# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 157 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #7801–7850 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/157 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/156.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/158.md) ### FormStruct-Bench:A Hierarchical and Diagnostic Benchmark for Table-Form Document Structure Recognition Authors: Lujie Ban, Jiangtao Zhu, Yuanheng Yu, Jiasheng Shi, Chenhao Ma Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10396v1 Transforming table-form documents into machine-processable records requires recovering not only their visible content but also the multilevel structure that organizes it. However, existing benchmarks evaluate either holistic document outputs or conventional table grids, and their aggregate scores provide little insight into where structural failures occur. We introduce FormStruct-Bench, a hierarchical and diagnostic benchmark that evaluates table-form document structure recognition at both the document level and progressively finer component levels, allowing aggregate performance to be traced back to specific structural failure modes. To construct auditable ground truth at scale, we annotate 70 reusable templates and expand them into 7,000 verified instances through a provenance-preserving Director--Artist--Verifier pipeline; all 1,100 instances in the template-disjoint test set additionally receive human review. Our evaluation protocol uses five primary metrics and three structure-specific diagnostics across page, schema, and component levels, together with slices over difficulty, structural constraints, and visual degradation. Across 14 API-hosted and locally deployable systems plus two SFT variants, the best document-level score reaches 83.85%, whereas the best reported fine-grained structural score remains below 18%. These results reveal a pronounced gap between reading document content and recovering the hierarchy and regional organization required for reliable table-form understanding. --- ### Improved cross-validated distances for multivariate pattern analysis Authors: Laurent Caplette, Sarah Lippé Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: q-bio.NC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10394v1 Characterizing the dissimilarity of neural representations between experimental conditions, and tracking it across time, is a central goal of multivariate pattern analysis. Guggenmos et al. (2018) assessed the reliability of many of the measures that can be used for that purpose on MEG data and recommended the use of either the cross-validated Euclidean distance or the within-class-corrected Pearson distance. In this commentary, we show that we can improve upon these distances. First, we show that the cross-validated Euclidean distance is equivalent to a sum of between-partition distances and that this equivalence can be leveraged to obtain a generalized variant, with increased reliability and accuracy. Second, we use the relationship between Euclidean distance and Pearson correlation to define a cross-validated correlation distance in a similar way. The resulting distance is more accurate and interpretable than a formulation proposed by Guggenmos and colleagues. Finally, we discuss the relationship between our generalized cross-validation and within-class correction, another strategy often used to increase reliability, and we show that generalized cross-validation results in higher accuracy for the correlation distance. --- ### Hidden in Plain Sight: Diffusion-Based Unrestricted Robotic Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Jiahui Han, Yuhui Yao, Xin Wang, Jiafei Cao, Mingxuan Zhang, Danfeng Shan, Huiqi Deng, Guanchu Wang, Xia Hu Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10393v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong capabilities in controlling robots across diverse manipulation tasks. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely underexplored, and exploiting this weakness can lead to physical-world harm. Existing attacks on VLA models often rely on pixel-space perturbations or white-box access, resulting in noticeable artifacts and limited deployability in real-world robotic systems. In this work, we propose DURA, a diffusion-based unrestricted robotic attack that generates visually natural adversarial patches for VLA models. DURA supports both white-box and black-box attack settings, where the black-box setting requires only the predicted actions of the victim model. By optimizing along the latent trajectory of a pretrained diffusion model, DURA generates visually natural patches while steering the robot toward attacker-specified target actions. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real physical world show that DURA consistently outperforms existing methods. Our findings expose a safety risk for physically deployed VLA models and call for stronger defenses. --- ### Share First, Route What Remains: A Unified Framework for Token-Adaptive MoE Computation Authors: Gongli Zhang, Zhulin Liu, C. L. Philip Chen Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10392v1 Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have recently moved beyond routing a fixed number of complete experts. Shared-expert designs preserve reusable knowledge, fine-grained methods vary computation within experts, and dynamic routers adapt the number of active experts. Yet these decisions are usually made independently, overlooking a basic dependency: extracting reusable computation changes both what remains and how much expert capacity the remainder needs. We study this dependency by decomposing sparsely upcycled feed-forward experts into key-value channels. Co-activated experts align at a subset of value positions; removing these positions changes expert preference; and greater shared coverage is associated with lower residual expert demand. These observations lead to one principle: share first, then route what remains. We instantiate it in UniF-MoE, a unified framework for token-adaptive MoE computation. Each expert is partitioned into aligned blocks. A shared-demand score sets the shared block count and pathway weight, key prototypes select the shared content, and the complementary demand determines the residual expert count through cumulative routing mass. A Gram regularizer separates and normalizes router embeddings, promoting diverse routing directions, sparse expert overlap, and a simple routing geometry. Experiments on DomainBed and GLUE show that this unified design improves predictive performance over representative static and dynamic MoEs while reducing activated computation, inference latency, and memory. Code is available at https://github.com/existence0420/UniF-MoE. --- ### Efficient Weak-Entropy PINN for Solving Hyperbolic Conservation Laws Authors: Qi Gao, Kuang Huang, Xuan Di Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10389v1 In recent years, neural networks have significantly advanced numerical solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, solving PDEs with discontinuous solutions, such as hyperbolic conservation laws, remains challenging for neural network-based methods such as physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Existing methods often rely on strong prior assumptions such as knowledge of discontinuity locations, or they introduce artificial smoothing terms that degrade accuracy. However, accurately solving these conservation laws and predicting the formation and propagation of discontinuities in solutions is crucial in many practical applications, including gas dynamics and traffic flow modeling. In this paper, we introduce a novel Weak-Entropy PINN (WEPINN) framework for hyperbolic conservation laws with discontinuous solutions. The method enforces the governing equations in their weak (integral) formulation and incorporates the entropy condition to select the physically admissible solution, while employing the discrete fast Fourier transform (DFFT) for efficient numerical integration. Our method is tested through extensive numerical experiments on a variety of scalar conservation laws and systems of conservation laws in one and two dimensional spaces. These experiments demonstrate that our method can accurately resolve sharp discontinuities while effectively capturing interactions between multiple shock and rarefaction waves. --- ### Dreamer-SAC: Off-Policy Learning in Latent World Models for Sample-Efficient Autonomous Driving Authors: Jiazhuo Li, Linjiang Cao, Qi Liu, Xi Xiong Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10386v1 Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias. While world models reduce the reliance on costly environment interactions, policy optimization over learned dynamics remains sensitive to prediction errors. This paper proposes the Dreamer-SAC framework, which integrates a recurrent state-space world model with an off-policy soft actor-critic algorithm trained directly in latent space. The framework uses a combination of real interactions and short-horizon generated trajectories with n-step target estimation and multi-objective supervision. Evaluated in autonomous driving scenarios with objectives encompassing driving efficiency and safety, the proposed framework consistently outperforms representative reinforcement learning baselines, including DreamerV3, SAC, and PPO, while achieving improved performance with substantially fewer real environment interactions. Experiments reveal an inverted-U relationship between rollout horizon and policy performance, where short-horizon latent rollouts achieve the best trade-off between additional training signals and accumulated model bias. Furthermore, n-step target estimation demonstrates more effectiveness over one-step temporal-difference targets in exploiting predicted experience for value learning. --- ### Persona Conditioning as an Assessor-Sensitivity Probe for LLM-Based IR Evaluation Authors: Samaneh Mohtadi, Pietro Bernardelle, Joel Mackenzie, Gianluca Demartini Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10385v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as relevance assessors in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, raising questions about how assessor framing affects judgment reliability and downstream system comparison. We study persona conditioning as a diagnostic mechanism for exposing LLM assessor sensitivity. Using task-oriented personas drawn from two complementary sources (PersonaHub and NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA), we instantiate five assessor