# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 19 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #901–950 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/19 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/18.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/20.md) ### Item-Mean Surrogates: Why Richer Persona Data Fail to Improve LLMs as Human Surrogates Authors: Daehwan Ahn, Chengfeng Mao, Dokyun Lee Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29455v1 LLMs are increasingly used as human surrogates, often on the premise that richer persona data could make them substitutes or exploratory tools for specific individuals. We test this premise across four datasets covering more than 400,000 participants and more than 6,000 survey items and experimental outcomes. LLMs perform well at the aggregate level: their average responses closely align with average human responses to the same items. But this success largely reflects predicting each item's average human response. Once each item's human mean is removed, LLM predictions explain only 3.05% of the remaining respondent-specific variation, far below the 53.6% human test-retest benchmark. Richer personas, model variants, and fine-tuning do not close this gap. In variance analyses, once item means are removed, the reliable remaining signal is person-by-item. It captures how a respondent departs from the mean on a particular item and is about 8.9x larger than the stable person effect. Persona data encode the respondent, but not this item-specific deviation. LLM responses also compress human response distributions, using less spread, fewer response categories, and distorted distributional shapes. We call this pattern item-mean surrogacy. Current LLM surrogates can approximate item averages, but not the distributions or respondent-specific deviations needed to replace individual humans. We propose four empirical tests for LLM-based human-surrogate claims. --- ### AI Can Be Easily Persuaded in Clinical Decision Making Authors: Jiayuan Zhu, Jiazhen Pan, Fenglin Liu, Minhao Hu, Junde Wu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29453v1 As AI becomes increasingly integrated into clinical practice, it is playing a growing role in medical decision making. Medicine, however, is a high stakes and evidence based field, where decisions can directly affect patients' lives. It is therefore important to understand whether AI can maintain objective judgment when others try to persuade it. In this paper, we study how easily AI can be persuaded through controlled experiments. We find that professional authority, national background, institutional affiliation, claimed past performance, multiple physicians, supported clinician views, and repeated pressure can all affect AI decisions. Surprisingly, the same persuasive input changes about 10% more cases when it comes from a senior clinician than from a medical student. Simply claiming a better performance history consistently makes the physician more persuasive. More strikingly, a plausible clinician view can persuade AI away from a correct decision even when it is fabricated to support an incorrect answer. This indicates that AI can be strongly influenced by convincing support without reliably determining whether this view from the clinician is correct. Together, these findings suggest that AI can be easily persuaded by what people say, who says it, and how the opinion is presented. Therefore, it is essential for AI to maintain sound judgment under persuasion, enabling its safe and reliable use in high stakes medical decision making. --- ### Vocabulary Growth Fundamentals: Bernstein Functions and Hausdorff Sequences Authors: Łukasz Dębowski Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: math.PR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29449v1 We survey the theory of vocabulary growth founded in the setting of stochastic processes. In particular, we model the expected number of types through Bernstein functions and Hausdorff sequences. These classes of mathematical objects, defined by alternating signs of their derivatives or differences, can be related to continuous-time Poisson point processes and discrete-time IID processes, respectively. Building on previous accounts of the vocabulary growth, we integrate the broader theories of Bernstein functions and Hausdorff sequences and connect them with recently developed hapax rate models. In particular, we prove that the logistic hapax rate model has a non-negative spectrum and hence it defines a Bernstein function, thereby solving an earlier posed problem. We also analyze the limitations of the Bernstein--Hausdorff theory of the vocabulary growth by considering its generalizations under stationary and Weibull renewal processes. --- ### SS-ESOAP: Self-Scaled Adaptive Preconditioning for Physics-Informed Learning Authors: Guangyuan Wang, Mads Toftrup, Sebastian Loeschcke, Yixuan Wang, Anima Anandkumar Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29448v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often face ill-conditioned objectives that limit high-accuracy training. Dense quasi-Newton methods improve local conditioning but require expensive optimizer state, while Kronecker-factored methods such as SOAP scale to larger networks but rely on periodic basis updates. We introduce \method, which augments SOAP-style preconditioning with a scalar secant-energy correction adapted to Kronecker geometry and an adaptive basis update followed by variance-state downscaling. We characterize the directional secant