# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 140 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #6951–7000 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/140 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/139.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/141.md) ### Spatial Attention Noise Masking for Causally Sufficient Interpretability Authors: Benjamin Formby, Kuang-Ching Wang, D Hudson Smith Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14725v1 We present a novel causal approach to interpretability for computer vision models that dynamically masks the input image prior to classification. The interpretability of deep learning predictions is critical in high-stakes fields such as medical imaging, security, and autonomous driving. Most interpretability methods are applied passively to already trained models, which typically result in correlational rather than causal explanations. Existing causal interpretability methods are limited to post hoc analysis, weakening the causal claims. Additionally, existing active methods generally lack explanations that explicitly assign responsibility to input features. This work proposes a spatial attention noise masking framework that provides causal explanations about the features sufficient for the prediction. The proposed framework consists of: 1) a UNet-style mask generator, and 2) a Resnet18 encoder and linear classifier that classifies both masked and unmasked versions of an input image. The generated masks are regularized to be sparse and spatially smooth, while masked image embeddings are constrained to remain consistent with embeddings from the corresponding unmasked images. The resulting masks can be interpreted as feature attribution maps that are competitive with related interpretability methods while additionally providing strong causal explanations of model predictions. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate mask faithfulness, near-baseline classification performance across five classification tasks despite substantial masking of image information, and robustness to distribution shifts such as background swapping and natural adversarial examples. Qualitative comparisons further demonstrate mask behavior and competitive interpretability relative to state-of-the-art feature attribution methods. --- ### Privacy-Preserving Dataset Curation for Kuala Lumpur Urban Traffic: Grounded Vision-Language Detection with Spatial Vehicle-Context Filtering Authors: Mohammed Abdul Al Arafat Tanzin, Rudzidatul Akmam Dziyauddin Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14724v1 The rapid advancement of intelligent transportation systems and autonomous driving relies heavily on multi-modal urban traffic datasets. However, curating high-fidelity video imagery in complex tropical urban environments---specifically Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia---presents severe challenges for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) anonymization due to high motorcycle density, dark acrylic license plates, dynamic camera tilt, and extreme tropical glare. We propose an automated anonymization framework tailored for the Kuala Lumpur Road Dataset, captured via a mobile cycling platform at 2 FPS. We document how legacy Haar cascades and YOLOv8 fail under these conditions---generating false positives on background elements while missing rotated or occluded targets. Our architecture resolves this by integrating Grounding DINO---a zero-shot open-set vision-language transformer---with a novel Spatial Vehicle Region of Interest (ROI) Containment Engine. By requiring license plate centroids to reside within validated vehicle boundaries, the pipeline suppresses environmental false positives while automatically obfuscating faces, heads, and license plates. An initial evaluation on 1,266 frames demonstrates a $\sim$95\% success rate, with remaining failures restricted to small, heavily occluded, oblique, or ambiguous targets. Coupled with temporal persistence mechanisms and an automated quality-control auditor, the framework minimizes privacy-related false negatives while preserving scene context for downstream vision tasks. While formal legal compliance depends on broader governance procedures, this publicly available pipeline and demonstration notebook provide an auditable preprocessing stage for privacy-aware dataset curation. --- ### A Vision Transformer for ECG-Based Detection of Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction Across Multiple Clinical Sites Authors: Burcu Ozek, Aruna Mohan, David Vorchheimer, Daniel Weiss, Eyal Kedar, Tamar Sobol, Or Zilbershot, Fatemeh Afghah Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14723v1 Reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is frequently asymptomatic and often detected only after advanced heart failure develops. Electrocardiograms are recorded routinely yet underused for this condition, because reduced LVEF has no single diagnostic waveform. We trained an ensemble of vision transformers from scratch to detect reduced LVEF ($\leq$40%) from 12-lead ECGs, analyzing each heartbeat individually, using 10,142 patients across seven sites in three US health systems. In a held-out external cohort of 4,092 patients from three geographically independent US clinical sites at a real-world reduced-LVEF prevalence of 8.72%, the model achieved an AUROC of 0.88 (95% CI 0.86-0.89), sensitivity 81.2%, specificity 81.0%, and negative predictive value 97.8%. Sensitivity remained high across sex, race, ethnicity, and comorbidity subgroups, while specificity was lower in older patients and those with atrial fibrillation or cardiomyopathy. Beat-level attention maps provided interpretability into the model's predictions, showing consistent focus on the QRS complex rather than the P wave. These findings support the potential of routine ECGs as a scalable first-pass triage step to identify patients who should undergo echocardiography for reduced ejection fraction across diverse patient populations. --- ### Braided Vision Transformer for Stroke Detection in Multi-view Retinal Fundus Imaging Authors: Aysen Degerli, Mika Hilvo Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14722v1 Stroke remains a leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide, emphasizing the importance of its accurate and immediate assessment. Retinal fundus imaging has emerged as a promising modality for stroke assessment, as the retina reflects cerebrovascular and neurological risk factors. Contrary to conventional neuroimaging techniques, retinal fundus imaging offers a non-invasive, cost-effective, and portable alternative for rapid screening. This paper explores the feasibility of retinal fundus imaging for stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA) detection using macula-centric and optic nerve head-centric views captured from both eyes. Our study introduces, to the best of our knowledge, the first vision transformer model for retinal fundus imaging in stroke assessment, offering a novel approach for capturing retinal patterns. Thereby, we propose the Braided Vision Transformer (BViT) model, which extracts representative features from the given multi-view images while simultaneously capturing inter-view relationships across both eyes, enabling a more informative understanding of retinal biomarkers associated with cerebrovascular events. Experiments conducted on our collected Stroke-Data dataset demonstrate that BViT achieves an AUC score of 0.75 for stroke detection, outperforming regular vision transformers. --- ### AeroGround: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Aerial-Ground Collaborative Reasoning Authors: Shenghong Yi, Lin Zhang, Muzian Li, Jiakang Yuan, Haoyu Zhang, Peng Ye, Jiayuan Fan, Huafeng Qin, Tao Chen Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14721v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely employed in understanding and reasoning tasks for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Existing UAV benchmarks primarily focus on aerial-view scenarios. However, whether current VLMs can perform well on understanding and reasoning tasks in aerial-ground collaborative scenarios which are practical in real-world applications like rescue and infrastructure inspection remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AeroGround, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning. AeroGround is built upon a simulated aerial-ground dataset containing approximately 29,000 multimodal observation groups from diverse open environments, and provides 2,250 high-quality question-answering instances covering cross-view correspondence, spatial understanding, and reasoning. Experiments on 16 pretrained VLMs, together with two domain-adapted variants, reveal a substantial gap between current models and human performance: the best model achieves an average accuracy of 54.4%, whereas humans reach 93.3%. By systematically revealing the strengths and limitations of existing models in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning, AeroGround provides a foundation for developing more capable aerial-ground collaborative embodied intelligence systems. --- ### Multi-Agent Closed-Loop Reasoning for Organic Structure Elucidation from Multimodal Spectra Authors: Bingsen Xue, Zhuojun Jiang, Jianhao Zhang, Mingcheng Gu, Yizhe Yuan, Yongtai Zhuo, Yifan Zhang, Li Wang, Ya Su, Yue Yuan, Jiang Liu, Xueqian Kong et al. Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14720v1 Following the molecular discovery and synthesis revolutions, scalable automated structure elucidation from routine spectroscopic data remains an outstanding challenge. Despite decades of computational efforts, no existing system achieved reliable reasoning over unseen spectra. Here, we propose MACROS, a multi-agent system automating structure elucidation by emulating expert iterative hypothesis-testing. Trained on 100M simulated and 1.6M experimental spectra-molecule pairs, it natively supports arbitrary combinations of routine spectroscopic techniques. It achieves unprecedented zero-shot generalization to diverse real-world samples, correctly identifying synthetic compounds, natural products and metabolites above 500 Da with 1D NMR. Remarkably, MACROS spontaneously recovers textbook spectroscopic correlations from unassigned data and exhibits emergent chemical intuition such as a ring-first parsing preference, learning fundamental chemical principles rather than memorizing database patterns. MACROS augments chemists via collaboration to deliver sixfold faster, 40% more accurate elucidation. MACROS establishes a scalable foundation for fully automated structure elucidation, and catalyzes accelerated molecular discovery toward autonomous laboratories. --- ### DeCo-MIL: Debiased Counterfactual Reasoning for Long-Tailed Whole Slide Image Analysis Authors: Xiaoxiao Li, Xitong Ling, Jiawen Li, Weiming Chen, Zhenyang Cai, Xidong Wang, Tian Guan, Benyou Wang, Yonghong He Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14719v1 Multiple instance learning (MIL) is widely used for weakly supervised whole slide image (WSI) analysis. However, under long-tailed distributions, MIL-based WSI analysis faces a nested dual long-tail: an inter-slide class long tail and an intra-slide long tail of instance-level discriminative evidence. The two long tails are coupled: tail classes have few training slides, while their limited diagnostic evidence is concentrated in a few patches and obscured by abundant within-bag redundancy. This coupling biases models toward head classes and degrades rare-class recognition. To address this, we propose DeCo-MIL for long-tailed WSI analysis, which jointly alleviates the nested dual long-tail through frequency-debiased counterfactual reasoning. For the inner long tail, DeCo-MIL clusters patches into tissue-morphology anchors, replaces each anchor with its matched normal prototype to perform a counterfactual intervention, and estimates its counterfactual contribution to the ground-truth class using class-frequency-corrected predictions. These contributions guide redundancy masking to preserve scarce discriminative instances. For the outer long tail, DeCo-MIL constructs anchor-stratified pseudo-bags from redundancy-reduced bags and combines tail-aware oversampling with consistency regularization, increasing effective supervision for tail classes while preserving tissue-morphology composition. Extensive experiments on three long-tailed WSI benchmarks demonstrate that DeCo-MIL achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tail-class recognition and overall classification. --- ### VideoGAIA: A Benchmark for General AI Assistants on Agentic Video Understanding Authors: Fan Zhang, Guangming Yao, Jinyang Wu, Hao Wu, Zheng Lian, Xinyu Geng, Jingdong Chen, Yi Yuan, Pheng-Ann Heng Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14718v1 Video understanding is a fundamental task for evaluating the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing leading models have already achieved approximately 90% accuracy on the Video-MME leaderboard, suggesting that conventional single-turn video understanding tasks are becoming increasingly saturated and insufficient for assessing the intelligence of advanced MLLMs. Towards this end, we introduce VideoGAIA, an agentic video understanding benchmark for general artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. Moving beyond one-shot video question answering, VideoGAIA formulates video understanding as a multi-turn, tool-augmented interaction process, where models must iteratively perceive videos, invoke external tools, gather complementary information, and integrate multimodal evidence across turns. VideoGAIA contains 271 model-human co-designed tasks covering diverse and complex real-world scenarios. Each video-question-answer instance is independently verified by three human experts to ensure both correctness and appropriate difficulty. All evaluated MLLMs, including frontier models such as GPT-5.5 and Kimi-K3, achieve less than 60% accuracy on VideoGAIA, highlighting its value as a high-quality and timely benchmark for evaluating next-generation MLLMs. We hope that VideoGAIA will facilitate the transition from conventional video understanding toward agentic video understanding. --- ### Local Gains and Fixed-Assignment Set Losses in Shared Set Decoders Authors: Ze Zhang, Yang Zhang Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14717v1 A query-relation deletion can improve the edited slot while reducing the utility of the prediction set that contains it. We study this tension in two related ResNet-50 DETR-family checkpoints using recorded, selection-conditional evidence from 710 paired image-relation units per checkpoint. The primary comparison subtracts a matched active control, which deletes the same leader source at a different recorded recipient, from the selected target deletion. It is therefore a composite contrast rather than a same-recipient placebo. The target-minus-control contrast is locally positive and fixed-assignment negative in both checkpoints. The opposite-sign pattern occurs within 302/710 DETR units and 460/710 DINO units. After rematching, the corresponding counts are 285/710 and 433/710. Rematching and native selection absorb enough of the mean loss for DETR intervals to cross zero, whereas DINO intervals remain negative, so persistence across readouts differs by checkpoint. A fixed-map comparison between hard deletion and a mass-preserving edit also differs before rematching. That comparison is conditional on the outcome-blind map and does not establish same-dose transport. Local intervention success therefore does not determine the consequence for a jointly decoded set. The supported conclusion is selection-conditional deletion sensitivity whose persistence depends on the readout and intervention operator. We do not identify an intervention-invariant edge mechanism, detector-level degradation, population prevalence, or the value of a training-time regularizer. --- ### Koopman early warning signals for bifurcation and rate-induced tipping Authors: Juan Nathaniel, Carla Roesch, Derek DeSantis, Parvathi Kooloth, Hang Fan, Valerio Lucarini, Anastasia Romanou, Pierre Gentine Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: nlin.CD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14716v1 Abrupt transitions in complex systems are often preceded by early warning signals. However, most indicators rely on the notion of critical slowing down and do not generally extend to rate-induced tipping where transitions can occur without local loss of stability. This is problematic in stochastic, nonautonomous systems where internal variability and time-varying variables interact to shape tipping onset. We use Koopman operator theory to develop a unified early warning framework for both bifurcation and rate-induced tipping in stochastic systems. Our approach builds on residual Koopman mode decomposition that measures discrepancies between dynamics and their finite-dimensional approximation, and extends it to the control setting by augmenting the observable space with time-varying control variables. In idealized examples, the resulting indicators recover expected signatures near bifurcation points and improve detection in rate-induced regimes where classical indicators fail. We further show that learned embeddings through deep learning outperform prescribed dictionaries, especially in a high-dimensional setting. Applied to simulations of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, our Koopman-based indicators distinguish tipping from non-tipping trajectories and reveal interpretable spectral signatures prior to critical transition. --- ### Algorithm Design and Physician Liability Authors: Shujie Luan, Shubhranshu Singh, Tinglong Dai Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, econ.TH arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13618v1 A single clinical algorithm can deliver unequal accuracy across patient groups, and concern about such disparity has grown as artificial intelligence (AI) spreads through clinical decision-making. In response, a liability rule introduced in the United States holds healthcare providers responsible when their reliance on disparate algorithms contributes to erroneous clinical decisions. We examine how such liability considerations reshape (i) an AI firm's algorithm design decisions that drive group-specific accuracy and (ii) a physician's decisions to use AI in healthcare delivery. The AI firm designs an algorithm for two patient groups, and improving accuracy for the disadvantaged group is more costly. The physician (who remains the accountable decision-maker) then decides whether to consult AI, weighing the reduction in clinical uncertainty against expected liability exposure when AI errors disproportionately affect the disadvantaged group. We find the liability rule can induce disparate use of AI: the physician may reduce AI use overall and, over an intermediate range of liability, rely on AI less for disadvantaged patients. The effect is non-monotone. As liability increases, the physician's use of AI for disadvantaged patients first declines, then rises as the firm reallocates investment toward reducing disparity or switches to an equal-accuracy design. Mandating equal algorithmic accuracy across patient groups can then inadvertently harm both groups, because a uniform accuracy requirement distorts the firm's investment incentives and the physician's equilibrium AI-use decisions. --- ### How Compliant is Sepsis Treatment? An Expert-Guided Neuro-symbolic Pipeline for Generating Clinical Compliance Insights Authors: Himanshu Tripathi, Kaushik Roy, Subash Neupane, Shahram Rahimi Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13617v1 Verifying whether clinical care follows evidence-based protocols is a natural neuro-symbolic problem, yet the safety-critical setting defeats either paradigm alone. We present an expert-guided pipeline that constrains a large language model strictly to semantic normalization, mapping messy drug and microbiology strings onto a fixed clinical vocabulary, while a Sugeno fuzzy inference system reasons over the normalized events. The fuzzy layer encodes eight Surviving Sepsis Campaign bundle rules and replaces binary judgments with graded scores in (0,1). Applied to 2,438 MIMIC-IV v3.1 sepsis episodes, it surfaces antibiotic timing as the most critical breakdown (mean 0.24, 13% within one hour), Hour-1 underperformance (mean 36.7%), a 51% elevated-lactate drop-off, and descriptive differences in ICU stay across compliance groups (3.8 versus 5.1 days). --- ### Adjacency-Based Spectral Proxy Control of Mobile Communication Agents Authors: Mariana del Castillo, Federico