roles emphasizing intent interpretation, domain expertise, contrastive judgment, evidence verification, and global search-quality assessment, compared with a standard UMBRELA baseline. Across six LLM backbones on TREC DL20 and RAG24, our analyses reveal structured rather than uniform assessor sensitivity. Judgments usually remain close to the baseline while shifting assessment strictness, evidential threshold, or interpretation emphasis rather than producing widespread relevance reversals. At the system level, high-capacity models preserve system-ranking agreement, while smaller models amplify persona-induced instability. Local rank-displacement analysis shows sensitivity concentrates on particular retrieval systems and system types, especially neural ranking/reranking systems on DL20 and RAG-oriented pipelines on RAG24. Persona source matters less than assessor role and model capacity. These findings position persona-conditioned judging as a controlled sensitivity probe for stress-testing LLM-based IR evaluation pipelines and identifying systems whose evaluation outcomes are sensitive to assessor framing. --- ### Generator-Guided Inverse Sampling for Lévy-Driven Generative Models Authors: Tianfu Qi, Jun Wang, Jun Zhang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10384v1 This paper studies inverse sampling for Lévy-driven generative models from the perspective of Markov generators. Unlike conventional diffusion models, Lévy-driven dynamics involve infinite jump activities, which makes their reverse process nonlocal and difficult to characterize using score information alone. We address this challenge by analyzing the forward and reversed generators. It is derived that the reversed jump component generally becomes a state-dependent Markov jump process governed by a nonlocal density ratio. This observation motivates a structured reverse sampler that decomposes the dynamics into diffusion, small jump, and large jump components. Based on this characterization, we develop a computationally tractable sampler for a class of isotropic linear Lévy SDEs with symmetric $α$-stable jump components. For the jump component, the neural network is used only to amortize the rate of large jump activities, while jump amplitudes are generated from analytically derived conditional distributions, which improves interpretability and controllability. Efficient implementation techniques are further introduced under this setting to avoid expensive high-dimensional integration and sampling. The sampler is further adapted to approximate observation-guided sampling and applied to OFDM-SISO channel estimation under mixed Gaussian and impulsive noise. Simulations show robust estimation performance with a favorable tradeoff between complexity and performance. --- ### A Single Atom in Front of a Mirror is a Universal Reservoir Computer Authors: Peter J. Ehlers, Phi Hung Nguyen, Kanu Sinha, Noelle Daigle, Travis W. Sawyer, Hendra I. Nurdin, Daniel Soh Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10382v1 Universal approximation in reservoir computing is typically associated with a class of reservoirs. We show that universality can be associated with a single reservoir, considering a minimal setup of a single atom in front of a mirror. In its linear-transducer limit, our reservoir is a universal approximator of fading-memory maps under an operating class of checkable conditions, with a rate constant measured at the operating point. A given reservoir can reach arbitrary accuracy by changing measurement settings. The proof gives an explicit recipe: for a target accuracy, it specifies the required physical resources and resonator modes. Enlarging the number of accessible modes increases the matchable kernel span without reducing capability. Beyond the linear limit, the atom's saturation replaces high-order polynomial readouts, and the device operates on real-world tasks alongside classical baselines. Our results highlight an example of universality with a minimal quantum setup. --- ### Beyond Forecasting: Recasting Volatility Control as a Routing Problem Authors: Hongji Pu, Leyang Zhou Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10375v2 Volatility control converts risk estimates into portfolio exposure, yet existing approaches often rely on a fixed volatility estimator or a pre-defined control rule that may not adapt to changing market conditions. We propose VolRouter, a modular framework that formulates volatility control as state-conditioned routing over estimator-controller pairs. VolRouter first summarizes market conditions into a control-relevant state profile and then performs routing through three stages: state inference, switch review, and pair selection. The Router can be implemented using rule-based, learnable, or LLM-based decision modules, while portfolio actions remain generated by predefined control policies. We evaluate VolRouter across S&P 500, Multi-Asset, Bitcoin, and USDT volatility-control settings. VolRouter achieves the highest Sharpe ratio in three of four settings. On S&P 500, it improves Sharpe from 0.952 for RV + Naive Scaling to 1.222 while reducing maximum drawdown from 15.10% to 12.58% and daily CVaR from 1.76% to 1.32%. On Multi-Asset, it improves Sharpe from 1.498 to 1.540 and reduces CVaR from 1.56% to 1.18%. Bitcoin shows similar improvements in risk-adjusted performance, while USDT provides a boundary case where simpler state-aware selectors remain competitive. Ablation and sensitivity analyses show that the improvement comes from relative policy evaluation and selective persistent switching rather than simply expanding the policy library. These results suggest that volatility control can be viewed as a policy-selection problem when risk management requirements vary across market states. --- ### Fisher8: Stabilizing Neural Heteroscedastic Regression via Output-Layer Fisher Geometry Authors: Sumedh Vemuganti, Nickvash Kani Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10374v1 Training neural networks to jointly predict mean and uncertainty estimates from noisy observations can be unstable, prompting a series of independent stabilization efforts. We argue that these interventions highlight a common underlying issue where gradient steps are poorly aligned with the geometry of the loss landscape. To better align updates with local curvature, we derive Fisher8, an output-layer gradient correction that reorients and rescales updates using Fisher geometry rather than Euclidean geometry. Unlike past stabilizers, Fisher8 introduces no data-dependent hyperparameters beyond learning rate and admits an approximate KL trust radius between successive predictive distributions. We show that prior stabilizers converge on overlapping components of this geometric correction. Across multidimensional regression and representation-learning tasks, Fisher8 obtains superior likelihood--error tradeoffs, predicts calibrated uncertainty estimates, and learns rich uncertainty-aware feature spaces. --- ### Invertible Logits Transformation for Accuracy-Preserving Post-Hoc Uncertainty Calibration Authors: Lening Zhao, Qipeng Zhan, Li Shen Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10372v1 Post-hoc calibration aligns a classifier's predicted confidences with its empirical accuracy without retraining. An ideal calibrator should correct nonlinear miscalibration, scale gracefully to large label spaces, and preserve the original predictions; existing methods typically violate at least one of these properties---temperature scaling lacks expressivity, more flexible parametric alternatives introduce parameters that grow with the number of classes $C$, and other expressive methods do not preserve the rank ordering of class scores and may alter the predicted class. We propose \textbf{Invertible Logits Transformation (InvLT)}, which applies a learned scalar MLP $f:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ element-wise to the pre-softmax logits. Sharing $f$ across all logit dimensions makes the parameter count independent of $C$. Monotonicity of $f$---and hence preservation of the argmax prediction---is softly encouraged via a paired inverse network rather than enforced through the numerical integration required by prior monotone calibrators; this avoids their computational overhead while empirically preserving the original classification accuracy in every setting we evaluate. Across standard image classification benchmarks and a range of architectures, InvLT consistently outperforms a broad set of post-hoc baselines on standard calibration metrics. --- ### DSAgentBench: Can Agents Automate End-to-End Data-Science Workflows in Real Computer Environments? Authors: Mizanur Rahman, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Ridwan Mahbub, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shafiq Joty, Enamul Hoque Prince Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10366v1 Real-world data science involves long-horizon workflows that span data wrangling, exploration, modeling, visualization, and validation, and require coordinated use of tools such as notebooks, IDEs, terminals, browsers, and databases within real operating environments. Yet existing benchmarks lack real-computer interaction and do not evaluate whether agents can execute complete end-to-end data-science workflows in realistic computing environments, failing to capture the multi-stage, multi-tool nature of data-science practice. We introduce DSAgentBench, the first benchmark to evaluate whether agents can automate full data-science workflows inside real computer environments. DSAgentBench contains 275 diverse tasks covering the entire data-science life-cycle, reflecting the complexity and tool coordination required in practice. Each task requires grounding decisions in intermediate outputs and coordinated tool use, and includes a deterministic evaluator that verifies analytical correctness, visual outputs, and model performance rather than code-only execution. Our extensive experiments with 15 closed- and open-source models show that even the strongest agent, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, achieves only 56.70% task success, while all open-source agents remain below 1%, frequently failing at tool orchestration, OS grounding, and multi-step reasoning. These results reveal a substantial capability gap between current agentic systems and real data-science workflows, positioning DSAgentBench as a foundation for developing grounded, verifiable, autonomous data-science agents. We release DSAgentBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DSAgentBench. --- ### Nutrition