RAG and MCP can connect grounded code generation with executable feedback from industrial robot simulation software, while reducing but not eliminating expert setup and final supervision. --- ### When Do LLMs Actually Help? Evaluating LLMs as Data Quality Annotators Authors: Praphulla Lal Shrestha Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18158v1 LLMs have been increasingly used to catch data quality issues automatically, but we know very little about how consistent these judgments actually are. This study tests an LLM on two e-commerce data quality tasks, entity matching and brand mislabeling, against rule based baselines and human verified ground truth, under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting. On entity matching while using the Abt Buy benchmark (2,194 labeled pairs), a simple rule based baseline (F1=0.950) performed about as well as LLM zero shot prompting (F1=0.948). Moreover, a few-shot prompt revision that looked effective on a small validation sample reduced full-scale performance to F1=0.914. This showed that small sample prompt evaluation can be misleading. On brand mislabeling detection, using 500 Amazon product listings with synthetically injected labeling errors, the LLM clearly outperformed a naive rule based baseline (F1=0.833 vs 0.721), because it could draw on background knowledge of brand product relationships that a simple rule could not access. Testing consistency across repeated runs (200 pairs, 5 runs at temperature 0.7) showed the model agreeing with itself 99.7% of the time on average, with 99% of pairs giving identical answers across all 5 runs. Using majority voting across these runs only improved F1 by 0.005, at 5 times the inference cost. These results suggest that the value of using an LLM over traditional methods depends heavily on the task. LLMs offer little advantage when strong lexical signals already exist, but a clear advantage when the task requires background knowledge, all while remaining highly consistent across repeated queries. --- ### How Quantum Is the Advantage? A Fair, Calibration- and Noise-Aware Benchmark and Attribution Audit of Quantum Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection Authors: Syeda Anshrah Gillani, Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig, Shahid Munir Shah, Asher Ali, Hamzah Siddiqui Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18155v1 Quantum machine learning (QML) for network intrusion detection (NIDS) is routinely reported to reach near-perfect accuracy, yet the most rigorous studies find that well-tuned classical models remain competitive, and that apparent quantum gains may be artefacts of classical dimensionality reduction and implicit regularisation rather than genuine quantum effects. We ask not whether a quantum model can post a high accuracy, but how quantum the advantage really is. We present a unified, reproducible QML-IDS benchmark evaluating hybrid variational quantum circuits and quantum-kernel SVMs against five honestly-tuned classical baselines across four standard NIDS datasets (NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, CICIDS2017, NF-ToN-IoT-v2) under one leakage-controlled protocol, with an equal-budget feature view, imbalance- and calibration-aware metrics with significance testing, and a simulated NISQ noise sweep. We introduce a quantum-attribution audit (parameter-matched classical controls, a random-feature kernel, and a regularisation sweep) that quantifies how much of any gain is genuinely attributable to the quantum component. Tuned classical models (Random Forest, XGBoost) match or exceed the quantum models on aggregate detection on every dataset, and the audit attributes this to classical preprocessing and regularisation rather than quantum effects. Two advantages survive false-discovery-rate correction: the quantum-kernel SVM out-ranks its direct classical surrogate (a random-feature kernel) on AUPRC and ROC-AUC, and a small four-qubit hybrid out-detects the best classical baseline at the 1% false-positive operating point on the distribution-shifted NSL-KDD task (p = 0.005, BH q = 0.030). Code, seeds, and splits are released; our contribution stands whether quantum wins, ties, or loses. --- ### Iterative Refinement Diffusion for Super-Resolved Data Assimilation of Multiscale Physical Systems Authors: Mrigank Dhingra, Ramchandran Muthukumar, Rebecca Willett, Omer San Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14744v1 Recovering high-resolution states from sparse, low-resolution observations is a central challenge in scientific machine learning and data assimilation. Classical data assimilation exploits temporal information through forecast-analysis cycles, but often requires repeated access to expensive high-resolution forecast models. Generative super-resolution can recover unresolved structure from coarse observations, but is commonly used as a one-shot mapping that does not fully exploit constraints from past states. We introduce Iterative Refinement (IR), a learned data assimilation framework that combines these perspectives. Instead of performing a single coarse-to-fine reconstruction, IR decomposes the task into resolution-wise forecast-analysis operations across a multiresolution hierarchy. At each stage, a shared neural operator with resolution-dependent spectral mode slicing provides a dynamical prior, while a shared conditional diffusion corrector uses the current coarser-resolution state to produce a refined posterior at the next finer resolution. We evaluate IR on one-dimensional stochastically forced Burgers dynamics and two-dimensional Kraichnan turbulence. On the challenging 256x256 Kraichnan benchmark, IR achieves an RMSE of 0.184 and an SSIM of 0.836, outperforming spectral upsampling, one-shot diffusion super-resolution, enhanced deep super-resolution, and an autoregressive forecaster. On the more constrained Burgers testbed, IR remains competitive with one-shot diffusion, which achieves the lowest RMSE. These results show that one-shot generative reconstruction can be effective for simpler settings, while hierarchical forecast-analysis refinement becomes advantageous in strongly multiscale and underdetermined regimes. Overall, IR combines temporal priors, generative correction, and multiresolution reconstruction for learned data assimilation in complex physical systems. --- ### Generative Learning of Separatrices Authors: Ellis R. Crabtree, Dimitris G. Giovanis, Anastasia Georgiou, George Datseris, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, math.DS, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14743v1 The identification and reconstruction of the boundaries separating basins of attraction in multistable, multidimensional dynamical systems presents a fundamental challenge in computational dynamics. These structures govern transition pathways and other important large timescale behavior, yet they remain typically under-sampled since their neighborhood does not get routinely visited during direct simulations. Traditional computational approaches face computational limitations in high-dimensional systems and require a priori knowledge of the dynamical system and its equations. Simplistic sampling methods such as random or uniform sampling of the phase space typically fail to quantitatively approximate separatrices and their structure altogether. We introduce and implement a framework that combines supervised classification with generative modeling to address this challenge. Our approach first trains neural network classifiers on uniformly or randomly sampled initial conditions labeled by their corresponding basins of attraction in the system of interest. Using uncertainty metrics of the trained classifier to quantify decision boundaries, the method then identifies these high uncertainty regions and boundaries of the classifier as preliminary approximate separatrices. Subsequently, score-based generative models are trained specifically on samples from high-uncertainty regions, ultimately generating densities of samples consistent with the empirical density of samples on or close to the manifold that constitutes the separatrix between basins in the sampled region. This approach leverages the complementary strengths of (a) discriminative models for global phase space partitioning and (b) generative models for detailed geometric sampling, resulting in a systematic, iterative, data-driven framework that produces empirically consistent reconstructions of (approximate) separatrix