matching induced by the scalar correction and give a bound on variance-state mismatch across basis changes. Across eight PDE benchmarks, \method attains the lowest final residual on six, including Burgers and Boussinesq, while SOAP-family baselines perform better on Gray-Scott and Ginzburg-Landau. On Boussinesq, \method reaches a residual of $10^{-5}$ in 4.1 hours with 9.2 GB peak VRAM, while Adam does not reach this target within 14 hours. Three-seed $L^2$ and $H^1$ errors on four representative PDEs support the link between lower residuals and improved solution accuracy. These results position \method as a scalable option for stiff, high-accuracy physics-informed training, rather than a uniform replacement for existing optimizers. --- ### Whose Assessment of Distress? Community Perspectives and LLM Alignment on Well-Being Posts Authors: Andrew Aquilina, Xiang Lorraine Li, Yu-Ru Li Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29446v1 Judgments about psychological distress are socially situated: what counts as concerning hinges on community norms around emotional expression, vulnerability, and help-seeking. Yet large language models (LLMs) used for distress detection are typically aligned to a single, undifferentiated standard. How well do these models capture the perspectives of the communities whose language they assess? We address this question through a perspectivist annotation study in which 321 participants provided 9,587 judgments on 1,198 Reddit posts spanning six identity-based communities, yielding community-specific labels. Raters in the contextualized in-group condition show a modest tendency to agree more with their community than uncontextualized out-group raters (OR = 1.18), an effect varying significantly across communities. We then evaluate nine open-weight LLM configurations and four frontier configurations against these labels. Open-weight LLMs systematically over-estimate distress: when communities perceive none-to-mild distress, these models achieve only 31-44% accuracy, predominantly producing false positives. GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro show the same none-to-mild inflation even when their full-sample over/under rates are mixed, while Claude Opus 4 is more conservative. This pattern does not simply mirror an outsider reading position: uncontextualized out-group human aggregates were nearly symmetric, with 18% over-estimation versus 19% under-estimation. Instead, the models that inflate none-to-mild cases exhibit a distress prior that exceeds both contextualized in-group and uncontextualized out-group human judgments. These findings have implications for equitable AI deployment in mental health contexts, where miscalibrated distress detection may unevenly affect the communities being assessed. --- ### Does Latent Planning Survive Point Clouds? Action-Conditioned JEPA World Models for Geometric Observations and Goals Authors: Fabio F. Oberweger, Michael Schwingshackl, Markus Murschitz Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29434v2 Latent action world models let agents plan new behaviors at test time by predicting how actions change the environment, and joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) do so by forecasting future latent states rather than pixels. Yet nearly all such models see the world through a camera, even though robotic manipulation is fundamentally geometric: in robotics goals for manipulation are traditionally specified by target object poses, not by images of the object once placed. We ask whether latent planning survives a shift from appearance to geometry, on the observation side as well as on the goal specifications side. To answer this, we extend the stable-worldmodel evaluation platform with simulated LiDAR-style raycast point clouds as a new sensor modality, and adapt three JEPA designs to point clouds: a frozen-encoder model built on Utonia features, a distribution-prior model based on LeWM, and an action-sensitive model based on Delta-JEPA. We further introduce a goal-encoding mechanism that constructs the goal latent from the current latent and a 3D target pose, removing the need for goal images or goal point clouds. A comparative evaluation of the different anti-collapse mechanisms shows that point-cloud world models can match their image-based counterparts, demonstrating that the modality shift from appearance to geometry is achievable. All models are released as open weights with open-source training and inference code, to make world-model planning accessible for LiDAR-driven and pose-directed robotic tasks. --- ### Calibration and Comparative Analysis of Forward-Looking Sonar and 3D Sonar for Enhanced Underwater Object Recognition Authors: Aditya Penumarti, Khanh Dong, Zi-Hao Zhang, Yongkyoon Park, Zhenqi Wu, Trung Dong, Shahriar Negahdaripour, Xiaomin Lin, Jane Shin Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29433v1 Sonars generate a significant amount of noise. With the advent of new technology capable of producing full 3D point clouds, the noise is amplified in sparse point clouds, making it challenging to recognize features for navigation, recognition, or reconstruction. To address this challenge, we propose using two different sonar modalities: one that produces a 2D intensity image and another that generates a 3D point cloud. By implementing auto-calibration, we can filter out noisy features between the modalities to enhance feature extraction. Experiments demonstrate that auto-calibration improves performance over manual calibration by 5% and that filtering enhances