Data Infrastructure for the AI Era: Operationalizing FAIR for Agent-Mediated Research Authors: Lin Liao, Peng Li Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10363v2 AI agents can accelerate nutrition research, but their analyses inherit the identity, semantic, and release ambiguities of the underlying data. We present Nutrition Data Service (NDS), source-preserving infrastructure that operationalizes FAIR for automated use: description resolution makes release-specific records findable; typed crosswalks connect independently released resources; machine-readable interfaces expose versioned sources and crosswalks, supporting replayable and auditable analyses. On food-description benchmarks, NDS outperforms the best published language-model result on NutriBench. External and blinded crosswalk evaluations show that its typed contract favors defensible links and rejects unsupported mappings. In a person-level glycemic-index analysis, pinned NDS inputs produce identical outputs across models and repeated runs, while open-web reconstruction remains unstable. Together, these results show that agent-mediated nutrition research requires a new infrastructure that makes data identity, search, and crosswalk policy explicit. --- ### MemSpec: Memory-Aware Runtime for Adaptive Draft Scheduling in Speculative Decoding on Edge Devices Authors: Eunjeong Kim, Yeong Jun Jeon, Myeonggyun Han Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.OS, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10362v1 Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to speculate multiple tokens, reducing expensive target model decoding steps. Its effectiveness depends heavily on draft selection, motivating adaptive methods that exploit variation across inputs and generation stages. On memory-constrained edge devices, however, these methods often fail to improve end-to-end throughput due to the overhead of switching between draft models. We identify a key limitation in this setting: the mismatch between draft selection and draft availability under tight memory budgets. To address this challenge, we present MemSpec, a prediction-guided, memory-aware runtime for adaptive speculative decoding on edge devices. MemSpec decouples draft selection from execution through proactive resident working-set management. A lightweight predictor estimates draft effectiveness from prompt and generation context, while a memory-aware scheduler reduces reactive model loading overhead. Experiments on a Jetson Orin Nano show that MemSpec improves steady-state generation throughput by 40.7% on average over state-of-the-art bandit-based adaptive methods while closely approaching the oracle upper bound. --- ### MazzikaAI: A knowledge-based performance-to-prompt compiler for real-time Arabic maqam accompaniment with a streaming text-to-music model Authors: Jiaxin Du, Boulbaba Abdeljaouad, Yong Zhuang, Haoyu Li Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10360v1 Arabic maqam music microtonal, modal, and built on ornamented call and response is among the traditions most underserved by generative music models, whose training frameworks remain predominantly Western and equaltempered. Real time accompaniment sharpens this gap: an AI partner must listen, adapt dynamically, and respect idiomatic microtonal structures. Streaming text to music models provide strong generative capabilities but lack precise control interfaces. We present MazzikaAI, a knowledge based system that uses natural language as the actuator of a realtime control loop. By compiling live MIDI, gesture, and inferred harmony into continuously updated text prompts, MazzikaAI steers an unmodified streaming generator, Google Lyria RealTime, without requiring model finetuning. The system embeds expert knowledge of six core maqamat, characteristic ornaments, and ensemble dynamics, maintaining realtime responsiveness with subsecond keytoaudibleupdate latency. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that dynamic prompt compilation reliably grounds generation in microtonal scales, significantly increasing offgrid quartertone content over baseline generation. Beyond its core implementation, MazzikaAI illustrates how deterministic knowledgebased rules can effectively bridge expert, nonWestern musical traditions and unfinetuned foundation models. This architecture establishes a scalable paradigm for realtime humanAI cocreation, offering a generalizable blueprint for interactive accompaniment, adaptive music education, and culturally inclusive generative audio across diverse global idioms. --- ### VoxSumm: A Multilingual Corpus of Long-Form Spoken News for Joint Summarization and Translation Authors: Yejin Jeon, Marie Maltais, Virginia Ceccatelli, Min Ma, David Ifeoluwa Adelani Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10359v1 As information increasingly traverses linguistic boundaries, users require concise cross-lingual representations of long-form content. Nevertheless, long-document summarization research remains text-centric, whereas multilingual speech research has largely prioritized translation, preserving source content rather than compressing it. We address this methodological gap by formalizing joint speech summarization and translation (JSumT): the generation of a succinct, faithful target-language summary directly from a long spoken document in a source language. We additionally introduce VoxSumm, the first multilingual and cross-lingual benchmark for this task, comprising 10,045 BBC article-summary pairs across 24 languages and encompassing approximately 703 hours of speech data. Our evaluation of representative speech-language models reveals pronounced variation across models and generation settings: Gemini3.1-Pro demonstrates the greatest consistency, summarization into English generally surpasses generation into non-English target languages, and translating an entire document before summarization compounds instruction-following failures. Through the release of VoxSumm, we establish a foundation for developing and evaluating multilingual systems capable of jointly interpreting, compressing, and translating long-form speech. --- ### Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agentic Tasks Authors: Zelei Cheng, Amritansh Mishra, Sambit Sahu, William Campbell Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10357v1 Long-horizon tool-using agents must reason over user goals, domain policies, tool calls, simulator state, and delayed verifiable rewards. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for this setting, but multi-turn on-policy rollouts create long contexts, while model-specific attention layers may require custom masks and learned sink normalization. We present SINKFLEX-RL, a modular training system for RL in dual-control tool-use environments. The system combines a Gymnasium-compatible environment wrapper, a VERL-style rollout dataflow, group-relative policy optimization without a separate value model, and a sink-aware FlexAttention path designed to preserve model-specific sink scaling under causal and sliding-window masks. In a preliminary Tau2Bench retail run, validation reward (mean@1) rises from 0.25 early in training to $0.44$ later in the observed training window, while training-score and trajectory-reward proxies also trend upward. In a fixed-configuration memory benchmark, the optimized attention path reduces peak VRAM from 28.06GB to 22.52GB at 4096 tokens, a $19.7\%$ reduction, and runs the measured 8192-token configuration using $25.53$~GB where the eager baseline runs out of memory. These results illustrate the value of integrating environment interfaces, RL dataflow, and attention-kernel design for memory-feasible long-horizon agent training. --- ### Accelerated Learning of High Dimensional Functions with a Tensor-Featured Training Network Authors: Karl Pierce, Yuehaw Khoo, Haizhao Yang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10351v1 In this work we present a method to accelerate the optimization of learning high dimensional functions using deep neural network (DNN). This optimization procedure introduces contextual features into the first layer of a DNN. The parameters of DNN are optimized via standard gradient descent while keeping the input-feature basis fixed. After optimization of the DNN parameters, the feature layer is provided a chance to update and change before DNN optimization resumes. The feature layer has two types of functions: those that can be evaluated quickly in a matrix-free way on the domain (i.e. rank-1 features) and more complex features that must first be decomposed using tensor network (TN) decomposition strategies (tensor features). In particular, we study the effect of adding features which distill pretrained DNN into TNs using a discretize and decompose strategy. To efficiently decompose high-dimensional functions constructed from discretized DNN, we leverage a randomized tensor decomposition strategy. Using randomization, we are able to reduce the storage cost of decomposing high dimensional functions by at least 8 orders of magnitude. Using this approach, we are able to efficiently train models between 5 and 40 dimensions. --- ### Beyond Detection Accuracy: Measuring Explanation Cost, Stability, and Utility for Resource-Aware IoT Intrusion Detection Authors: Abdurrahman Tolay Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10349v1 Machine-learning intrusion-detection studies commonly emphasize predictive accuracy while treating explanation generation as a computationally free post-processing step. This study jointly evaluates predictive effectiveness, explanation cost, local explanation stability, and selective explanation for binary Internet of Things (IoT) intrusion detection. A leakage-safe CICIoT2023 corpus was constructed using exact 39-feature hashes, non-finite-value handling, exact-feature deduplication, conservative label-collision removal, and deterministic hash-level partitioning. Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost were evaluated on natural and balanced test distributions. TreeSHAP cost was measured, stability was assessed under prediction-preserving perturbations, and validation-calibrated policies were used to allocate explanation workload. XGBoost provided the strongest overall predictive profile, while Random Forest produced the lowest false-positive rate. At 5,000 samples, TreeSHAP required 700.759 s for Random Forest and 1.471 s for XGBoost. Random Forest showed the strongest overall base-level explanation stability; XGBoost retained high rank and directional consistency but showed greater top-feature turnover and attribution-magnitude drift. On the balanced test, about 90% false-negative explanation coverage permitted 28-32% compute savings, while about 95% coverage permitted 15-23% savings. Savings were much smaller under the attack-heavy natural prevalence. These results show that operationally useful explainable IoT intrusion detection depends on predictive quality, explanation cost, local stability, workload prevalence, and selective invocation rather than detection accuracy alone. --- ### Towards Unified Dynamic Face Landmark Detection Authors: Sebastian Regalado, Varshanth R. Rao, Ruowei Jiang, Parham Aarabi, Igor Gilitschenski Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10346v2 Although advancements in face landmark detection (FLD) methods continue to push performance boundaries, they overlook two major functional limitations: (1) different network parameters need to be trained independently for each ``$N$-point'' benchmark dataset, and (2) a model trained on an ``$N$-point'' dataset reliably outputs only the $N$ landmarks. In our work, we first conceptualize Face Part-Anchored Landmark Positions (FPALPs), wherein each landmark is treated as a progression value between zero (start) and one (end) along a face part's contour. Every landmark can be expressed in the FPALP format, irrespective of its source dataset, hence unlocking the ability to unify all ``$N$-point'' datasets into a single dataset. Secondly, we represent each landmark with an FPALP-based query, refine it progressively with a cross-modality decoder, and predict its coordinates based on the final representation. Our approach, called Unified Dynamic FLD, embodies these two design choices and streamlines the landmark detection pipeline by enabling (1) a single model to learn on any number of ``$N$-point'' datasets, and (2) yield any number of specific landmark predictions by loading the designated landmark queries at runtime. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our method delivers these benefits while remaining competitive with, and in several cases outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. --- ### CasDeblurGS: Cascaded 2D-to-3D Multi-View Consistency for 3D Gaussian Splatting from Two Blurry Images Authors: Haeyun Choi, Minhyuk Jang, I-Gil Kim Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10345v1 Free-viewpoint 3D scene media is increasingly important for immersive applications, yet practical capture often suffers from severe view sparsity and motion blur. Although neural rendering has advanced sparse-view synthesis, existing blur-aware methods typically require substantial multi-view redundancy, accurate camera poses, or costly per-scene optimization. We address a stringent yet practical setting: reconstructing a coherent 3D scene from only two motion-blurred images with known intrinsics, without input-view poses, auxiliary sharp images, or per-scene test-time optimization. To this end, we propose CasDeblurGS, a cascaded framework that progressively recovers reliable cross-view information from local 2D correspondences to global 3D guidance. Stage 1 constructs locally reliable guidance through occlusion-aware correspondence filtering, while Stage 2 aggregates the intermediate restorations into a provisional pose-free 3D Gaussian representation whose input-view re-renders provide dense global guidance for final restoration. The resulting views enable a more coherent 3D representation and higher-quality novel-view synthesis. Experiments on real-world and synthetic Deblur-NeRF scenes show consistent gains over strong baselines, improving PSNR by 1.19 dB and 2.11 dB, respectively. Progressive ablations, cross-view correspondence visualization, and camera reprojection analysis further demonstrate improvements in both rendering quality and multi-view geometric consistency. --- ### On the Importance of Geometric Nonlinearity and Temperature-Dependent Properties in Multi-Material Thermo-Mechanical Topology Optimization Authors: Shirin Hosseinmardi, Xiangyu Sun, Ramin Bostanabad Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10344v2 Thermo-mechanical compliant devices are commonly designed with small-strain linear elasticity and temperature-independent material properties, even though they might operate hundreds of kelvin above ambient where both assumptions are questionable. In this work, we quantify the effect and cost of each assumption in multi-material topology optimization of thermally actuated compliant devices. To this end, we introduce a physics-informed, simultaneous analysis-and-design framework with (i) a finite-strain quadratic-Hencky (logarithmic-strain) constitutive model whose isotropic thermal eigenstrain admits an exact additive split in log-strain space, and (ii) temperature-dependent conductivity, thermal expansion, and elastic moduli for a titanium--copper--steel material system. We optimize a thermal actuator and a thermal gripper at three design temperatures under both a baseline model and the full physics, subject to mass and manufacturability constraints. Every converged design is re-evaluated by verified nonlinear finite element solvers in the full factorial of constitutive law and property model. The comparison between the two factors reveals that the constitutive law is the decisive modeling choice: These devices work as linkages where linear kinematics mistakes rotation for compressive strain; its error therefore grows with the design temperature and concentrates on the very layouts that exploit rotation best. Because a linear optimizer also steers away from the rotation-rich mechanisms that would expose this bias, the model can deceptively appear trustworthy when validated against its own designs. Designing with the full physics yields consistently stronger and more temperature-robust devices at a modest increase in design-time cost. --- ### ENCORE: Efficient Noise Context-Aware Representation for Low-Dose CT Denoising Authors: Minwoo Yu, N. Robert Bennett, Jongduk Baek, Adam S. Wang Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10343v1 While deep learning-based denoising has become widely adopted in low-dose CT, conventional models use generic architectures designed for natural images, failing to account for non-stationary and spatially correlated CT noise characteristics. To address this, we propose an Efficient Noise COntext-aware REpresentation (ENCORE) framework that explicitly leverages CT noise characteristics and anatomical features. First, we reformulate the noise synthesis procedure based on a realistic noise distribution beyond the conventional Gaussian approximation, establishing a rigorous foundation for training pair generation. Next, we extract local noise power and correlation contexts to guide the denoising process. To fully leverage the potential of noise context, we propose a FlyingConv module, which adaptively changes convolution weights for each local image region. Notably, our approach demonstrates substantial gains in both denoising quality and computational efficiency. Furthermore, manipulating the intensity of the noise context maps at inference time enables zero-shot conditional denoising, allowing for dynamic control over the output image texture. The entire pipeline is available at https://github.com/minwoo-yu/ENCORE.git --- ### Expert-Guided g-computation with Large Language Models for Estimating Causal Effects on Timings: Applications to Hospital Quality Improvement Authors: Patrick Vossler, Jialin Ouyang, F. Richard Guo, Anran Huang, Ali Shojaie, Lucas Zier, Fan Xia, Jean Feng Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10339v1 Hospital quality improvement (QI) programs routinely face multiple candidate interventions to optimize hospital flow, but existing methods struggle to estimate and rank the causal effects of such interventions. This work focuses on one of the most standard hospital metrics, the average length of stay (LOS), and its causal estimand, the average time saved. To characterize this causal effect, qualitative approaches rely on expert judgment to map patient trajectories, making them susceptible to cognitive biases; quantitative approaches rely on data-driven models, which fail when interventions are hypothetical with no historical data or have complex causal mechanisms that require clinical reasoning rather than data alone. We propose expert-guided g-computation, or egg-computation, which combines the complementary strengths of both approaches by connecting the Gantt charts commonly used to map patient trajectories with the causal DAG literature. We introduce a causal model over Gantt charts and establish identification using a variant of g-computation that seeks expert input only for components unidentifiable from data. To make egg-computation practical, we develop an LLM-assisted pipeline that reliably scales up expert reasoning. In simulations, egg-computation outperforms conventional causal inference methods when patients have diverse causal structures and intervention mechanisms. In a study of eleven candidate QI interventions at an urban safety-net hospital, the LLM pipeline generated graphs and time-saving estimates highly concordant with those of human experts. Beyond healthcare, egg-computation is a broadly applicable framework for estimating the average time saved for candidate interventions whose causal mechanisms can be represented using Gantt charts. --- ### Narrative Keyframing for Generative Creative Writing Authors: Chao Zhang, Abe Davis Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10337v1 We introduce narrative keyframing, an interaction technique for AI-assisted creative writing that lets writers specify different types of narrative constraints at selected moments in a story, then use AI to generate intervening prose. Inspired by the use of keyframing in animation, narrative keyframing offers a flexible way to connect story planning with adaptive control over generated text. We explore three types of keyframes: plot keyframes define significant events in a story, character keyframes represent how individual characters change over the narrative, and perspective keyframes capture how individual characters experience different events through first-person narratives. Plot and character keyframes offer a flexible way to adapt the type of high-level conditioning explored in previous AI writing tools to more customizable, iterative, and fine-scale control, while perspective keyframes add a new way to control characterization and focalization by using first-person narratives as an intermediary. Through