manifolds. --- ### PandasCorpus: A Resource of Real-World Pandas Workflows and Usage Patterns Authors: Syrym Abdikhan, Mazhar Hameed Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14742v1 Pandas has emerged as the de facto library for data processing and machine learning, widely used for tasks, such as data loading, transformation, and analysis. Despite its ubiquity, there has been limited systematic investigation into how Pandas is used in real-world projects and how typical workflows are composed in practice. To address this gap, we introduce PandasCorpus, a dataset curated from GitHub repositories that captures real-world Pandas workflows at scale. In this work, a workflow refers to Pandas-based code contained in Jupyter notebooks, a prevalent medium for writing, executing, and sharing data analysis code. The dataset comprises 139k notebooks from approximately 100k repositories and captures more than 4M Pandas API calls spanning 136 distinct operations. Beyond dataset construction, we characterize workflows using structural and Pandas-specific features and analyze notebook evolution between 2015 and 2025. Our study examines code executability, notebook size, and recurring sequences of Pandas operations, providing empirical insights into how Pandas is used in practice. The resulting corpus offers a reusable resource for studying data analysis workflows, Pandas usage patterns, and library-aware code composition. Both the dataset and the extraction pipeline are publicly available via GitHub and Zenodo. --- ### PolyComp: A Polycube-based Benchmark for Compositional 3D Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Models Authors: Siddharth Patel Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14741v2 We introduce PolyComp, a procedurally generated and verified benchmark that stresses visual recognition and compositional spatial reasoning. In each problem, a model must identify which of four options shows a pair of polycube components that can be combined to form a target solid. The benchmark contains 120 problems across four geometry families, and each problem has three different presentation formats using either a single image or multiple images. The random guessing baseline is 25%. Across the three presentations (360 presented problems per model), GPT-5.6 Sol with max effort attains 50.0% accuracy (95% problem-cluster CI 43.3-56.7%) at a mean cost of \$0.951 per presented problem, Claude Fable 5 with max effort attains 39.4% (33.1-46.1%) at \$0.701, and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview with thinking level high attains 27.5% (22.8-32.5%), near the 25% random guessing baseline, at \$0.350. The observed accuracy spread across geometry families is larger than across presentation formats. We present a problem development and evaluation protocol, cost and token accounting, and release the 120 problems. --- ### From Dense Prediction to Visual Editing: Structured Supervision for Unified Image and Video Creation Authors: Zhefan Rao, Bin Zou, Xuanhua He, Chong Hou Choi, Yanheng Li, Rui Liu, Haoxuan Che, Qifeng Chen Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14740v2 Unified image and video creation requires a model to follow diverse instructions while preserving identity, geometry, and temporal structure from visual context. However, semantic-only conditioning and creation-only training do not explicitly supervise the local structure needed for precise, temporally consistent editing. We therefore formulate depth and surface-normal prediction as image-form denoising targets, using these dense tasks as structured visual supervision within the same creation interface. Our framework decouples semantic interpretation from spatially aligned visual injection while sharing one multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) backbone across all tasks. Mutual Context Attention (MCA), a paired-video data-construction procedure, and a progressive training curriculum then connect the learned structural cues to temporally localized editing and reference-conditioned creation. A single checkpoint obtains the highest overall score in the reported comparison of unified systems (4.15); adding dense supervision improves OpenVE Overall from 3.98 to 4.06 and Local Add from 3.92 to 4.18. These results support a deliberately bounded conclusion: perception-oriented dense supervision transfers useful structural knowledge to downstream creation, especially editing locality and preservation; we do not claim superiority as a standalone dense predictor. --- ### Class Imbalance and Batch Effects in LLM-Based Screening for Systematic Reviews Authors: Gilberto Sussumu Hida, Danilo Monteiro Ribeiro, Clayton Suguio Hida Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14737v1 This study analyses LLMs in imbalanced binary classification, using study screening in systematic reviews as the application domain. An experiment was conducted in five reviews, comparing individual and batch processing, with and without prevalence metadata. The results indicate a limited influence of the prevalence metadata, with no evidence that it improves performance. In contrast, batch processing produced larger behavioral changes that varied according to the prevalence of the class. The aggregate and item-level analyses did not always coincide. Therefore, batch processing should be evaluated not only in terms of cost, but also in relation to its effects on decision-making behavior. --- ### AccretionLink: On-Device Auditing of Exposure-Control Attacks on Attribute Inference Authors: Faruk Alpay, Taylan Alpay Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14735v1 Exposure control lets an adversary rank authentic public posts to strengthen private-attribute inference without altering content. AccretionLink defines confidentiality and integrity games for this attack, models bounded selection odds through partial identification, and constructs dependence-aware time-uniform e-processes. On 52 held-out synthetic profiles, odds-four selection reduced aggregate negative log likelihood at every horizon. At eight posts the advantage was 0.01595 nats (95% CI (0.00890, 0.02336)), three of four target effects survived Holm adjustment, and label-blind model-guided selection caused 6/109 high-confidence false reversals. On 142 PAN15 test profiles, exploratory selection produced a 0.01227-nat advantage but no reversal. A separate TF-IDF selector retained a 0.01470-nat advantage against the unchanged G5 target, while matched identity shuffling did not reproduce it. Pixel 10 encoded all 1,622 held-out posts once with a fallback-free Tensor G5 graph. A P-256 checkpoint authenticated the selected-replay, actual-model, native-report, and operation digests; local KeyInfo identified the signing key as StrongBox-backed. --- ### Unraveling the Size Determination Mechanism of Nanocrystal Synthesis via Interpretable Neural Networks Authors: Kai Gu, Haizheng Zhong Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14734v1 Deep learning models of nanocrystal synthesis enable the prediction of size and shape by encoding precursors and reaction conditions. However, their black-box nature hinders gaining deep insights into the underlying synthetic mechanisms. Here, we develop the Nanocrystal Equation Learner (NanoEQL), a fully white-box neural network to unravel the size determination mechanisms of nanocrystal synthesis. Building on the EQL architecture, eight operators are introduced to replace standard activation functions to fit the mathematical equations in nanocrystal synthesis. Among these operators, three smoothed operators address the gradient explosion of singular operators at zero. To evaluate the weights of different precursors, we develop a temperature-gated attention pooling strategy that encodes concentration-driven and reactivity-driven chemical synthesis mechanisms into the temperature gate. The NanoEQL model illustrates that the final nanocrystal size can be described by a linear equation composed of three scalars representing nanocrystallization capability (-Zp), growth capability (Zrea), and external input potential (-Zops). These interpretable scalars not only advance the rational design of nanocrystal synthesis but also establish a generalizable paradigm for deciphering chemical reaction mechanisms through white-box machine learning. --- ### A Novel Fourier Feature Network for Solving Partial Differential Equations Authors: Qihong Yang, Zhijie Su, Yangtao Deng, Qiaolin He Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14733v1 Building on the foundation of single-hidden-layer neural networks, Fourier Feature Networks (FENs) are proposed, which incorporate Fourier features using $\cos$, $\sin$, or a combination of both. Similar to Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs), FENs employ a single-hidden-layer architecture to generate a set of basis functions. The target function is then approximated as a linear combination of these basis functions, with the coefficients determined using the least squares method. However, unlike ELMs, which often rely on affine transformations to improve representational power, FENs can achieve high-precision solutions without requiring such transformations on the input variables. To evaluate the representational capacity of these networks, we search for an optimal scaling factor within a predefined range for the randomly initialized and fixed weights and biases. By adjusting this scaling factor, we ensure a fair comparison between FENs and ELMs using various activation functions, such as $\text{sigmoid}$, $\tanh$, and $\text{swish}$. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that FENs consistently achieve higher accuracy than ELMs. --- ### Emergence of Transfer Learning towards Specific Identification of Alzheimer's Disease A Prospective Approach Authors: Soumik Podder, Chandramouli Haldar Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14731v1 Worldwide, millions of senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer disease abbreviated as AD, a well- versed form of dementia. AD is featured by amnesia, intellectual disability, and difficulty with consciousness. DL and ML models are undoubtedly explored to identify AD related patterns on large dimensional neuroimaging data but they need global optimization and are suffering from overfitting issue that might yield dissatisfactory result in testing data set. DL overcomes the issue by convolution of input image with kernel but any sudden change in the MRI image or human manipulation, limited pre- processing of the images can mislead CNN in achieving highly accurate detection. Transfer Learning (TL) has proved itself in AD diagnosis by utilizing pre-trained models on large data sets to guide novice model in a new neuroimaging dataset. This review provides an inclusive glimpse of TL implication in classification, identification including the conversion of AD. Keeping in view, we have assessed the strengths and limitations of TL in improvising diagnostic accuracy even with limited data. The uniqueness of the present review is the incorporation of explainable AI in TL based AD diagnosis system. Finally, it can be claimed that the review will guide the new re-searchers in the area of TL induced neurodegenerative disease detection. --- ### IP Protection in the Era of Visual Generative AI: A Survey Authors: Zhuan Shi, Shunchang Liu, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Qian Yang, Han Yu, Cao Yang, Chaochao Chen, Yuping Yan, Yaochu Jin, Golnoosh Farnadi, Lingjuan Lyu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14730v1 The rapid evolution of visual generative AI has introduced a wide range of intellectual property risks, spanning the unauthorized learning, reproduction, extraction, misuse, and redistribution of protected data and model assets. To address these risks, a growing body of technical defenses has been proposed. However, existing surveys typically organize this literature by lifecycle stage or technical mechanism, which can obscure the protective intent of different methods. This survey presents a two-dimensional taxonomy for IP protection in visual generative models. The primary axis is a Control Logic View, which classifies methods into Information Exposure Control, Generative Behavior Constraint, and Attribution & Accountability according to the risk variable they regulate. The secondary axis distinguishes Data IP from Model IP as cross-cutting asset dimensions. Under this framework, we systematically review protection methods, align evaluation protocols with protection objectives, and discuss open challenges including proactive model-level safeguards, standardized evaluation, robustness against adaptive attacks, and explainable evidence. This survey aims to offer a principled, systematic, and easy-to-follow overview for both new and experienced researchers in visual generative AI IP protection. --- ### When Lexical Change Misleads: Rethinking Dynamic Topic Model Evaluation with Traditional and LLM-Based Metrics Authors: Charu Karakkaparambil James Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13835v1 Dynamic topic models capture evolving word distributions, but traditional coherence metrics may fail when vocabulary changes while semantic meaning persists. We evaluate 120 topics from CoNTM and DLDA across NYT, DBLP, and arXiv, using three human annotators and Low, Medium, and High lexical-change categories. Traditional temporal coherence shows highly variable agreement with human judgments ($ρ$=-0.256 to 0.614). In contrast, LLM-based semantic similarity agrees strongly with human semantic judgments for CoNTM on NYT ($ρ$=0.609), DBLP ($ρ$=0.721), and arXiv ($ρ$=0.502), but is less consistent for DLDA. Lexical-change stratification reveals variation hidden by aggregate evaluation. We therefore advocate lexical-change-aware evaluation, jointly reporting traditional coherence and LLM-based semantic measures as complementary rather than interchangeable signals. --- ### AdsWorldEngine: A Self-Evolving Conversational Advertising Agent through Orchestrator and Tool Coevolution Authors: Simiao Zuo, Chenhui Xu, Yimeng Jia, Qiang Lou, Jian Jiao, Denis Charles Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13833v1 Conversational advertising aims to deliver useful ads within multi-turn assistant interactions. Unlike conventional query-based advertising, where the user's intent is often expressed in a short standalone query, conversational ads must infer latent commercial intent from the current user query, the assistant response, and dialogue history while also deciding whether an ad would be helpful rather than intrusive. We propose AdsWorldEngine, an agentic framework for conversational advertising. AdsWorldEngine uses an Opportunity Gate to determine whether ads should be shown, an Orchestrator to generate commercial intents, call advertising tools, and construct a top-3 ad slate, and an Evaluator to score delivered ads for offline optimization. The central contribution is an iterative actor-tool training procedure: we first train the Orchestrator with supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, then use high- and low-reward rollouts to construct preference data to train tools. This creates a self-improving loop in which the system learns not only how to use advertising tools, but also how to improve them from rewarded behavior. To support subjective production decisions, we introduce label grounded judgment modeling, which trains judgment models from human labels collected under explicit guidelines. It enriches labels with thinking traces, filters inconsistent rationales through reflection, and further optimizes binary judgments with a cost sensitive GRPO variant that preserves asymmetric reward gaps. Offline, AdsWorldEngine improves diversity by 60% and relevance by 80% over the current production ad delivery system. In an online A/B test, it increases RPM by 22% and ads coverage by 74%. --- ### VoiceChat-TTS: A Low-Latency Continuous Speech Synthesis Model for Interactive Agents Authors: Edresson Casanova, Jaehyeon Kim, Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor, Shehzeen Hussain, Viacheslav Klimkov, Valentin Mendelev, Mikyas Desta, Paarth Neekhara, Piotr Zelasko, Chen Chen, Elena Rastorgueva, Ke Hu et al. Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13831v1 Spoken dialogue is a natural form of human--computer interaction, yet most speech language models remain limited to turn-based operation and lack real-time adaptability, such as user barge-in. Recent duplex speech-to-speech and speech-to-text models reduce latency by replacing multi-stage pipelines, but often compromise speech quality because accurate ASR, interruption handling, and high-fidelity synthesis must be optimized jointly. We propose VoiceChat-TTS, a low-latency, continuous, and streamable text-to-speech model for interactive agents. VoiceChat-TTS is driven directly by LLM text-token streams, supports explicit interruption via control tokens, and produces silence when no textual input is available. The model enables always-on, responsive speech generation while preserving modularity and high speech quality, and it supports mid-utterance interruptions without resetting the KV cache. --- ### HI-MeshGraphNets: Efficient and Accurate Mesh-based Physics Learning with Hierarchical Multi-scale Graph Neural Networks Authors: SiHun Lee, Dong-Hyuk Park, Taesoo Bang, Seung-Hoon Kang Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13827v2 Machine-learned physical surrogate models have become promising alternatives to mesh-based numerical solvers. Among them, graph neural networks (GNNs) are well suited for representing simulation meshes and learning nodal state evolution through message passing. However, conventional flat message passing becomes inefficient on large, high-fidelity meshes because information propagates only one hop per layer, requiring deep processors for long-range interactions and increasing computational cost, memory usage, and the risk of over-smoothing. To address this limitation, we propose Hierarchical Interpolating MeshGraphNets (HI-MGN), a multiscale extension of MeshGraphNets for efficient long-range communication on unstructured meshes. HI-MGN replaces the flat processor with a hierarchical multiscale processor that coarsens graphs using farthest-point sampling and Voronoi partitioning while preserving the original mesh topology. Message passing on coarse graphs enables information to travel over larger geometric distances with fewer layers, and a learned graph interpolation network reconstructs fine-resolution features. Across three structural and fluid benchmarks, HI-MGN achieves improved accuracy compared with MeshGraphNets and the Bi-Stride Multi-Scale GNN while reducing training time and peak memory usage. The results show that topology-aware hierarchical message passing and learned coarse-to-fine interpolation provide an effective and practical framework for scalable mesh-based physics surrogate modeling. --- ### SPEAR: Structure Property Explainability with Attention Regularization Authors: Aditya Raghavan, Utkarsh Pratiush, Dalton A. Pearl, Jade Holliman, Katharine Page, Philip D Rack, Sergei V Kalinin Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13826v1 Machine learning is increasingly used to learn structure property relationships from spectroscopic and diffraction data, yet its adoption in materials discovery is often limited by poor interpretability of model predictions. Although attention mechanisms are frequently treated as inherently explainable, unregularized attention can yield unstable, fragmented, or intensity driven attribution patterns that obscure the physical origin of these relationships. Here we introduce SPEAR (Structure Property Explainability with Attention Regularization), a framework that constrains attention distributions during training to improve their stability, selectivity, and physical interpretability. SPEAR augments attention based regression with a learnable temperature that controls attention concentration and a smoothness penalty that enforces coherence across neighboring spectral positions, treating attention as a learnable explanatory object rather than a post hoc visualization. Using synthetic spectral benchmarks with known generative structure, we show that attention regularization produces smooth, contiguous attribution profiles aligned with causal features while preserving predictive accuracy. Applied to experimental X ray diffraction data from a combinatorial rare earth zirconate thin film library, the regularized model selectively emphasizes physically relevant diffraction features and decouples feature importance from raw peak intensity. The reflection it identified prompted a reassessment of our earlier structural analysis, revealing a correlation between the 220 peak position, the tetragonal distortion that accommodates cation size disorder, and the local thermal conductivity. Attention regularization therefore provides a principled training constraint for explainable structure property regression, yielding mechanistically meaningful explanations without sacrificing predictive performance. --- ### SDO: Subspace Deconflicting Operator for Multi-Adapter Composition Authors: Zhongsheng Wang, Zhedong Lin, Qian Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Jiamou Liu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13820v1 Composing independently trained adapters within a shared diffusion backbone provides a modular approach to multi-character generation, but naive joint deployment often causes identity mixing, cross-character attribute leakage, and unstable scene composition. We study this interference from a parameter-space perspective and hypothesize that it arises partly from conflicts between overlapping dominant subspaces in shared layers. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{SDO}, a \textbf{S}ubspace \textbf{D}econflicting \textbf{O}perator for multi-adapter composition. SDO reconstructs layer-wise low-rank updates from the selected adapters, extracts compact subspace signatures, measures pairwise conflict through output-subspace overlap, and applies a permutation-equivariant transformation that suppresses harmful shared directions while retaining identity-specific characteristics. The resulting representations are mapped back to standard adapter updates and can be directly incorporated into existing diffusion inference pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that SDO consistently improves identity fidelity and compositional stability, with particularly clear gains as the number of jointly composed adapters increases. --- ### Trajectory Dynamics in Self-Supervised Learning Latent Space for Audio Deepfake Detection Authors: Tomás Andrade Weber Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: eess.AS, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13817v1 Human speech production is constrained by physiology, giving rise to characteristic temporal structure on acoustic signals. We hypothesise that these constraints manifest as structured trajectory dynamics in the latent space of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models, and that synthetic speech violates them detectably. To test this hypothesis, we train a causal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) next-frame predictor on bonafide speech only (Stage 1), using the deepfake-specialised SSL backbone Wav2Vec2-Large-AntiDeepfake, and compare against a static global-average-pooling baseline using identical features, thus isolating the contribution of temporal modelling. A supervised Stage 2, which trains a Multi-Layer Perceptron on the frozen LSTM internal states using labelled data, is included to characterise the role of spoof supervision. Our system achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance across six benchmarks: ASVspoof 2019/2021, Codecfake, In-the-Wild, MLAAD-EN, and Deepfake-Eval-2024, including best published EER on ASVspoof 2021 (0.75\%) and, notably, Stage 1 trained on bonafide speech only surpasses the published supervised baseline from the same backbone on DE2024 (30.35\%). On near-domain benchmarks, static and dynamic approaches perform comparably. On harder cross-corpus benchmarks with diverse synthesis methods, trajectory dynamics provide substantial gains, confirming that temporal physiological constraints carry detection signal beyond utterance-level statistics. --- ### What preferences can - and cannot - predict in multi-agent online learning Authors: Omar Abbadi, Rida Laraki, Panayotis Mertikopoulos Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13810v1 We examine the interplay between ordinal, preference-based solution concepts in games and the long-run behavior of game dynamics, asking in particular to what extent the combinatorial data of a game -- its preference graph -- determine the outcomes of no-regret learning dynamics -- such as follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL). In one direction, we show that the skeleton of every dynamically stable set (i.e. the set of pure profiles it contains) must also be preferentially stable, that is, it must be closed under profitable deviations. We then ask the converse question: when do preferences determine the long-run behavior of the players' learning dynamics? We begin by showing that preferences characterize asymptotic stability in the case of subgames -- i.e. subsets of pure profiles obtained by restricting players' action sets. Beyond this case