# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 152 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #7551–7600 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/152 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/151.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/153.md) ### Data Attribution of Emergent Misalignment with Persona Features Authors: Clemens Vetter, David Kaczér, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11025v2 Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies. We ask where these features come from: which pre-training documents activate them, and whether naturally occurring human-written text suffices to induce EM. Using Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) based model diffing across four open-weight models, we find that features related to jailbreak personas, sarcasm, deception, and manipulation are amplified by misalignment fine-tuning, while safety-relevant and assistant-identity features are suppressed. Steering individual features controls EM in both directions: it induces misalignment rates of up to 62% in aligned models -- exceeding the 35% reached by misalignment fine-tuning itself -- and re-aligns misaligned models to near-baseline misalignment rates. Attributing the causal features to a corpus of one million pre-training web documents retrieves semantically relevant narratives about villainous characters, domination, and harmful agency. However, fine-tuning on these human-written documents does not reliably induce EM, even after reformatting into assistant-style responses, whereas synthetic instruction-response pairs derived from the same content do -- and transfer across model families. Semantic relevance alone is therefore not sufficient: response structure or model-generated phrasing plays an important role in inducing EM. --- ### Data Attribution of Emergent Misalignment with Persona Features Authors: Clemens Vetter, David Kaczér, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11025v1 Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies. We ask where these features come from: which pre-training documents activate them, and whether naturally occurring human-written text suffices to induce EM. Using Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) based model diffing across four open-weight models, we find that features related to jailbreak personas, sarcasm, deception, and manipulation are amplified by misalignment fine-tuning, while safety-relevant and assistant-identity features are suppressed. Steering individual features controls EM in both directions: it induces misalignment rates of up to 62% in aligned models -- exceeding the 35% reached by misalignment fine-tuning itself -- and re-aligns misaligned models to near-baseline misalignment rates. Attributing the causal features to a corpus of one million pre-training web documents retrieves semantically relevant narratives about villainous characters, domination, and harmful agency. However, fine-tuning on these human-written documents does not reliably induce EM, even after reformatting into assistant-style responses, whereas synthetic instruction-response pairs derived from the same content do -- and transfer across model families. Semantic relevance alone is therefore not sufficient: response structure or model-generated phrasing plays an important role in inducing EM. --- ### When Visual Signals Mislead: A Mechanistic Study of Attribute Hallucination in Vision-Language Models Authors: Yufei Zhang, Chenlu Zhan, Hongwei Wang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11024v1 Attribute hallucination---where vision-language models (VLMs) correctly identify an object but mischaracterize its properties---is prevalent yet mechanistically poorly understood. The dominant explanation, language-prior dominance, has motivated prior-suppression methods, but this explanation has not been directly tested at the attribute level. We present VISOR (Visual-Operational Remediation), a unified framework that couples null-image-based diagnosis with routed remediation. Its VSNR diagnostic decomposes each prediction into a visual logit signal and a language-prior signal. Across 10,791 negative-ground-truth samples from three VLM families and three attribute types, the visual signal strongly predicts false positives, whereas the language-prior signal is near chance. VISOR uses this diagnosis to separate two failure modes: low-margin but directionally correct visual signals in color/state attributes, and low-SNR or misaligned visual signals in material attributes. The same diagnosis routes each query to the appropriate operator: calibration for threshold-placement errors, abstention for training-free low-SNR handling, or targeted visual adaptation for material failures that prior suppression cannot correct. Across Qwen, InternVL, and LLaVA, VISOR reduces attribute false positives without relying on the prior-dominance assumption. --- ### Workflow Cards: Structured Summaries of Workflow Executions Using Provenance Data Authors: Nicola Giuseppe Marchioro, Gabriele Padovani, Amal Gueroudji, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Wesley Brewer, Valentine Anantharaj, Sandro Fiore, Renan Souza Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11022v1 Model Cards and Data Cards have demonstrated the value of structured, human-readable documentation for machine learning artifacts, capturing their context, parameters, limitations, and intended use. However, these practices remain focused on static artifacts (the datasets and trained models themselves) while overlooking the workflow executions that produce, transform, and evaluate them. Such executions hold critical details about data preparation, parameter choice, runtime behavior, resource use, and intermediate transformations, precisely where bias, performance variation, and reproducibility gaps tend to originate. To close this gap, we introduce Workflow Cards: structured summaries that condense the machine-readable provenance data of a workflow execution into a form both humans and large language models (LLMs) can read and analyze. This paper has two main parts. First, it defines a Workflow Card template informed by a representative set of provenance questions that surface from the execution-level data missing from Model and Data Cards. Second, it evaluates how effectively LLMs use Workflow Cards to understand workflow executions compared with querying provenance databases through a schema-based interface. Results show that Workflow Cards provide execution-level information absent from existing card types, such as Model Cards and Data Cards, thereby filling an important documentation gap; and that Workflow Cards nearly double answer quality compared with schema-based querying, consistently across LLM-as-a-Judge and human assessments. --- ### Derivative Computation in PINNs: Automatic Differentiation, Finite Differences and Beyond Authors: Maciej J. Mikulski, Tadeusz Uhl Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11020v1 We systematically investigate finite-difference (FD) derivative computation in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) as an alternative to automatic differentiation (AD). On three benchmark PDEs we show that, with a properly calibrated step size, FD matches AD in accuracy on every problem while running faster across the full tested batch-size range and using substantially less GPU memory, and that a stochastic variant we propose outperforms AD on a stationary problem. We further show that for neural architectures with inter-sample dependencies (e.g. BatchNorm, self-attention) the standard PyTorch autograd idiom is silently incorrect; the correct per-sample alternative is computationally infeasible at PINN-relevant batch sizes, while FD provides a forward-only approximation that is empirically an order of magnitude closer to the true per-sample derivative. --- ### DEFT: Data-Efficient Frequency-domain Top-k Sampling via Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform for Spatiotemporal Dynamical Systems Modeling Authors: Hengbo Xiao, Jiale Liu, Jiahao Song, Guannan He Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11019v1 Modeling spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) poses two major challenges: it either requires expensive physics-based simulators that entail iterative numerical solving at high computational cost, or it depends on abundant training data, yet purely data-driven models often generalize poorly to downstream dynamic operating conditions. We propose DEFT, a frequency-domain data sampling method that identifies the dominant Fourier modes of a physical system and systematically varies the corresponding amplitudes and phases to generate physically consistent training data via the inverse discrete Fourier transform. In addition, we derive a generalization bound of this method. We note that it also provides a theoretically principled criterion for selecting $K$. We evaluate the proposed method through three sets of experiments, each targeting a distinct aspect of its utility. First, we validate the framework on canonical PDEs solving demonstrating that it outperforms traditional methods when the system is dominated by a few prominent frequency components. Second, we employ DEFT as a data-value filter on the diffusion--sorption and Burgers equations of PDEBench, showing that it reduces data requirements by $40\%$ while sacrificing less than $2\%$ in predictive accuracy. Third, to evaluate DEFT for more challenging and practically relevant problems, we validate it in the battery degradation PDE system, achieving consistently high predictive accuracy across various test datasets with $R^2$ values exceeding $0.99$. Moreover, the learned frequency-domain features transfer to other battery chemistries with only $20\%$ of the fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that DEFT is an effective data-sampling method