feature extraction by more than 40% relative to the raw point cloud. Code and datasets are given at https://theaprilab.org/fls-3d-calibrator --- ### Evaluating the Semantic Specificity of Representation Steering in Language Models Authors: Zhangdie Yuan, Andreas Vlachos Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29431v1 Localized Representation Steering (LRS) is widely used to correct reasoning pathologies in large language models. However, standard benchmark evaluations can easily be fooled by superficial label overrides, creating a false impression of reasoning circuit repairs. In this work, we propose Cross-Rule Transfer (CRT), a diagnostic framework that audits representational interventions by evaluating them on rule families where the model is natively competent. Evaluating late-layer LRS for a widespread logical failure, contradiction blindness, reveals that the intervention merely injects a global label bias: applying the steering vector to rules the model already handles correctly (99.6% baseline) degrades performance to 40.4% by forcing false contradiction predictions. We support this diagnosis with four complementary controls (direct logit bias equivalence, control vector label-flipping, cross-model grafting, and early-layer steering checks), providing a rigorous methodology to distinguish genuine reasoning repairs from superficial label overrides. --- ### Content Exploration Beyond the Feed: Creator Supply and the Shared Corpus Authors: Yuanyuan Shen, Yiren Yan, Wenjie Li, Chunhui Zhu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG, econ.EM, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29430v1 Industrial recommenders give new content initial views through budgeted exploration, then use early performance to decide further delivery. On many short-video platforms, exploration is the primary way new videos reach viewers. Viewer-side tests measure consumption; the published budget objectives we review omit creator response. We analyze four experiments on a major short-video platform. An eight-month creator ablation finds production exploration raises videos posted per creator by 8.55% and creators posting at least once by 7.10% relative to a minimal floor. A budget-matched reallocation raises creator participation with no detectable short-run viewer-side change. A year-long viewer ablation finds 1.74% more video views but 2.13% less view time. A delivered view creates immediate feed value, can trigger organic take-up, and can induce creator supply. Take-up and supply replenish a shared corpus, creating two measurement limits. Viewer-side A/B tests cancel the corpus effect when both arms consume the same corpus. Giving each arm its own corpus avoids cancellation, but turnover still controls the horizon. If the corpus turns over at rate w per posting cycle, a t-cycle experiment expresses at most wt of the eventual corpus effect. More users reduce noise but do not speed turnover. Before the corpus path visibly bends, data cannot distinguish a modest fast effect from an arbitrarily large slow one, so a valid confidence interval may lack a finite upper endpoint. As predicted, the three-week co-diverted experiment cannot determine the sign of the eventual corpus effect. Within the window, it identifies the direct feed effect, and an exploratory cohort analysis detects organic lift after exploration ends. The experiments establish a positive creator response, measure the gross corpus flow visible within three weeks, and show the design and duration needed to identify total value. --- ### Behavioral Latency as Weak Event-Time Supervision for EEG Reaction-Time Decoding Authors: Anuar Aimoldin, Ayana Mussabayeva, Yedige Mussabayev, Xue Liu, Kun Zhang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29428v1 Single-trial EEG analyses are often organized around events and latencies, yet EEG-based reaction-time (RT) prediction is posed as scalar regression on a fixed stimulus-locked window. RT is treated as a window-level label rather than timing evidence about response-relevant dynamics. Here we reformulate trial-wise RT decoding as event-time posterior modeling. Instead of predicting RT directly, the model estimates a posterior over response-relevant event times, $p(t_{\mathrm{event}}\mid X)$, and uses its mean as the RT estimate. This treats behavioral latency as a weak observation of latent response-relevant timing. We evaluate this formulation on the Healthy Brain Network contrast change detection EEG task under a subject-disjoint, release-separated protocol. Across five seeds, distributional event-time supervision consistently improves held-out RT prediction relative to scalar regression and temporal-readout controls. Controlled objective comparisons isolate supervision of the event-time distribution, rather than expectation-based readout alone, as the source of this gain. Architecture controls show that the effect persists across four temporal backbones and is not explained by model scale. Beyond point prediction, posterior geometry characterizes concentration, target alignment, and interval behavior, while observation-noise calibration separates latent concentration from predictive uncertainty over RT. Shifted-crop inference probes shortcut use versus temporal localization. Matched shift-jitter improves robustness, increases mean sensitivity, and moves predictions more often in the expected crop-relative direction. Sensitivity remains below ideal crop-relative localization, leaving a clear equivariance gap. Together, these results establish event-time posterior