# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 172 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #8551–8600 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/172 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/171.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/173.md) ### Calling the Bluff: Detecting Ever-Shifting Harmful Chat Dialogue via Ordered Reasoning Chain Regularization Authors: Haojie Yu, Ziyou Jiang, Junjie Wang, Mingyang Li, Yuekai Huang, Jie Huang, Qing Wang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08451v1 Harmful chat dialogues are ever-shifting through type-shifting and lexical evasion, yet we find they share invariant principles, i.e., an Ordered Reasoning Chain (ORC) of recurring topics, harm language indicators, severity hierarchies, and type characteristics, which can help us capture the key information in the frequently changing lexical expressions. We propose BRACE, which encodes the ORC as four differentiable stages (Topic -> Indicator -> Severity -> Type) with intermediate supervision, serving as a structured regularizer blended with direct heads, and supported by prototype-based feature augmentation and feature path disentanglement. The evaluation results show that, across 4 domains and 5 harm categories, BRACE achieves harm-type macro F1 of 0.934 (RoBERTa-wwm-ext, 3-seed mean), with decoder backbones (Qwen3-1.7B LoRA) reaching 0.949. Ablation studies show that all components contribute to BRACE, and the structural decomposition of ORC enables BRACE to distinguish harmful types with semantic ambiguity. Disclaimer: This paper may contain content that is disturbing to some readers. --- ### Hidden Language Consistency Phenomena in Reasoning LLMs Authors: Muhammad Ali Shafique, Kelly Marchisio Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08447v2 Multilingual reasoning models are commonly evaluated by whether they arrive at the correct answer, but not by whether they preserve the intended language while reasoning and responding. This omission conceals important multilingual behaviors that emerge as tasks become harder. In this paper, we study task difficulty, task accuracy, thinking-language consistency (TC), and answer-language consistency (AC) across reasoning models using PolyMath benchmark in eight languages and four difficulty levels. We uncover four findings: (1) language consistency exhibits four difficulty-dependent behaviors: output-language consistency remains aligned with input, remains misaligned, degrades gradually, or collapses abruptly. (2) We identify the language consistency breakdown effect, where increasing difficulty can cause a sudden drop in output-language consistency, especially in less strongly represented and non-Latin-script languages. (3) Due to this breakdown effect, accuracy can be preserved or even improved at a harder difficulty level as the model shifts to its internal dominant language. (4) Quantization can improve or degrade output-language consistency independently of its effect on accuracy, with GPTQ and AWQ often outperforming AutoRound under tolerance-based voting with ε = 1.0. These results show that multilingual capability cannot be characterized by accuracy alone; reliable evaluation should jointly consider task accuracy, language consistency, and task difficulty for multilingual benchmarks. --- ### TRACE-Memory: Public-Conditioned Retrieval and Utility-Aware Evidence Admission for Personalized Generation Authors: Jing Wang, Zhu Wang, Yifan Guo, Yulong Yang, Yunji Liang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08446v2 Personalized generation systems retrieve user history by request--memory relevance and inject it into the model context. Yet relevant history may concern the wrong preference aspect, duplicate public information, or provide insufficient support. We argue that personal memory should be used only when it adds utility beyond a public-only response. We propose TRACE-Memory, a two-stage framework for selective personalization. Stage 1 queries for user-specific information missing from the request and public context, then retrieves a coverage-oriented candidate pool. Stage 2 admits a compact subset of source-traceable evidence units, or the empty set, according to response-level incremental utility. We progressively train the query-generation and evidence-admission policies through structured SFT initialization, reduced-space stage-wise GRPO warm-up, and nested multi-sample Joint GRPO. Across 4,500 Controlled and Natural tasks from Goodreads, Amazon Reviews, and Reddit, TRACE-Memory consistently outperforms random and lexical memory use, improves over semantic retrieval, remains competitive with frontier-LLM memory pipelines as local generator capacity increases, and conditions evidence admission on public-context sufficiency, supporting selective rather than default personalization. --- ### Forgotten History or Test-of-Time? Retrospect and Prospect on RAG from an IR Perspective Authors: Xiaoyan Zhao, Yujie Cai, Yang Zhang, Grace Hui Yang, Tat-Seng Chua Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08445v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely regarded as a novel paradigm born from the limitations of large language models (LLMs)--a mechanism to ground their outputs in external knowledge. This view, however, is incomplete when considered within a broader historical context. In this paper, we argue that the core ideas underlying RAG are not new: foundational concepts such as integrating retrieval and language generation, knowledge augmentation, answer verification, and iterative query (or prompt) refinement had already been studied and instantiated in information retrieval (IR) and question answering (QA) research dating back to the early 2000s, well before the emergence of LLMs. We make this case by systematically tracing the intellectual lineage of modern RAG and Agentic RAG back to their classical IR and QA antecedents, and examining why this continuity has gone under-recognized -- a consequence of community fragmentation, shifting terminology, and the recency bias endemic to fast-moving fields. Rather than treating LLMs as the origin point of retrieval-augmented intelligence, we propose viewing them as a new interface layer atop a decades-old QA architecture. This reframing is not merely historical: by situating RAG within the longer trajectory of IR research, we surface underutilized prior work -- on user modeling, answer validation, and query refinement -- that can directly inform next-generation RAG design, reducing unintentional rediscovery and fostering genuine cross-community integration. --- ### Private Etymology: Designing Relational Reuse of Shared Symbols in Long-Term Human-AI Interaction Authors: Miki Ueno Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08443v2 Previous studies have shown that people can develop shared symbols, partner-specific expressions, personal idioms, inside jokes, and other parts of a relational microculture. Recent work has also examined how humans and conversational AI negotiate and revise symbolic meanings. However, long-term human-AI systems still lack a clear design model for recording how a dyad-specific expression gains meaning, checking whether both sides still accept that meaning, and safely reusing the expression in later sessions. This concept-and-prototype paper introduces Private Etymology, a machine-representable relational provenance that records how a dyad-specific symbolic expression is proposed, interpreted, negotiated, repaired, reused, revised, stabilized, contested, forgotten, or retired over time. I also propose relational reuse: reactivating a dyad-specific expression in a later session without fully explaining its meaning again. The contribution is not the invention of shared symbols or relational microcultures. Instead, this paper integrates prior ideas into persistent, revisable, and evidence-grounded symbolic units for human-AI relationships. I present a lifecycle model, an illustrative machine-readable schema, a working Apple Watch prototype, and a longitudinal research agenda. In the prototype, a language model classifies discrete conversational evidence, while deterministic local code decides whether a Shared Symbol can be updated. This prevents a free-form model confidence score or an AI proposal by itself from directly updating the persisted symbol. Private Etymology is proposed as infrastructure for conversational agents to participate in changing relational microcultures without inventing their origins or treating relational meaning as a fixed memory value. --- ### MGMCL: Multi-Granularity Manifold Contrastive Learning With Neural ODEs for Cross-Subject EEG Emotion Recognition Authors: Xiang Xie Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08440v1 Cross-subject electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition remains challenging due to substantial inter-individual variability and discrete formulation that overlooks affective continuity. Existing methods operate in Euclidean space and focus on marginal distribution alignment, failing to preserve the semantic structure of emotions across subjects. This article proposes MGMCL, reconceptualizing emotion recognition as learning continuous representations on symmetric positive definite (SPD) Riemannian manifolds. The frame?work introduces multi-granularity manifold contrastive learning at instance, emotion, and trajectory levels while preserving semantic ordering. Neural ordinary differential equations on manifolds model continuous emotion dynamics. Cross-subject generalization employs Gromov-Wasserstein manifold alignment. Weakly-supervised learning enables continuous valence-arousal-dominance prediction from discrete labels. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 91.23% accuracy on SEED, 73.82% on SEED-IV, and 76.38% on DEAP, achieving consistent improvements of 1.89%, 1.66%, and 1.28% over previous best methods, respectively. --- ### FSTC-Encoder: Feature--Spatial--Temporal Correlation Learning for Generalizable RF Sensing Authors: Jing Wang, Zhu Wang, Changlong Cheng, Yifan Guo, Yin Zhang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08439v1 Heterogeneous RF sensing differs substantially in feature structure, spatial layout, and temporal scale, making existing models difficult to reuse across devices, environments, and RF modalities. We propose FSTC-Encoder, which unifies heterogeneous RF representation learning through feature, spatial, and temporal correlation modeling. Structure-aware feature encoding accommodates different signal structures, set-based spatial encoding aggregates variable observations, and hierarchical temporal encoding jointly captures local variations and long-range dependencies. Across sensing tasks and modalities, FSTC-Encoder retains the same spatial--temporal backbone architecture while varying only the feature configuration and task head. Across Widar3.0, CSI-Bench, and XRF55, FSTC-Encoder achieves 92.15% mean Accuracy under multi-factor cross-domain protocols, ranks first on three of four additional sensing tasks, remains consistently strong across WiFi, millimeter-wave radar, and RFID, and reduces the cross-modality performance gap from 18.85% to 12.93% through cross-RF learning. These results demonstrate that FSTC-Encoder achieves high domain robustness, task generality, and modality extensibility. --- ### FreCast: Refining Radar Echo Intensity via Phase-Preserving Amplitude Residual Diffusion for Precipitation Nowcasting Authors: Heping Fang, Zihuai Yin, Kaicheng Mao, Peiguang Zhang, Peng Yang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08436v1 Precipitation nowcasting predicts the spatiotemporal evolution of future radar echoes from historical radar echo sequences, thereby estimating the occurrence, development, and movement of precipitation over the near term. In recent years, deep learning has become an important approach to precipitation nowcasting. Although state-of-the-art models can generally capture the overall spatial distribution of future precipitation, their predictions still exhibit substantial biases in radar echo intensity at individual locations. This observation motivates a more targeted strategy for reducing forecast errors. Instead of regenerating an entire radar echo sequence without spatial constraints, the predicted precipitation structure can be used to guide the refinement of echo intensities at individual locations. This structure-guided refinement directly targets echo intensity biases. Accordingly, we propose FreCast, a two-stage framework for radar echo prediction. The first stage generates an initial forecast of future radar echoes. The second stage uses the spatial structure of the initial forecast as a constraint to further correct intensity biases at individual locations in the first-stage prediction. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that FreCast achieves consistent improvements across forecast skill metrics. Qualitative results further show that FreCast better preserves rainband continuity and intense precipitation structures at longer lead times. --- ### Human-Guided Causal Knowledge Injection for Virtual Cells Authors: Pengcheng Wang, Changjian Chen, Zhuo Tang, You Wu, Long Wang, Feng Yu, Kenli Li Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08430v1 Virtual cells employ machine learning models to simulate and predict cellular behaviors, serving as a critical computational framework for investigating health and disease. Injecting causal graphs into virtual cells can improve the interpretability, but such graphs are usually not available in real-world applications. Recently, many methods have been proposed to construct causal graphs from data, which group genes based on their similarities to form concepts and extract their causal relationships. However, since this automatic process is unsupervised, the causal graphs usually contain errors. In this paper, we propose a human-guided causal knowledge injection method for virtual cells. We developed a gene-similarity-aware causal graph visualization supported by a hybrid optimization algorithm to help explore both the causal relationships between concepts and the similarities between genes. Based on the exploration, we further developed a counterfactual analysis strategy supported by a counterfactual visualization and a causal path visualization to help validate and refine causal graphs. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through two real-world case studies, the extraction of scientifically meaningful causal insights, and positive feedback from domain experts. --- ### ARC: Augmented-Rank Conformalization for Changepoint Localization --- Finite-Sample Validity and Distribution-Robust Efficiency Authors: Chenchen Peng, Mixia Wu, Qijing Yan, Zhiqi Shen, Jie Zhang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: stat.ML, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08424v1 Conformal changepoint localization turns any score into a confidence set for the changepoint with finite-sample coverage. Coverage is universal; efficiency is not. The oracle score is a likelihood ratio, so practical scores estimate density ratios, and set length deteriorates under heavy tails, skewness, and distribution shift, where no length guarantee applies. We propose ARC (Augmented-Rank Conformalization), a family of scores depending on the data only through within-segment ranks: rank-CUSUM location and scale channels, their fixed combinations, and a lightweight neural score frozen after synthetic training. Every ARC score inherits finite-sample coverage for every frozen weight configuration, including random initialization and mistraining. The main result is an efficiency transfer theorem: the entire ARC confidence set is almost surely invariant under strictly increasing marginal transforms, so the set length distribution depends on the data pair only through its rank structure, and lengths certified once hold verbatim across its monotone orbit, whereas a plug-in score's length changes with every re-expression. Across different rank structures lengths do change, and are reported as such. Classical rank-test theory positions ARC as targeting the optimal invariant score at bounded cost. Simulations confirm nominal coverage for all scores, including sabotaged networks, identical sets under monotone transforms where plug-in scores inflate, and smooth degradation where plug-in sets become vacuous; on the well-log benchmark ARC localizes annotated shifts to three to five candidates and flags misfit by an empty set. Two boundaries are stated rather than hidden: serial dependence destroys exactness, and trend-type alternatives lie outside the piecewise-exchangeable model. --- ### Population-Level Generative Modeling for Ranking Data Authors: Zhaoyang Shi Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08422v2 Ranking data arise in scientific and machine learning applications, including recommendation systems, information retrieval, voting, marketing, and AI preference ranking from human feedback. Existing statistical work has primarily focused on inference tasks such as preference estimation, rank aggregation, and ranking prediction. However, generating realistic synthetic rankings from an observed population is important for privacy-preserving data sharing, benchmark construction, simulation, and uncertainty quantification. This task is challenging because rankings are high-dimensional combinatorial objects with non-Euclidean dependence structures, while ranking populations often exhibit substantial preference heterogeneity. We propose a framework for population-level generative modeling through a latent preference simplex embedding. It estimates a low-dimensional latent preference simplex through a likelihood-based ranking model, leverages flow matching to learn the population distribution of latent preferences, and generates new rankings through the fitted probabilistic ranking model. We show that ranking generation admits an oracle reduction to latent distribution learning and derive finite-sample generative guarantees that clarify how the number of items, ranking length, and latent dimension affect accuracy. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate improved population-level fidelity and provide a statistically interpretable representation of preference heterogeneity. --- ### Learning Deep Modality-Shared Self-Expressiveness for Image Clustering with Textual Information Authors: Xianghan Meng, Wei He, Zhiyuan Huang, Chun-Guang Li Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08418v1 Leveraging textual information for image clustering has emerged as a promising direction, largely owing to the powerful representations learned by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing approaches typically retrieve a textual counterpart for each image and then refine multimodal representations by directly enforcing cross-modal agreement, e.g., maximizing image-text similarity inherited from pretrained VLMs. However, such a strategy aligns heterogeneous representations across modalities without explicitly modeling the intrinsic structure within each modality and thus might yield unreliable alignment or distort modality-specific structures that are crucial for clustering. In this paper, we propose a simple but principled approach, termed deep modality-shared self-expressive model (DeepMORSE), which discovers cross-modal structures via a modality-shared self-expressive model and simultaneously learns structured representations that conform to a union of modality-specific subspaces. Moreover, we theoretically justify that the modality-shared self-expressive coefficients suppress inter-class noise towards a subspace-preserving solution, and show that mini-batch optimization procedure introduces an implicit regularization onto the self-expressive model. We evaluate our DeepMORSE on six widely used image clustering benchmarks and observe performance improvements exceeding 3% on the UCF-101, DTD-47, and ImageNet-Dogs datasets. In addition, we demonstrate the strong transferability of the learned representations by achieving state-of-the-art performance on downstream tasks such as image retrieval and zero-shot classification---without requiring any task-specific losses or post-processing. The code is available at: https://github.com/mengxianghan123/DeepMORSE. --- ### Optimal Learning Under Tsybakov Noise Authors: Steve Hanneke, Hongao Wang, Mingyue Xu Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08416v1 Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning (Val84) is a fundamental learning model that has been extensively investigated. In this model, $\mathcal{H} \subseteq \{0,1\}^{\mathcal{X}}$ is a concept class, and $h^*\in\mathcal{H}$ is the target concept to be learned. Having access to i.i.d. labeled examples from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathcal{X}\times\{0,1\}$, which admits $h^*$ as the best concept in $\mathcal{H}$, the goal is to design a learning algorithm that outputs a hypothesis having low error competitive to $h^{*}$ with high probability. This model was initially studied under the realizable setting, which assumes that $h^*$ has no error. A natural relaxation is to allow label noise, that is, the true label can be flipped with probability $η\in(0,1/2)$. In reality, certain labels might be extremely noisy, especially for those points near the