for efficient operator learning. --- ### R4DSG: Relative 4D Scene Graph Memory for Object-Centric Question Answering in Long Egocentric Video Authors: Ke Ma, Yamin Mao, Weiming Li, Shuai Tan, Yijie Zhong, Hao Chen, Haofen Wang, Meng Wang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11017v1 Long-horizon egocentric video is a rich substrate for wearable AI assistants, but object-centric questions such as where an item was moved, when it last changed state, or why it was relocated remain difficult because caption- and transcript-based memories rarely preserve persistent object identity or structured spatial change. Existing long-video QA methods mainly emphasize temporal grounding and clip retrieval, while prior 3D scene-graph methods typically assume stronger geometry than free-motion wearable RGB video provides, including point clouds, RGB-D input, posed views, sparse reconstruction, or reconstructed scenes. R4DSG introduces a relative 4D scene graph memory for long egocentric video. Instead of storing raw graph sequences, R4DSG converts video into compact queryable memory entries indexed by time, place, persistent objects, anchor-relative change, and local interaction context. The main idea is to separate stable anchors from dynamic objects, maintain persistent object identity across frames, and represent object state through anchor-relative transitions rather than a globally aligned world model. Built on recent RGB-only advances in promptable video segmentation, temporal propagation, and relative 3D lifting, the method produces a retrieval-ready memory directly usable for long-horizon question answering. Evaluation on a 255-question object-related subset from EgoLifeQA shows, under question-only retrieval, a 6.7-point overall gain over EgoRAG-Text and a 12.5-point gain on when questions, which highlights the value of temporally organized object memory. These results position relative 4D scene graphs as a practical memory substrate for wearable assistants, AR systems, and embodied multimedia agents. GitHub Page: https://dualtransparency.github.io/R4DSG/. --- ### Gromov-Wasserstein Quantization and Clustering: Structure, Rates, and Algorithms Authors: Florian Beier, Stephan Eckstein Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.CG, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11016v1 Clustering is a fundamental class of data analysis techniques with the most important representatives being centroid-based methods like $k$-means. Such methods are strongly connected to quantization problems, which aim to approximate general probability measures with discrete ones. For example, $k$-means corresponds to quantization with respect to the Wasserstein distance. While Wasserstein quantization clusters points within a fixed space, this paper studies Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) quantization, which additionally aims at clustering the ambient geometry of the space. We show existence of solutions to the GW quantization problem and give a characterization that justifies an analogue to the $k$-means algorithm (Lloyd's algorithm) to approximate them numerically. We further calculate the quantization rate for usual Euclidean geometries that are used in the GW context, and relate it to standard Wasserstein quantization rates. Finally, numerical experiments show that GW quantization opens up many modeling possibilities beyond normal clustering methods (e.g., for geodesic distances of 3D shapes or structured pruning of neural networks) and that the introduced algorithm leads to useful numerical solutions with approximation quality often in line with theoretically optimal rates. --- ### Watching Synthetic Videos: Aligning Cross-modal Representations with Visual Synthesis for Zero-shot Video Captioning Authors: Liangyu Fu, Junbo Wang, Yuke Li, Ya Jing, Xuecheng Wu, Zhiyong Wang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11013v1 Text-only training is a popular paradigm in zero-shot video captioning, where the video distribution is not available to the model during training, leading to a cross-modal gap between the training (text-only) and the inference (video-only). Previous works attempt to bridge the gap through simple linear transformations. However, the inherent gap between text and video makes cross-modal representation space alignment insufficient, resulting in inaccurate sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel zero-shot video captioning framework (WSV) consisting of two training stages, which first generates corresponding synthetic video latent representations via a pretrained text-to-video generation model. To strengthen the fidelity of the latent representations, we propose a polisher capable of bridging the gap between real and synthetic video distributions. Subsequently, we design a prompter that conditions GPT-2 on the polished latent representations to generate the captions in the second training stage. During inference, an input video is encoded by a pretrained 3D Causal VAE and then fed directly into the prompter, which in turn guides GPT-2 to produce the final caption. Experimental results conducted on MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves scores of 52 and 95.7 on the B@4 and CIDEr metrics, respectively. --- ### Templated or fully synthetic? Prompt construction as a confound in measuring LLM political stance beyond writing assistance Authors: Ilias Chalkidis Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11008v2 Political stance detection in LLMs has long been dominated by closed-ended, multiple-choice political survey questions---originally designed for humans, and thus lacks the realism and nuance of human-AI interactions in the wild, while also being susceptible to sandbagging. The recent IssueBench framework substantially mitigates these limitations with templated prompts anchored in real-world chat logs. Given the rise in non-work-related use of GenAI assistants, we extend IssueBench beyond writing assistance to include two additional tasks, information seeking and opinion sharing. We argue that templated prompts still lack the nuance of real ones, especially for open-ended tasks, and remain recognisable as evaluation artefacts. We propose the use of fully synthetic (LLM-generated) prompts, produced under detailed instructions with real prompts as seeds. We assess the ecological validity of real, templated, and LLM-generated prompts in a small-scale study covering 3 highly contested policy issues and 3 recent geopolitical conflicts. Human and LLM annotators rank LLM-generated prompts as no less realistic than real ones and clearly more realistic than templated ones, and find that they carry their intended intent and stance more clearly; the LLMs separate templated prompts from the other two far more sharply than the humans do. In a case study, templated and LLM-generated prompts yield systematically different stance estimates for the same model, most visibly under neutral framings, where templated prompts overstate the model's leaning in the direction encoded by the topic-and-stance text (filler) slotted into their templates. --- ### Templated or fully Synthetic? Prompt construction as a confound in measuring LLM political stance beyond writing assistance Authors: Ilias Chalkidis Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11008v1 Political stance detection in LLMs has long been dominated by closed-ended, multiple-choice political survey questions---originally designed for humans, and thus lacks the realism and nuance of human-AI interactions in the wild, while also being susceptible to sandbagging. The recent IssueBench framework substantially mitigates these limitations with templated prompts anchored in real-world chat logs. Given the rise in non-work-related use of GenAI assistants, we extend IssueBench beyond writing assistance to include two additional tasks, information seeking and opinion sharing. We argue that templated prompts still lack the nuance of real ones, especially for open-ended tasks, and remain recognisable as evaluation artefacts. We propose the use of fully synthetic (LLM-generated) prompts, produced under detailed instructions with real prompts as seeds. We assess the ecological validity of real, templated, and LLM-generated prompts in a small-scale study covering 3 highly contested policy issues and 3 recent geopolitical conflicts. Human and LLM annotators rank LLM-generated prompts as no less realistic than real ones and clearly more realistic than templated ones, and find that they carry their intended intent and stance more clearly; the LLMs separate templated prompts from the other two far more sharply than the humans do. In a case study, templated and LLM-generated prompts yield systematically different stance estimates for the same model, most visibly under neutral framings, where templated prompts overstate the model's leaning in the direction encoded by the topic-and-stance text (filler) slotted into their templates. --- ### Policy Convergence and Divergence Across National and Within Regional AI Strategies: A Policy Design Element Analysis Authors: Benjamin Faveri, Brie Bhasin Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11006v2 Governments worldwide have responded to the rapid expansion of AI by publishing national and regional AI strategies. Comparing national and regional AI strategies to identify their convergences and divergences can uncover their common practices, understand regional variations, and provide policy designers a comprehensive set of policy design elements for their ongoing AI strategy developments. Yet, existing work has not examined their underlying policy design elements or assessed whether those elements are horizontally (country-to-country) or vertical (region-to-country) converging or diverging over time. This paper addresses that gap by coding and analyzing 74 national and 3 regional AI strategies drawn from a global scan of all 