however, the equivalence between dynamic and preferential stability collapses: concretely, we construct a three-player game with a preferentially stable set whose span is dynamically unstable, showing in this way that preferences do not suffice as a criterion of dynamic stability. We then bridge this gap via the notion of resilience under aggregate deviations, an easy-to-check payoff-based condition that guarantees asymptotic stability of arbitrary spans of pure strategies. --- ### Optimal Power Allocation and AI Receiver Design for Superimposed DMRS and Data Transmission Authors: Sha Hu, Zhongwang Fu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13809v1 In this paper, we consider transmissions with superimposed (SI) demodulation-reference-symbol (DMRS) and data in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. First, we derive an analytical framework to characterize the iterative behavior between the mean-square errors (MSEs) of channel estimation (CE) and MIMO detection (MD) within an iterative CE and detection (ICED) process. This framework is subsequently utilized to optimize power allocation and pilot patterns between the DMRS and data symbols for SI-DMRS transmission. Second, we design an artificial intelligence (AI) based receiver built upon Transformer encoders for SI-DMRS transmissions, which incorporates an iterative CE and detection (ICED) structure. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AI-ICED receiver, combined with SI-DMRS, effectively increases spectral efficiency (SE) compared to conventional systems using non-overlapped DMRS and data symbols. --- ### Label-Free Deep-Tissue Peripheral Nerve Detection with a Handheld Multimodal OCT Probe and NerveDetNet Authors: Yihan Wang, Ruilin You, Shaobai Li, Jiabin Chen, Bofan Song, Anh D. Le, Rongguang Liang Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: physics.optics, cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13807v1 Peripheral nerves buried beneath intact tissue are difficult to visualize during surgery and remain inaccessible to white light wide-field imaging and other surface optical imaging methods. Existing OCT nerve studies have largely relied on exposed nerves or polarization contrast with limited depth penetration, restricting their value for subsurface intraoperative guidance. Here, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first label-free framework for detecting peripheral nerves beneath unopened tissue and resolving their depth using intensity-based OCT structural signatures alone. The framework combines a handheld multimodal probe, integrating swept-source OCT with co-registered white light and autofluorescence imaging, with a ``confirm-then-capture'' workflow designed for practical surgical use. To enable efficient analysis of sparsely sampled OCT volumes, we develop NerveDetNet, a lightweight 2.5D segmentation network that recovers weak and spatially displaced nerve signals by incorporating spatial context, frame-order information, and shift-tolerant correlations across frames through a dedicated nerve feature correlation module. In ex vivo tissue experiments, NerveDetNet consistently outperformed six representative 2D baselines across all frame spacings, achieving a Dice score of 0.725 under the sparsest sampling condition while using approximately half the model parameters. End-to-end validation demonstrated localization of nerves invisible at the surface and depth-resolved detection up to 1.3--1.4~mm below the tissue surface, with OCT derived depth maps overlaid directly onto the surgical view. Together, these results establish a practical label-free approach for subsurface nerve visualization that supports intraoperative compatibility, enables efficient sparse-volume analysis, and provides depth-resolved guidance without tissue opening, contrast agents, or nerve exposure. --- ### Stochastic Control Policies for Robust Molecular Transition Path Sampling Authors: Jingqian Liu, Yu-Hsiang Wang, Yanru Qu, Ge Liu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13800v1 Transition path sampling (TPS) aims to efficiently generate rare molecular transition trajectories between metastable states and is essential for understanding biomolecular mechanisms. Beyond traditional molecular dynamics (MD)-based sampling, machine learning has become central to state-of-the-art TPS. One major class of methods learns control forces during explicit MD rollouts. By preserving the underlying molecular dynamics, these methods tend to produce more physically plausible trajectories than endpoint-conditioned generators that construct paths directly. However, rollout-based control methods have been reported to exhibit unstable and strongly seed-dependent performance. We recast rollout-based control as learning a path-space proposal distribution and investigate stochasticity placement as a design choice for improving exploration and optimization robustness. We develop two stochastic policies: FS-TPS, which directly parameterizes a state-dependent Gaussian distribution over the control policy output, and LaS-TPS, which samples a compact latent control variable and decodes it into structured, cross-atom-correlated force variation. We conduct extensive multi-seed experiments on three biomolecular systems of increasing size: alanine dipeptide, chignolin, and BBL, a fast-folding protein. Stochastic policies consistently improve transition success and path quality over deterministic-policy baselines while substantially reducing sensitivity to random initialization. --- ### Dynamic Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing with Online Requests: Event-Driven Transformer--DRL and Rolling-Horizon Benchmarking Authors: Faezeh Ardali, Gerald M. Knapp Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13799v1 This paper presents an event-driven learning and benchmarking framework for the Dynamic Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with progressively revealed requests and evolving vehicle states. Masked MLP and Transformer policies are trained through behavior cloning and proximal policy optimization. Deterministic feasibility masking prevents invalid vehicle--request assignments, while fixed-prefix/flexible-suffix route commitments protect completed, active, and near-term decisions and separately measure vehicle reassignment and resequencing. The learned policies are compared with dynamic insertion heuristics and time-limited rolling-horizon optimization. In a 20-scenario policy benchmark, all methods completed every request without invalid actions, but nearest feasible achieved the lowest mean objective and outperformed the learned policies in routing quality, waiting time, stability, makespan, and runtime. Across five independent training runs, PPO had little average effect on the MLP and improved the Transformer on average, although with greater seed variability. Under the common protocol, nearest feasible achieved the lowest combined objective and route disruption, whereas rolling horizon achieved the lowest waiting times and makespan at substantially higher computational cost. The learned policies retained millisecond-level decisions and transferred to instances with up to 80 requests without retraining, but did not outperform the strongest heuristic. No single method was best across routing efficiency, service responsiveness, stability, and online computation. --- ### Recent Advances in Deep Learning-Based Drug-Target Binding Affinity Prediction Authors: Jafin Khan, Md Hossain Shuvo Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13797v1 Computational approaches to drug discovery involve multiple sub-problems, and among them, drug-target binding affinity prediction plays an important role. Despite recent advances, accurately predicting binding affinity remains an open research area. The major objective of our paper is to perform a comprehensive review and comparative analysis of recent machine learning methods for drug-target binding affinity prediction, with a focus on identifying strengths, limitations, and research gaps. We review representative recent deep learning approaches that use common benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, covering a range of neural network architectures and representation strategies. In addition, we analyze seven widely used benchmark datasets and commonly adopted evaluation metrics for drug-target binding affinity prediction. Our analysis indicates that although many methods report strong performance on standard