decision boundary. Hence, it is natural to allow very noisy points, though only rarely. This is quantified by a noise model introduced by (MT99) and (Tsy04), now known as Tsybakov noise. For learning general concept classes, (MN06) gave the general upper and lower bounds for error guarantees under Tsybakov noise. However, their upper and lower bounds differ by a logarithmic factor. Resolving this gap has remained a well-known open question for the past twenty years. In this work, we resolve this open question by improving the upper bound to match the best known lower bound, thus establishing the optimal error guarantee for learning under Tsybakov noise. Our learning algorithm operates by adaptively partitioning the instance space into regions, roughly corresponding to different noise levels, and returning a hypothesis in the concept class satisfying a specific error constraint for each region. Our technique shares a conceptual foundation with several recent advances in non-realizable learning, such as (HLZ24) and (Han25). --- ### Constrained Learning with Universally Learnable Concept Classes Authors: Herlock SeyedAbolfazl Rahimi, Spyridon Pougkakiotis, Dionysis Kalogerias Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08414v1 We study constrained statistical learning over infinite-dimensional hypothesis classes in the fully nonconvex setting, and establish universal PACC learnability of the solutions of dual algorithms: Probably Approximately Correct on Constraints, guaranteeing optimality and constraint satisfaction at once. This strengthens near-PACC results, whose feasibility residual no amount of data can remove. Optimality is caught between generalization, governed by Rademacher complexity and favoring small classes, and strong Lagrangian duality, which rests on Lyapunov convexity for vector measures and needs decomposability, a demand pulling the other way. We reconcile the two by posing the population problem over a universal RKHS $\mathcal{H}_K$, dense in a decomposable envelope, and learning over norm balls of growing radius. This yields the Tikhonov complexity $\mathfrak{T}^{\varepsilon}_{n}$, the least RKHS norm reaching an $\varepsilon$-optimal Lagrangian level set; we prove it finite, obtain exact learnability of the optimal value, and make the sample threshold explicit and polynomial in $1/\varepsilon$ under a source condition. Feasibility is harder: absent convexity the Lagrangian may not attain its infimum, and dual information pins down only an averaged constraint-risk vector, not the risks of any returned predictor. We introduce the closure-realization gap $\varepsilon^\star_\infty$, an index of how well $\mathcal{H}_K$ retrieves feasible solutions from dualization; it is a property of the problem, not of a modeling choice. Learnability is exact when $\varepsilon^\star_\infty=0$, in particular under dual differentiability, and near-PACC with residual exactly $\varepsilon^\star_\infty$ otherwise. Finally, no distribution-free threshold exists already in the unconstrained specialization, so universality is the canonical frame for dual algorithms over large hypothesis classes. --- ### Abstracted Away: Resisting Alienation and Ungrounded Abstraction in AI Research Communities Authors: Vyoma Raman, Isabel O. Gallegos, Neha Srivathsa Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08408v1 Logics of abstraction in computational AI research often push important forms of knowledge and reflection aside: dominant standards of legitimacy separate from lived experience of harm; the goals of work misalign with the practices that operationalize them; and career demands crowd out critical reflection. Even as prior academic and community-oriented efforts have sought to recontextualize and challenge common practices, exposure to sociotechnical harms and epistemic injustice persists. As three early-career critical AI researchers, we experienced this as alienation: feeling like outsiders in our research communities. This alienation has involved having some aspects of our backgrounds overlooked and others tokenized. We argue our alienation occurred through mechanisms that mirror abstraction by creating distance from relevant material realities. Beyond abstraction's role in computational AI research as a foundational practice structuring complex computational tasks, we have encountered it as a social norm in computational research spaces, illustrated through an autoethnographic inquiry into our alienation. We narrate three vignettes describing how we encountered and resisted alienation in our research communities. By analyzing themes across these accounts, we construct an interpretive framework of alienation categorizing its preconditions, mechanisms, and harms. Finally, we identify affect abstraction, one of the mechanisms of alienation we describe, as a high-leverage mechanism that is resistible by staying attuned to our affective responses, and collective action as a way to reduce risk and isolation when engaging in resistance. To assist others with similar reflection, we present our framework as a hermeneutic resource. Critical self-reflection and meaning-making are necessary steps toward challenging exclusionary disciplinary norms and cultivating more inclusive forms of AI research. --- ### Does a Toehold Make a Bidder Bolder? Preemption and Multiplicity in Multi-Round Takeover Auctions Authors: Zain Naboulsi Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08407v1 A bidder can quietly buy a stake in a company before making an offer for it. That stake, a toehold, is supposed to pay for itself twice: it makes the bidder willing to bid harder, and it frightens rivals into staying out of the fight. The first effect is arithmetic. The second is what would justify the cost and exposure of taking one at all. Yet toeholds are rare in practice, a standing puzzle. We ask whether that second effect is there once the contest is modelled as several rounds of escalating offers rather than the single exchange classical models assume. We turn it into a game a computer can solve, and certify the answers to an accuracy a referee can check. Three findings. The auction fixes what the toehold-holder earns but not how it bids: the same contest supports a bidder who opens aggressively against a rival who folds, and one who opens cheaply against a rival who does not, with the same profit either way. Aggressive preemptive bidding still appears when the toehold is removed entirely, so it comes from bidding in public and in turns, not from owning the stake. And the tidy "bigger toehold, more deterrence" relationship holds only in a contest cut short after one round; give it a real second round and it stops responding. So the two reasons to buy a toehold do not fare alike. The profit reason holds up; the deterrence reason does not, which suggests why toeholds may be rarer than theory predicts, alongside the procedural costs of disclosure and price impact that this model omits. A warning follows for anyone computing economics from a game solver: solve this auction once and it returns a confident figure for what a preemptive bid is worth; solve it again from a different start and it returns a different one, equally converged. We also report which solvers cope with contests of this shape, including versions too large to enumerate. Code is released. --- ### Rethinking Learning-Based Influence Maximization: Simple Neural Surrogates and Native Discrete Search Authors: Yiqiao Liao, Parinaz Naghizadeh Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08406v1 Existing learning-based influence maximization frameworks rely heavily on complex neural architectures and continuous optimization over seed representations. We challenge this paradigm with SIMBA, a diffusion-model-agnostic framework pairing a lightweight neural surrogate with direct discrete search. SIMBA introduces three key components: 1) uniformly anchored node embeddings that eliminate initialization noise and encourage learning driven by graph topology and diffusion pattern, 2) a shallow two-layer graph neural network surrogate predicting final infection states, and 3) batched multi-swap simulated annealing that explores combinatorial seed space without gradients or continuous relaxation. By shifting compute from complex representation learning to effective discrete search, SIMBA drastically cuts time-to-solution while achieving superior influence spread and data efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/yl489/rethink-IM. --- ### Agentic AI-powered flexible fiber-bundle endoscopy for high-resolution NIR-II fluorescence imaging in vivo Authors: Yanzhao Shi, Yuanhua Liu, Sixin Xu, Wayne Jason Li, Yuyuan Chen, Danyang Xu, Zhisheng Wu, Hanze Yu, Ian Yu-Hong Wong, Simon Ying-Kit Law, Hongjie Dai, Liangqiong Qu et al. Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08402v1 Fiber-bundle endoscopy offers a compact and flexible route for clinical fluorescence imaging through natural human orifices, but since its first report in the 1950s, it has remained limited by low spatial resolution, honeycomb artifacts, and inter-core crosstalk. The crosstalk becomes more pronounced at near-infrared-II wavelengths (NIR-II, 1000-3000 nm), a spectral window that offers superior contrast, resolution, and tissue penetration depth for biomedical imaging. Here, we present an AI-powered flexible endoscopy platform that overcomes these constraints through optical-computational co-design: optimizing ultrathin fiber bundles to mitigate crosstalk-induced image blur and enable high-fidelity image transmission across the visible-to-NIR-II spectral range, and developing an Agent-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (GAME) pipeline for honeycomb-artifact removal and image restoration. GAME provides a single restoration entry point for diverse biomedical images acquired with our endoscope, spanning cell, mouse and human samples. It dynamically routes each input to suitable restoration experts via a vision-language model, facilitating image reconstruction with a fourfold resolution improvement beyond the NyquistShannon sampling limit. The utility of our endoscope is demonstrated through in vivo NIR-II imaging of anatomical structures in mice, as well as imaging of the digital micromirror device (DMD)-projected human gastric tube and lymphatic system, paving the way for future clinical translation. --- ### Anatomically Consistent Cross-Contrast Super-Resolution of Anisotropic Brain T2w MRI Authors: Mengqi Shen, Haicheng Wang, Meghna Trivedi, Tony J. Wang, Yuanguang Xu, Yingyan Zeng, Yading Yuan Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08401v1 T2-weighted (T2w) brain MRI provides fluid-sensitive soft-tissue contrast that is important