205 UN member and non-member states. The coding used a latent-inductive approach organized around three functional policy design elements: goals, approaches, and principles. Two research questions guided the analysis: to what degree are national AI strategies becoming horizontally convergent or divergent over time; and to what degree are national strategies becoming vertically convergent or divergent with those countries' regional AI strategy. Results indicate strong horizontal convergence around economic competitiveness, research support, and ethical AI use, alongside persistent divergence in human rights goals, participatory governance approaches, and human-centric principles. Across the three regions, the AU exhibits the highest vertical convergence, the EU demonstrated strong alignment on regulatory and economic priorities but diverges on human-centric values, and the Nordic-Baltic Region displays mixed vertical convergence. These findings offer policy designers a comprehensive evidence base for identifying emerging AI policy design choice norms as AI strategies are developed and updated. --- ### Policy Convergence and Divergence Across National and Within Regional AI Strategies: A Policy Design Element Analysis Authors: Benjamin Faveri, Brie Bhasin Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11006v1 Governments worldwide have responded to the rapid expansion of AI by publishing national and regional AI strategies. Comparing national and regional AI strategies to identify their convergences and divergences can uncover their common practices, understand regional variations, and provide policy designers a comprehensive set of policy design elements for their ongoing AI strategy developments. Yet, existing work has not examined their underlying policy design elements or assessed whether those elements are horizontally (country-to-country) or vertical (region-to-country) converging or diverging over time. This paper addresses that gap by coding and analyzing 74 national and 3 regional AI strategies drawn from a global scan of all 205 UN member and non-member states. The coding used a latent-inductive approach organized around three functional policy design elements: goals, approaches, and principles. Two research questions guided the analysis: to what degree are national AI strategies becoming horizontally convergent or divergent over time; and to what degree are national strategies becoming vertically convergent or divergent with those countries' regional AI strategy. Results indicate strong horizontal convergence around economic competitiveness, research support, and ethical AI use, alongside persistent divergence in human rights goals, participatory governance approaches, and human-centric principles. Across the three regions, the AU exhibits the highest vertical convergence, the EU demonstrated strong alignment on regulatory and economic priorities but diverges on human-centric values, and the Nordic-Baltic Region displays mixed vertical convergence. These findings offer policy designers a comprehensive evidence base for identifying emerging AI policy design choice norms as AI strategies are developed and updated. --- ### Information Bottleneck under Perfect Privacy Authors: Junle Zhong, Mohamad Assaad, Sreejith Sreekumar Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11003v1 In this work, we study the information bottleneck under perfect privacy, with particular emphasis on the active-rate regime, where the representation-rate constraint is binding and directly limits the achievable utility. The goal is to construct a representation that preserves utility-relevant information while remaining statistically independent of a sensitive variable. This exact independence requirement introduces an additional constraint beyond the classical rate-relevance tradeoff and must be explicitly incorporated into the optimization. To this end, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based method tailored to the resulting problem structure. Under suitable regularity conditions, we establish global convergence of the generated sequence, characterize its convergence rate through the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz exponent, and extend the analysis to inexact block updates. --- ### On the Limitations of Cross-Lingual Consistency in Multilingual Text-to-image Generation Authors: Sicheng Zhang, Zhonghao Yan, Binzhu Xie, Shi Qiu, Muzammal Naseer, Naveed Akhtar, Mubarak Shah Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11002v1 Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing research has largely focused on English-only settings, leaving cross-lingual performance gaps and language-specific effects insufficiently explored. To fill this gap, we introduce LingT2I, a benchmark covering 10 widely used languages with 33K prompts, designed to evaluate cross-lingual effects in both content generation and text rendering. Building on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive cross-lingual analysis, uncovering linguistic inequality and language-dependent trade-offs across evaluation dimensions. Beyond quantitative evaluation, we further reveal a range of language-dependent generation patterns, highlighting how linguistic factors and their corresponding cultural contexts systematically impact model outputs. Our benchmark and analysis provide a foundation for studying cross-lingual behavior in T2I generation and facilitate the development of more robust and inclusive models. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/RISys-Lab/LingT2I. --- ### ConRub-Med: Reinforcement Learning with Consensus Rubrics for Open-Ended Medical Question Answering Authors: Taojie Zhu, Yuan Xia, Tao Sun, Yizhi Wang, Yan Chen, Qunshan He, Tian Guan, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Junwei Liu, Yonghong He Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10996v1 Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has been especially effective in mathematics and coding, where answers can be checked automatically. Many open-ended medical questions lack comparably cheap outcome verifiers: responses may be partly correct, incomplete, or contain clinically consequential errors. Rubrics written or validated by physicians offer strong clinical grounding, but involving experts in every instance is costly. Model-generated rubrics make this supervision scalable. We introduce ConRub-Med to preserve useful distinctions as rubric feedback moves from construction to policy optimization. For each prompt, three heterogeneous language models propose atomic criteria independently; a separate model reviews them, retaining only criteria with semantic support from all three generators. Three-State scoring distinguishes correct coverage, missing information, and incorrect claims. Errors receive negative rather than zero credit. When every response in a complete Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) group receives the same final reward, a pairwise judge provides sequence advantages only if both candidate orders agree, without changing the scalar rewards. Groups without ties use vanilla GRPO. In a blinded study matched by question, two medical experts rate panels from the full pipeline as more clinically relevant than panels produced by one generator. Across the evaluated open models, ConRub-Med ranks first on six of nine benchmarks and achieves the highest medical and generalization averages. Using the resulting rubric dataset of 5,166 prompts, it scores $38.98 \pm 1.04$ (mean $\pm$ SD) on HealthBench-Hard, compared with InfiMed-ORBIT's 33.60 with 8,000 samples and 37.30 with 28,000. --- ### HNDiff: Haze-Noise Diffusion for Image Dehazing Authors: Jin-Ting He, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Min-Hung Chen, Chia-Wen Lin, Yen-Yu Lin Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10995v1 Existing diffusion-based methods have recently made significant progress in image dehazing. However, they typically neglect the physics of haze formation and reconstruct clean images from pure Gaussian noise, thereby limiting their restoration potential. To address this issue, we propose Haze-Noise Diffusion (HNDiff), a novel diffusion framework that embeds the atmospheric scattering model as an inductive bias. By grounding diffusion in physical principles, HNDiff ensures that the restoration aligns more closely with underlying mechanisms of haze formation. In its forward process, we introduce joint haze-noise diffusion with a haze-aware noise scheduler, which progressively adds both haze and noise to an image. Essentially, the scheduler adapts noise levels according to haze density, meaning that regions with heavier haze receive stronger noise injection to encourage content generation, while clearer regions receive lighter noise to better preserve details, which directly links the forward degradation process with the physics of haze. In the reverse process, we then derive a physically consistent dehazing-denoising process that simultaneously removes haze and noise to restore a clean image in a manner aligned with the forward degradation process. To further enhance practicality, we propose Latent HNDiff, which compiles clean latent priors that can be seamlessly integrated into existing dehazing networks to boost performance. Extensive experiments show that our work significantly improves leading dehazing backbones and achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The project page is available at https://jin-ting-he.github.io/HNDiff . --- ### Putting Registers to Work: Task Registers for Token Pruning in Vision Transformers Authors: Hongsen Cao, Mona Jaber, Shanxin Yuan, Ahmed Sayed Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10989v1 Token-pruning policies are usually designed for a single recognition pipeline, but pretrained Vision Transformers are reused across tasks with different spatial demands. We ask which parts of a pruning