Larroca Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG, cs.MA, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13616v1 We consider a heterogeneous mobile-agent network composed of uncontrolled task agents and controllable communication agents. The objective is to reposition communication agents online as task agents move. Since throughput-based objectives are generally unsuitable for real-time control, spectral graph metrics such as algebraic connectivity are commonly adopted as surrogate objectives. However, controlling algebraic connectivity relies on the eigenvector corresponding to the second-smallest eigenvalue of a graph's Laplacian matrix (i.e., the Fiedler vector), whose distributed estimation requires an unbounded number of communication rounds to converge. In this work, we identify a structural decomposition of this Fiedler-gradient controller into a local interaction rule and a graph embedding component, suggesting the use of alternative embeddings that are easier to estimate distributively than the Fiedler vector. As a particular instance, we propose A-Fiedler, which replaces the Fiedler embedding with the dominant eigenvector of the adjacency matrix, commonly used as a graph embedding of nodes into a latent geometry. This representation is more naturally suited for distributed implementation under local communication constraints. We evaluate A-Fiedler against the classical Fiedler-gradient controller. Results show comparable network performance in the absence of communication constraints and improved robustness under distributed estimation. For instance, under the same number of communication rounds, the Fielder-gradient may even converge to disconnected configurations whereas our proposition maintains performance. We believe our contribution provides a simpler path toward distributed network control. --- ### VoiceDesigner: Text-to-Voice Generation and Editing via Unified Diffusion Modeling and Data Augmentation Authors: Jiarui Hai, Karan Thakkar, Ke Chen, Yunyun Wang, Jiaqi Su, Rithesh Kumar, Mounya Elhilali, Zeyu Jin Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: eess.AS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13613v1 Recent breakthroughs in generative models have made text-to-voice generation (TTV) possible, enabling the synthesis of speech directly from textual voice descriptions. However, existing systems face two key challenges. First, they struggle to generate a diverse range of voices, spanning real-world human speakers and fictional characters. Second, they lack robust and flexible voice editing capabilities, such as voice cloning and the ability to modify attributes like emotion and tone. In this paper, we propose VoiceDesigner, a unified framework for text-to-voice generation and editing that supports diverse and controllable voice design. To tackle the above challenges, we propose solutions from two perspectives. First, we develop a hybrid data pipeline that leverages digital signal processing techniques and speech generation models to construct a diverse voice dataset covering both real-world and fictional voices. Second, we introduce a diffusion transformer with architectural improvements to better handle complex conditioning and enhance multi-task performance, enabling unified voice generation and editing. Through subjective and objective evaluations, VoiceDesigner achieves superior prompt alignment with both voice descriptions and editing instructions, while maintaining competitive perceptual quality and voice usability compared to state-of-the-art TTV models. --- ### SemPlan: Benchmarking Structured Semantic Planning for LLM-Based Queries over Enterprise Data Authors: Bruno Santos Teixeira Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13612v1 Natural-language interfaces to enterprise data must translate underspecified requests into governed, executable behavior while controlling invalid queries, policy failures, cost, and nondeterminism. SemPlan Benchmark evaluates this architectural design space with a deterministic synthetic bilingual benchmark containing 1,800 cases in English and Brazilian Portuguese; 1,200 cases form the frozen scientific evaluation subset. Four architectures are compared under the same model configuration: direct SQL generation (A1), a bounded tool-agent baseline (A2), structured semantic-request generation followed by deterministic planning and execution (A3), and a clarification/stateful semantic-plan variant (A4). Across 4,800 primary records, answer correctness was low in absolute terms: 22.25% for A1, 22.58% for A2, 25.67% for A3, and 24.25% for A4. A3 had the highest observed correctness and significantly exceeded A1, A2, and A4 in the pre-specified paired correctness analysis, while A1 retained the highest policy-correct rate and the lowest unsafe-or-invalid rate. A4 had the lowest mean API cost and lowest false-refusal rate. On a preselected 150-case stability subset, answer-correct repeatability ranged from 92.00% to 98.67%. The results support a trade-off interpretation rather than a universal ranking: additional structural constraints changed failure modes and efficiency, but did not monotonically improve correctness or solve ambiguity and multi-turn state consistency. --- ### A Local-Linearly Convergent Algorithm for Nonconvex Equality-Constrained Optimization Authors: Frank E. Curtis, Lingjun Guo, Daniel P. Robinson Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12665v1 For solving nonconvex equality-constrained optimization problems, a recent Gradient-Eigenstep Algorithm by Goyens et al.~is an iteration-efficient approach, based on minimizing Fletcher's augmented Lagrangian function, for finding an approximate second-order stationary point from an arbitrary starting point. In this paper, the analysis of this algorithm is extended, offering a two-fold contribution. First, it is shown that a local-linear rate of convergence can be obtained by this method if it is initiated sufficiently close to a strong second-order stationary point and employs a sufficiently small step-size parameter and sufficiently large penalty parameter. In this case, the algorithm reduces to a gradient descent algorithm applied to minimize Fletcher's augmented Lagrangian. Second, as a particularly useful application of the first result, it is shown that the Gradient-Eigenstep algorithm can be used as an iteration-efficient subproblem solver in the context of a progressive sampling strategy for solving equality-constrained optimization problems when the objective and constraint functions are defined by large sample averages, ultimately offering an algorithm with an improved worst-case sample complexity when compared to an approach that solves a full-sample problem directly. --- ### Evaluating AlphaEarth Foundations Embeddings for Wildfire Susceptibility Mapping Authors: Yuan Zhuang, Sanaa Hobeichi, Peng Shi, Fei Huang Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: stat.AP, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12663v1 Wildfire susceptibility mapping typically relies on physical variables assembled from multiple remote-sensing, climate, and geospatial products. AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) provides analysis-ready geospatial embeddings that may reduce this dependence on heavy harmonisation and task-specific feature engineering, but their value for wildfire susceptibility mapping has not been systematically evaluated. Using Victoria, Australia (2017-2025), as a case study, we show that AEF embeddings can reconstruct commonly used variables in wildfire susceptibility analysis with high accuracy. In downstream susceptibility models trained on satellite-derived fire occurrence data, embedding-based susceptibility models achieve ROC-AUC values above 0.92 and consistently identify high wildfire susceptibility across eastern Victoria, particularly Gippsland and the north-eastern uplands, with additional localized hotspots in central and northwestern Victoria. A key feature of AEF embeddings is their strong near-region transferability within climatically similar regions. When embedding-based models trained in Victoria are applied to Canberra and Western Sydney-Blue Mountains, ROC-AUC improves by around 4% at Canberra and declines by around 2% at Western Sydney-Blue Mountains, compared with a mean decrease of approximately 25% for physical-variable models. These findings provide practical guidance for using AEF embeddings and lay a foundation for scalable wildfire susceptibility mapping workflows for downstream users such as government agencies and (re)insurers. --- ### Inference-Time Orthogonal Seeding Enables Geometry-Aligned 3D Organ Segmentation for Slice-Propagation Methods Authors: Md Rakibul Haque, Tushar Kataria, Shireen Y. Elhabian Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12658v1 Dense voxel-level annotation remains a major bottleneck in 3D medical image segmentation. Single-slice propagation methods such as Sli2Vol reduce this burden by propagating one annotated seed slice through a volume using label-free registration. However, axial-only propagation accumulates errors with distance from the seed, especially in surface-distance metrics, because it ignores coronal and sagittal evidence and therefore underuses the 3D information available in CT/MRI volumes. To better leverage volumetric geometry, we study how key training and inference choices affect slice-propagation models, including single-axis versus multi-axis label-free registration, single-seed versus multi-seed propagation, and orthogonal seed configurations. Instead of propagating from a single axial seed, we use three orthogonal seeds---one axial, one coronal, and one sagittal---and fuse their propagated labels with a simple label-free rule. Our results show that the training paradigm has limited impact: an axially trained network applied to off-axis seeds captures nearly all the improvement, while explicit three-axis training adds little. Instead, performance is driven by inference-time seed geometry, especially orthogonality rather than the number of annotated slices, as a budget-matched three-axial control provides no benefit and can even degrade performance. On a multi-organ CT cohort, orthogonal seeding with the axial Sli2Vol backbone improves Dice by 21.9%, Normalized Surface Dice by 25.5%, and reduces Average Hausdorff Distance by 53.5% over the single-axis baseline. --- ### General Probabilities of Causation with Causal Knowledge Authors: Xin Shu, Zhen