a user study, we show that narrative keyframing supports a more controllable, transparent, and engaging way to use generative AI in creative writing. --- ### MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scale Authors: Yuhang Yao, Zeyu Wang, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang, Yuhang Han, Jie Xiao, Chengke Bao, Tianyi Zhao, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang, Tianyu Shi Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10333v1 LLM agents execute heterogeneous sequences of model calls within a single task: some invocations require careful reasoning, while others are structured steps such as formatting or tool-argument construction. Prior routing methods exploit this asymmetry by assigning easy invocations to a cheaper small model and difficult ones to a large model. Such policies reduce inference cost, but they leave the small model's capability unchanged, so attainable savings remain bounded by the work the student can already solve. MERA instead improves the small model itself, using a single model invocation as the unit of adaptation. In each cycle, MERA replays failed student invocations to obtain execution-verified teacher demonstrations, distills recurring procedures into an iteratively updated SkillBook, and fine-tunes a student LoRA adapter via supervised learning and optional GRPO. Routing serves as supporting machinery for deployment: the improved student is served behind a cost-calibrated router with verifier-backed fallback, and a candidate SkillBook, adapter, or router is admitted only when joint replay preserves task quality. Empirically, four-cycle adaptation raises Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B from 28.7% to 49.7% pass on held-out HumanEval+MBPP. Under verifier-backed fallback, the deployed policy retains 88.3% pass at 60.8% of always-Luna cost. On TAU-2, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B improves from 14/35 to 18/35 and matches an unadapted 4B model. These results indicate that verifier-backed multi-cycle adaptation can increase small-model capability, rather than only routing around a fixed student. --- ### Topological Feasibility Guarantees for Differentiable Predictive Control Authors: Guangyu Wu, Ján Drgoňa Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10332v1 Differentiable predictive control (DPC), a self-supervised learning approach for approximating explicit model predictive control (MPC) policies, offers significant computational advantages over online optimization-based MPC. However, feasibility guarantees, a core requirement for safe control, are currently provided either probabilistically or via online safety filters. The lack of rigorous feasibility guarantees for offline policy optimization remains an open problem. This paper establishes deterministic feasibility guarantees for DPC using a novel topological analysis of the induced reachable safe set, without requiring online safety filters. By exploiting the inherent model-based nature of DPC, in which differentiable system dynamics are embedded directly into the computational graph, we analyze the properties of the learned control policies and the corresponding system states from topological and geometric perspectives. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, we propose a novel self-supervised offline policy learning strategy that utilizes a proxy loss with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Crucially, these properties not only significantly improve policy training but also enable the derivation of strict, deterministic feasibility guarantees from a finite number of training samples. Extensive closed-loop simulations validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the empirical constraint violations monotonically decrease to zero as the training sample size increases. Ultimately, this work illustrates that DPC policy optimization yields formal safety certificates that are structurally unattainable with conventional black-box methods, e.g., reinforcement learning (RL) or supervised learning-based approximate MPC, thereby providing a new perspective on feasibility guarantees in learning-based control. --- ### Hierarchical Compositionality for An Assistive AI Agent Authors: Tianyi Fu, Mohan Sridharan Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10330v3 AI agents are increasingly being developed to assist humans in various applications, and Large Language Models and other deep network architectures are considered to be state of the art for such agents. These methods are impressive stochastic predictors, but they are resource-hungry, opaque, and known to make arbitrary decisions in novel situations due to the narrow set of underlying representation and processing choices. Our work seeks to explore the design of architectures for such AI agents based on core principles that can be traced back to the early pioneers of AI but are not fully utilized in modern AI methods. We do so in this paper in the context of the core problem of AI agents addressing ambiguity in the objects being referred to by the human participants. Humans address such ambiguity by heuristically leveraging compositional knowledge of domain context and the preferences of the other human participants. Drawing inspiration from this observation, we describe an architecture that embeds the principle of hierarchical compositionality and uses simple heuristics to achieve the desired disambiguation. Specifically, domain objects are represented in terms of primitive attributes drawn from human-validated semantic feature norms, and a hierarchical combination of attributes and concepts automatically identified from a limited observed history of interactions of an assistive agent with specific users. The assistive agent then achieves the desired disambiguation by reasoning with knowledge of this compositional hierarchy; axioms governing domain dynamics; and models of semantic compatibility, session salience, and user-specific thematic preference, requesting human clarification when necessary. Experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms state of the art data-driven baselines, supporting adaptation to specific user profiles. --- ### Who Gets Heeded? An Obligation-Level Audit of Responsiveness in EPA Rulemaking Authors: Jianing Fan, Yue Yao Published: 2026-08-11 Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10329v1 Notice-and-comment rulemaking gives any affected party the same formal right to influence federal regulation, but formal access is not substantive capacity to shape rule text. Existing strategies operate at the rule or aggregate-corpus level, too coarse to capture the discrete regulatory obligations where commenters seek change. We introduce obligation-level responsiveness auditing, an auditable, AI-assisted framework for measuring whether public-comment engagement co-occurs with changes to specific regulatory duties. The framework extracts proposed and final-rule obligations, matches comments to the obligations they address, and classifies proposed-final outcomes; each load-bearing component is evaluated against blind human judgment. We apply the framework to 70,075 comments across 36 EPA anchor rulemakings, drawn from a corpus of 786,197 comments across 6,145 dockets from 2010-2022. Three descriptive findings emerge. First, engagement is associated with revision at a modest within-docket magnitude. Second, support-versus-opposition direction does not clearly differentiate outcomes, an informative null inconsistent with simple preference-aggregation. Third, under a permissive reconstruction of commenter type, organizational-majority engagement concentrates in editorial-refinement rather than substantive-modification outcomes at the cross-docket level. A blind human audit of the load-bearing outcome contrast preserves this third finding under corrected labels and reveals that text-similarity methods are insufficient for distinguishing editorial from substantive regulatory change, a measurement-validity lesson we treat as a supporting methodological contribution. Together, these findings locate the equity asymmetry upstream of agency response: in differential capacity across commenter populations to identify, interpret, and contest specific legal obligations. --- ### Offline Policy Evaluation as a decision support tool for designing Adaptive Experiments Authors: João Victor Ferreira Alves, Eduardo Rocha Laurentino, Gustavo de Oliveira Kanno, Thiago Costa Rizuti da Rocha Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30273v1 We investigate how historical data from fixed randomized experiments (A/B tests) can be used to inform the deployment of adaptive experiments based on contextual bandits. Given data collected under a static allocation, our goal is to assess which adaptive policies, if any, would have outperformed the original design and under what conditions. To this end, we combine off-policy evaluation (OPE) with a controlled warm-start simulation. From logged A/B test data exhibiting heterogeneous treatment effects, we estimate nuisance components and use doubly robust estimators to rank a portfolio of pre-specified adaptive and non-adaptive policies. When ground truth is available, we then deploy the same offline-trained policies in a simulator that reuses the exact data-generating reward probabilities, providing a safe, ground-truth-anchored environment to study the offline-to-online transition under warm starting. Using synthetic randomized controlled trials with known heterogeneity structures and an oracle policy, our results indicate that adaptive, context-aware policies improve upon fixed allocations when meaningful heterogeneity is present, while providing little benefit in its absence. We reinforce our findings on standard open benchmarks (Hillstrom, Criteo Uplift, and LaLonde), reinterpreted through a policy-value and regret perspective. Overall, our results provide a practical methodology for deciding when adaptive experimentation is worth deploying and how to select among competing adaptive policies using existing A/B test data. --- ### ENAS: An Efficient Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search Framework for TinyML on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers Authors: Mohd Moin Khan, Naman Srivastava, Pandarasamy Arjunan Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30272v1 We present \textbf{ENAS}, a hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework that combines a static feasibility check, a cell-based search space supporting standard, depthwise-separable, and bottleneck