benchmarks, their effectiveness is often influenced by dataset bias and limited evaluation settings. Furthermore, most methods exhibit reduced performance in cold-start scenarios, highlighting challenges in generalization. We identify several limitations of current approaches, including dataset imbalance, the lack of standardized evaluation, limited real-world applicability, and challenges in cold-start scenarios. We also discuss future research directions, including better dataset design, more robust evaluation methods, improved handling of cold-start problems, and the integration of multimodal representations. --- ### On the Brittleness of Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Gaussian Process Hyperparameter Optimization Authors: Tyler R. Johnson, Kian Ben-Jacob, Christopher P. Muller, Ramin Bostanabad Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13793v1 Machine learning (ML) has become an indispensable part of modern engineering design workflows. A crucial step in training an ML model is the selection of the loss function which can be systematically formulated via various techniques such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and cross-validation . While MLE is one of the most popular, effective, and intuitive mechanisms for training ML models, it is brittle: if the assumptions underpinning it are not met, the trained ML model may generalize poorly. This brittleness affects even Gaussian processes (GPs) which are widely used in engineering design and are often (incorrectly) presumed to be very robust to overfitting. In this paper, we fundamentally evaluate the brittleness of MLE in the context of training GPs for probabilistic regression or classification tasks. We compare theoretically grounded metrics against MLE and propose practical solutions. Our extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions in downstream design tasks such as Bayesian optimization and provide a blueprint for practitioners to build accurate and robust GPs that can even outperform tabular foundation models in terms of prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, and inference cost. Our contributions are publicly available via GitHub at https://github.com/Bostanabad-Research-Group/GP-vs-TabPFN-vs-GPyTorch. --- ### VLM- and LLM-Driven Multi-Agent System for PET Image Denoising Authors: Boxiao Yu, Savas Ozdemir, Yang Xing, Fumio Hashimoto, Jiong Wu, Yizhou Chen, Axel Rominger, Ruogu Fang, Kuangyu Shi, Tinsu Pan, Kuang Gong Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13791v2 Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging suffers from limited spatial resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio, which can compromise quantitative accuracy and lesion detectability. Deep learning-based denoising methods have demonstrated strong potential for improving PET image quality. However, their practical deployment in real-world settings remains challenging, often requiring multiple specialized models and expert interventions, such as identifying motion-induced misregistration artifacts, estimating noise levels to select an appropriate denoiser, and performing lesion-focused quantitative assessment after denoising. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) for image quality understanding and large language models (LLMs) for contextual reasoning provide new opportunities for automated, decision-driven workflows. Inspired by expert workflows for PET image quality enhancement, we propose an VLM- and LLM-driven multi-agent PET denoising framework that dynamically assesses image quality and lesion status, autonomously selects optimal denoising models and parameters, and enables closed-loop feedback with rollback mechanisms. Experiments were conducted on Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra PET/CT data with 1/20 and 1/50 low-dose settings. Individual module evaluations demonstrated the reliability of the agentic components, while the complete framework achieved higher PSNR and SSIM than UNet, GAN, and DDPM baselines at both dose levels. These preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of using a closed-loop multi-agent framework to adapt PET denoising strategies to different image conditions. --- ### PPAPlace: Differentiable Cross-Stage Objectives for Chip Placement Optimization Authors: Ruogu Chen, Jie Han Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13790v1 Macro placement significantly affects a chip's post-route performance, power, and area (PPA). Most placement methods optimize half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL) as the primary objective. However, recent benchmarking shows a near-zero correlation between HPWL and post-route timing metrics such as the worst negative slack (WNS) and total negative slack (TNS). As a result, all six evaluated artificial intelligence (AI) placers degraded PPA relative to the hierarchical baseline. Recent efforts have tried to train cross-stage predictors to close this gap. However, existing methods focus on macro-only representations and use pre-route metrics as training labels. A label fidelity study of ten circuits at four design flow stages reveals that HPWL and pre-route timing poorly reflect final post-route timing rankings. In contrast, post-global-routing achieves the best balance between final timing fidelity and label generation cost-effectiveness. Based on this finding, PPAPlace is a timing-driven differentiable surrogate predicting post-route PPA from macro and standard-cell placements. The surrogate is a dual-stream predictor that combines graph attention over the chip netlist with spatial convolution over the placement grid. It is trained on post-global-routing labels. The predicted WNS and TNS gradients flow end-to-end back to cell coordinates. PPAPlace exploits these gradients in two ways: as a co-objective injected into an analytical placer's optimization loop (PPAPlace-CoOpt), and as a post-placement refinement step that adjusts macro positions via projected gradient descent (PPAPlace-Refine). On five ChiPBench test circuits excluded from training, PPAPlace improves average WNS and TNS by 22\% and 51\% over the hierarchical baseline while preserving power and routability, using the same predictor without test-circuit retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/ValleyC/PPAPlace. --- ### From Passive Delegates to Strategic Negotiators: Reinforcing Social Reasoning in Small Language Models with SocialRL Authors: Wenyue Hua, Zachary Huang, Tyler Payne, Safoora Yousefi, Saleema Amershi, Asli Celikyilmaz Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13787v1 AI agents increasingly act on their users' behalf, handling tasks such as scheduling meetings, comparing offers, and haggling over prices. These principal-driven tasks routinely place the agent across from a counterpart (another user's agent, a seller, a recruiter) whose goals may conflict with its principal's. Yet the dispositions that make an assistant pleasant can make it a poor delegate: a friendly, helpful frontier model may disclose its principal's private information unprompted and concede at the first sign of resistance. We present SocialRL, a general recipe that trains social reasoning directly, and apply it to a 4B model across six domains: Deal-or-No-Deal, CaSiNo, Craigslist, Job Interview, Calendar, and Marketplace. Every domain is trained in-domain under the same recipe, and every policy is evaluated on all six. We find that (1) in-domain training reaches the frontier: on held-out scenarios the 4B matches or exceeds the GPT-5 family per domain, closing 73-122% of the baseline-to-frontier gap on the negotiation games, with 78% of buyer openings anchoring below target versus 3% untrained; (2) cross-domain transfer follows game structure: structurally paired games lift each other, a broad multi-issue donor lifts nearly all domains, and structurally isolated games transfer nothing; (3) guided by this transfer structure, two strategies, cascade RL and multi-teacher on-policy distillation (OPD), consolidate the per-domain specialists into a single unified 4B that reaches 0.627 average utility across all six environments, matching or exceeding GPT-4.1 (0.625), GPT-5.1 (0.619), and GPT-5.2 (0.613); (4) an explicit theory-of-mind scaffold helps only through training: distilling the ToM trace, rather than actions alone, lifts utility on every environment and generalizes better across them, and of the two ToM skills, only next-action prediction predicts negotiation