Lei, Ang Li Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12657v1 Probabilities of causation (PoCs) characterize individual causal responses that cannot be directly observed and therefore generally require partial identification. Tian and Pearl first derived theoretically sharp bounds for binary PoCs, including the probability of necessity (PN), the probability of sufficiency (PS), and the probability of necessity and sufficiency (PNS). Mueller et al. subsequently tightened the bounds for binary PNS by incorporating causal information encoded in covariates and mediators. More recently, Li and Pearl, as well as Shu et al., extended PoCs to multivalued settings and derived corresponding theoretical bounds. These developments naturally raise the question of whether additional causal knowledge can further tighten the bounds in multivalued settings. This paper addresses this question by deriving tighter bounds for multivalued PoCs through the incorporation of causal information encoded in covariates and mediators. We illustrate the theoretical results with toy examples, while simulation studies further demonstrate that the proposed bounds are tighter than existing nonbinary bounds. --- ### Training Under Challenge: Executable Certificates and Challenge-Closed Optimality for Neural Networks Authors: Farhang Yeganegi, Arian Eamaz, Mojtaba Soltanalian Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12655v1 A flat training curve does not reveal whether a neural network has reached a global optimum, is locally trapped, is representation-limited, or is mismatched to its trainer. We introduce Training Under Challenge, an executable-certificate framework in which predeclared, architecture-valid procedures construct complete alternatives in the same certified class and reevaluate the same objective. Any lower-valued candidate is a replayable witness that lower-bounds the checkpoint's empirical global-optimality gap. Passing a finite suite is only suite-relative; global-gap conclusions require a separately justified coverage mechanism. We define a resource-indexed challenge-power modulus that characterizes the largest gap compatible with passage. For squared loss, current block-decrease operators make coverage checkable and yield uniform and realized-residual bounds. We prove the converse frontier: without coverage, a first-order ReLU trainer can reach infinitely many exact conditional head optima while converging to a non-global point. On a channel-gated ResNet-18 distillation problem with known optimum, eight internal challenges cover all 240 audited output directions, and realized-residual bounds lie within factors of 1.74--3.02 of the true gap. Paired predictive certificates separate decoder under-use from representation insufficiency, while quantized-denoising studies demonstrate diagnosis, repair, and current-state recertification. --- ### SteerBench-Work: A Benchmark for Agent Steering at Action Boundaries Authors: Oguz Serdar, Cuneyt Mertayak Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12654v1 Long-running LLM agents act through tools, and a single step can send an email, merge a pull request, or wire a payment. The steering decision is the pre-commit choice at that boundary: proceed, or hold for human or policy review. We introduce SteerBench-Work, an incident-anchored, bidirectional benchmark for that decision in workplace agents across developer operations, customer service, finance, legal, medical, HR, and security. Release v2026-05 contains 106 scenarios anchored in public incidents, paired evidence-reversed mirrors, and calibration controls, with labels split nearly evenly between proceed and hold so the two error directions get near-identical numbers of chances. A model sees the proposed action and the available evidence, returns a gate decision, and is scored on whether it crosses or holds the boundary correctly. Across 30 model conditions the failures run almost entirely in one direction: models wrongly hold authorized, evidence-cleared work on 28.1% of opportunities and wrongly allow unsafe work on 1.0%. The hardest cases are risk-resolved commits, where signed or structured evidence has already cleared a real risk trigger, and models score markedly worse on evidence-reversed mirrors of famous incidents (63.8%) than on the incidents themselves (98.5%). General capability is not the same as steering calibration: higher-capability models often over-refuse at the commit boundary, and more reasoning can repair a weak gate while leaving a calibrated one flat. The public leaderboard is at steerbench.com. --- ### Excess Separability: Nuisance-Controlled Residual-Stream Probing for Benchmark Contamination Detection Authors: Florian Braun Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12652v2 Benchmark contamination is diagnosed with n-gram overlap, likelihood-based membership inference, or canary strings, and each needs something usually unavailable: the training corpus, a well-chosen test statistic, or foresight at release. A recent alternative reads it off a linear probe on internal activations. We show the natural way to do this does not work, specify one that survives measurement, then find that the correction making it work carries more variance than the null it is tested against. The protocol reports a zero-sum contrast on the depth profile of probe accuracy, recentred on a level-matched placebo baseline, tested against a label-permutation null, with the reference set twice the size of the suspect set. Each choice replaces a simpler alternative we rejected on measurement. Reporting the level of excess separability rather than its shape makes the false positive rate track the size of the analyst's own control set, 0.03 to 0.99 under a true null. Contrasting against a flat depth profile rejects a true null 0.72 of the time when surface decodability rises with depth, and loses all power when it falls. On real transformers the protocol fails a test the simulations did not pose. The recentring subtracts an estimate, and the permutation null holds it fixed. Re-estimated across split seeds on four audits of contaminated checkpoints, its standard deviation is 1.30 to 1.56 times the null's own in every arm: what is subtracted to remove a bias is more variable than what it corrects. The one nominally significant result, p = 0.0075, becomes 0.0745 once that variance is propagated, and no verdict is issued. The simulations missed this because their surface key is the covariate driving item variation; on real text it is a proxy, and degrading key quality in simulation reproduces it. We add a companion measurement and a widened null. No arm shows contamination. --- ### Jagged Judges: Epistemic Stability Under Perturbation, Pressure, and Persistence Authors: Justin Zhao, Himaghna Bhattacharjee, Hannah Korevaar, Bhaktipriya Radharapu, Khalid El-Arini Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12645v2 LLM judges have become central infrastructure for model evaluations, online grading, and reward modeling. Judges are typically validated by accuracy on golden data, but accuracy says little about whether they are stable under re-prompting, challenge, or sustained pushback. We introduce the \emph{Wiggle Framework}, a unified stress test for epistemic stability in LLM judges. The framework decomposes judge robustness along three dimensions: Mechanical Consistency (stability under re-prompting and reframing), Single-turn Conviction (stability under a single challenge), and Multi-turn Persistence (stability under sustained or adaptive pressure). We use the framework to study 9 frontier models across 14 judging tasks spanning safety, toxicity, AI writing detection, and political-response evaluation. Every model exhibits substantial wiggle as a judge --- flipping verdicts 25--71\% of the time under static pushback, and 62--91\% with an adversarial LLM persuader. Critically, we find that pressure that succeeds in changing a judge's verdict is almost always net-corrupting with respect to ground truth. Beyond the framework itself, we identify baseline jury majority strength as the most effective single-shot signal for anticipating which items wiggle. Taken together, this is the first apples-to-apples cross-dataset comparison of mechanical, conformity, and persuadability tests in a judging context. --- ### Interpretable Causal Discovery via Causal-Effect Constraints Authors: Cixuan Zhang, Guy Van den Broeck, Benjie Wang Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML, stat.OT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12640v1 Causal discovery aims to uncover the underlying causal relationships given data generated from a system. The goal, however, is not merely to predict causal edges given data, but also to be able to interpret and explain either observed or hypothesized phenomena, such as a particularly large causal effect. We consider this task of conditional causal discovery and cast it as a Bayesian inference problem, in which we target the posterior over causal graphs and parameters conditional on an event such as a causal-effect constraint. Unfortunately, this poses a computational challenge: existing approaches to Bayesian causal discovery struggle when the event has small posterior mass. To address this, we adapt rare-event estimation techniques to perform inference the joint graph-parameter space. Our method gradually drives a particle population toward the constrained region while maintaining samples that approximate the conditional posterior. Empirical evaluation on synthetic graphs validates the accuracy of our approach at small and large scales, and we show in a case study on the Sachs protein dataset how our method can be used to aid scientific exploration by providing pathway-level summaries. --- ### Novels generated by language models show compressed formal variation Authors: Mehdy Sedaghat Payam, Justin Quinn Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12630v1 While large language models can generate entire novels, there is little information about the level of formal variation in their output over many generations. Rather than asking whether individual passages can be identified as AI-generated, this study asks whether repeated AI generation can produce the same range of diversity which is found across human corpora. This paper contrasts six corpora based on generation source and target style: twenty novels generated using GPT-5.5 Thinking in a