for neuro-oncology and radiotherapy planning. However, T2w scans are acquired with anisotropic voxels and appear blurred or stair-stepped on coronal and sagittal views, which obscures small structures and weakens any downstream 3D analysis. We propose VIPP-SR (View-Independent Patched Projection Super-Resolution), a cross-contrast guided super-resolution framework that restores the inter-plane resolution of an existing anisotropic T2w volume without an isotropic ground-truth T2w. VIPP-SR first trains a view-independent patched generator (VIP-GAN) to learn local T1c-to-T2w anatomical correspondence from high-resolution axial slices. The trained generator is then applied to axial, coronal, and sagittal views of the T1c volume to generate three orthogonal T2w estimates. Shape-preserving patching and deepest-skip removal reduce view-specific shortcuts, thereby constraining the generator to learn patch-local representations and enabling the zero-shot inter-plane transfer. Central to VIPP-SR, a projection-based optimization then enforces anatomical consistency across the three view-specific volumes, fusing them by balancing inter-plane self-consistency against per-view data fidelity. The generator is trained on BraTS-MET and evaluated on both the held-out BraTS-MET testing set and the BraTS-GLI cohort without retraining, assessing the cross-cohort generalizability. The results validate that VIPP-SR improves downstream segmentation over the real anisotropic T2w baseline, raising mean-label Dice from 0.330 to 0.465 on BraTS-MET and, zero-shot, from 0.473 to 0.563 on BraTS-GLI and ablation studies identify inter-plane self-consistency as the main source of the gain. --- ### Exact Rank and Convex Calibration Dimension Lower Bounds for the Multi-Label F1 Loss Authors: Mingyuan Zhang Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08399v1 The instance-wise $F_1$ measure is a central performance measure for multi-label classification. For a problem with $s$ labels, it defines a $2^s\times 2^s$ loss matrix. Previous work exhibited $s^2+1$-coordinate affine and shifted low-rank representations and used them to construct quadratic-dimensional convex calibrated surrogates. We determine the exact rank. Under the convention $F_1(\varnothing,\varnothing)=1$, the $F_1$ score matrix, the shifted loss matrix, and the unshifted loss matrix all have rank $s^2-s+2$, while the column-affine dimension of the loss is $s^2-s+1$. The proof factors the nonempty score matrix through subset-incidence matrices and a positive-definite Cauchy matrix. Exact rank does not, by itself, lower-bound the dimension of an arbitrary convex calibrated surrogate. We therefore analyze the Bayes geometry of $F_1$ directly. We construct a distribution for which precisely all supersets of a fixed core label set are Bayes optimal, and show that the corresponding active loss columns, restricted to the witness support, have affine dimension $hn$, where $n=s-\lfloor s/3\rfloor$ and $h=\lceil(s\lfloor s/3\rfloor)^{1/2}\rceil-1$. Applying the feasible-subspace lower bound for convex calibration dimension gives \( \operatorname{CCdim}(L^{F_1}) \ge \left(\frac{2}{3\sqrt{3}}-o(1)\right)s^2. \) Together with the quadratic upper bound, this establishes $\operatorname{CCdim}(L^{F_1})=Θ(s^2)$. --- ### Estimating Uncertainty in Galaxy Morphology Classification Authors: Kai Cheng, Ruoqi Wang, Qiong Luo Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI, astro-ph.IM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08398v1 Astronomers classify galaxy morphology to investigate cosmic evolution. While deep foundation models are increasingly utilized in Galaxy Morphology Classification (GMC), little work has been done on evaluating the uncertainty of GMC results. Uncertainty evaluation is important because astronomical data are inherently noisy due to instrumental and environmental limitations. Also, the continuous evolution of galaxies creates intrinsic morphological ambiguity. However, current foundation models operate as deterministic point estimators, failing to quantify the uncertainty. To overcome this limitation, we propose UEGMC, a post-hoc framework of Uncertainty Estimation for Galaxy Morphology Classification. It categorizes uncertainty in GMC into distinct types by model parameters, astronomical data, reference standards, or intrinsic physical ambiguities, thereby facilitating better classification. Our framework can directly predict uncertainties from representations extracted from the frozen backbones of foundation models, without computationally expensive sampling, therefore enabling fine-grained uncertainty evaluations. Our experimental results demonstrate that UEGMC provides competitive uncertainty quantification performance compared with previous methods. --- ### From Product Search to Preference Articulation: The Economics of Agentic Commerce Authors: Lingxiu Dong, Kaiwen Luo, Fasheng Xu Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: econ.TH, cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08395v1 Generative AI is shifting digital commerce from browsing toward agentic search, in which consumers delegate product discovery to AI agents. We compare manual search, which accurately evaluates a limited product set, with agentic search, which screens a broad catalog through noisy representations of preferences and products. Preference complexity is the number of satisfaction-relevant dimensions that are difficult to articulate before search but readily evaluated upon inspection. Consumers have finite attention and choose search intensity: products inspected manually or preference-refinement depth with an agent. We obtain three findings. First, manual search collapses beyond a finite complexity threshold: inspection ceases, mismatch reaches the no-search benchmark, and platform revenue falls to zero. Agentic search avoids this collapse. Once refinement becomes worthwhile, it remains worthwhile as complexity rises; mismatch stays below the no-search benchmark and revenue remains positive, although articulation effort and mismatch may increase. Second, platforms rank the regimes by conversion revenue, whereas consumers also bear search expenditure. When manual inspection is sufficiently inexpensive, agentic search becomes revenue-superior before consumers voluntarily adopt it, creating an adoption lag in which consumers rationally continue manual search. Third, conditional on agentic participation, platforms may assign lower fidelity to consumers with larger attention budgets because they can offset noisier representations through additional refinement, yielding an inverted fidelity allocation. Agentic commerce thus shifts scarcity from product inspection to preference articulation, making consumers' willingness and ability to interact central to voluntary use and platform fidelity design. --- ### CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception Authors: Zejun Xu, Taiyi Chen, Jin Li, Yongtong Gu, Qi Cheng, Aixuan Lv, Shuai Zhu, Pengfei Zhu, Kaichen Yang, Boyu Sun, Yixian Yang, Mulong Xie et al. Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08392v1 Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that interact with the web through browsers. While recent progress has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate end-to-end task success, these evaluations largely overlook two fundamental sources of difficulty in real web browsing: complex actions over rich user interfaces and visual perception of dynamically rendered content, especially in workflows that span multiple websites. We introduce CAP, a scalable benchmark for evaluating browser agents on cross-site, human-like web tasks that require non-trivial UI interactions and visual understanding. Specifically, we adopt a decomposition-and-recomposition pipeline that first abstracts each website into a structured site card capturing user-facing functions, complex execution operations, and perceptual requirements, and then recomposes these components into realistic cross-site workflows. Each task is therefore grounded in multiple specific operations on each website, enabling fine-grained diagnosis. Built on this framework, we construct 420 tasks across 108 real-world websites and 24 domains under careful quality control. Experiments on state-of-the-art browser agents using our verifiable agent-as-a-judge evaluation framework show low success rates and reveal that perception-heavy interactions remain a major bottleneck, exposing substantial gaps between current agents and real-world web browsing demands. --- ### Lasso Universality Under Linearly Dependent Covariates in the Sparse Regime Authors: Soroush Mesforush, Rahul Parhi Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: math.ST, cs.IT, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08390v1 Throughout the last decade, Gaussian universality has been widely studied for high-dimensional estimation problems. Most of the literature focuses on i.i.d. sensing matrices or accounts for special forms of dependence, such as block dependence or other specific row/column dependencies. More general simultaneous row and column mixing has not yet been fully studied. In this paper, we focus on that setting. We prove a Gaussian universality theorem for the lasso in the sparse regime, where the non- Gaussian covariates have linearly dependent rows and columns. To the best of our knowledge, our setting permits a broader simultaneous row and column dependence structure than those treated in much of the prior universality literature. Numerical illustrations for various sparse profiles support the universality claims of this paper. --- ### Not Worth Another Token: Marginal Value Estimation for Efficient Deep Research Agents Authors: Harshitha Kolukuluru, Reshma Ashok, Kirat Arora, Evan William Ciccarelli, Nischal Ashok Kumar, Lunyiu Nie, Franck Dernoncourt, Samyadeep Basu, Ryan A. Rossi, Nedim Lipka Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08389v2 Long-horizon research agents solve open-ended tasks through iterative retrieval, aggregation, and synthesis, but context grows rapidly while the marginal value of additional evidence often declines. This leads to unnecessary token cost, higher latency, and noisier inputs for final report generation. We study marginal value estimation for context management in deep research agents and present the first systematic stage-aware comparison of pruning strategies across the pipeline. We evaluate lightweight heuristic criteria and a learned value model at pre-retrieval, post-retrieval, and pre-synthesis stages. Our results show that pruning effectiveness depends more on where pruning is applied than on the specific scoring rule: early pruning yields the