blocks with optional skip connections, and a three-stage hybrid search strategy (random $\rightarrow$ top-$K$ $\rightarrow$ mutation) with persistent cross-run caching. Unlike many existing NAS frameworks that rely on GPU acceleration, ENAS is designed to operate efficiently without requiring GPUs, making it suitable for resource-constrained development environments. We evaluate ENAS on two TinyML benchmarks, Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer, across eight microcontrollers with memory footprints ranging from 20\,KB to 1\,MB SRAM and nine input image resolutions. Our experimental results show that ENAS achieves mean search-time speedups of $2.41{\times}$ and $1.70{\times}$ on the Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer datasets, respectively, while maintaining competitive test accuracy compared with the recent NanoNAS framework. A measured resource analysis further shows that ENAS-selected models use substantially lower peak activation RAM, the binding constraint for microcontroller deployment at matched accuracy. Additionally, ENAS achieves $79.4\%$ test accuracy on an STM32H743-based microcontroller, outperforming the greedy CPU-only baseline by $2.6$ percentage points. We release the ENAS framework as open-source at: https://github.com/EdgeIntelligenceLab/ENAS --- ### WatchPoint: Executable User Feedback for Real-World Agentic Web Development Authors: Guanqun Yang, Wei Yang, Xueqing Liu Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26204v1 When a professional web developer's code fails a test, they do not simply re-read the stack trace. They open the application in a browser, click buttons, inspect computed styles, and run diagnostic commands to understand what went wrong. Existing feedback mechanisms for coding agents rely on screenshots, LLM-as-a-judge scoring, or natural-language corrections, but few interact with the live application the way a developer would. We introduce WatchPoint, a simulated-user system that mimics real developer behavior by generating and executing diagnostic scripts against the running application, producing structured observations that guide the coding model's retry. Unlike prior approaches that target single-file edits or evaluate using non-executable metrics, we operate on Web-Bench, a benchmark of 50 multi-file web projects comprising 1,000 sequentially dependent tasks, verified by deterministic end-to-end tests. WatchPoint recovers 57.6% of the tasks it diagnoses, and a controlled user study confirms the simulation's realism: human testers achieve a comparable recovery rate (54.5%), providing evidence that automated diagnostic scripts can substitute for interactive human testing on sequential web development tasks. We further identify a pattern of capability gaps that governs when simulated-user feedback is helpful and when it should be withheld. --- ### Identifying Intelligent Processes via Online Sequential Testing Authors: Aritra Das, Debayan Gupta Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26193v1 Active sequential hypothesis testing studies how to identify an unknown hypothesis with a given set of sensing actions. We study this in the setting of identifying large language models (LLMs), \textit{i.e.}, if a user is conversing with an LLM drawn from a known set of models, how can they identify which one is in use? Here, the available sensing actions (evaluations) are themselves a design choice: an evaluator must first decide which environments and prompt families to construct, and only then decide how to use them sequentially. We formalize these two levels as an outer probe-design problem and an inner identification problem. Simply put, the outer stage selects a set of probes to be sent to the entire set of models, creating a kind of fingerprint dataset. This is followed by the inner stage, which sequentially sends a budget-minimizing set of those probes to identify the model in use. For the outer problem, we show that selecting which evaluations to construct at minimum cost, so that every pair of candidates is distinguished, is exactly a weighted set cover problem. Since the response distributions of the candidate models are not known exactly but only through calibration samples, we give a one-shot procedure that estimates the cover instance from these samples. For the inner problem, we bound the number of evaluations needed to identify the unknown model in terms of how well the available evaluations distinguish each pair of candidates. --- ### Topology-Aware Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Cross-Dataset Retinal Vessel Segmentation Authors: Yongsong Huang, Tomo Miyazaki, Kai Xu, Xiaofeng Liu, Yaohou Fan, Shinichiro Omachi Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26189v1 Retinal vessel segmentation in multi-domain deployment requires a source model to adapt to domains that differ in imaging conditions and annotation conventions. Conventional parameter-efficient fine-tuning reduces target-specific storage, but its highly restricted adaptation subspace can be insufficient for reconstructing thin, connected vascular structures. We therefore ask how target-specific capacity should be allocated so that topology-aware supervision remains effective under a strict per-domain parameter budget. Based on this principle, we propose TAPDecoderFT, a topology-responsive, role-structured adaptation framework. Specifically, TAPDecoderFT shares a fixed source parameter state across deployment domains, uses low-rank residuals for target-specific private/fusion feature mixing, and retains a trainable dense-reconstruction path comprising the decoder, output head, and refinement module. To promote structurally faithful predictions, the compact target state is jointly optimized with a region-overlap and topology-aware objective that encourages centerline continuity and thin-branch recovery. It improves both DSC and clDice over GenericLoRA-r4 and narrow TAP-r4 in all six directions and is comparable to full fine-tuning. --- ### End-to-End Visual Odometry with RNNs and Attention Authors: Ruiyu Li, Yinjia Liu, Alexander Yu Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26188v1 Video Odometry (VO) is the process of estimating the ego-motion of an object by analyzing visual information such as a sequence of frames from one or multiple cameras. It has been a popular research topic in computer vision and robotics, and its applications include mobile robotic systems as well as autonomous driving. In this project, we investigate existing end-to-end deep-learning approaches to VO, and propose a novel temporal attention-based model to improve upon the baseline. In addition, while the vast majority of existing deep-learning-based approaches to VO are trained on driving data, we investigate the performance of deep-learning-based VO to the more dynamic and complex problem of hand-held cameras. --- ### Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs Authors: Doniyorkhon Obidov, Honggang Yu, Xiaolong Guo, Kaichen Yang Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26185v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across many applications but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which elicit harmful or unintended content. While model fine-tuning is an option for safety alignment, it is costly and prone to catastrophic forgetting. Prompt optimization has emerged as a promising alternative, yet existing prompt-based defenses typically rely on static modifications (e.g., fixed prefixes or suffixes) that cannot adapt to diverse and evolving attacks. We propose Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization (DDPO), the first jailbreak defense based on deep prompt optimization. DDPO uses the target LLM's own intermediate layers as feature extractors to dynamically generate defensive embeddings via a lightweight multilayer perceptron. These tailored embeddings are then injected into a subsequent intermediate layer, enabling an input-dependent defense without modifying the LLM's weights. This design ensures high adaptability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on a diverse set of models and attacks demonstrate that DDPO significantly outperforms static prompt optimization methods, particularly on weakly aligned models and when handling semantically ambiguous benign prompts, successfully distinguishing them from genuinely harmful requests. --- ### Modality-Gated Deep Adapters: Adding a Modality to a Frozen Embedding Model with Exact Preservation Authors: Abdul Basit Tonmoy, Kazi Fardinul Hoque, Md. Shahrier Islam Arham, Arman Luthra Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26182v1 Multimodal embedding models are deployed at scale: retrieval indices, benchmark results, and behavioral audits all depend on the base model's exact outputs. Extending such a model to a new modality with existing parameter-efficient methods silently changes those outputs; LoRA-style adaptation rewrites the text path whether or not the weights are merged, invalidating every stored embedding. We propose modality-gated deep adapters: bottleneck adapters attached to every decoder layer of a frozen multimodal embedding LLM, grouped into per-modality packs that execute only while their own modality is being encoded. The result is a modality added with zero change to existing outputs: inputs no pack claims traverse the base model's own computation graph, bit-for-bit unchanged, and co-loaded packs compose with an exact-zero isolation matrix. Both properties are stated as propositions, hold after arbitrary training rather than only at initialization, require no task labels or routing metadata at inference, and are verified by exact-equality tests on the released checkpoints. On one frozen 2B base, the audio pack (injected as connector tokens) improves audio-to-text R@10 by +3.4 to +5.4 points over an identically trained control, positive at every seed and reproduced at eleven times the data; the thermal pack, reusing the base's own frozen vision path, clears its pre-registered acceptance gate roughly sevenfold at every seed and lifts thermal-to-text R@10 from 0.224 to 0.785. An encoder swap locates the missing capacity: an external audio encoder that outranks Whisper-family encoders in CLAP-style comparisons loses by 16 R@10 points inside the frozen LLM, so the capacity belongs in the layers, exactly where the gated adapters place it. We release the audio model, the thermal pack, and the training, evaluation and invariance suites: models at huggingface.co/EximiusLabs, code on GitHub. --- ### Unanimity Without Persuasion: A Single Round