nineteenth-century British realist style, twenty novels generated using Qwen3-14B in a nineteenth-century British realist style, twenty novels generated using each of these models in a contemporary zero style, 205 nineteenth-century human-written British novels, and sixty-five contemporary human-written Zero-Style novels. At the document level, the research includes MATTR-500, Shannon entropy, average sentence length, readability, and punctuation rate measurements. The most robust and reliable result is compression of sentence structure. Repeated generations produce novels that vary far less from one another in sentence structure than human novels do. Compression is also present in the measures of readability, punctuation, and sentence length variability within novels. Lexical measures tend to be similarly compressed, with the exception of Qwen Zero-Style MATTR. Despite having distinct mean stylistic profiles, GPT and Qwen lack a stable pattern of cross-measure correlation. This article therefore distinguishes between variance overclosure, which represents a limited formal range between novels, and a more specific phenomenon of correlational overclosure. This means that an individual AI-generated novel may resemble human fiction stylistically, while a collection of AI-generated novels occupies a much narrower formal range. --- ### CAKE: Compiler-Agent Co-Design for Frontier Kernel Evolution Authors: Zihao Ye, Yingyi Huang, Hongyi Jin, Bohan Hou, Junru Shao, Zhongming Yu, Jinqi Chen, Meghan Cowan, Shiyi Cao, Shanli Xing, Hanfeng Chen, Vinod Grover et al. Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12629v1 GPU kernel agents and GPU programming languages have advanced separately, leaving expert kernels difficult to reproduce. Agents usually treat the compiler as a fixed black box and receive only errors, correctness outcomes, and timing, while existing DSLs either hide critical scheduling decisions or expose them through difficult layout abstractions. We present CAKE, a compiler-agent co-design in which agents author CAKE IR, a typed, hardware-explicit schedule representation. CAKE exposes warp roles, memory movement, synchronization, and pipelines while supporting verification, cost modeling, and localized diagnostics. The harness itself evolves: recurring failures become verifier rules, IR primitives, model calibrations, and reusable optimization tactics. In matched implementation-hidden Flash-KMeans clean starts on B200, the best CAKE IR candidate at an 80-million-token budget runs at 1.144x the tuned FlashML baseline, compared with 0.928x for direct CUDA/PTX. Beyond this benchmark, agent-generated Kimi Delta Attention achieves a 2.05x geometric-mean speedup over official FlashKDA and passes end-to-end serving validation. Dispatcher-backed KNN and KMeans improve performance by 1.42x to 2.12x across more than 400 shapes, and four kernel changes are available as upstream PRs. CAKE targets NVIDIA GPUs from Ampere through Blackwell and separates single-shape evolution from library generalization and dispatch. --- ### EgoCITE: Context-Augmented Indexing and Time-Aware Retrieval for Long-Horizon Egocentric Memory Authors: Le Zhang, Hao Chen, Vlad Roznyatovskiy, Jianzhong Zhang, Ke Sun Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12627v3 Long-horizon egocentric memory transforms continuous first-person video and audio into a searchable record of past experiences. We demonstrate two bottlenecks in existing systems: indices built from context-poor captions are unreliable for agentic search, while retrieval ignores a question's temporal intent. To address both bottlenecks, we introduce EgoCITE (Egocentric Context-augmented Indexing and Time-aware Evidence retrieval), a long-horizon agentic memory framework for egocentric QA. EgoCITE comprises three components. EgoScheme uses local multimodal context to turn fragmentary video captions and speech transcripts into self-contained atomic memory indices. EgoIndex organizes complementary action, activity, utterance, and conversation representations into searchable multi-view memory indices at multiple granularities. EgoRetrv combines semantic search with question-conditioned temporal relevance scoring and curation of retrieved evidence. We evaluate EgoCITE on EgoLifeQA, EgoMem, and EgoR1-Bench in terms of answer accuracy and target-event retrieval alignment. EgoCITE improves accuracy over agentic memory baselines by at least 4.4--14.2% while achieving 36$\times$ lower cost than long-context LLM agents. --- ### LLMs Are Not Good Strategists, Yet Memory-Enhanced Agency Boosts Reasoning Authors: Yi Wu, Zhimin Hu Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12626v1 Strategic reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) within long-horizon environments is often limited by inconsistent subgoals. In these settings, finite attention resources prevent the model from maintaining strategic coherence over thousands of steps. This limitation leads to strategic drift, where localized decisions fail to sustain a coherent trajectory across reasoning. To address this, we introduce EpicStar, a framework that enables agents to learn memory as policy to tackle long-horizon reasoning. Specifically, the agent maintains a bank of successful past episodes as a heuristic alongside a working memory to track short-term environmental changes. During inference, a dynamic gating mechanism determines whether to execute a retrieved action directly or to perform new reasoning through a contextual fusion of the retrieved episodes and current working memory. Utilizing StarCraft II as the testbed, we evaluated EpicStar against diverse opponent styles. It significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving higher win rates while consuming an order of magnitude fewer tokens, and it maintains this advantage consistently across difficulty levels and opponent strategies. Our findings provide compelling evidence that structured cross-episode memory is essential for enabling LLM agents to perform robust, long-term strategic execution in dynamic, autonomous settings. --- ### Structure-preserving uncertainty quantification for GENERIC dynamics Authors: Zequn He, Celia Reina Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12624v1 Structure-preserving machine learning embeds physical structure directly into model architectures, yet uncertainty quantification (UQ) for such hard-constrained models remains limited because standard UQ methods may violate the encoded admissibility conditions, require architectural modifications, or impose substantial computational costs. In this work, we propose Structure-Preserving Epistemic Neural Networks (S-PENNs), a general framework for UQ in scientific machine learning models with hard architectural constraints, and instantiate it for GENERIC (General Equation for Non-Equilibrium Reversible-Irreversible Coupling) dynamics. S-PENNs preserve the structural constraints of a pretrained model by attaching lightweight epinets to its constrained components, ensuring that every sampled realization remains physically admissible by construction. When applied to GENERIC dynamics, such a proposed framework yields thermodynamically consistent rollouts that preserve the first and second laws. Furthermore, we combine S-PENNs with split conformal prediction as a post-hoc calibration method to produce prediction intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees. We validate S-PENNs on three numerical examples: a harmonic oscillator coupled to a heat bath and an idealized chemical motor, both governed by ODEs, and a one-dimensional viscoplastic model governed by PDEs. Across all three examples, S-PENNs produce thermodynamically consistent stochastic realizations and well-calibrated prediction intervals while reducing the computational cost by about one to three orders of magnitude compared to deep ensembles. Although the present study focuses on GENERIC dynamics, S-PENNs can be extended more broadly to scientific machine learning models in computational mechanics with either hard or soft constraints. --- ### When Explanations Betray Backdoors: Black-Box Auditing for Language Model Classifiers Authors: Yang Liu, Ran Zou Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12623v1 Language model classifiers with explanations are used for moderation, routing, topic triage, and low-resource annotation. We study black-box auditing when the defender has only clean calibration data without trigger information but can ask the classifier for a label plus a short rationale or quoted evidence. We introduce Groundedness Drift, a lightweight score measuring whether the answer summary remains grounded in the input. Across two 7B backbones, five datasets, and four common non-adaptive OpenBackdoor-style attack families, Groundedness Drift achieves higher AUROC and lower residual target ASR than every compared detector in all cases at a nominal 5\% clean-FPR budget. We then evaluate Unsupported Groundedness, a multi-probe escalation for explanation-camouflage stress cases. Unsupported Groundedness improves signals but does not close the adaptive gap. --- ### The Boolean Power of ReLU Authors: Pablo Barceló, Floris Geerts, Matthias Lanzinger, Klara Pakhomenko, Jan Van den Bussche Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12617v1 We prove that, on finite simple undirected graphs equipped with a single Boolean node feature, the Boolean queries expressible in $Σ$-MPLang, for any collection $Σ$ of eventually constant activation functions and with arbitrary real coefficients, form a strict subclass of the Boolean queries expressible in ReLU-MPLang. We thereby settle a recently posed open problem: whether ReLU-MPLang is more powerful than trReLU-MPLang when it comes to Boolean queries. In particular, this implies that ReLU-GNNs are strictly more expressive than {TrReLU,id}-GNNs with respect to Boolean queries on Boolean-featured graphs. --- ### Drive-to-Music: Context-Aware Generative Audio for In-Vehicle Experiences Authors: Cosmin Dragoiu, Nooshin Nabizadeh Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12615v1 In-vehicle music can serve as an adaptive interface to enhance driver experience, attention, and well-being. We present Drive-to-Music, a context-aware system that generates music in real time from multimodal driving signals. Using dashcam imagery and vehicle telemetry, the system extracts scene semantics and driving context, maps them to high-level musical descriptors, and conditions generative audio models to produce contextually aligned soundtracks. The architecture combines perception and generative components to translate visual and kinematic inputs into structured musical attributes and synthesize audio with low latency. It supports smooth transitions as driving conditions evolve, and to ensure robustness and deployment readiness, we incorporate constraint-based controls and safety checks across the generation pipeline. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time, context-aware music generation in automotive settings, providing a foundation for personalized and adaptive in-vehicle audio experiences. --- ### From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generation Authors: Houston H. Zhang, Tao Zhang, Li Gu, Linfeng Ye, Yuanhao Yu, Xinxin Zuo, Yang Wang, Zhixiang Chi Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12611v1 Existing screenshot-to-code systems face a trade-off between flexibility and controllability. Direct multimodal generation can hallucinate visible details, whereas structured pipelines reduce such errors through component-wise decomposition, predefined templates, and customized intermediate representations. These structures, however, introduce additional generative orchestration and restrict outputs to designs covered by the representation. We investigate whether selective tool grounding can improve the fidelity--efficiency trade-off of direct widget-to-code generation. We introduce \textbf{WidgetGen}, a lightweight tool-grounded framework that extracts observable text and color evidence, performs high-level layout and optional chart reasoning, and directly generates executable JavaScript XML (\emph{JSX}). This design reduces reliance on component-wise generation while avoiding a fixed UI schema. Across six multimodal models and \(1{,}000\) held-out widgets, WidgetGen outperforms direct prompting and the structured Widget2Code pipeline on most visual reconstruction metrics, with consistent gains in area, legibility, and style. Finally, reconstruction-derived image-code pairs improve six Qwen-family open-weight models across every reported metric through supervised fine-tuning. These results establish WidgetGen as a strong lightweight baseline and show that selective evidence grounding offers an effective alternative to extensive representation constraints. --- ### @skills: Attention is all you have Authors: Li Yin, Zhi Li, Zhan Shi, Haoran Zhang, Haebin Seong, Zhangyang, Wang Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12610v1 There are 56,804 public agent skills today, and teams write many more privately. The dominant delivery model is installation: once installed, a skill's description remains in the system prompt, competing for fewer than 100 reliable trigger slots. This leaves the long tail with no practical path to use and forces teams' own playbooks to compete for the same scarce space. We observe that installation bundles three separable functions: content, persistence, and automatic triggering. Only the last requires prompt residency. We therefore propose @skills, an open protocol that separates them. A path addresses any skill, subtree, or collection, and reading a skill is sufficient to use it, so nothing is installed or made resident. The operation vendors a copy at the same path into a project's Git-tracked tree for adaptation and ownership. The operation adds one .gitignore-style line, the only element that costs prompt residency. A directory is a menu, making bundles ordinary directories rather than all-or-nothing units. The protocol requires no manifest, lockfile, or registration, and SKILL.md remains unchanged. @skills is additive, ships as an installable package, and turns any agent that can read files and run commands into a client through a single instruction file. Its open specification is at https://github.com/SylphAI-Inc/atskills and it is implemented in the AdaL CLI at https://adalagent.ai . Because paths address skills well but cannot find them, the protocol is paired with a free hub at https://atskills.one for corpus-wide search and ranking, repository-free hosting, private and team collections, and one-screen authoring. The hub is optional: gh: and local paths resolve without it, and indexed GitHub skills retain their gh: identities. Install less, use more. --- ### PseudoMapLabeler: Confidence-Aware Pseudo-Label Generation for Semi-Supervised Online Mapping Authors: Chikao Tsuchiya, Dhaval Bhanderi, David Ilstrup, Hsinmin Cheng, Christopher Ostafew Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12600v1 A critical challenge in deploying online HD map construction systems to real-world scenarios is the scarcity of labeled training data, which limits model generalization in diverse environments. To address this limitation, we propose a teacher-student semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework that generates high-quality pseudo-labels from unlabeled data through confidence-aware map refinement. Our approach first trains a teacher model on limited labeled data, then leverages Beta-distribution-based confidence maps to assess the reliability of predicted map elements across temporal observations. Unlike conventional filtering methods that discard entire elements, we introduce a spatial clipping technique that selectively preserves high-confidence regions while removing unreliable segments. The refined map elements serve as map priors that improve the teacher model's prediction accuracy on unlabeled data in a second pass. These enhanced predictions become pseudo-labels for training a student model from scratch, followed by fine-tuning on the original labeled data. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our teacher-student framework with refined pseudo-labels improves performance by +6.1 mAP under a low-label regime compared to training on labeled data alone, offering a practical solution to the labeled data scarcity problem in online HD map construction. --- ### Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues Authors: Haoyuan Zhu Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12599v1 Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia. No existing instrument measures this influence per clause, predicts it before delivery, or repairs it under matched budgets. \sysname{} closes the three gaps through the model API alone: a contract ledger pairs every constraint with an executable checker, records revocations as tombstones, and compiles the net constraint state ahead of time into a single specification; a sequential ablation probe measures per-clause adherence and incremental behavioral effect; a repair ladder operates under token- and attempt-matched budgets. On \dataname{} (\NTasks{} HumanEval tasks, \NClauses{} verified checkers), relapse at an 8B operating point climbs from \ScaleDelayedMTwo{} to \ScaleDelayedMEight{} as constraint load grows, while stronger models sit at floor. Under matched checkers, model, and budget, ahead-of-time compilation significantly reduces relapse against a no-ledger verifier-retry baseline (\RestoreDiff{}, 95\% CI \RestoreDiffCI{}, $p$ \RestoreDiffP{}); adaptive ladder interventions stacked on top add no detectable gain (95\% confidence excludes gains $\geq$ \LadderExcludedGain{}). The probe predicts relapse before delivery (AUROC \AurocPrimary{}); a one-sentence tombstone note recovers about a third of the compilation effect and survives a placebo control. At \CostDeliveryFactor{} delivery overhead and \CostTotalHedged{} of API compute for every result, revocation failure becomes a measurable, predictable, and repairable property of dialogue state rather than an invisible one. --- ### Intensional Anaphora Authors: Ezra Keshet, Steven Abney Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12598v1 Intensional operators are often treated as quantifiers over possible worlds, parallel to the treatment of determiners as quantifiers over individuals. Yet individuals introduced in intensional contexts cannot serve as antecedents to later pronouns as easily as those introduced in merely quantificational contexts. For instance, "Everyone is eating a cheeseburger" may be followed by "They are large", where "they" refers to the cheeseburgers being eaten. However, as Stone (1999) points out, the similar "Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger" does not support later anaphoric references such as "It is large" or "They are large". Stone (1999), Stone and Hardt (1999), and Brasoveanu (2010) address this by requiring a pronoun's value (its referents) to exist in the world of evaluation, ruling out anaphora from non-veridical intensional contexts. We show, however, both cases where such anaphora is disallowed even when the pronoun's referents clearly exist and cases where it is allowed even though they might not exist. We argue that intensional anaphora is best captured using a description-based rather than value-based account. A pronoun presupposes that its corresponding antecedent description is instantiated in each world of the context set. Thus, there must be a cheeseburger being eaten by Andrea in every candidate world for "It is large" to be felicitous after "Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger". We implement our proposal via a new logic, building on Keshet (2018) and Abney and Keshet (2022), called Plural Intensional Presuppositional predicate calculus (PIP). Each PIP formula translates directly into standard first-order predicate calculus with set abstraction, providing a classical foundation for this work. --- ### Predicting When Random Low-Dimensional Reparameterizations Train Neural Networks Authors: Andrew Cheng, Ali Eslamian, Jie Cheng, Mehdi Zargham, Qiang Cheng Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12597v1 Neural networks can often be trained or fine-tuned through random low-dimensional reparameterization, where a small latent vector is mapped into a full parameter update by a frozen random map. This raises a practical question: how large must the latent search space be to reach a low-loss region? We first express the known accessibility transition in an equivalent conic form, centered for compact convex targets at the statistical dimension of the polar cone. Our main theoretical contribution is an orientation-resolved quadratic master formula that predicts the random-slice residual from both the