largest end-to-end savings, while later pruning mainly refines the final synthesis context. Lightweight heuristics reduce token usage by up to 73% with little quality degradation, learned pruning remains competitive on selected trade-offs, and no single method dominates across quality, efficiency, and faithfulness. These findings provide practical guidance for designing efficient long-horizon agentic systems. --- ### Safety Cost of Steering Vectors Is Separable and Reducible Authors: Yuxiao Li, Gjergji Kasneci Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08383v1 Steering vectors are a lightweight tool for controlling LLM behavior. However, emerging evidence shows that steering vectors can unintentionally compromise a model's safety mechanisms and increase compliance with harmful requests, while no effective mitigation yet exists. In this work, we show that this safety degradation arises from a separable component in the vector that disrupts the model's safety mechanisms but contributes little to the steering objective. We identify and remove this safety-degrading component, formulating the task as a constrained optimization problem solved through primal-dual updates, subject to preserving the intended steering effect and bounding false refusal. The resulting solution is both interpretable and surgical: the optimization recovers a single direction whose ablation from the steering vector restores model safety with minimal utility cost. Across models, steering behaviors, and attack suites, including unseen attacks types, our method substantially reduces steering-induced safety degradation while preserving the original steering effect with minimal impact on false refusal. Our method offers a post-hoc correction to steering vectors that mitigates their safety cost, and more broadly, it provides a general recipe for applying activation-level model interventions without paying a safety tax. --- ### LLMVisor: A Real-Time Latency Attribution Model for Multi-Tenant LLM Serving Authors: Shuowei Jin, Xueshen Liu, Jiaxin Shan, Le Xu, Tieying Zhang, Liguang Xie, Z. Morley Mao Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08382v1 As LLM inference shifts to multi-tenant GPU clusters, co-batching improves throughput but obscures per-tenant usage and limits control. Enabling fractional sharing of the inference engine requires a real-time, per-request attribution primitive that is accurate and light enough to run inside the scheduling loop. We present LLMVisor, a roofline-guided latency attribution model that captures the memory-bound and compute-bound phases via a concise piecewise-linear form over features proportional to FLOPs and memory I/O traffic. LLMVisor decomposes batch latency into additive, per-request shares and runs efficiently at microsecond scale. We evaluate LLMVisor across Llama 3.1-8B and Qwen 2.5-14B/32B on A100/H100 GPUs under varying tensor parallelism and workload mixes. Compared to a token-count baseline, LLMVisor attains near-perfect R-squared and reduces relative error by up to 2.5x and 3.3x at p90 and p99, respectively, for prefill, and by up to 3.5x and 4.4x for decode, despite batching variability and sequence divergence. --- ### DoRF++: Spherical Representation Learning over Doppler Radiance Fields for Robust Wi-Fi Sensing Authors: Navid Hasanzadeh, Shahrokh Valaee Published: 2026-08-09 Categories: cs.CV, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08381v2 Motivated by the IEEE 802.11bf effort to standardize advanced WLAN sensing, interest in Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) for passive, device-free, and privacy-preserving activity and gesture recognition has grown rapidly. Recent studies have shown that Doppler velocity projections extracted from CSI, which directly reflect human-motion velocity, enable more robust human activity recognition (HAR) and stronger generalization across users and unseen conditions. Nevertheless, reliable generalization under real-world variability remains a major challenge that hinders the adoption of Wi-Fi sensing. To address this challenge, we build on Doppler Radiance Fields (DoRF), adapting the concept of neural radiance fields (NeRF) from computer vision to Wi-Fi sensing. DoRF treats the extracted Doppler velocity projections as sparse virtual-camera views of human motion. From these views it recovers a regularized latent 3-D motion descriptor whose projections along learned effective Doppler directions explain the CSI observations. The recovered motion is then re-projected onto an equiangular grid of directions on the unit sphere, yielding a spherical representation of the underlying activity. Because DoRF produces a signal defined on the sphere, this paper introduces DoRF++, a spherical representation-learning model that applies quadrature-aware spherical Transformers directly to the spherical field for activity classification. Experiments on our collected hand-gesture dataset show that DoRF++ noticeably outperforms state-of-the-art Wi-Fi-based HAR methods in cross-user generalization accuracy, especially for difficult gestures when only a single multi-antenna receiver access point (AP) is available. --- ### From Risk Scoring to Risk Allocation: A Density-Driven Framework for Diverse Monitoring in Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Zhaohui Wang Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26146v1 Risk monitoring in multi-agent systems is commonly built on a per-state primitive that scores each state independently and selects the top K. Under crowding, where many agents share the same fragility, this approach picks redundant alerts whose risks are jointly correlated, a pattern we describe as ``herding in monitoring.'' We propose a paradigm shift from risk scoring to risk allocation, supported by two contributions. First, we identify the Crowding Paradox, namely that P(risk | x) $\propto$ p(x) rather than 1/p(x), so density rather than anomaly score is the operative risk signal; on financial data, density-based scoring reaches AUROC $\geq$ 0.94 at 5d/10d/20d crash horizons, while five anomaly baselines all fall below 0.80. Second, given a density-derived fragility score, we recast monitoring as combinatorial subset selection over interdependent states and map it to a QUBO objective with a $λ$-controlled risk--diversity tradeoff. The resulting Pareto frontier contains standard diverse-subset methods (MMR, k-DPP) as fixed operating points; the gain over greedy grows monotonically with scale, from +24% at n=15 to +66% at n=200; a learned $λ$ policy reaches 99.5% of an oracle grid-search objective; and the formulation transfers to traffic and multi-agent reinforcement learning. The same QUBO instances execute without modification on Rigetti superconducting QPUs (Ankaa-3 and Cepheus-1-108Q via Amazon Braket), which we report as a compatibility property of the formulation rather than a claim of quantum advantage at this scale. --- ### When Verifiers Vote Backwards under Verdict Substitution: Signed Pivotal Value in Correlated Self-Consistency Authors: Yang Shu Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26144v1 Replacing one ballot can change a majority decision only on queries decided by a single vote; this structural fact requires no independence assumption. We study the sign of that change using a labeled, verdict-style intervention: one correctness signal replaces one correctness-indicator ballot in $k{=}7$ self-consistency panels. This diagnostic intervention is not identical to deployed answer-identity plurality. A primary MATH-500 experiment ($n{=}570$) gives a different-model verifier a $+24.2$pp pivotal gain, whereas a role-reversed configuration gives $-11.2$pp; an exploratory code stress test (14 pivotal rows across 9 tasks) gives $-24.5$pp. An exact signed-gain decomposition accounts for all observed signs through the verifier's state-specific accuracy and the composition of the two one-vote tally states, rather than global accuracy or model provenance. Same-source signals lose accuracy on the pivotal stratum (65$\to$44\% in the primary configuration), while error correlations provide a descriptive error-association diagnostic. Controlled degradation and a $k\in\{3,5,7\}$ subset sensitivity analysis probe the stability of the observed pattern around this accounting. Under the evaluated ties-incorrect answer-identity plurality analysis, the structural zero and strong-verifier benefit persist, but the role-reversed harm attenuates to $-0.9$pp and is not significant. The results therefore establish harmful verdict substitution, not universally harmful deployed plurality, and motivate a testable but unverified hypothesis for negative process-reward-model weights. --- ### TailSpec-EASE: Knowledge-Graph-Regularized Linear Recommendation for Web Long-Tail Discovery Authors: Jianru Shen Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26143v1 Recommender systems on Web platforms tend to over-serve popular items and neglect the long tail. Item-side knowledge graphs (KGs), often available as linked data or RDF-style Web resources, can help by connecting sparse items through shared semantic attributes. Many competitive KG-aware recommenders rely on graph neural architectures, whereas strong shallow linear models such as EASE-R typically ignore side information and may become infeasible in their global closed-form version. We introduce TailSpec-EASE, a lightweight recommender that injects a relation-aware spectral KG prior into a local closed-form reconstruction objective. The prior strength adapts to item popularity, giving stronger semantic guidance to long-tail items. Across four public benchmarks and a broad set of classical, linear, graph-CF, KG-aware neural, and score-level KG baselines, TailSpec-EASE attains a favorable trade-off between overall accuracy, long-tail performance, and training cost. It improves NDCG@20 by up to 24% over its counterpart without KG information. All tail-metric improvements over the no-KG counterpart are statistically significant under a paired bootstrap, and overall NDCG improves significantly on three of the four datasets. In a representative Amazon-book timing study, TailSpec-EASE trains in 37 seconds on CPU, compared with 2,584 seconds for a GPU-trained KGAT run and 15,800 seconds for CPU LightGCN, while attaining higher NDCG@20 and Tail Recall@20 on that dataset. It also remains feasible on catalogs where the global closed-form model runs out of memory. --- ### Three Routes to One Answer: Reconciling AIPW, TMLE, and Double Machine Learning for Applied Researchers Authors: M. Ehsan Karim Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: stat.ME, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26142v1 Augmented inverse-probability