modeling as a probabilistic and interpretable formulation for linking single-trial EEG dynamics to behavioral timing. --- ### Polis: 3D Self-Supervision at City Scale Authors: Alexander Rusnak, Sophia Kovalenko, Jingru Wang, Ismail Moudden, Xiru Wang, Frédéric Kaplan Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29426v1 Reliable semantic representations derived from city-scale 3D models are increasingly important for urban analysis, infrastructure monitoring, autonomous systems, and heritage conservation. However, urban scenes of large spatial extent captured through aerial surveying differ substantially from the indoor, object-level, and self-driving LiDAR data used to pretrain most 3D self-supervised models. We introduce Polis, to our knowledge the first application of Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) as an objective for a native point cloud encoder, and evaluate it through a frozen-feature benchmark spanning fourteen city- and building-scale corpora. Polis combines geometrically matched cosine invariance, SIGReg, and VICReg-style anti-collapse terms with a 12.8k-scene outdoor pretraining mixture and gravity-preserving spatial view sampling. Controlled ablations show that this objective outperforms student--teacher architecture alternatives, as well as Polis versions without anti-collapse terms, on the same representative outdoor corpus. On three pretraining-disjoint city datasets, Polis reaches $23.8\%$ mean mIoU versus $16.3\%$ for the next-best encoder under high-capacity frozen probing, and $17.3\%$ versus $16.1\%$ at a matched point and voxel budget. The same city-scale lead holds on datasets whose training sets were seen in pretraining. On localized terrestrial captures with fine-grained facade and streetscape labels, the ranking reverses. Our results show that distributionally-regularized joint embedding architectures can be successful on challenging city-scale 3D scenes, and that transfer improves when self-supervision is designed for the capture geometry and spatial context of this domain while also revealing the limits of this specialization. --- ### One Capability or Many? Structural and Predictive Tests of Benchmark Validity Disagree About Economic Benchmarks for Frontier AI Authors: Louis Yiven Zhu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29420v2 Frontier-model leaderboards now rank systems on economic benchmarks, and those rankings inform what organisations buy and what regulators scrutinise. Whether such benchmarks measure a capability distinct from general test-taking is a question of construct validity that a structural test and a predictive test can answer in opposite ways. We show that they do on a hash-pinned snapshot of a frontier leaderboard with 421 model configurations across twelve benchmarks, four of them economic, of which 103 configurations carry all three sparsely scored economic benchmarks and 96 carry all twelve; four hypotheses and their thresholds were fixed before analysis, and every deviation from the plan is reported. The first factor of a three-factor extraction carries 74.5% of common variance and tracks release date (R^2 = 0.505), and date adjustment lowers its share by 14.9 points. Under the dimensionality rule fixed in advance the economic benchmarks form no factor of their own. A leave-one-benchmark-out test with factors re-estimated inside every fold nevertheless finds that a multi-factor representation predicts held-out economic scores better than a single general index (pooled Delta-MSE 0.037, 95% bootstrap interval (0.019, 0.055)) under the linear learners that fit best, an advantage that reverses for tree learners. Under the linear learners the same representation also predicts the eight other benchmarks better, so the battery carries predictive structure that one index misses and the economic benchmarks share it without forming a distinct factor. Construct validity should therefore be assessed by predictive tests alongside structural ones. We give a two-test protocol for benchmark builders and release the pinned data, the analysis plan and the code. --- ### Scalable Clinical Data Infrastructure and Comparative ML Evaluation for Hospitalisation Risk Prediction in Elderly Patients with Multiple Long-Term Conditions using CPRD Authors: Asra Aslam, Volodymyr Chapman, Maurice M. O'Connell, Aseel S. Abuzour, Michael Abaho, Danushka Bollegala, Gary Leeming, Eduard Shantsila, Andrew Clegg, Lauren E. Walker, Iain Edward Buchan, Samuel D. Relton Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29419v1 Deep learning architectures are increasingly proposed for patient trajectory modeling in electronic health records (EHRs), yet their advantage over simpler, more interpretable models is rarely subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny in real-world clinical settings. We present a comprehensive patient timeline pipeline applied to elderly patients in CPRD Aurum, incorporating 260 clinical conditions classified via a three-tier automated framework including specialised detection logic for 17 complex conditions. Using this infrastructure, we benchmark Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (TG-CNN) against Logistic Regression with LASSO regularisation and Random Forests for predicting 12-month all-cause emergency hospitalisation risk, motivated by (but not filtered to) the elevated risk of adverse drug reactions. Under cross-validation, TG-CNN achieves a marginally higher mean AUC-ROC than LASSO (0.712 vs. 0.705), whereas on the held-out test set LASSO achieves the highest discrimination