curvature spectrum and the reference-to-solution displacement profile. It yields a self-consistent isotropic-orientation predictor and, in a conservative radius-only specialization, recovers the earlier Gaussian-width quadratic bound. Building on this analysis, we introduce Random Mapping Networks (RaMaN), which instantiate the predicted latent dimension using structured Hadamard or seed-regenerated Gaussian maps. These constructions avoid the O(dP) storage of dense random maps and reduce optimizer-state memory from O(P) to O(d). We also develop matrix-free curvature approximations and sweep-free dimension selection. Across controlled quadratic and neural-curvature experiments, the orientation-resolved predictor closely tracks measured transition locations and outperforms orientation-agnostic approximations when displacement direction matters. End-to-end experiments further show sharp, protocol-dependent training transitions across image and language models. --- ### What Makes a Peer? Valuation-Anchored Similarity in Private Markets Authors: Sebastian Frank, Jingrao Lyu, Max Jarmey, Preetha Saha, Mingshu Li, Sweet Kaur, Sola Akinola, Dhagash Mehta Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: q-fin.ST, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12594v1 As more investors contemplate private markets and contend with limited transparency, sparse disclosures, and infrequent transactions, identifying economically meaningful peer companies for comparison is a fundamental challenge for valuation, due diligence, portfolio construction, and risk management. We propose an ensemble tree-based supervised similarity learning framework that defines company similarity through the lens of market valuation rather than static feature matching or semantic descriptions. Specifically, we train a CatBoost gradient-boosted decision tree model on observed private company valuations and derive a valuation-aware similarity metric from importance-weighted leaf-node co-occurrences across the ensemble. The similarity metric captures shared valuation drivers while accommodating nonlinear relationships, mixed data types, and pervasive missing data common in private markets. Using a global private-market universe of approximately 270,000 companies, including more than 53,000 firms with observed or derivable post-money valuations spanning multiple industries, geographies, and deal stages, we demonstrate that the proposed similarity framework improves upon traditional distance-based and text-embedding-based approaches in downstream k-nearest-neighbor valuation tasks in the evaluated industry groups, while retaining case-based explainability. --- ### DiG-bench: Discovery in Games Authors: Ruairidh M. Battleday, Kai Sandbrink, Jimi Cullen-Drohan, Zihan Yan, Timothy Muller, Clare Maguire, Ales Kubicek, Fraser Greenlee-Scott, Sukrit Sumant, Tri Dao, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Michal Valko et al. Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12593v1 Discovery---formulating novel generalizations---is a central part of the scientific process. Despite its importance, there is a gap in the current AI benchmark landscape, with few benchmarks directly probing the capacity for discovering new knowledge with experimentation in controlled environments where the objective is unknown. To address this gap, we release a new benchmark: DiG-bench (Discovery in Games). DiG-bench consists of a set of 70 independent games. Each game is encoded as a short string and has unique transformation rules that must be discovered through interaction and experimentation. The levels of the game present a series of challenges to test whether the rules have been discovered, where the win conditions for each level are also unknown. We provide games at seven tiers of difficulty for AI agents. The lowest tier is routinely solvable by multiple models, while the highest tier challenges the best models in agentic harnesses. All 70 games were solved by at least one human on first attempt. A subset of 21 games is released publicly, and the remainder is held private for secure evaluation. --- ### Represent, Then Generate: Multimodal-Conditioned Time-Series Generation under Irregular Missingness Authors: Haochen Zhang, Jiaheng Guo, Yu-Chao Huang, Nicholas Konz, Tianlong Chen Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12592v2 Continuous physiological time series underpin modern clinical monitoring, yet many of the most informative signals are invasive, expensive, or simply unavailable for a given patient. Conditional generation offers a remedy: an absent signal can be synthesized from co-recorded signals and routine clinical variables. Existing generators, however, are built around a single conditioning modality and degrade when forced to handle the heterogeneous, irregularly missing mix of time-variant signals and static covariates seen in practice. We propose ReCoGen (Represent Conditions, then Generate), a two-stage framework that decouples multimodal condition representation from target generation. Stage I trains one masked autoencoder per modality, distilling each time-variant condition into a compact and missingness-tolerant token sequence. Stage II trains a flow-matching generator that fuses these tokens with static conditions to synthesize the target signal. Across three physiological benchmarks, including continuous glucose monitoring on AI-READI and arterial blood pressure generation on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, ReCoGen attains the best downstream utility on all sixteen (dataset, task, metric) settings, surpassing six representative conditional generators; on thirteen of them its utility also reaches or exceeds the utility measured on the real signal, a reference we read as an approximate anchor rather than a ceiling. Ablations trace the gains to the conditioning path: learnable cross-attention over the frozen per-modality encoders, and a dual token-plus-AdaLN route for the static conditions. ReCoGen thus turns routinely collected signals into informative surrogates for invasive or unavailable ones, a step toward less invasive, lower-cost continuous clinical monitoring. --- ### Auditable agentic AI for evidence-grounded thyroid ultrasound diagnosis and reporting Authors: Haifan Gong, Shiyu Chen, Bodong Wang, Yuqi Wang, Shijie Wang, Guoliang You, Xinyu Xiong, Haowei Wang, Mingzhi Mao, Dexing Kong, Qinghua Liu, Wei Lou et al. Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12590v1 Thyroid ultrasound diagnosis requires coordinated lesion localization, measurement, risk stratification and reporting, yet most AI systems address these tasks in isolation and provide limited support for clinical review. We present ThyroidXAgent, a clinician-interactive agentic AI system that coordinates specialized diagnostic tools and stores their outputs as an auditable case-level evidence record. The system was developed using OpenThyroidDB, a multicentre, multitask resource integrating approximately 0.3 million ultrasound images and 24,000 paired reports, and was evaluated on 28,458 non-overlapping test cases, including 8,721 cases from 35 centres in the private NHC-MISD-TUS cohort. Across heterogeneous datasets, ThyroidXAgent achieved a mean Dice score of 87.21 percent for nodule segmentation and a mean AUROC of 0.9466 for benign-malignant classification. The same workflow supported lymph-node metastasis prediction and follicular versus papillary thyroid carcinoma classification, with AUROCs of 0.864 and 0.805, respectively. For report generation, evidence-grounded assembly outperformed multimodal language-model baselines across three cohorts. ThyClinScore, a lesion-level clinical semantic metric introduced here, showed the strongest correlation with a location-aware language-model judge. ThyroidXAgent improved physician classification accuracy, increased report diagnostic consistency from 70.3 percent to 86.2 percent, and reduced segmentation and reporting time by 35.9 percent and 27.4 percent, respectively. These findings support auditable, clinician-correctable agentic AI for thyroid ultrasound diagnosis and reporting. --- ### Supervised Mixed-Frequency Learning for Macro-Financial Forecasting When Factors are Weak Authors: Ulrich Hounyo, Zhendong Li Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: econ.EM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12589v1 Factor-MIDAS regressions forecast a low-frequency target by extracting common factors from a large panel of high-frequency predictors via principal component analysis (PCA). While PCA mitigates the curse of dimensionality, it relies on factor pervasiveness, an assumption often violated when factors are weak, as is common in macro-financial forecasting. We propose SsPCA-MIDAS, which integrates supervised scaled PCA (SsPCA) into the mixed-data sampling framework. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality under weak factors, permitting inference on the prediction target. Simulations show that SsPCA-MIDAS outperforms competing PCA-based and supervised methods, especially when weak factors are prevalent. Applying machine-learning techniques such as boosting to the cleaner factors it extracts yields further gains. An extensive application to U.S. macro-financial forecasting shows that SsPCA-MIDAS selects economically meaningful predictors and improves forecasts of GDP, inflation, unemployment, asset prices, and volatility. --- ### DYSANOS Generative Dynamic Smooth Arbitrage-free Non-parametric Option Surfaces Authors: Hans Buehler, Blanka Horvath, Anastasis Kratsios Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: q-fin.MF, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12587v1 This article presents with DYSANOS the first generative market model for smooth SANOS option surfaces for all strikes and expiries which are free of static arbitrage. Our model is designed to generate entire paths of daily spot and option prices for years in the future. We present a robust and useful if somewhat simplistic baseline hidden state generative model in the form of an AR(1) model. We discuss model setup, data pipeline, and training and investigate numerical resence of dynamic arbitrage. We illustrate model performance on Option Metrics' IvyDB S\&P Index data from 2020 to~2025 and compare it to a pure implied-vol PCA model. --- ### Reasoning Jury: Multi-Model Consensus for Evaluating Reasoning Traces Authors: Congchao