of Debate Erases the Disagreement That Verification Needs Authors: Yang Shu Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26145v1 A debate panel can become unanimous without becoming more correct. This is dangerous for downstream safeguards: a substituted verification ballot can change only narrow-margin votes, while richer arbiters lose disagreement as a natural targeting signal. We show that one debate round can erase that resource without requiring persuasion. Tracking a heterogeneous 7-judge panel through a blind round and three debate rounds on 600 code-correctness candidates, unanimity on a fixed cohort jumps from 39.5\% to 95.2\% in round 1 (93.1\% of the total collapse), while accuracy moves by less than one point and 96.3\% of verdict flips follow the displayed peer majority. An execution-based verification ballot corrects 8 of 2,037 pre-debate candidate-substitution instances but changes zero in every later round; by round 3 every wrong decision is unanimous, erasing dissent that had flagged two-thirds of the panel's errors. Identical-cohort controls explain why: no-peer reconsideration reproduces 79.6\% of the collapse, real labels without reasoning reproduce 91.5\%, and random labels steer flips toward whatever they display; the full-debate condition adds 4.3 percentage points over labels only (clustered 95\% CI 0.7--8.1). The one-round collapse reproduces in two additional real runs and two fake-label seeds, remains under panel sizes 3--7, and appears in MATH-500. Parse failures concentrate on contested candidates ($p<0.001$), making attrition non-ignorable. The design implication is operational: verify before any second-pass evaluation or peer exposure, and never treat post-debate unanimity as independent evidence of reliability. --- ### Beyond the Raw Waveform: Fusing Visual Representations of EDA for Stress Detection Authors: Stefanos Gkikas, Thomas Kassiotis, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li, Eric Nichols, Houshyar Asadi, Nikolaos Smyrnis, Giorgos Giannakakis Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22095v1 Electrodermal activity (EDA) is widely used in automatic stress detection, yet most pipelines treat it only as a raw one-dimensional waveform. This study examines whether complementary visual representations of EDA provide useful information for stress classification and whether their fusion im- proves recognition performance. Six image-based representations are derived from each EDA recording: an unwrapped short-time Fourier transform (STFT) phase spectrogram, an instantaneous-frequency map computed from that phase, a power spectral density (PSD) spectrogram, a continuous wavelet transform scalogram, a recurrence plot, and a rendered waveform trace. The selected representations are stacked as channels of a single multichannel input, together with the raw waveform, and processed by a shared asymmetric-attention architecture. Experiments on a 58-subject stress dataset show that representation fusion improves over the raw waveform. The best configuration, which combines five representations while excluding the unwrapped phase spectrogram, reaches 70.97% test accuracy, compared with 67.36% for the raw waveform. The single PSD spectrogram achieves 69.44%, remaining close to the best-fused configuration at a lower computational cost. The results show that alternative visual forms of the same EDA signal can provide useful inductive biases for stress detection, and that a compact selection of complementary representations can be more effective than the raw waveform alone. --- ### Space as an Interventional Invariant: Cross-Modal Predictive Geometry for Stratified Cities and Em-Spaced Intelligence Authors: Tao Yang, Xuhui Lin, Kunyao Li, Haijiang Li Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11959v1 Space is a foundational concept across mathematics, physics, spatial cognition, urban science, and embodied intelligence, yet these fields often treat spatial structure either as a shared geometric container or as a collection of disconnected representations. Such approaches struggle to explain how heterogeneous sensory and urban processes can jointly reveal a common spatial structure, particularly when different modalities do not share the same metric or representation. This paper addresses this gap by defining space as an interventional invariant: the minimal relational structure that preserves local compatibility and the conditional laws of future observations under admissible actions. We develop a cross-modal predictive geometry that integrates local state spaces, modality-specific observation maps, an action groupoid, and a canonical predictive-state quotient, with explicit causal conditions for identifying interventional rather than merely observational structure. The key theoretical result shows that, under joint point separation, equivariance, and interventional faithfulness, the latent space is identifiable up to the centraliser of the intervention group, thereby reducing representational ambiguity to residual coordinate freedom. The framework is further extended to stratified urban systems using sheaf-valued representations, allowing geometric, physical, mobility, social, and economic layers to coexist without being reduced to a single metric. Synthetic experiments under noise evaluate equivariance, predictive sufficiency, holonomy, restriction-map recovery, cross-scale consistency, and context saturation. The resulting framework provides a unified and falsifiable foundation for spatial cognition, urban science, embodied AI, and em-spaced intelligence. --- ### Decoding Mixture Perception through Computational Modeling of Component Interactions Authors: Fei Wang, Xiaoya Xie, Junfei Liu, Huihao Wang, Yixiao Wang, Yintao Wang, Yi Li, Hao Dong, Xing Chen Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11958v1 Olfaction played an indispensable role throughout human evolution and civilization. Even in the contemporary era of advanced technology, olfaction remains a critical channel for person to conduct danger discrimination, emotional experience, and memory formation. However, most substances in nature exist as multi-molecule mixtures. The complexity of mixture compositions, as well as concentration dependent saturation effects and receptor specific activation thresholds, pose substantial challenges in identifying olfactory characteristics. In this study, we proposed a novel bio inspired deep learning framework for accurate odor perception recognition of mixtures. We robustly constructed neural response curves for molecule-receptor interactions, and developed a fusion strategy that integrates attention-weighted multi-receptor curves with concentration-dependent multi-molecule curves, replicating the competitive activation and synergistic integration of mixture components. Furthermore, by comparing the consistency of response curve patterns, the model can transfer knowledge from the semantically rich space of molecular associations to guide recognition of mixture perception characteristics. Therefore, we established a complete computational pathway from chemical blending, neural encoding, to perceptual formation. Finally, we conducted comprehensive evaluation, and results demonstrated exceptional superiority, achieving an accuracy of 92.2%. Consequently, our work provides a generalizable solution to the long standing mixture perception challenge. More importantly, it can be integrated into embodied cognitive systems to enhance the agents perceptual and interactive capabilities in complex scenarios. --- ### Compiling VGDL into Causal Models Authors: Mohit Jiwatode, Bodo Rosenhahn, Alexander Dockhorn Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05459v1 Reinforcement learning and large language models often struggle to accurately capture the causal mechanics of game environments. Standard reinforcement learning agents tend to rely on spurious correlations, while large language models are prone to hallucinating game rules. Although causal reinforcement learning improves interpretability, there is currently no formal methodology to map complex game mechanics directly into causal models. To address this, we propose a deterministic framework that compiles games specified in the Video Game Description Language into Dynamic Structural Causal Models. Rather than inferring causal structures from gameplay traces or noisy large language models' outputs, our methodology directly translates game components, including sprite dynamics, interaction rules, and termination conditions, into explicit structural equations. Each game tick represents a causal transition from state variables at time $t$ to $t+1$. By establishing this grounded mapping, the approach guarantees absolute causal fidelity to the ground-truth game mechanics. The resulting models offer transparent causal pathways that support counterfactual reasoning, causal reinforcement learning agent training, and procedural content validation. This framework provides a principled bridge between symbolic game descriptions and causally grounded game AI. --- ### Self-Evolving Skills via Surrogate-Guided Solve-and-Reproduce Authors: Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28638v1 Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, skills evolved from scratch underperform human-curated ones and, on a weak model, using no skill at all. Second, an evolution-time pass records one lucky trajectory that a fresh stochastic agent often fails to reproduce at deployment. We present reSolve, a per-task, oracle-in-the-loop framework built on three components. It decouples interactive solving from a self-contained deliverable that is independently re-executed in a fresh container, a protocol we call solve-and-reproduce. It enhances the sparse reward signal with a surrogate verifier that cannot access hidden tests or reference answers. It then runs verifier-guided beam search over a solution-construction graph. Within a fixed harness, a cheap model self-evolves skills that reach $74.9\%$ mean-of-3, $+14.8$ points over the $60.1\%$ human-curated baseline, exceeding the strongest official curated-skill result ($67.3\%$, GPT-5.5/OpenHands). We also report observed failure cases and domain-level results, including performance on the 14 Natural Science tasks, to clarify when the approach does and does not help. --- ### AI Scientist Mission Control (AIMC): Visual Analytics for Human Oversight of Autonomous Scientific Discovery Authors: Rikathi Pal, Klaus Mueller Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28637v1 Autonomous scientific discovery