policy transfer across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. For each pipeline, controlled probes freeze the no-pruning checkpoint and apply a series of parameter-free reduction criteria at one eligible layer at a time without retraining. The probes reveal three differences: segmentation and detection rank the criteria differently, classification is especially sensitive to attention-based pruning in the earliest layers, and the dense tasks prefer opposite recovery endpoints. These findings motivate Task-Adaptive Pruning (TAP). Existing register tokens serve as task-agnostic storage for feature artifacts. TAP instead introduces one task register per task and activates only the current one. Its evolving state ranks tokens, distributes an exact removal budget over depth, and sets the recovery scale for dense features. At a final keep rate of $ρ=0.5$, our jointly adapted model, TAP-J, reaches $47.0$ mIoU at $1.30\times$ encoder throughput on ADE20K and $53.7$ box AP at $1.32\times$ encoder throughput on COCO while remaining competitive on ImageNet-1K. --- ### What Iterated Self-Feeding Probes of Language Models Measure, and a test that separates the construction from the model Authors: Nicolás Vera Zúñiga Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10986v1 A growing class of methods probes a language model by feeding it its own output: self-consistency, iterated refinement, agentic loops. We ask what such a probe measures, in a construction chosen to make the question sharp: a ring of token cells resampled in place by the model's own windowed conditional p_r(x_i | x_{i+-r}). The substrate is Glauber dynamics on token sequences and is not new; what we change is the coupling. Advancing two rings that differ in one token under common random numbers makes undamaged copies diverge by exactly zero, so damage spreading becomes measurable where a maximal coupling gives mixing times instead. The answer is that it measures two different things at once, in readings that look alike. Some quantities are fixed by the construction: the damage light cone is kinematic, and the radius scaling of the token-space Lyapunov exponent lambda_ca(r) is model-invariant across 19 models and two scale ladders spanning 70x. Others genuinely track the model: lambda_ca crosses zero at a reproducible point in training, and the attractor share ranks models consistently however the lattice is built. Left undistinguished, the first kind is readily mistaken for the second -- we did so ourselves for four months, and report a phase transition we measured to three decimal places that belongs to the probe rather than to any language model. We give the test that separates them: hold the construction fixed and vary the model, or hold the model fixed and vary the construction, and see which readings move. We validate the instrument by reproduction first, recovering a Domany-Kinzel damage field bit-exactly against an independent prediction, and we report the estimator failures that this discipline caught -- four retracted verdicts, each on a quantity that looked like a measurement. The methodology ships as a package. --- ### PEAK: Precise and Persistent Concept Erasure via k-Sparse Autoencoders Authors: Man Jiang, Ouxiang Li, Weibao Xue, Zhenhua Tang, Yuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Yanbin Hao Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10985v1 Erasing concepts from large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has become increasingly crucial due to the growing concerns over copyright infringement, privacy violations, and offensive content. Existing approaches struggle to achieve both precise and persistent concept erasure: inaccurate localization of concept-related representations may cause unintended semantic interference, while incomplete removal of the underlying concept knowledge allows adversarial recovery. To address this dilemma, we propose PEAK, a \textbf{\textit{precise}} and \textbf{\textit{persistent}} concept erasure framework via k-Sparse Autoencoders (kSAEs). PEAK first trains a kSAE on internal activations of the diffusion denoising network to decompose dense representations into interpretable sparse features. By contrasting sparse activations induced by target and non-target prompts, PEAK identifies a compact set of target-specific features according to both activation strength and frequency. These localized features are then used for parameter optimization, where PEAK selectively suppresses target-related activations while preserving complementary non-target ones towards the original model. This feature-guided optimization embeds concept erasure directly into diffusion parameters, eliminating the need for additional inference-time intervention and facilitating effective persistence against adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PEAK achieves effective and robust concept erasure. On the I2P benchmark, PEAK reduces NudeNet detections from 582 to 6, lowers the average attack success rate (ASR) from 96.52\% to 5.63\%, and preserves general generation quality on MS-COCO with a near-zero KID. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/manmanTAT/PEAK --- ### TimeRoute: Time-Aware Modality Routing and Diffusion for Multi-Modal Recommendation Authors: Pengyu Zhang, Yangqin Jiang, Klim Zaporojets, Congfeng Cao, Paul Groth Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10983v2 Multi-modal recommenders fuse user-item interaction signals with item modalities such as text, images, and audio, but the usefulness of each drifts over time and at different rates. For example, around Valentine's Day, chocolate purchases become less driven by textual ingredient cues and more by visual packaging and ambient audio. This \emph{modality time-scale mismatch} gives rise to two coupled challenges: (1) users with different temporal behavior profiles require different modality proportions, and (2) less relevant modalities are more likely to introduce outdated or misleading signals into the recommender. We address both challenges within a unified diffusion-based recommender, \textbf{TimeRoute}. A temporal-aware modal router maps each user's aggregated temporal profile to a personalized modality distribution, replacing the globally shared fusion weights used in prior work. The diffusion-based graph reconstructor is conditioned on the same profile through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) with dual-stream long- and short-term denoising heads. This design captures both slowly and rapidly evolving temporal dynamics to suppress outdated modality edges before they enter the propagation graph. Experiments on TikTok, Amazon-Baby, and Amazon-Sports, averaged over 10 seeds, demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines across Recall@K, Precision@K, and NDCG@K, reaching up to 9.8\% (P@20 on Amazon-Baby). Controlled attribution studies further show that these gains require both the proposed mechanisms and temporal input: naively granting the backbone the same temporal profile yields no benefit, and feeding the router random noise performs no better than removing the router entirely. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TimeRoute. --- ### TimeRoute: Time-Aware Modality Routing and Diffusion for Multi-Modal Recommendation Authors: Pengyu Zhang, Yangqin Jiang, Klim Zaporojets, Congfeng Cao, Paul Groth Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10983v1 Multi-modal recommenders fuse collaborative signals with item modalities such as text, images, and audio, but the usefulness of each drifts over time and at different rates. For example, chocolate purchases typically guided by textual ingredient cues can shift toward visual packaging and ambient audio around Valentine's Day. This modality time-scale mismatch gives rise to two coupled challenges: (1) users require different modality proportions across temporal contexts, and (2) less relevant modalities are more likely to introduce outdated or misleading signals into the recommender. We address both challenges within a unified diffusion-based recommender, TimeRoute. A temporal-aware modal router maps each user's aggregated behavioral features to a personalized modality distribution, replacing the globally shared fusion weights used in prior work. The diffusion-based graph reconstructor is then conditioned on the same temporal profile through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) with dual-stream long- and short-term denoising heads, suppressing outdated modality edges before they enter the propagation graph. Experiments on TikTok, Amazon-Baby, and Amazon-Sports demonstrate consistent improvements of up to 9.8\% in Recall@K, Precision@K, and NDCG@K over strong baselines across 10-seed paired tests. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TimeRoute. --- ### ThinkAfford: Affordance-Centric Reasoning for Fine-Grained 3D Grounding in Cluttered Scenes Authors: Xinrui Lin, Sha Zhang, Shumin Wang, Zenghuan Zhu, Jiajun Deng, Yanyong Zhang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10981v1 Task-driven 3D affordance grounding aims to localize the functional region in a cluttered 3D scene that enables an action specified by a natural-language instruction. Existing methods either predict 3D masks directly or construct them by selecting and fusing intermediate 2D/3D regions. However, they remain vulnerable to two intertwined failure modes: the predicted or selected regions may miss the target interaction area or have unsuitable granularity, while language grounding may confuse visually similar alternatives under relational instructions. To this end, we introduce ThinkAfford, which decouples high-recall affordance proposal generation from instruction-grounded reasoning. Specifically, the Affordance Proposal Generation module first uses learnable affordance prompts and multi-level visual features to predict interaction-conditioned heatmaps, extracting a variable number of fine-grained proposals without parsed object or part names as segmentation prompts. Visual-Prompted Affordance Reasoning then reasons over labeled proposal overlays using the full instruction, returning identifiers in a structured "think-then-answer" response. Moreover, Group Relative Policy Optimization uses proposal-level rewards from lifted 3D overlap to align VPAR selection with final 3D grounding. On the SceneFun3D validation split, ThinkAfford achieves 10.69% AP50 and 25.46% AP25 under the official evaluator, outperforming comparable 3D open-vocabulary and vision-language-model-based 2D-to-3D baselines. Module-level diagnostics further show that APG attains 77.5% recall at 25% intersection-over-union, while GRPO-trained VPAR achieves 72.1% selection accuracy on APG-covered queries, compared with 63.4% under supervised fine-tuning. --- ### A Dataset and Benchmark for Optical Music Recognition of String Quartet Scores Authors: Dongmin Kim, Brian Liu, Jose J. Valero-Mas, Dasaem Jeong Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10978v1 Optical music recognition (OMR) transcribes music scores into digital formats. While the field has advanced significantly on monophonic and piano-form scores, multi-part score transcription remains underexplored, largely due to the absence of a suitable dataset. We introduce OpenScore String Quartet for Optical Music Recognition (OSSQ-OMR), the first dataset dedicated to multi-part OMR. Built on the OpenScore String Quartet corpus, OSSQ-OMR pairs digitally encoded scores with their original scanned editions from IMSLP, with all images visually aligned to their transcriptions. The dataset is released with score images at system and staff levels, and paired transcriptions in three encoding formats: Extended Linearized MusicXML (LMXE), **kern, and ABC. In total, OSSQ-OMR contains 24,544 system images and 98,172 staff images drawn from 116 string quartet scores. We accompany the dataset with a benchmark protocol and baseline results from two representative OMR models, evaluated across four random score-level splits with mutually exclusive test sets. Baselines reach OMR-NED as low as 3.6% on synthetic and 5.9% on scanned inputs; results reveal substantial effects of encoding and segmentation choices, with the LSTM-based baseline degrading on scanned inputs roughly 2.6 times less than the Transformer-based baseline. --- ### XCoT-VLA: Executable Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action Driving Authors: Foundation Model Team, XPeng Inc Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10976v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can connect scene understanding, semantic reasoning, and trajectory generation for autonomous driving. However, verbose natural-language Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is poorly suited to real-time control because it is open-ended, costly to decode, and difficult to optimize as an action-facing representation. We propose XCoT-VLA, which replaces descriptive rationales with compact executable CoT tokens learned from automatically constructed Reason-Action supervision. Logged trajectories provide action evidence, while scene context supplies causal semantics. The predicted XCoT sequence remains in context and conditions fixed trajectory queries through shared multimodal self-attention. Deterministic token-function routing applies the Reason FFN to XCoT tokens and the Control FFN to trajectory queries for flow-matching trajectory generation. We further introduce XCoT Policy Optimization (XCPO) as an optional refinement extension in the same executable token space. XCoT-VLA reduces longitudinal ADE from 1.645 to 1.323 on a general-distribution set and lateral FDE from 1.616 to 0.648 in lane-change scenarios. By representing driving-oriented reasoning with only 2-6 executable XCoT tokens, our method substantially reduces autoregressive reasoning overhead and remains within the real-time planning budget. These results demonstrate that driving-oriented reasoning can be compact, executable, and directly connected to trajectory generation. --- ### MUSE: A Full-Text Cross-Domain Knowledge Base of Scientific Problems, Solutions, and Rationales Authors: Tsofia Cohen, Tom Hope Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10974v1 Scientific papers contain fine-grained records of problem solving: authors mention technical obstacles and methods that were used to address them, often along with reasoning on why those methods were chosen. We introduce MUSE (Mining Underlying Scientific Explanations), a full-text, multi-domain resource of scientific Problem-Solution-Rationale (P-S-R) triplets. We curate 579 expert-annotated full-text paragraphs, with a rich annotation schema covering salient problem, solution, and rationale spans, solves and rationale_of links and conceptual coreference. A modular extraction pipeline scales this annotation to build a high-quality knowledge base of 37K source-grounded P-S-R triplets. We evaluate the extraction components and include a preliminary experiment training a rationale-supervised LLM for scientific problem solving. Interestingly, we find that rationale supervision improves performance on complex, multi-constraint problems but can harm performance on simpler ones. --- ### ReLTEx: Reliable LLM-based Taxonomy Expansion Authors: Zeinab Ghamlouch, Mehwish Alam Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10970v1 Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating semantically relevant concepts and relations, making them promising tools for taxonomy enrichment. However, directly relying on LLM-generated expansions often leads to noisy, redundant, or hierarchically inconsistent structures, limiting their reliability for automated taxonomy expansion. In this paper, we present ReLTEx, a framework for reliable LLM-based taxonomy expansion. ReLTEx combines LLM-driven candidate generation with structure-aware validation and recursive expansion control to improve the consistency and quality of generated taxonomies by reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the proposed framework using benchmark taxonomies under a masked taxonomy expansion setting and compare multiple validation strategies. Experimental results, supported by both adapted evaluation metrics and human evaluation, demonstrate that ReLTEx produces more reliable and semantically coherent taxonomy expansions. --- ### GARLIC: Graph Attention-based Relational Learning of Multivariate Time Series in Intensive Care Authors: Ruirui Wang, Yanke Li, Manuel Günther, Diego Paez-Granados Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10969v1 Healthcare data, such as Intensive Care Unit (ICU) records, comprise heterogeneous multivariate time series sampled at irregular intervals with pervasive missingness. However, clinical applications demand predictive models that are both accurate and interpretable. We present our Graph Attention-based Relational Learning for Intensive Care (GARLIC) model, a novel neural network architecture that imputes missing data through a learnable exponential-decay encoder, captures inter-sensor dependencies via time-lagged summary graphs, and fuses global patterns with cross-dimensional sequential attention. All attention weights and graph edges are learned end-to-end to serve as built-in observation-, signal-, and edge-level explanations. To reconcile auxiliary reconstruction and primary classification objectives, we developed an alternating decoupled optimization scheme that stabilizes training. On three ICU benchmarks (PhysioNet 2012 & 2019, MIMIC-III), GARLIC sets the new state of the art in outcome prediction, significantly improving AUROC and AUPRC over best-performing baselines at comparable computational cost. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each module, and feature-removal trials validate the fidelity of importance attribution through a monotonic performance drop (full > top 50% > random 50% > bottom 50%). Real-time case studies demonstrate actionable risk warnings with transparent explanations, marking a significant advance toward accurate, explainable deep learning for irregularly sampled ICU time series data. Moreover, we demonstrated \proposed{}'s superiority in data imputation and classification on various time-series datasets beyond the ICU domain, showing its generalizability and applicability to broader tasks. --- ### CARE: Confidence-Aware Reasoning for Reliable Medical VQA Authors: Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, Zhenyuan Chen, Luyuan Chen, Rongyu Zhang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Zhijie Xu, Ming Kong, Zhan Zhou, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10964v1 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) has enabled medical Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for visual question answering, yet these models suffer from $\textit{confidence miscalibration}$---a systematic gap between expressed certainty and actual diagnostic accuracy that undermines clinical trust. We propose $\textbf{CARE}$, a $\textbf{C}$onfidence-$\textbf{A}$ware medical $\textbf{RE}$asoning framework that jointly optimizes accuracy and calibration through a dual-stage pipeline. First, a scalable Medical-CoT synthesis provides structured cold-start data for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Second, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel $\textbf{Confidence-Aware Reward (CAR)}$ mechanism ties the model's confidence to diagnostic correctness within the reward signal. Across three Medical VQA benchmarks, $\textbf{CARE}$ achieves the highest diagnostic accuracy while obtaining the lowest Expected Calibration Error and Hallucination Rate, establishing a foundation for trustworthy clinical decision support. Our code is available at https://github.com/anotherbricki/CARE. --- ### REAP: Relation-Aware Elicitation and Parsing for Closed-Book Knowledge Base Construction from LLMs Authors: Thanh-Dan Bui, Thanh-Trung Do, Tuan-Phong Nguyen Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10963v2 We present the REAP system for the AKBC Shared Task 2026 on constructing knowledge bases from language models in a closed-book setting, subject to a budget of at most 32B parameters and no model fine-tuning. Our system combines structured chain-of-thought reasoning, relation-specific query strategies, and a reasoning-based empty-set gate to elicit parametric knowledge, followed by direct extraction into valid JSON arrays. On the test set, the system, built on the Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501 model, achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.62, with particularly strong results on countryLandBordersCountry (F1 = 0.95), companyTradesAtStockExchange (F1 = 0.73), and hasArea (F1 = 0.77). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yammdd/AKBC-Shared-Task-2026. --- ### REAP: Relation-Aware Elicitation and Parsing for Closed-Book Knowledge Base Construction from LLMs Authors: Thanh-Dan Bui, Thanh-Trung Do, Tuan-Phong Nguyen Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10963v1 We present the REAP system for the AKBC Shared Task 2026 on constructing knowledge bases from language models in a closed-book setting, subject to a budget of at most 32B parameters and no model fine-tuning. Our system combines structured chain-of-thought reasoning, relation-specific query strategies, and a reasoning-based empty-set gate to elicit parametric knowledge, followed by direct extraction into valid JSON arrays. On the test set, the system, built on the Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501 model, achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.62, with particularly strong results on countryLandBordersCountry (F1 = 0.95), companyTradesAtStockExchange (F1 = 0.73), and hasArea (F1 = 0.77). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yammdd/AKBC-Shared-Task-2026. --- ### Once Poisoned, Arbitrarily Controlled: A Programmable Backdoor in VLMs Authors: Tao Lin, Gaojie Jin, Zongxin Liu, Peng Wu, Lijia Yu Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10959v1 Existing vision-language model (VLM) backdoors are usually treated as static vulnerabilities: one-to-one and N-to-N attacks bind one or more triggers to a finite set of targets before victim training. This assumption substantially underestimates the threat. We show that a single poisoning phase can implant a programmable backdoor into a VLM, allowing an attacker to choose previously unseen target-caption semantics at inference time and synthesize corresponding stealthy triggers on demand. Unlike fixed-mapping attacks, the proposed any-to-any caption-control paradigm decouples post-training target selection from poisoning, enabling dynamic control of target captions without retraining the VLM. Our method has two components. First, a heuristic poisoning strategy exposes the model to diverse trigger-caption pairs, encouraging it to learn a general trigger-as-instruction rule rather than memorize a specific backdoor pattern. Second, a feature-space trigger steganography method maps any attacker-specified target caption to a stealthy visual trigger, implemented as either a norm-controlled perturbation or a non-semantic patch. Once inserted into arbitrary images, these triggers cause the poisoned VLM to generate outputs semantically aligned with the chosen target caption, even when the target was unseen during poisoning. Extensive experiments show that our attack achieves high any-to-any caption-control success rates, preserves clean model utility, and remains effective under several classical backdoor defenses. --- ### Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes Authors: Zhaoyang Wei, Bowen Jiang, Xumeng Han, Jiashu Li, Xuehui Yu, Yuling Liu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10954v2 While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorates significantly in complex scenes under adverse conditions. In these settings, models often rely on implicit inference without sufficient visual evidence, leading to a disconnect between perception and reasoning. Meanwhile, existing outcome-oriented benchmarks evaluate only final predictions and fail to diagnose failures in the underlying reasoning process. To address this gap, the authors propose AD2-Bench, which introduces a Hierarchical Visual Diagnosis framework that decomposes reasoning into a structured Chain of Evidence (CoE). This fine-grained diagnosis reveals that robust multimodal reasoning fundamentally depends on accurate evidence acquisition. Building on this perspective, the authors formulate reasoning from a probabilistic viewpoint and identify two primary causes of reasoning failure: Spatial Ambiguity, where models fail to distinguish target objects from background clutter, resulting in localization errors; and Semantic Uncertainty, where degraded visual features lead to incorrect semantic interpretation, resulting in understanding errors. To overcome these evidence deficiencies, they further propose Evidence-grounded Visual Reasoning (EGVOR), which replaces implicit reasoning with the explicit generation of Evidence Atoms - structured spatial-semantic triplets that enforce tight alignment between localization and semantic understanding. The model is trained through a hierarchical curriculum that progresses from reflective supervision construction to reinforcement learning, where reducing reasoning variance is explicitly rewarded. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGVOR substantially improves reasoning stability under adverse conditions, providing a more robust framework for trustworthy multimodal cognition. --- ### Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes Authors: Zhaoyang Wei, Bowen Jiang, Xumeng Han, Jiashu Li, Xuehui Yu, Yuling Liu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10954v1 While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorates significantly in complex scenes under adverse conditions. In these settings, models often rely on implicit inference without sufficient visual evidence, leading to a disconnect between perception and reasoning. Meanwhile, existing outcome-oriented benchmarks evaluate only final predictions and fail to diagnose failures in the underlying reasoning process. To address this gap, the authors propose AD2-Bench, which introduces a Hierarchical Visual Diagnosis framework that decomposes reasoning into a structured Chain of Evidence (CoE). This fine-grained diagnosis reveals that robust multimodal reasoning fundamentally depends on accurate evidence acquisition. Building on this perspective, the authors formulate reasoning from a probabilistic viewpoint and identify two primary causes of reasoning failure: Spatial Ambiguity, where models fail to distinguish target objects from background clutter, resulting in localization errors; and Semantic Uncertainty, where degraded visual features lead to incorrect semantic interpretation, resulting in understanding errors. To overcome these evidence deficiencies, they further propose Evidence-grounded Visual Reasoning (EGVOR), which replaces implicit reasoning with the explicit generation of Evidence Atoms - structured spatial-semantic triplets that enforce tight alignment between localization and semantic understanding. The model is trained through a hierarchical curriculum that progresses from reflective supervision construction to reinforcement learning, where reducing reasoning variance is explicitly rewarded. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGVOR substantially improves reasoning stability under adverse conditions, providing a more robust framework for trustworthy multimodal cognition. --- ### Multiple Scale Latents for Learned Image Compression Authors: Jonas Brenig, Radu Timofte Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10952v1 Most learned image compression systems rely on a single latent representation combined with a hyperprior, which limits their ability to efficiently capture image structure across spatial scales. In this work, we propose a hierarchical latent representation to improve the efficiency of the entropy model. By using multiple latents at different scales, each with its own entropy model, we better capture the spatial structure of the latent representation. Our experiments show that this approach achieves a 17.9% BD-rate reduction over VVC on Kodak, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-scale latent representations. Furthermore, the approach is orthogonal to other advances in learned image compression, making it a versatile addition to existing methods. --- ### StreamFlow: Dynamic Memory Flows for Streaming Video Understanding Authors: Muxin Fu, Yifan Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Fangming Guo, Qian Chen, Guibin Zhang, Shuicheng Yan, Bo An Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10949v1 Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to preserve relevant evidence from continuously evolving streams under strict causality and bounded memory. Yet existing paradigms remain limited: model-based methods require intrusive backbone updates, while memory-based methods expend substantial visual-encoding computation on temporally redundant content and rely on rigid access to visual history. To address these limitations, we introduce StreamFlow, an efficient visual memory framework that enables dynamic, on-demand access to historical visual information. StreamFlow combines a lightweight, dynamics-aware mid-term memory that filters temporal redundancy before visual encoding with a latent long-term memory that consolidates historical video content into visual latents accessible to subsequent reasoning. During generation, an attention-guided retrieval mechanism injects relevant visual latents when the model's reliance on visual