weighting (AIPW), targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE), and double/debiased machine learning (DML) are three routes to the same efficient influence function for the average treatment effect --- settled theory we treat as background. This tutorial's contribution is its worked, shared-nuisance reconciliation on real data: what a practitioner must actually match for the routes, and the software packages, to agree. Working the effect of smoking cessation on weight change in the open NHEFS data (n=1566) with one shared Super Learner library and identical cross-fitting folds, we build all three estimators by hand from one influence function, in full-sample, cross-fit, and double-cross-fit variants; the six resulting doubly-robust estimates span only 3.32--3.42 kg, consistent with the established benchmark. We then reconcile the same estimand across our engine and the tmle, AIPW, DoubleML, and tmle3 packages. At their defaults the estimates span 3.32--3.49 kg. Once the library and folds are matched and single-split noise is averaged out, the three library-sharing implementations agree to within 0.01 kg --- so the residual spread traces to the nuisance library, folds, and repetitions, not to the estimator label. Because the estimators share one influence function, they agree under good overlap; under a positivity violation the pooled ATE is not identified without additional extrapolation assumptions, and their finite-sample estimates can then diverge sharply. We therefore place a positivity diagnosis ahead of estimator choice, illustrate the failure on a no-overlap example, and close with a reporting checklist. Open-source R code reproduces every number. --- ### ChainUQ: Reasoning Consistency-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models Authors: Dahai Yu, Rongchao Xu, Lin Jiang, Ximiao Li, Guang Wang Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26060v1 While large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities, response-level confidence may remain unreliable when intermediate claims conflict with the final conclusion. Therefore, effective uncertainty quantification (UQ) is required to capture logical inconsistencies within the reasoning chain, not just the correctness of the final output. Current approaches have two major limitations: (1) their reliance on token-level probabilities fails to capture reasoning consistency, and (2) they lack mechanisms to dynamically calibrate confidence using the structural logic of the generated chain. To advance existing research, we introduce ChainUQ, a reasoning consistency-aware uncertainty quantification framework for LLMs. ChainUQ consists of two key technical components: an alignment-aware lightweight UQ module that estimates a raw intrinsic model confidence score from frozen features aligned to the final conclusion, and a reasoning consistency-aware calibrator that refines this score using reasoning-chain consistency evidence. Evaluations across diverse in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks show that ChainUQ consistently improves response-level uncertainty estimation, achieving an average 3.1% relative gain in AUROC and up to 45.0% relative reduction in ECE, and can be directly transferred to new settings without additional fine-tuning. --- ### CricRAG: Retrieval Augmented Vision-Language Models for Personalized Cricket Coaching Authors: Agamdeep Singh, Sujit PB, Mayank Vatsa Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26056v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising capabilities for automated sports coaching but face a fundamental limitation: they implicitly compare against professional standards, making their feedback impractical for developing players. We present CricRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that aligns VLMs with skill-appropriate benchmarks for personalized cricket coaching. Our key insight is that by retrieving similar-but-better techniques as reference points, we can guide VLMs to provide developmentally appropriate feedback that mirrors human coaching practices. We contribute: (1) a labelled dataset of 288 cricket technique videos spanning multiple skill levels, (2) an efficient motion retrieval pipeline using contrastive learning that achieves 78% top-3 retrieval accuracy, (3) a frame sampling technique that reduces inference costs, and (4) a retrieval-augmented approach that significantly improves feedback alignment with coaching principles, achieving up to 94% agreement with professional assessments compared to 67% without retrieval context. --- ### MME-Safety: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of MLLMs Authors: Yilian Shi, Yueming Lyu, Haoxiang Tan, Linzhuang Zou, Qihao Wang, Guihua Yu, Chenyang Si, Caifeng Shan Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20850v2 While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show remarkable advancements, their cross-modal capabilities introduce complex vulnerabilities that easily bypass unimodal filters. Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained intent-related annotations and rely on unidimensional metrics, hindering comprehensive robustness evaluation. To address this, we propose MME-Safety, a rigorously verified benchmark featuring a unique four-dimensional annotation schema that categorizes risk scenarios, harm severity, and modality-specific stealth levels. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical evaluation framework to assess fundamental response reliability, actual risk exposure, and the structural integrity of defensive behaviors. Extensive zero-shot evaluations across 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs provide a comprehensive safety profile of current multimodal systems. Our analysis systematically investigates cross-modal input configurations and uncovers safety implications associated with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. These multifaceted findings underscore the urgent need for robust, reasoning-aware safety alignment in the multimodal landscape. --- ### Nepali Legal Expertise through Generative and Extractive Pre-trained Transformers (NepLEGiT) Authors: Ranjit Raut, Tishya Dhakal, Aaryan Shakya, Bhabuk Thapa, Prasiddha Koirala, Bal Krishna Bal Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16010v1 The complexity of legal language and limited accessibility to legal information pose significant challenges to justice delivery in Nepal. Traditional legal services remain inaccessible to many citizens due to language barriers, information fragmentation, and a critical shortage of legal expertise, particularly in rural areas. We present NepLEGiT (Nepali Legal Expertise through Generative and Extractive Pre-trained Transformers), a specialized small language model (SLM) designed to democratize legal knowledge and enhance legal-service delivery in Nepal. We pre-train a decoder-based GPT-2 SLM from scratch on a curated corpus of ~4 million tokens of Nepali legal text, covering constitutional law, civil and criminal codes, and administrative regulations. The model comprises ~30 million parameters in a 6-layer, 6-head, 384-dimensional transformer trained with warmup cosine-decay scheduling, gradient accumulation, and mixed-precision arithmetic. On a held-out validation split, NepLEGiT attains a cross-entropy loss of 0.5684, a perplexity of 1.8, and a next-token prediction accuracy of 82.9%. We further evaluate continual masked-language-model pre-training of mBERT and MuRIL on the same corpus; mBERT achieves a perplexity of 2.35 (eval loss 0.8565), outperforming MuRIL (perplexity 6.07, eval loss 1.8026), providing a strong encoder baseline complementary to NepLEGiT's generative orientation. --- ### Marginal Expected Revenue for Jointly Ranking Auction and Fixed-Price Listings in E-Commerce Sponsored Search Authors: Greg Kocher, Sanjana Arun Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01628v1 E-commerce search ranking must balance multiple objectives--relevance, user engagement, and platform revenue--when allocating impression slots to competing listings. Estimating the expected revenue component is well understood for fixed-price items, but becomes challenging when marketplace inventory includes mixed listing formats such as pure auctions and hybrid "Auction with Buy It Now" (ABIN) items, where prices evolve dynamically and the final transaction value is unknown at ranking time. Yet auction and ABIN listings account for a meaningful share of inventory and transaction volume on platforms such as eBay, and are a popular format for individual sellers and for unique items with unclear value. We extend the standard Expected Cost-per-Mille (eCPM) framework to auction and ABIN listings by deriving a marginal eCPM (meCPM) that captures the incremental value of showing one more impression of an item whose price is still evolving. The resulting formulation extends the familiar fixed-price eCPM--which is already inherently marginal--to auction dynamics, allowing unified ranking of fixed-price, auction, and ABIN listings under a single objective. We then describe a practical production implementation that approximates this objective, addressing cold-start challenges by bootstrapping from existing engagement models. Online A/B tests at a large e-commerce platform showed positive revenue gains and statistically significant improvements to user metrics, and the system was deployed to production. --- ### Do MLLMs Really Understand Low-Resource Khmer Documents? A Pilot Study on Khmer Document VQA Authors: Nimol Thuon, Panhapin Theang Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28635v1 Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced document understanding, visual question answering, and text extraction. However, their reliability in low-resource, non-Latin settings remains uncertain. Khmer form documents present particular challenges because they contain complex script forms, mixed Khmer-English fields, and monetary values in both Cambodian Riel and US Dollars. Available resources for Khmer Document VQA are also limited. This paper presents a pilot diagnostic evaluation of open MLLMs on Khmer document images. We construct an evaluation subset from the previously introduced KH-FUNSD collection, covering invoices, receipts, quotations, and other business forms. The subset includes questions in English and Khmer, with answers retained in their original English, Khmer, mixed-script, or numeric forms. Rather than introducing a full public benchmark, this study examines the capabilities and failure modes of existing models. We evaluate representative open Qwen-VL models using direct image-based prompting and compare parser-assisted and external OCR-assisted