of three models (AUC-ROC 0.733, versus 0.710 for Random Forest and 0.702 for TG-CNN). We show, that discrimination alone is an incomplete criterion for clinical deployment: after Platt calibration, LASSO is the only model with an acceptable calibration slope (0.817), while Random Forest (0.759) and, TG-CNN (0.391) remain substantially miscalibrated. We argue that LASSO, not the highest-discriminating model, is the model best suited to direct clinical deployment. We present lessons for the machine learning and healthcare community regarding data infrastructure, model selection, and value of calibration and interpretability in high-stakes decision support. --- ### Where Induction Runs Out: Description-Length Difficulty and the Memorisation Gap in Integer-Sequence Benchmarks Authors: Sabilashan Ganeshan Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29411v1 Integer sequences from the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) are increasingly used to benchmark mathematical reasoning in language models. We ask what such benchmarks actually measure, using an exactly computable reference learner: two-part minimum description length (MDL) over the class of P-recursive (holonomic) recurrences, evaluated on every prefix of a sequence as terms arrive. Three findings follow. First, MDL difficulty is a parameter count. The discovery point nd, the first prefix length at which a symbolic hypothesis beats verbatim storage, is predicted almost exactly by a combinatorial identifiability bound on the selected operator's order and degree. It is invariant to term magnitude: scaling Fibonacci over twelve orders of magnitude leaves nd unchanged, because a hypothesis must encode its own initial conditions and the magnitude cancels. Second, at scale the learner exhibits a regime our curated corpus could not produce even once: across 20,000 OEIS sequences, 89.98% of those that fit a recurrence on some prefix fit none at full length. We call this the wilderness -- induction acquires a theory, loses it, and never recovers. Third, evaluating three language models on sequences stratified by these MDL regimes refuted our pre-registered hypothesis: models do not confabulate where MDL reports no theory, but hedge appropriately. Confident errors are inverted, concentrating on the easy stratum, where apparent competence tracks recognition of the sequence rather than induction of its rule. OEIS-derived benchmarks therefore substantially measure memorisation, and MDL supplies a cheap, contamination-free difficulty signal they currently lack. Code and data are released. --- ### An Integrated Vision-and-Language Pretraining (VLP) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) model to Automate Nondestructive Evaluation Image Analysis Authors: Mehrdad Shafiei Dizaji, Hoda Azari Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29408v2 An AI-based approach called ChatNDE Figure to Caption is introduced, which aims to automate the interpretation of NDE images using deep learning and natural language processing (NLP). A Vision-and-Language Pretraining (VLP) strategy is developed to help the model learn how to connect visual features with meaningful language. Basically, we built a large NDE image dataset, trained the model using annotated examples, and then evaluated how well it performed using BLEU scores to compare its output to expert written descriptions. So, the system combines a ResNet50 model to extract important features from the images and a GPT2 language model to turn those features into natural sounding text. Even though the accuracy of the model has been low the generated caption results have been solid so far, the captions were shorter but mentioned some important features of images what human experts would say, which shows the model is learning to pick up on key details. Also, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model is used as part of the system. VQA models are designed to take an image and a question about that image (like Is there a crack? or Where is the defect located?) and generate a useful answer. By adding this layer, the platform will not just describe what it sees, it can also respond to specific questions, making it even more interactive and helpful for inspectors in the field. This whole approach is a big step toward speeding up NDE workflows, reducing human error, and making the technology more accessible. --- ### Explanations, Prompts, and Formalizations: Arguments for New Norms in LLM-Enabled Mathematical Research Authors: Axel Boldt Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: math.HO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29401v1 As several mathematical conjectures have recently been settled using large language models (LLMs), the mathematical community has formulated norms and recommendations regarding the publishing of such results. These norms do not cover the disclosure of the prompts and precise software setup used to obtain those results, nor do they require that results be formalized in a manner that allows for machine verification. I argue that both of these are essential. In addition, since LLM-obtained results may be hard to understand, human authors have the responsibility to invent intuitive explanations. --- ### AlgoWorlds: Benchmarking Tool Use for Global Optimization in Algorithmic Worlds Authors: Zixiang Xu, Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29397v1 Tool-use benchmarks generally evaluate whether an agent completes a workflow using appropriate tools and valid arguments. However, feasibility alone is insufficient