evidence weakens. StreamFlow achieves state-of-the-art streaming video understanding performance, reaching 67.73% overall accuracy on StreamingBench, while also delivering strong performance on offline long-video benchmarks. Relative to the vanilla setting, it improves the visual attention score (VAS) by 59.1% while reducing end-to-end latency and peak memory by 50.4% and 21.1%, respectively, enabling more visually grounded and efficient reasoning. --- ### Mixture-of-Experts-based Entropy Model for Learned Image Compression Authors: Jonas Brenig, Radu Timofte Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10947v1 Learned image compression has seen significant progress in recent years with the development of end-to-end learned models that achieve better compression efficiency than state-of-the-art conventional methods. Recently, Mixture of Experts (MoE) approaches have seen promising results in NLP and computer vision tasks. In this paper, we introduce the MoE approach to learned image compression. We propose a MoE-based Entropy model (MoEE) for learned image compression, allowing the model to selectively activate only the subset of parameters required for the input image. Our model achieves a BD-Rate improvement over VVC of -16.85% on the Kodak dataset. --- ### Physics-informed Diffusion Generative Model for Time-Series Data Synthesis in Dynamic Systems Authors: Haiteng Wang, Yunfei Zhu, Tao Wang, Yikang Li, Jiabao Dong, Xiaoge Zhang, Lei Ren Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10941v1 Industrial time-series signals, such as turbine temperature and rotational speed in aero-engines, are essential for monitoring the health and operational status of complex dynamical systems. However, collecting such data is often limited by harsh environments (e.g., high temperature and high pressure) and the high cost of experimental testing. To address this challenge, we introduce PhysDGM, a stepwise physics-embedded diffusion generative model for synthesizing time-series data that are consistent with the underlying physical laws of dynamical systems. PhysDGM embeds physical laws directly into each reverse diffusion step of the generative process, ensuring trajectory-level physical consistency, rather than enforcing constraints only at the final output. A large-scale AI-synthetic dataset (4.4 million samples, 20x scale-up) constructed by PhysDGM demonstrates strong fidelity across 34 datasets spanning turbofan engines, aero-engines, batteries, and chemical processes. After incorporating the synthetic data, the downstream task performance substantially surpassed that using real data alone by 48% for remaining useful life prediction, 15% for health indicator estimation, 22% for state-of-health assessment, and 20% for fault diagnosis. Moreover, it requires 10-20x less training data than existing approaches, substantially reducing the high cost of data collection in dynamical systems. We further demonstrate PhysDGM's potential in identifying early-stage faults in aero-engines by incorporating AI-synthesized data. In summary, PhysDGM provides a solid foundation for generating physically consistent industrial time-series, paving the way for expanding physics-guided AI into diverse data-scarce environments, including both industrial machinery and complex chemical reaction dynamics. --- ### A Cost-Efficient Routing Pipeline for Multilingual Short-Text Classification Using Small Language Models Authors: Wajdi Ben Saad, Safa Madiouni Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10939v1 Multilingual short-text classification supports operational systems such as content moderation, customer support routing, and intent recognition, yet aggregate evaluation often hides large differences between high-resource and low-resource languages. Uniform inference policies are simple to deploy, but they assume that all languages are equally well served. In this work, we evaluate a fixed-list routing strategy that keeps stronger languages on a direct multilingual path and selectively sends weaker languages through translation into English before zero-shot classification. The pipeline is fully self-hosted, uses pretrained compact sentence encoders, and requires no task-specific fine-tuning. We test the approach on two benchmarks chosen to differ in scale and label granularity: a 15-language subset of SIB-200 for seven-way topic classification and a 15-locale subset of MASSIVE for intent classification over an official 60-intent inventory. On SIB-200, the best overall configuration is R1, which translates only the low-resource tier: high-tier and mid-tier Macro-F1 remain unchanged, while low-tier Macro-F1 rises from 0.4632 to 0.6828. On the MASSIVE subset, the same low-tier intervention raises low-tier Macro-F1 from 0.2143 to 0.4417, but the best overall result is obtained by full translation, R3, at Macro-F1 0.4647. Across these two benchmarks, selective translation is a reliable intervention for weaker languages, whereas the optimal routing boundary depends on the task. We therefore report routing through tier-level quality gains and tier-level latency rather than a single global efficiency score. --- ### GS-CPE: Unified 6-Degree-of-Freedom Camera Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Huaiyuan Weng, Chul Min Yeum, Su-Min Kang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10938v2 Despite substantial progress in visual localization, from scene coordinate regression to direct camera pose regression, achieving both robust generalization and high accuracy remain challenging. This study introduces GS-CPE (Gaussian Splatting based Camera Pose Estimation), a coarse-to-fine framework for 6-DoF camera pose estimation that unifies geometry-based coarse pose estimation with robust 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) warping based pose refinement. GS-CPE first estimates a coarse pose via retrieval-guided geometric pose estimation on a 3DGS scene representation, then refines it by minimizing a visibility aware masked RGB warping objective in a multi-scale optimization framework, with adaptive re-rendering. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor benchmarks including 7Scenes, Cambridge Landmarks, FAST-LIVO2 datasets, and a custom dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming in both accuracy and generalization. --- ### GS-CPE: Unified 6-Degree-of-Freedom Camera Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Huaiyuan Weng, Chul Min Yeum, Su-Min Kang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10938v1 Despite substantial progress in visual localization, from scene coordinate regression to direct camera pose regression, achieving both robust generalization and high accuracy remain challenging. This study introduces GS-CPE (Gaussian Splatting based Camera Pose Estimation), a coarse-to-fine framework for 6-DoF camera pose estimation that unifies geometry-based coarse pose estimation with robust 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) warping based pose refinement. GS-CPE first estimates a coarse pose via retrieval-guided geometric pose estimation on a 3DGS scene representation, then refines it by minimizing a visibility aware masked RGB warping objective in a multi-scale optimization framework, with adaptive re-rendering. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor benchmarks including 7Scenes, Cambridge Landmarks, FAST-LIVO2 datasets, and a custom dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming in both accuracy and generalization. --- ### Threshold Structure of Optimal Policies in Restart POMDPs Authors: Konstantin Avrachenkov, Alexey Piunovskiy, Yi Zhang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10936v1 We study a Restart POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) on a general Borel state space, where the controller either lets the hidden state evolve unobserved or restarts the system and observes the new state. Exploiting a sufficient-statistic representation consisting of the last observed state and the elapsed time since restart, we reduce the problem to a fully observed MDP. Under a natural one-step cost deterioration condition, we prove that optimal policies have a threshold structure in the elapsed time for both the discounted and total undiscounted cost criteria. When the state space is partially ordered and the kernel is stochastically monotone, we further show that the optimal threshold is nonincreasing in the state. For the average cost criterion, under additional assumptions of geometric ergodicity and domination of the transient gain, we establish analogous threshold results via the vanishing discount approach, after showing the uniform boundedness of the optimal thresholds and relative value functions. --- ### SafeCA: Safe Cross-Attention Localization and Regulation for Text-to-Video Jailbreak Defense Authors: Siyuan Liang, Yupeng Qiu, Junfeng Fang, Rong-Cheng Tu, Jiaxing Huang, Dacheng Tao Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10933v1 Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in real-world deployment, leading them to produce harmful or inappropriate content. Existing defense approaches mainly rely on input filtering or reconstruction, which not only incur high computational latency but also tend to distort semantics. To address these issues, we experimentally and systematically analyze the differences between clean and jailbreak samples in the cross-attention feature space, revealing for the first time a cumulative separation effect and a progressively increasing trend of linear separability between the two during the diffusion process. Based on this insight, we propose SafeCA, a feature-level defense mechanism for safe cross-attention localization and regularization. Firstly, we identify key defensive regions and values through attention stability analysis using cross-attention features collected from clean prompts within a single inference. Secondly, SafeCA mitigates anomalous activations via attention masking with energy normalization and introduces a lightweight semantic-space adapter to redirect abnormal semantic flows. Furthermore, we detect and suppress potentially malicious tokens by back-propagating feature anomaly signals to the input cue words, thereby enhancing the deployability of the defense in commercial models. Experimental results show that SafeCA reduces the jailbreak success rate by about 20% on mainstream T2V models, adds almost no inference overhead (+0.1s), and maintains good text-video semantic consistency. Overall, SafeCA provides an architecture-level, deployable protection paradigm for T2V generation models. --- ### Temporally Grounded Compositional Camera Motion Understanding via Geometric Knowledge Distillation Authors: Dazhao Du, Shiyan Du, Jian Liu, Yongjian Yu, Bohai Gu, Tao Han, Hualuo Liu, Eric Liu, Yujia Zhang, Xi Chen, Song Guo Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10932v1 Understanding camera motion is fundamental to video perception, with applications in spatial intelligence and controllable video generation. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide a natural interface for this task, but existing work typically assigns one or more labels to an entire clip. Such clip-level recognition overlooks two defining properties of real camera motion: it can change within a shot, and multiple movements can occur simultaneously. We therefore formulate camera-motion understanding as temporally grounded, compositional recognition, which requires a model to localize motion-consistent intervals and identify every movement active within each interval. We introduce CamChoreo, a benchmark of 4,229 real single-shot clips with expert-annotated temporal segments. Its annotations use a compact vocabulary of 20 direction-aware labels, and nearly half of the segments contain compound camera motion, with multiple movement primitives active simultaneously. Recognizing such fine-grained, compositional motion is hard for current MLLMs, whose visual encoders emphasize semantic content rather than the geometric evidence on which camera motion depends. Directly injecting features from a frozen 3D foundation model addresses this gap, but requires running the expensive geometry model on every input; we refer to this baseline as CamInject. We instead propose CamDistill, which distills the same geometric knowledge into lightweight camera tokens during training and removes the 3D model at inference. CamDistill matches the accuracy of direct feature injection without running the 3D teacher at inference. Together, CamChoreo and CamDistill advance camera-motion understanding from clip-level labeling to temporally grounded, compositional recognition. Project page: https://ddz16.github.io/cammotion.github.io/. --- ### FedCGR: Federated Cross-Domain Generative Recommendation Authors: Zhuodong Liu, Hugen Lv, Xiangyu Li, Bohan Guo, Peiyu Hu Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10929v1 Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) transfers preference knowledge across related domains, but federated deployment makes cross-domain alignment difficult because the behavioral anchors that align item spaces, such as overlapping users and shared interaction signals, are often sparse, unavailable, or privacy-sensitive across clients. To address this tension, we revisit federated CDR as generation over a stable semantic item language. By representing items as discrete semantic ID (SID) sequences derived from public item-side metadata, cross-domain item alignment is induced by a shared vocabulary rather than by exchanging private interactions or aligning domain-specific embeddings. Directly federating SID-based generators, however, introduces two design constraints: the SID tokenizer must remain fixed to preserve cross-client token consistency, which creates a semantic-only bottleneck because local collaborative filtering (CF) signals cannot be globally shared or aligned; meanwhile, standard federated averaging can cause negative transfer under domain heterogeneity. To overcome these constraints, we propose FedCGR, a federated generative CDR framework that keeps the item language stable and makes adaptation explicit. FedCGR injects local CF evidence through a reliability-aware semantic interface and trains a prototype-personalized generator that selectively aggregates shared parameters according to domain relatedness while keeping domain-specific quantities local. Experiments on six Amazon cross-domain scenarios show that FedCGR consistently outperforms federated generative baselines and achieves competitive performance against strong sequential and federated CDR methods under both full-ranking and sampled evaluation protocols. --- ### ThinkRetrieve: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Traces for Test-Time Scaling Authors: Vaibhav Singh, Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Sarvesh Gharat, Soumyabrata Pal, Ramasuri Narayanam, Dinesh Manocha Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10928v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by allocating additional inference-time compute to generate extended chain-of-thought reasoning. However, recent studies reveal that sequential test-time scaling often yields diminishing or even negative returns, as longer traces exhibit increased uncertainty, error compounding, and drift from the original problem. We propose ThinkRetrieve, a test-time scaling framework that augments the reasoning traces of LRMs with dynamically retrieved solved examples at each reasoning step. Given an external corpus of problems paired with step-by-step solutions, ThinkRetrieve retrieves relevant exemplars at each intermediate step and injects them directly into the thinking trace, providing the model with guidance on how to reason rather than merely what facts are relevant. Experiments across five reasoning models (1.5B--8B parameters) on GSM-8K, MATH-500, AIME 2025, and SciQ demonstrate that ThinkRetrieve consistently improves accuracy over standard test-time scaling, with relative gains of up to $60\%$ on AIME 2025. --- ### IO Factory: Simulating AI-Enabled Influence Campaigns at Scale Authors: Lukasz Olejnik, Wenchao Dong, Jonas R. Kunst, Signe Riemer-Sørensen, Tobias Herb, Meeyoung Cha, Daniel Thilo Schroeder Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10920v1 We introduce IO Factory, an AI-driven framework for simulating information and influence campaigns as fully integrated, traceable processes. The threat of digital manipulation now extends beyond persuasive text from individual language models to AI swarms, i.e., persistent groups of coordinated agents that adapt to platform feedback and disguise organized campaigns as ordinary social interaction. Because such campaigns cannot be identified from isolated messages alone, they must be analyzed across a continuous spectrum of planning, platform action, exposure, interpretation, measurement, and adaptation. IO Factory represents this process inside a controlled simulated platform, linking actor roles, platform actions, exposure records, structured model-based evaluations, and configured changes in the simulated population. We implement the architecture and evaluate it across configurations of up to 100,000 agents. The results show that IO Factory executes campaign timelines at scale and produces inspectable evidence of exposure and measured movement in configured belief variables. By recording the actors, objectives, action constraints, exposure paths, and measurement rules used in each run, IO Factory supports reproducible research and red-team analysis of coordinated influence. --- ### FaithformBench: Benchmarking Faithfulness of Mathematical Chain-of-Thought Autoformalisation Authors: Rob Cornish, Iacopo Ghinassi, Po-Hung Yeh, Shuqi Liu, Qiyuan Xu, Haoxuan Yin, Dominik Wagner, Wenda Li, Yee Whye Teh, Luke Ong Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10916v1 Autoformalisation (AF) systems map natural language reasoning steps into formal statements in a proof assistant such as Lean. We consider how to assess the faithfulness of these systems. Existing approaches require expensive human-annotated ground truth, or rely on LLM judges or embedding models, which come with limited guarantees of accuracy. In addition, these methods typically only consider inputs that are known to be correct, and therefore do not assess whether the AF translates incorrect inputs faithfully. To address these limitations, we propose a new benchmark for AF faithfulness that is cheap to apply, sound under weak assumptions, and assesses both positive and negative examples. Our method is based on automatically generating perturbed reasoning steps that are designed to be invalid, and then measuring validity preservation on unperturbed steps and invalidity preservation on perturbed steps. We apply our method to eight AF systems across four mathematical datasets, and observe pervasive sycophancy: many AFs "silently correct" invalid inputs into provable statements. The most validity-preserving fine-tuned AFs are also the most sycophantic, suggesting a tension between validity and invalidity preservation in current AF systems. --- ### ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI Authors: Qianggang Ding, Xingyao Wang, Rui Feng, Zhibin Wang, Feixiang Yao, Kelong Mao, Hao Sun, Zhiyao Luo, Jiankai Tang, Lei Li, Jiadong Guo, Minheng Ni et al. Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10915v2 After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit. --- ### ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI Authors: Qianggang Ding, Xingyao Wang, Rui Feng, Zhibin Wang, Feixiang Wang, Kelong Mao, Hao Sun, Zhiyao Luo, Jiankai Tang, Lei Li, Jiadong Guo, Minheng Ni et al. Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10915v1 After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit. ---