Wang, Diwakar Singh, Qiaozi Gao, Spyros Matsoukas, Yang Liu, Mahdi Namazifar Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12585v1 Improving reasoning LLMs requires the ability to judge the quality of long reasoning traces for effective reasoning data curation, strong training signals during reinforcement learning, and an in-depth understanding of reasoning behaviors during model performance evaluation. Additionally, surfacing reasoning mistakes that the model makes would enable improving the model's performance at runtime through providing feedback. Due to the difficulty of this complex task on long reasoning traces, single-model judges (even frontier models) do not do well at identifying reasoning defects. Additionally, leveraging frontier models during online training of reasoning LLMs is generally prohibited due to guardrails in terms of use. In this work, we introduce Reasoning Jury, a system that replaces the single judge with a jury of LLMs and a moderated consensus mechanism, to improve the fidelity of judgments for identifying reasoning defects. In reasoning jury, defects of a reasoning trace and their severity are surfaced through a deliberation where a moderator conducts a discussion amongst the jury where the jurors critique each other's judgments and get to modify their initial votes. The moderator derives a consensus through deliberation amongst jurors or consolidation of judgements. We show that Reasoning Jury with a jury of open-weight models (e.g., gpt-oss-120b) is able to significantly outperform frontier models (opus-4.6, sonnet-4.6, and gemini-3.1-pro) at correctly identifying reasoning defects. Besides accuracy performance improvements, the aggregated cost of the jury (initial verdicts, deliberations, consolidation, etc.) is a fraction (8 to 15%) of the cost of running frontier models in LLM-as-a-judge setup. We also show how these judgements can be leveraged to understand failure modes of reasoning LLMs on benchmarks, which allows much deeper understanding of a model's performance. --- ### Not All Nudges Land: Behavioral Controllability and Elaboration Quality in AI-Supported Journaling Authors: Nadia Mehjabin, Henry Kautz, Subigya Nepal Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12582v1 AI journaling tools can tailor prompts to a person's own sensed behavior, but it is unclear which behaviors respond to them. We analyzed 369 journal entries from an eight-week passive sensing study. An LLM labeled each entry as expressing an intention to change a behavior or not, and we measured follow-through against 26 sensor features with a 3-day before/after comparison. Responsiveness depended most on whether a behavior involves other people. Behaviors that depend on others improved in only 15 to 22% of cases, while behaviors a person can act on alone improved more often, up to 50 to 63%, though unevenly. How users wrote mattered less. No single text feature separated improved from unimproved entries; writing carried signal only within specific behaviors, most clearly for text messaging and for longer, more personal intention entries. The sample is small, so we treat these as exploratory patterns that point to where AI journaling nudges are most likely to work. --- ### Trie Automata for Constrained Decoding over Large Finite Sets Authors: Xingzi Xu, Karim Bouyarmane Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.FL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12574v1 Large language models increasingly need to generate structured outputs that conform to predefined schemas, with one common constraint being selection from a finite set of valid strings. Current constrained decoding systems handle this through general-purpose grammar compilation, which becomes prohibitively slow as the number of valid values grows into the thousands, a cardinality wall. We introduce the trie automaton, a specialized mechanism that exploits finite-set structure (shared prefixes, bounded depth, known cardinality) via Aho-Corasick multi-pattern matching to precompute per-node token masks. The trie achieves 7X faster per-step valid-token computation (0.65 us vs. 5.8 us) compared to XGrammar, one of the primary backends in vLLM and SGLang, and 2--6.5X faster compilation at K >= 300. Because precomputed masks enable a stateless serving path that bypasses the guided decoding pipeline, this advantage compounds in batch serving: end-to-end vLLM throughput reaches 219 req/s vs. XGrammar's 7.5 req/s at batch size 256 (29X). The 29X combines the algorithmic speedup with integration-path savings that only precomputed masks can unlock. Across seven tokenizer families (32K--262K vocabulary), the trie maintains sub-100ms compilation up to K = 10,000 and flat per-step cost regardless of set size, while guaranteeing 100% output validity. --- ### Prof-K: Probabilistic One-Pass Filtering for Efficient Top-k Selection Authors: Tadeusz Dziarmaga, Witold Sikora, Łukasz Struski, Jacek Tabor, Marcin Mazur Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12573v1 Top-k selection is a fundamental computational primitive with applications spanning databases, information retrieval, signal processing, and modern machine learning workloads, including sparse activations and attention pruning. As data sizes grow, existing approaches become inefficient: exact methods incur high memory and compute overhead, while approximate methods often rely on brittle heuristics that degrade under adversarial or heavy-tailed inputs. In this paper, we introduce Prof-K, a fast, scalable, and distribution-agnostic top-k algorithm with probabilistic correctness guarantees. Prof-K performs a single-pass filtering procedure: a small random sample estimates an adaptive threshold, the N input elements are streamed once into a compact buffer, and an exact top-k routine on this buffer recovers the true top-k elements with probability at least 1 - $ε$, where $ε$ > 0 is user specified. We derive high-probability guarantees for correctness and buffer size, together with an approximately optimal sample size that minimizes overhead as a function of N and k. Empirically, Prof-K achieves 1.5x-10x speedups over the highly optimized PyTorch topk and recent RadiK implementations, with the largest gains in the large-scale, small-to-moderate-k regime where prior methods struggle most. Unlike previous approaches, these guarantees hold independently of the input distribution, ensuring robustness to adversarial settings. By relaxing the recall target (e.g., recovering 95% of the true top-k values), Prof-K additionally provides a principled accuracy-speed trade-off. We further demonstrate its impact on training BatchTopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), where top-k selection constitutes a significant portion of the training cost. --- ### Is this Citation on Point? Authors: Apurv Verma Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.DL, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12571v1 In 2023, a New York judge sanctioned two attorneys in Mata v. Avianca for filing a brief with hallucinated citations generated by ChatGPT. Such failures are largely caught by database lookups; the harder problem is detecting citations that point to real cases but do not support the propositions for which they are offered -- a failure mode that existing evaluations of LLMs for legal use cases largely overlook. In this paper, we study proposition-level citation support verification through controlled perturbations of real legal citations obtained from two legal corpora, either replacing the cited case or changing only the pinpoint page within the same case. We evaluate fourteen model configurations on the resulting examples. Models catch 93-100% of wrong-case corruptions. They catch only 37-61% of wrong-pinpoint corruptions on court opinions and 52-83% on legal briefs. When models fail to catch wrong-pinpoint corruptions, they accept the citation based on topical overlap rather than page-level support. Scale and extended reasoning narrow the gap but do not close it: GPT-5.4 with high reasoning effort still misses 40% of pinpoint mismatches on court opinions and 18% on briefs. Prompting the model to verify support at the cited page improves recall, but it also raises the false positive rate. Recognizing the right legal topic and verifying support for the cited proposition are distinct capabilities, and current models conflate them. --- ### Attribute-Conditioned Multimodal Slot Factorization for Controllable Fashion Retrieval Authors: Najmeh Forouzandehmehr, Topojoy Biswas, Evren Korpeoglu, Kannan Achan Published: 2026-08-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12570v1 Fashion retrieval often requires satisfying multiple attributes at once, such as category, color, pattern, and demographic. Monolithic embeddings mix these signals into a single vector, making attribute-specific control difficult at retrieval time. Many existing semantic-ID methods provide discrete item codes, but these codes are typically optimized as item-level or residual addresses and do not expose named, independently controllable attribute slots. We introduce MM-slotgate, a multimodal slot encoder that factorizes Fashion-CLIP text and image embeddings into four named attribute slots. Each slot learns its own text-image gate, so visually grounded attributes such as color and pattern can rely more on image evidence, while taxonomy-oriented attributes such as category and demographic can remain more text-driven. On H&M, using a combined slot-similarity and slot-logit retrieval score, MM-slotgate achieves 0.7566 macro ConstraintSatisfied@10, outperforming equal-weight multimodal fusion (0.7142) and fCLIP text-only retrieval (0.4755). The largest gain is on color, which improves from 0.321 to 0.889 (+0.568 absolute), as the learned color gate assigns 57.4% weight to image evidence. The learned gates are interpretable without modality supervision: color is image-leaning, category is text-leaning, and pattern and demographic lie near the middle. The resulting slots also remain controllable: linear probes show no measured excess leakage beyond the label-correlation baseline, and quantized slot codes support targeted intervention, including a 15.3x lift for color. These results suggest that controllable fashion retrieval benefits from typed, attribute-conditioned multimodal slots rather than either a single global embedding or opaque item-level semantic IDs. ---