in real-world decision settings such as route planning and fleet dispatch. Individual choices interact through shared constraints and costs, so a feasible solution may still be substantially suboptimal. This raises a harder question: can an agent turn information gathered through tools into a globally optimal decision? We introduce AlgoWorlds, a benchmark that transforms formally specified combinatorial optimization problems into partially observed decision environments with verifiable global optima. Each environment contains a hidden instance observed only through task-specific information tools, after which the agent commits to one structured decision evaluated for feasibility and optimality. AlgoWorlds contains 240 environments covering ten combinatorial optimization families and four workload levels. Family-specific deterministic programs generate the instances, exact algorithms certify their optima and determine workload levels, and two structurally different tool interfaces present each underlying instance. We evaluate seven leading LLMs, including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol. Achieving global optimality remains highly challenging: although leading models produce feasible decisions in most cases, the best-performing model reaches exact optimality in only 38.61% of cases. Even when agents collect sufficient information to reconstruct the hidden instance, most failures end in feasible but suboptimal decisions. The challenge therefore extends beyond information acquisition to information integration, global constraint reasoning, and decision verification. The project homepage is available at https://xzx34.github.io/AlgoWorlds/, and the code is available at https://github.com/xzx34/AlgoWorlds. --- ### GATE: Reliability-Gated Gaussian Evidence Fusion for Training-Free Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models Authors: Pedram MohajerAnsari, Amir Salarpour, Run Wang, Mert D. Pesé Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29395v1 Vision-language models such as CLIP and SigLIP provide strong zero-shot recognition, but their predictions can degrade when deployed on target data that differ from the pretraining distribution. Test-time adaptation offers a practical way to improve robustness without source data or target labels, yet existing methods often rely on either prompt-side adaptation or image-side target evidence alone. In this work, we introduce GATE, a training-free two-pass transductive test-time adaptation framework that uses the unlabeled target set while keeping the image encoder, text encoder, and prompt parameters fully frozen. Instead of representing each class with a single prototype, GATE builds two complementary Gaussian sources of evidence in the shared vision-language feature space: a text Gaussian estimated from multiple language descriptions and an image Gaussian estimated from reliable unlabeled target samples. A class-wise reliability gate controls the influence of image-derived pseudo-evidence, and a score-level generalized Product-of-Experts fusion produces a normalized residual correction to the original zero-shot logits. Across fine-grained recognition datasets, ImageNet-family distribution shifts, multiple CLIP backbones, and SigLIP-B/16, GATE achieves the best average accuracy in every benchmark/backbone group. It improves zero-shot performance by an average of 5.41 points and outperforms the strongest non-GATE baseline by 1.94 points, demonstrating the benefit of reliability-gated distributional evidence for frozen VLM adaptation. --- ### Fully Distributed GNE Algorithms for Multi-Robot Placement without Consensus on Multipliers Authors: Shao-An Yin, Mingyi Hong, Nicola Elia Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.GT, cs.MA, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29388v1 Recent machine learning research has increasingly focused on equilibrium analysis in non-cooperative games rather than solely on optimal solutions. Many such problems involve shared constraints and can be formulated as Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problems (GNEPs). For strongly monotone games, existing methods compute consensus-based variational GNEs (v-GNEs) by exchanging Lagrange multipliers. We propose a fully distributed continuous-time algorithm for shared linear equality constraints that converges without multiplier exchange and reaches any GNE, reducing communication overhead and improving privacy. Discrete-time schemes are also provided, and the method is validated on a multi-robot placement task. --- ### EvoGenUI-Bench: Evaluating LLMs as Multi-Turn Generative UI Assistants Authors: Yue Peng, Lanke Xia, Zihan Wang, Jiahao Ye, Ke Ning, Hongyi Wen Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29387v2 Large language models can generate interactive web interfaces, but reliable generative UI requires maintaining an executable artifact as user requests evolve. We introduce EvoGenUI-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn interface maintenance comprising 150 five-turn tasks and 750 turns across three scenarios: information presentation, executable interaction, and tool-grounded external state. We execute generated artifacts in a browser and evaluate them using screenshots, source and DOM evidence, actor traces, and runtime logs. Beyond turn-level and episode-level success, we measure cross-turn retention with Adjacent Pass Retention. Across eight models, even the strongest achieves 74.9% Turn Pass while completing only 37.3% of five-turn episodes; APR further falls to 