systems can generate large numbers of research ideas, experiments, and manuscripts with minimal human intervention. As these systems become increasingly capable, scientists require effective mechanisms to monitor output quality, identify recurring failure modes, understand research evolution, and prioritize promising discoveries for review. We present AIMC, a visual analytics framework for human oversight of autonomous scientific discovery. AIMC combines semantic embeddings, automated weakness extraction, temporal analysis, and interactive visualizations to support the exploration of AI-generated research artifacts. We demonstrate the framework through a case study of the papers generated by an autonomous AI Scientist (FARS), together with their associated review feedback. Our analysis reveals recurring methodological weaknesses, evolving research themes, domain-specific differences in quality, and a small set of highly novel papers that warrant deeper human inspection. These findings illustrate how visual analytics can support transparency, diagnosis, and human AI collaboration in emerging autonomous scientific discovery workflows. --- ### Sycophants in the Courtroom: Are LLMs Fragile to Juridical Authority and Evolving Legal Standards? Authors: Lorenzo Molfetta, Alessio Cocchieri, Luca Ragazzi, Ilaria Bartolini, Marco Patella, Gianluca Moro Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21409v1 In medicine, claims remain valid when supported by empirical evidence grounded in stable biological reality. In law, by contrast, truth is contingent, defined by jurisdiction, temporal validity, and the hierarchy of authoritative sources. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) on medical licensing examinations has encouraged an expectation of comparable legal competence. This analogy, however, obscures a critical distinction between domains. Unlike in medicine, legal performance often depends less on inference than on determining when external authority is applicable, valid, and non-contradictory. We introduce a comparative diagnostic framework evaluating legal reasoning against medical baselines along four axes (knowledge recall, grounding, confidence, and robustness), uncovering a sharp domain asymmetry when applied to a new benchmark that encodes temporal validity and normative relationships. While medical LLMs reliably benefit from verified sources, legal LLMs struggle to assess when retrieved citations are useful or misleading, exhibiting overconfidence in perturbed contexts and sensitivity to superficial formatting cues. Increased model scale amplifies this tendency, revealing that stronger instruction following can coincide with weaker resistance to authoritative perturbations. These findings show that LLMs treat law as unstructured text rather than binding precedent, while revealing a tendency to over-trust authoritative but false information when external references conflict with a model's internal knowledge. --- ### Hate Speech Classification In Roman Urdu: A Comparative Study On Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning And Prompt Engineering Authors: Toneema Zubair Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21408v1 Due to the widespread accessibility of the internet and social media, toxic and hateful con-tent has grown exponentially, causing significant distress and negative societal impacts. Ro-man Urdu, a low-resource language used in Pakistan and among Urdu-speaking communities worldwide, presents additional challenges because of its informal grammar, inconsistent sen-tence structures, and multiple variations in word spellings. This research aims to identify the most effective techniques for hate speech classification in such low-resource settings with limited data. To address this, the study investigates and compares the latest approaches, in-cluding prompt tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using LoRA, and prompt en-gineering, under various experimental configurations. To achieve this objective, four exper-iments were designed. The first experiment involved direct inferencing with LLMs without any fine-tuning, to evaluate how well these models understand Roman Urdu in a zero-shot setting, especially given limited data. The second experiment utilized parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA, which updates only a small subset of parameters, thereby reducing computational cost. The third experiment explored prompt tuning with both mixed and manually crafted prompts, using very small sets of training examples relative to the entire dataset, making it computationally efficient as well. Finally, the fourth experiment applied prompt engineering through zero-shot and few-shot learning, relying solely on care-fully designed instruction prompts for classification without further training. --- ### Mamba-based Selective State Space Modeling Improves the Accuracy-Complexity Tradeoff of SmolVLA Vision-Language-Action Experts Authors: Farida Mohsen, Thowayba Elkaffash, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani, Mohamed Mabrok, Nader Meskin, Ali Safa Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21407v1 Vision-language-action (VLA) models face a crucial tradeoff between their task success rate and the policy-call frequency. Executing a single action per inference ($N=1$) enables accurate robot control but comes at the cost of huge compute time overheads, making real-time implementation infeasible. On the other hand, executing longer action horizons before replanning ($N\gg1$) reduces compute complexity, but inevitably degrades the system's success rate. In order to improve the VLA accuracy-complexity tradeoff, this paper investigates Mamba's selective state-space modeling as an alternative to causal self-attention within the action expert of the popular SmolVLA model, widely used as a reference model for its highly accurate yet low complexity nature. We evaluate both the Mamba- and Transformer-based experts on the widely-adopted LIBERO benchmark suites across three execution horizons $N\!\in\!\{1,25,50\}$, respectively corresponding to high, moderate and low compute complexities. Our results remarkably show that the advantage of the Mamba expert increases with the execution horizon, indicating significant success retention under long execution horizons $N = 50$ and $N = 25$. When $N = 50$ actions are executed before replanning (i.e., corresponding to feasible real-time deployment), the Mamba expert outperforms the Transformer baseline by $7.8\%$. In addition, when $N = 25$ actions are executed before replanning, our Mamba expert outperforms the Transformer baseline by $3.7\%$. Finally, under per-action replanning ($N=1$), our Mamba variant matches the Transformer-based mean success rate while significantly reducing the overall model parameter complexity by $24\%$ thanks to Mamba's compute-efficient nature. --- ### Entropy-Constrained Adaptive Stochastic Quantization Authors: Ran Ben Basat, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Michael Mitzenmacher, Shay Vargaftik Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DS, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18147v1 Adaptive stochastic quantization (ASQ) is a recently introduced quantization approach that optimizes the Mean Squared Error (MSE) for a given input while preserving unbiasedness. It is designed to alleviate the communication and memory bottlenecks of modern data and machine learning workloads, including model, gradient, and KV-cache compression and nearest-neighbor search. Further, practical systems can then compress quantized data with a lossless entropy encoder. However, existing unbiased methods, including ASQ, choose their quantization values without considering this later encoding stage, leaving accuracy on the table. We formulate the Entropy Constrained Adaptive Stochastic Quantization (ECASQ) problem, which jointly selects adaptive quantization values to minimize MSE under an entropy budget and an unbiasedness constraint. We give an optimal dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d^2)$ space for a length-d vector and at most s quantization values, and a GPU-friendly approximate dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d)$ space. The approximation guarantees that the solution has an MSE no larger than the optimal solution that uses one fewer bit of entropy per entry. We also provide an iterative refinement procedure for the approximation solution that, in our experiments, yields near-optimal results while retaining a substantial speed advantage over our solver for the optimal solution. --- ### On Cross-Validation for Hyperparameter Optimization of Deep Learning Image Classifiers Authors: Ljubomir Buturovic Published: 2026-08-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14705v1 Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) can materially affect the performance of deep learning (DL) image classifiers, but there is little empirical guidance on how to derive the validation signal that drives it, especially for the small sample sizes common in fields such as medical imaging. We compared three HPO protocols in terms of {\em absolute performance-estimation error} (AEE; the absolute difference between the winning configuration's validation AUROC and its test AUROC): fixed holdout (F), reshuffled holdout (R), and 5-fold cross-validation (C). The search space, sampler, training procedure, architecture, and test set were held identical across protocols. We evaluated the protocols on three public datasets spanning two regimes: binary medical imaging (RSNA pneumonia radiographs and binarized HAM10000 skin lesions) and 200-class natural imaging (Tiny ImageNet), across a range of development set sizes $n$ and two backbones (ResNet-18 on all datasets, Vision Transformer (ViT-S/16) on RSNA). On the medical datasets, every point estimate favored cross-validation over both holdout protocols, with reductions in AEE largest at small sample sizes and diminishing as $n$ increased. This pattern remained robust under conservative family-wise adjustment. On Tiny ImageNet, AEE was negligible under all three protocols. Test AUROC was generally similar among protocols. Fixed holdout had lower mean AEE than reshuffled holdout in 11 of 12 medical conditions, although this secondary finding was less uniformly supported. For small-sample medical image classification, we recommend cross-validation-based HPO when computational resources permit because it trades additional computation for a more reliable development-time estimate of subsequent test performance. ---