configurations with Qwen3-VL-8B. Direct Qwen3-VL-8B outperforms smaller models, achieving 51.9% overall accuracy, although performance remains limited for Khmer-script and mixed-script answers. External OCR produces the strongest results, reaching 61.9% with Tesseract and 61.6% with PaddleOCR. Nevertheless, Khmer-script answers remain substantially more difficult than English and numeric fields. The results indicate that current MLLMs can process visually clear English and structured numeric content, but reliable native Khmer document understanding remains an open challenge. --- ### A Hierarchical Energy-Based Model for Multimodal Cognition Authors: Subir Varma Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12398v1 We propose IM-LEPP (Integrated Multimodal Latent Energy-based Predictive Processing), a hierarchical, energy-based model of multimodal cognition that extends a previously proposed single-modality model (LEPP) to integrate vision and language. Following the view that generative neural networks are effective theories of cognitive dynamics, analogous to how statistical mechanics relates to thermodynamics, IM-LEPP models cognition as latent states flowing through learned energy landscapes rather than as an account of neural circuitry. The architecture is a hub-and-spoke hierarchy, grounded in the controlled semantic cognition framework of Lambon Ralph et al., in which predictive-coding pipelines for visual objects, scenes, and linguistic units converge on a shared amodal hub modeled on the anterior temporal lobe. Each pipeline's own prediction is conditioned by, rather than overwritten by, the current hub state, preserving pipeline-specific identity while letting every prediction reflect the full multimodal context. We show this architecture gives a mechanistic account of attentional phenomena such as inattentional blindness and Necker-cube bistability, and that its structure recovers or motivates independently established findings in psycholinguistics, including surprisal theory, the N400/P600 ERP components, and garden-path reanalysis, alongside a falsifiable contrast with transformer language models on trajectory-sensitivity in next-word prediction. We also discuss data-efficient language acquisition relative to LLMs, outline a semantic/episodic memory subsystem, situate the model against predictive coding, the free-energy principle, JEPA, and Hierarchical Temporal Memory, and propose concrete experimental predictions to test its central claims Key Words: predictive processing; predictive coding; energy-based models; diffusion models; effective theory; computational neuroscience. --- ### Sheaf-Based Federated Representation Learning Authors: Gabriele D'Acunto, Enrico Grimaldi, Valeria Avino, Mario Edoardo Pandolfo, Leonardo Di Nino, Sergio Barbarossa, Paolo Di Lorenzo Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10016v1 Heterogeneous federated systems require agents to learn and exchange informative representations despite differences in data distributions, sensing modalities, model architectures, latent dimensionalities, and local learning objectives. To address this challenge, we propose Sheaf-based Federated Representation Learning (SFRL), a general framework that jointly optimizes local objectives with a manifold-constrained geometric alignment regularizer based on learnable sheaf restriction maps. Unlike most existing approaches, SFRL does not assume a shared global latent space. Instead, global consistency emerges from the alignment of neighboring latent representations through orthogonal transformations and isometric embeddings. This alignment is enforced by a quadratic gluing regularizer induced by the sheaf Laplacian, whose learnable restriction maps adapt the geometry to the observed data. The penalty is evaluated on a small set of shared pilot samples, ensuring scalability and communication efficiency. We develop a decentralized algorithm for solving SFRL, termed Sheaf-FRL, which alternates between gradient updates of the local models and closed-form Procrustes updates of the edge-wise restriction maps. We further establish convergence of Sheaf-FRL to first-order stationary points in both deterministic and stochastic settings. As an application, we consider a cooperative classification task in the context of semantic communication, under model and data heterogeneity. Our results show that Sheaf-FRL outperforms baseline approaches in terms of local and post-communication classification accuracy across different levels of local distribution shift and exhibits greater robustness to latent-space dimensionality compression. --- ### HIPNO: Symmetry-Aware Physics-Informed Neural Operators for Noninvasive Hemodynamic Inference Authors: Yunbei Pan, Jiahang Sha, Simon A. Lee, Maxime Cannesson, Wei Wang, Jeffrey N. Chiang Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10011v1 Continuous hemodynamic monitoring guides treatment decisions in surgery and intensive care. However, gold-standard signals are only measured in severe cases due to risks associated with invasive measurement. In this work, we introduce HIPNO (Hemodynamic Inference via Physics-informed Neural Operators) to recover hemodynamic state from ubiquitous, non-invasive signals and expand access to advanced monitoring. HIPNO addresses a problem of scale symmetry in physics-informed hemodynamic inference, where different combinations of flow, resistance, and compliance can generate the same observed pressure. We identify the symmetry group of the observation model and parameterize the network in its quotient space. For the 3-element Windkessel model, the quotient coordinates are the compliance-normalized flow $U=Q/C$, the decay time constant $τ_{WK}=R_2 C$, and the characteristic-impedance coordinate $κ=R_1 C$. Across 945499 intraoperative windows from 2562 patients, HIPNO predicts $τ_{wave}$, a proxy for vascular decay derived from pressure, with 32% lower error on the log scale than a population baseline while preserving mean arterial pressure accuracy. Because vascular decay and flow drive occupy separate coordinates, counterfactual perturbations produce the expected directional responses in at least 90% of windows in almost all prespecified scenarios, a separation unavailable to pressure-only baselines. The coordinates are also used as inputs to a calibration model for monitored cardiac output. Finally, the formulation identifies the external compliance or flow reference required to recover absolute physical scale. --- ### CurveFP: Co-Designing Numerical Representation and Product Arithmetic for Language Models Authors: Ye Qiao Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10010v2 Low-precision formats usually optimize scalar fidelity while inheriting conventional product arithmetic. We introduce CurveFP, a block-scaled family that distributes magnitudes across interleaved logarithmic curves. Uniform curve indices make every nonzero product an exact sign and integer-index update, while a rational radix exposes the finite phase schedule required for accumulation. We instantiate the algebra as CurveFP8 E4C3/E5C2 for training and CurveFP7 E3C3 for compact inference. On four 7B-9B models, CurveFP7 beats tensorwise FP8 perplexity with one fewer element bit and stays within 1.32% of native quality. CurveFP8 lowers error in all 36 paired training-GEMM comparisons. Across three matched 3B-token pretraining triplets, it reaches mean BF16-inference perplexity 22.5366 versus 22.5407 for FP8 and has a lower format penalty in every seed. Downstream evaluation shows transfer parity and a consistent WikiText-103 gain. In a preliminary 4x4 Nangate45 spatial accelerator tile, CurveFP8 uses one fewer product register and 4.6% less area than timing-closing FP8 at 500 MHz. These results support CurveFP as a numerical and arithmetic co-design, while leaving system-level efficiency to future study. --- ### Gated Spatial Redundancy Projection for Pathology Transformer Attentions Authors: Zhiyuan Yang, Jiahao Cheng, Vincent Quoc-Huy Trinh, Mahdi S. Hosseini Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08374v3 Transformer models are increasingly used for whole-slide image analysis in computational pathology. Yet, WSIs differ fundamentally from natural images: neighbouring patches often contain highly similar tissue type, stain, texture, and cellular composition. We identify this local spatial redundancy as a pathology-specific failure mode of self-attention, where dominant neighbourhood features can be repeatedly mixed into patch-tokens and weaken subtle diagnostic or prognostic deviations. We propose Gated Spatial Redundancy Projection (Gated SRP), a lightweight drop-in correction module for self-attention layers. For each patch token and attention head, Gated SRP estimates a local redundancy axis from neighbouring value vectors, projects the attention output onto this axis, and applies a learned signed gate to correct the redundancy-aligned component geometrically. Across five TCGA survival cohorts, Gated SRP obtains the highest mean C-index among the compared attention variants in all cohorts, with an average improvement over the base attention, while adding only +0.02% parameters. Across five slide-level classification datasets, it improves the base attention on 12 of 16 reported metrics and achieves the best AUC on three datasets. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/AtlasAnalyticsLab/GatedSRP. --- ### PARAGraph: Pathology-Anatomy-Aware Hierarchical Graph for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading Authors: Ziyang Zhang, Yuankai Huo, Yalin Zheng, He Zhao Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08368v1 Diabetic retinopathy (DR) remains a leading cause of vision loss among working-age adults worldwide, making reliable severity grading clinically important. Despite strong performance, most deep models formulate DR grading as image-level classification and do not explicitly model clinically grounded evidence, such as lesion types and spatial relations. In this paper, we propose PARAGraph, a Pathology-Anatomy-Aware Hierarchical Graph framework for DR grading. PARAGraph represents each image as a three-level hierarchical graph with lesion-level nodes, intermediate category and region nodes, and global anatomical and semantic nodes. To incorporate medical priors into nodes, we construct an optic disc-fovea-anchored coordinate frame that provides a scale- and rotation-normalized retinal reference system. Within this frame, lesion nodes are encoded with category, normalized area, and anatomical coordinates. To mitigate noisy lesion segmentation, PARAGraph uses a dual-fusion strategy that introduces global visual context into a graph semantic node and a decision-level prediction branch, improving robustness when lesion evidence is unreliable. Extensive experiments on Messidor-2, APTOS, and DDR show that PARAGraph achieves consistent DR grading performance over state-of-the-art methods. Interpretability and robustness analyses further demonstrate that its predictions are clinically grounded, closely associated with lesion evidence and robust to lesion segmentation noise. --- ### VOICE: A Vision-Omics Foundation Model Integrating Direct and Retrieval-Based Prediction of In-situ Single-Cell Gene Expression Authors: Xin Luo, Yicheng Tao, Haoxuan Zeng, Suyuan Wang, Chenzi Ouyang, Meiqi Zhu, Kai Liu, Shuibing Chen, Jie Liu Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08366v1 Spatial transcriptomics can resolve gene expression at single-cell resolution, but it is costly, limited to targeted panels of a few hundred to a few thousand genes, and applicable to only a small number of samples. H&E imaging, by contrast, is cheap and collected routinely at scale. This makes predicting single-cell expression directly from morphology a practical way to bring molecular analysis to large tissue archives. We therefore present VOICE, a multimodal foundation model that predicts single-cell gene expression from H&E images using paired Xenium data. VOICE first aligns cell centered H&E morphology from a pathology foundation model with single-cell expression embeddings from a transcriptome foundation model, trained using contrastive learning over 23 million cells. Next it predicts expression through two branches. One branch directly regresses expression from morphology. The other branch retrieves measured expression from similar reference cells, recovering genes that do not have morphological signal. Because genes vary in morphological predictability, VOICE fuses the two branches with a per-gene weight. After training, VOICE generalizes to heldout patients, slides, and partially overlapping gene panels from Xenium, and it consistently outperforms prior single-cell expression prediction methods on seven metrics. --- ### Failure-Mechanism Transferability of Cumulative-Damage Features for Health State Estimation of SiC Power Modules Authors: Mattia Scarpa, Evgeny Kusmenko, Francesco Toso, Mattia Bruschetta, Ruggero Carli, Simon Achatz Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08365v2 Data-driven health-state estimators for SiC (Silica-Carbide) power modules typically report their performance on a single accelerated-aging campaign, and how that performance transfers to a different failure mechanism is rarely tested. We benchmark five reference methods from the prognostics and condition-monitoring literature against a physics-informed NODE (Neural Ordinary Differential Equation) on two SiC power-cycling campaigns driven by structurally different failure mechanisms, solder-layer fatigue and wire-bond lift-off, under a per-module $k$-fold protocol. The NODE is evaluated under two input regimes that share the rest of the pipeline: the baseline electrical precursors and a set of cumulative thermoelectric features. Every reference method degrades on the wire-bond campaign, with average errors growing and precision decreasing with respect to their performance on the soldered campaign. The NODE fed with the cumulative features keeps its soldered-campaign metrics on both mechanisms, with differences inside the fold-to-fold variance, while the same architecture fed with the baseline precursors falls back to the reference-method cluster. The input representation contributes at least as much as the architecture to failure-mechanism transferability of a health-state estimator. --- ### Physics-Informed Condition Monitoring of SiC Power Modules Authors: Mattia Scarpa, Evgeny Kusmenko, Francesco Toso, Mattia Bruschetta, Ruggero Carli, Simon Achatz Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08363v2 Silicon carbide (SiC) power modules are increasingly deployed in automotive traction inverters, where condition monitoring is essential to prevent in-service failures. Despite extensive qualification under AQG 324, no consolidated approach exists for in-field health state estimation: physics-of-failure lifetime models lack real-time applicability, purely data-driven architectures require large labeled datasets and generalize poorly, and physics-informed frameworks remain too demanding for embedded deployment. We address SiC MOSFET modules assembled with sintered packaging, which suppresses solder degradation and produces aging behavior distinct from previously studied devices. Instead of the smooth quasi-exponential drift of solder-based modules, the forward voltage drop $V_{DS}$ exhibits multi-regime profiles, with wirebond liftoff events introducing abrupt, non-monotonic perturbations. We propose a condition monitoring framework combining three elements. First, physics-informed features replace raw sensor signals with cumulative damage indicators derived from junction temperature swing, mean junction temperature and a Miner rule accumulator, encoding degradation history in an interpretable form. Second, a monotonicity constraint enforced by gradient penalty regularization embeds the expected degradation direction as a physics-guided prior. Third, a heavy-tailed output distribution replaces the point estimate, giving calibrated uncertainty robust to the out-of-distribution variance introduced by liftoff. On an industrial power cycling dataset from Infineon Technologies, several neural architectures are compared under a strict cross-validation protocol. The full configuration reduces mean absolute error by approximately 70% over purely data-driven baselines and stays stable across all folds, while remaining lightweight enough for embedded deployment. --- ### Unimodality-Promoting Regularized Learning for Ordinal Regression Authors: Ryoya Yamasaki Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08359v1 Ordinal regression, also called ordinal classification, is classification of ordinal data, in which the underlying target variable is categorical and considered to have a natural ordinal relation. Previous works have indicated that, in many real-world ordinal data, the conditional probability distribution (CPD) of the target variable given a value of the explanatory variable would be unimodal in a large domain of the explanatory variable and close to be unimodal even in a remaining domain. Therefore, unimodality-promoting regularized learning (UPRL), which promotes a predicted CPD closer to be unimodal with the aim of decreasing a prediction variance without inducing much bias for ordinal data of the unimodality, is promising to improve the prediction performance especially with small-size training data. In this study, we show that previous UPRL methods promote a predicted CPD to not only become closer to be unimodal but also have a larger scale (in other words, be smoother or less-confident). Therefore, we develop a novel method that more strictly reflects the idea of UPRL and evades a scale-related bias, and verify through experimental comparison that the unimodality-promotion indeed contributes to improve the prediction performance. Additionally, while our proposed UPRL method could perform better for smaller-scale data or with larger-size training data compared to a previous UPRL method, our analysis explains this experimental observation in terms of the presence or absence of an unexpected scale-related bias. --- ### Tropical Cyclone Forecasting via Latent Rectified Flow using Satellite Imagery and Atmospheric Fields Authors: Meheru Zannat, Sk. Md. Masudul Ahsan Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08354v2 Tropical cyclones are growing more destructive in a changing climate, and efficient forecasting of their structure and track has become a necessity. Deep generative models promise an alternative to computationally expensive numerical weather prediction (NWP), yet current systems produce either satellite imagery or atmospheric fields, never both; they need many sampling steps, putting them out of reach of modest hardware; and their storm tracks come from regression heads with no physical link to the generated atmosphere. This work presents a single-pass model that jointly forecasts GRIDSAT-B1 infrared imagery and four ERA5 atmospheric fields (U-wind, V-wind, air temperature, and surface pressure) out to nine hours. A five-channel variational autoencoder compresses each 5 x 256 x 256 frame to a 4 x 64 x 64 latent, and a conditional rectified-flow UNet with a factorized temporal-attention module predicts the next three frames from three past frames, their best-track coordinates, and timestamps. The model is then reward-fine-tuned (DRaFT) against a differentiable track error derived from the predicted winds through a steering-flow calculation. On held-out 2022 storms the model reaches 16.35 dB PSNR and 0.759 SSIM, ahead of a reproduced cascaded-diffusion baseline at every lead time (+0.84 dB at +9 h) while sampling ~30x faster (56 ms vs. 1673 ms). Track error at +9 h is 62.4 km, 15% below the baseline, and a reward fine-tuning study demonstrates a further 8-11% track-error reduction across sampler budgets. --- ### Correlation flow governs learning at criticality Authors: Andrea Combette, Nelly Pustelnik, Antoine Venaille Published: 2026-08-08 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.dis-nn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08350v2 The initialization of deep neural networks determines whether information and gradients can propagate across depth, yet a unified theory connecting these properties to learning dynamics remains elusive. Combining mean-field theory and random matrix theory, we establish a direct link between correlation propagation and the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) that governs learning in the sequential limit of infinitely wide, infinitely deep networks. Correlation propagation to infinite depth is possible only at a single, critical point in the weight-bias variance plane. At this point, we leverage the algebraic decay of the end-to-end Jacobian with depth to prove that the NTK becomes exactly proportional to the output correlation at infinite depth, tying together information propagation and learning dynamics. We further show that orthogonal initialization suppresses the leading finite-size corrections present under Gaussian initialization, clarifying the respective roles of the two initialization ensembles in this limit. These theoretical predictions are validated quantitatively on finite-width, finite-depth networks. Together, these results demonstrate that orthogonal initialization and criticality are required to control the asymptotic dynamics of deep learning. ---