outcomes. --- ### Do AI chatbots find what experts would? Effects of model, user role, and sample size on study retrieval for medical questions Authors: Qingfang Liu, Qiao Jin, Joe D. Menke, Thorsten Kahnt, Zhiyong Lu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13786v1 Large language model (LLM) chatbots are increasingly used to answer clinical questions with citations to relevant clinical studies. Prior research has largely focused on citation fabrication, leaving a gap in evaluating the quality of retrieved studies and the factors driving their selection. In this study, we evaluated three general-purpose LLM chatbots: Claude Sonnet 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and ChatGPT GPT-5.5. We prompted the models with clinical questions adapted from 20 review questions in Issues 6 and 7 of the 2026 Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, simulating patient, clinician, and evidence-synthesis researcher roles. Each chatbot was queried under each user role with four independent repetitions, yielding 720 responses. Each chatbot was asked to support its answers with primary clinical citations, which we benchmarked against the included and excluded study sets of the Cochrane reviews. On average, a chatbot response retrieved 39.2% $\pm$ 29.8% of Cochrane included studies, while citing 5.0% $\pm$ 9.4% of excluded studies. Recall of Cochrane included studies varied significantly by model and user role. ChatGPT achieved higher recall than Claude or Gemini (63.1% $\pm$ 29.5% vs. 37.0% $\pm$ 23.8% vs. 17.3% $\pm$ 13.1%; $p=2.0\times10^{-5}$). The researcher role yielded higher recall than the clinician or patient roles (42.8% $\pm$ 30.8% vs. 38.6% $\pm$ 28.9% vs. 36.1% $\pm$ 29.3%; $p=2.0\times10^{-5}$). Controlling for publication year, citations per year, and open-access status, sample size was the only independently significant predictor of retrieval (odds ratio 1.80 per 1-unit increase in log sample size, 95% CI 1.37-2.36, $p=2.34\times10^{-5}$). These findings suggest that while LLM chatbots can retrieve some studies identified by expert reviewers, their performance varies by model and user role, and they exhibit a bias toward clinical trials with larger sample sizes. --- ### Doomed to Re-Annotate, Forever: The ImageNet Story Authors: Illia Volkov, Nikita Kisel, Tetiana Mishkina, Klara Janouskova, Jiri Matas Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13783v1 Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k remains the most commonly reported metric in visual recognition. Quality issues with the dataset have been repeatedly reported, yet the original 2012 noisy labels are still predominantly used. The paper presents a comprehensive effort, which goes well beyond prior correction attempts, towards obtaining accurate and complete ImageNet-1k validation set annotations. The result, ReImageNet, includes multilabel correction, object localization, revised class definitions, and semantic attributes (text-recognition, rendition, reflection, crowd, dominant). The reannotation reveals that approximately 12% of the original ImageNet-1k labels are incorrect, 33.3% of images are multilabel and 3.8% contain no object from an ImageNet-1k class. With the new labels, top-1 accuracy increases by up to 1.2% for supervised models and by 5-6% for MLLMs. We argue that annotation at ImageNet scale cannot realistically be completed in one pass, as errors and definitional issues are discovered only through annotating, and we build our pipeline around repeated refinement and error checking. We observed that human and LLM collaboration with appropriate tooling represents the current quality ceiling for annotation at this scale. ImageNet-1k issues propagate into its derivative test sets, indicating that the problem is structural rather than specific to any single benchmark. All annotations, class definitions, guidelines, and analysis code have been publicly released. Project page: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/reimagenet Annotations: https://huggingface.co/datasets/vrg-prague/ReImageNet Code: https://github.com/klarajanouskova/ImageNet --- ### FLARE MCMC: Fidelity-based Layer-Adaptive REcursive proposals for MCMC Authors: Harini Venkatesan, Christian Shelton, Ming-Feng Ho, Simeon Bird, Mengxuan Wu Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13774v1 Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires only the ability to evaluate the likelihood, making it a common technique for inference in complex models. However, it can have a slow mixing rate, requiring the generation of many samples to obtain good estimates and an overall high computational cost. FLARE MCMC is a multi-fidelity layered MCMC method that exploits lower-fidelity approximations of the true likelihood calculation to improve mixing and leads to overall faster performance. Such lower-fidelity likelihoods are commonly available in scientific and engineering applications where the model involves a simulation whose resolution or accuracy can be tuned. Our technique uses recursive, layered chains with simple layer tuning; it does not require the likelihood to take any form or have any particular internal mathematical structure. We demonstrate experimentally that FLARE MCMC achieves larger effective sample sizes for the same computational time across different scientific domains including hydrology and cosmology. --- ### CutClean: Neural Network Pruning for Privacy-Preserving Inference Authors: Leonardo Magliolo, Vito Paolo Pastore, Giuseppe Valenzise, Enzo Tartaglione Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13773v1 Neural networks are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications with growing privacy leakage concerns. We show that this privacy leakage can occur even in the absence of representation imbalances that lead to traditional dataset biases. This poses significant privacy risks when deploying models that process sensitive attributes. In this context, we propose CutClean, a privacy-aware pruning method that allows to reduce privacy information flow through the network, while increasing its sparsity. Our approach employs auxiliary linear privacy heads placed at each network's block to quantify information leakage, and further applies increasing levels of sparsity to remove the private attribute leakage, measured in terms of the accuracy of the privacy head attached to the last block. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively minimizes private information flow while achieving high sparsity rates and preserving classification target accuracy. --- ### Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spatially Independent Multispectral Land Classification Authors: Katherine L. Bauer, Teemu Harkonen, Simo Sarkka, Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13769v1 Land classification from satellite imagery is important for land management, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. Machine learning methods such as random forests and multilayer perceptrons have shown strong performance on multispectral data, while the Kolmogorov-Arnold network has emerged as an alternative architecture with compact model structures. This study evaluates the Kolmogorov-Arnold network for land classification using Landsat 8 imagery and compares it with random forest and multilayer perceptron models. The models were trained and tested on data from Edmonton, Alberta and evaluated on an independent dataset from Calgary, Alberta across five land classes: agriculture, urban, water, forest, and bare ground. For the Calgary dataset, the Kolmogorov-Arnold network matched the accuracy of the random forest and outperformed the multilayer perceptron, while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters and providing greater interpretability. --- ### Simulation-Aware In-Context Policy Improvement for LLM-Aided Analog Layout Refinement Authors: Bingyang Liu, Ziming Wei, Xiaohan Gao, David Z. Pan Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13767v1 Analog IC layout design remains a labor-intensive iterative process dominated by simulation-driven refinement. Although end-to-end layout generators accelerate initial placement and routing, they still require experts to manually tune layout optimization parameters with repeated post-layout simulations for stringent design specifications. While Bayesian Optimization (BO) is widely adopted for parameter tuning in analog IC design, at the layout level it typically requires hundreds to thousands of evaluations, each involving costly parasitic extraction and post-layout simulation, which makes it impractical. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in improving the sample efficiency of such simulation-driven tuning. However, their restricted access to geometric layout context and design-specific heuristics limits their ability to manipulate the layout optimization process. In this paper, we propose a simulation-aware LLM multi-agent framework that performs in-context policy improvement (ICPI) by iteratively updating layout optimization parameters exposed by an analog layout generator through an act-observe-reflect loop on compact structured layout representations. Experiments on real-world analog circuits show that, with only tens of post-layout simulations, our approach improves post-layout performance over the generator's built-in heuristics and BO-based tuning method. --- ### ChartProbe: A Diagnostic Study on Visual Reasoning through Perception, Grounding, and Simple Reasoning Authors: Mahsa Khoshnoodi, Sarah Adel Bargal Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13766v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on chart questions that require reasoning over visual quantities, and this weakness is usually attributed to a reasoning deficit and addressed with more reasoning supervision. We ask whether the difficulty lies in reasoning itself, or in the simpler skills that reasoning operates on: reading the plotted elements (\emph{perception}), locating them and binding them to their labels (\emph{grounding}), and performing single-step computations such as ranking, totals, and differences (\emph{simple reasoning}). We introduce \textbf{ChartProbe}, a diagnostic framework whose probes are generated directly from the code that renders each chart, so every gold answer is exact by construction, needs no human annotation, and attributes each failure to a single skill. ChartProbe enables an intervention prior work does not attempt: instead of synthesizing complex-reasoning data, we withhold complex questions and reasoning traces entirely, fine-tune on one simple skill at a time, and measure transfer to held-out complex-reasoning questions. Across three open-weight VLMs, supervising the simpler skills alone produces large gains on complex-reasoning questions the model never trained on: where these skills are weak and the model can be taught to read the image, training them recovers much of complex reasoning at no reasoning-data cost. The gains hold across three out-of-distribution settings: an unseen chart type (pie charts), a human-written benchmark disjoint from our images and templates (ChartQA), and a non-chart visual domain (CLEVR). Complex visual reasoning can therefore improve without complex-reasoning supervision. --- ### Amplified Does Not Mean Predictive: Reasoning Behaviors in Thinking Models Authors: Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Leena Mathur, Yonatan Bisk, Robert Hawkins, Graham Neubig Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13760v1 Which reasoning behaviors are associated with correct answers in reasoning models, and does reasoning-oriented training amplify those behaviors? This distinction is important because reasoning-oriented training can make traces look more deliberative without amplifying the behaviors most tied to model correctness. We quantify this mismatch with Behavioral Lift, a metric that measures how much correctness changes when a behavior is present versus absent in a model's reasoning trace. Across 15 models and 6 benchmarks spanning text-only and vision-language reasoning, we annotate 15,282 traces with a taxonomy whose core behaviors are defined for both LLM and VLM traces. We find evidence for an Amplification-Lift Gap, in which thinking models strongly amplify self-correction, hypothesis testing, and uncertainty acknowledgment, while the highest-lift behaviors are confidence calibration, knowledge alignment, and self-awareness. Confidence calibration is among the strongest positive signals of correctness in both modalities, yet is barely amplified; uncertainty acknowledgment is amplified by 3--7$\times$, yet is weakly or negatively associated with correctness. We find that reasoning-oriented training does not preferentially amplify the highest-Lift behaviors, motivating process-level objectives that reward calibrated and grounded reasoning rather than surface form alone. --- ### The Integer Alibi: Localizing Cross-Kernel Divergence in INT8-Quantized LLM Inference Authors: Teng-Ruei Chen Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13756v2 Two GPU kernels implementing the same scaled INT8 GEMM interface are usually treated as interchangeable. We test that assumption: holding the checkpoint, prompts, hardware, inference engine, decoding, and quantization configuration fixed, we swap only the INT8 linear kernel (CUTLASS versus Triton) inside vLLM. At 1.7B each arm reproduces itself bit-for-bit across cold restarts, yet the arms agree on no sequence in any end-to-end comparison we ran (0/8, 0/16, and 0/64). What makes this more than a benchmark discrepancy is an integer alibi: for shared INT8 operands under a verified no-overflow bound, the INT32 dot product is exact and order-independent, so the accumulator cannot be the source of any difference. Feeding both kernels identical operands from every linear layer of Qwen3-1.7B and 8B (196 and 252 layers), we find bit-identical outputs under power-of-two scales, confirming a pinned prediction list 196/196 and 252/252 (pre-registered at 1.7B, pinned but not blind at 8B), and observed differences of at most one bfloat16 spacing under the checkpoints' real scales. This localizes the divergence to scale application and output rounding after the exact accumulator. Applied as a probe checkpoint, the same intervention restores end-to-end bitwise agreement (8/8 and 16/16 sequences). Cross-implementation FP8 GEMM shows a different signature: both the prevalence and the magnitude of differences grow with reduction depth, while the INT8 fraction stays at parts per million and within one spacing over a 64x range of K. Teacher-forced replay ties layers to tokens: flips concentrate at small logit margins, which predict flip risk with ROC-AUC 0.94 on 16,384 positions. We will release the pre-registration, per-layer predictions, manifests with kernel-selection evidence, and a conformance procedure that turns these controls into a concrete check for kernel interchangeability. --- ### Explanation Multiplicity: Circuit-Level Interpretability Evidence Does Not Survive Defensible Analytic Variation Authors: Ajay Pravin Mahale Published: 2026-08-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13754v1 The EU AI Act requires providers of high-risk systems to file technical documentation describing how the system reaches its decisions. Mechanistic interpretability is the obvious source of such evidence, and circuit discovery is its most developed instrument. We ask whether that evidence survives the condition under which it would be relied upon: two competent analysts, the same system, the same tool, different defensible settings. We pre-registered a crossed grid of seven analytic axes, every level taken from a published implementation, and mapped each discovered circuit through a deterministic claim map to a structured Annex IV statement. Across 15,840 pre-registered specifications on GPT-2 small and the indirect object identification task, of which 7,561 produced a claim, the derived statement flips across 73.2% of specification pairs (95% CI 0.725 to 0.738) and the modal claim commands 41.1% of the space. The evidence fails a filability criterion at every tolerance a conformity assessment body would plausibly accept. Standardising the single most influential choice, the evaluation metric, leaves the flip rate at 59.4%. Removing circuit size from the claim entirely and holding it fixed leaves 27.1% (95% CI 0.255 to 0.286), still above the pre-registered threshold. The circuits underlying these claims are structurally near-disjoint, median pairwise Jaccard overlap 4%, and functionally uncorrelated at Cohen's kappa 0.015, so the instability is not one mechanism described in different words. We give the filability criterion as a standalone protocol, and we report that one of the seven documented discovery objectives does not execute at all on the library's own canonical task. The study covers one model and one task, and whether the conclusion holds at scale is untested. ---