52.4% on tool-grounded tasks. Diagnostic analysis shows that presentation failures center on information architecture, interaction failures on derived-state propagation and affordance binding, and tool-grounded failures additionally involve external-state grounding and requirement decomposition. These results reframe generative UI evaluation from judging isolated outputs to testing whether interface behavior, derived state, external state, and assistant claims remain synchronized as the artifact evolves. --- ### FiLM-GPNet: Geometry-Aware Pseudo-Supervised Phase Restoration with Zero-Shot Generalization for Large Temporal InSAR Stacks Authors: Getnet Demil, Muhammad Farhan Humayun, Tomi Westerlund, Jukka Heikkonen, Mourad Oussalah Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29384v1 The growing availability of dense commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) time series enables temporal Interferometric SAR (InSAR) analysis, but fixed classical filters fail under heterogeneous acquisition geometries, degrading phase quality and temporal consistency. We propose FiLM-GPNet, a geometry-conditioned network for wrapped-phase restoration that explicitly adapts to acquisition differences using Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) and a 7D per-pair geometry descriptor. The model is trained with pseudo-supervision from Goldstein-filtered interferograms and regularized by interferometric physics via triplet-closure consistency, while also estimating per-pixel aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on three Capella Spotlight stacks from the IEEE GRSS 2026 Data Fusion Contest show that FiLM-GPNet reduces temporal residual by 68% (Hawaii) and 66% (Western Australia) relative to the Goldstein baseline, alongside closure error reductions of 10% and 13%, respectively. In Western Australia, it further improves unwrapping success rate by 7.7 percentage points and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Normalized Median Absolute Deviation (NMAD) by 31%. The model also shows strong zero-shot generalization to a geographically and geometrically distinct third stack (Los Angeles) without retraining, supporting geometry-conditioned restoration as an effective alternative to fixed classical filtering across heterogeneous stacks. --- ### Safe to Resume? Breaking Execution Continuity of Agent Execution via Rollback Authors: Guanlong Wu, Dahui Li, Ke Jiang, Jianyu Niu, Cong Wang, Yinqian Zhang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29381v1 AI agents are moving toward persistent, stateful execution across various applications, accumulating execution state and external effects that are costly to reconstruct after failures. Checkpoint and rollback (C/R) are becoming essential for recovery, yet their security implications remain largely unexplored. Correct rollback does not imply secure recovery: a faithfully restored checkpoint may resume an execution whose states, assumptions, and external effects never coexisted in any valid history. In this paper, we present the first systematic security study of checkpoint and rollback in existing agent systems. By examining representative agent C/R systems, we characterize the design space of existing C/R mechanisms and develop a general execution model that captures their recovery boundaries and state dependencies. From this model, we identify five fundamental failure modes spanning incomplete or inconsistent internal state, stale external dependencies, nondeterministic replay, and unrecorded external effects. We further demonstrate their security impact through three end-to-end attacks on Hermes, Cline, and LangGraph, enabling malware-verification bypass, unauthorized mail forwarding, and double payment. To systematically study these failures in practice, we develop a multi-agent analysis pipeline that reconstructs execution semantics, identifies violations of the five failure conditions, and validates them through actual rollback. Across five representative frameworks, our evaluation shows that these failures recur across heterogeneous C/R designs and stem from a common gap between the state restored by a checkpoint and the dependencies required for secure continuation. --- ### Arabic Safety Alignment as Selective Refusal: An Empirical Study of SFT, DPO, and Guard Calibration Authors: Mohamad Zbib, Ammar Mohanna Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29378v1 Arabic large language models must refuse harmful prompts without over-refusing benign or sensitive prompts, yet a single refusal rate hides this trade-off. We evaluate it using benign refusal B and harmful-prompt refusal H, where H measures refusal rather than harmful compliance. Across five Arabic-capable models and 130 runs on the full human-written AraSafe set, refusal-only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) collapses toward blanket refusal, whereas selected mixed-SFT configurations reach H = 90% to 93% at B = 14% to 23%; four selected configurations exceed the H = 90% target in all three runs, while Fanar does so in two of three. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and inference guards change B and H differently across models rather than acting as uniform upgrades. In a blinded 300-response audit, annotator binary-refusal agreement is 89.0% (kappa = 0.78); Qwen3Guard and Aya Expanse 32B reach 88.7% and 91.0% accuracy, respectively, with no conclusive paired difference. Selected SFT raises H on Arabizi for all five models, but none reaches 90%, showing only partial transfer from Modern Standard Arabic. Overall, the results support model-specific operating-point selection: set a deployment target and retain only interventions that improve it. --- ### Evaluating Tiny Recursive Models Across Training for Code Generation Authors: Anjani Sirivella, Aanisha Newaz, Glaucia Melo Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29376v1 Code generation increasingly relies on large transformer models, whose capability advances with scale. Yet such a scale is costly, creating demand for small models, especially where data is limited. Recursive models address this by reusing a single block to add depth rather than stacking independent layers. Such models are typically evaluated by teacher-forced fit (next-token loss on ground-truth prefixes) or task accuracy, at a single checkpoint, whereas code is produced by free-running generation, where the model extends its own output. Whether a teacher-forced advantage survives free-running generation, and whether it holds across training, remains open. To study both, we compare a ~28M-parameter autoregressive Tiny Recursive Model (TRM-AR) on natural-language-to-Python code generation against parameter-matched and depth-matched controls, tracking fit and generation across 40 epochs and three seeds. The fit ranking between the recursive model and the depth-matched control reverses twice. Selecting each checkpoint by validation loss and examining the trajectory yields a consistent comparison. At equal parameters, TRM-AR fits, generates, and generalizes better than the parameter-matched control while recovering approximately 45% of the validation-loss gap and 57% of the generation-quality gap between the two controls, at roughly 175 times the per-step cost of the parameter-matched control. However, at equal effective depth, the larger transformer fits and generates better at its validation optimum, suggesting TRM-AR's advantage lies in resistance to overfitting, not greater capability. These findings suggest that recursive code generation models should be evaluated jointly on fit and generation across the training trajectory rather than at a single checkpoint. --- ### Think, Look, and Revise: Inconsistency-Aware Visual Self-Correction in MLLMs Authors: Yu Cheng, Arushi Goel, Hakan Bilen Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29374v1 Tool-augmented multimodal reasoning integrates external tools (e.g., object detection, depth estimation) into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to address perceptual bottlenecks in complex visual tasks. However, existing approaches rarely verify tool outputs, limiting their ability to detect and recover from tool failures. We propose ReVISE, a framework that equips MLLMs with verification and dynamic error recovery for tool-augmented reasoning. ReVISE introduces (1) a curated training dataset that supervises reflective behaviors, enabling models to validate tool-derived evidence, reformulate queries when visual mismatches arise, and fall back to intrinsic grounding when external tools are unreliable; and (2) a reinforcement learning based targeted rewards that encourage internal reflection and penalize spatial misalignment. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods, highlighting the importance of error detection and correction in tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. --- ### FORESIGHT-9: Prospective and Process-Aware Evaluation of Adaptive Trading Agents Authors: Xiangxin Luo, Chengtian Hong, Haohua Li, Yongyi Xie Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29372v2 Retrospective backtests provide a limited test of adaptive trading agents: they cannot rule out historical contamination, expose sensitivity to a single realized market path, or reveal internal degeneration during long-horizon adaptation. We introduce FORESIGHT-9, a prospective and process-aware benchmark built from nine auditable counterfactual stress worldlines branching from a common July 2026 information boundary. Each worldline specifies staged macro-financial events and joint multi-asset anchors; a deterministic generator realizes the trajectories, while observations are disclosed according to in-world time. A common contract standardizes observations and execution while preserving each agent's native adaptation loop. We evaluate two adaptive trading-agent frameworks with two foundation-model backbones across 36 long-horizon runs. Agent rankings vary substantially across worldlines and backbones, and a fixed equal-weight policy outperforms 31 of 36 runs. Process telemetry exposes failures that terminal returns conceal: in one high-return run, the live factor library collapsed while executed holdings converged to the equal-weight fallback, even though decision records continued to report an active factor ensemble. FORESIGHT-9 therefore evaluates not only portfolio outcomes, but whether adaptive agent state and execution remain coherent across alternative futures. We release the worldlines, trajectories, audit traces, and regeneration scripts. --- ### Unlearning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs through Subgraph Virtual Edge Reconstruction Authors: Qiming Guo, Wenbo Sun, Chen Pan, Ye Wang, Wenlu Wang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29369v1 Spatio-temporal graphs are widely used in modeling complex dynamic processes such as temporal forecasting, molecular dynamics, and healthcare monitoring. Recently, stringent privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have introduced significant new challenges for existing spatio-temporal graph models, requiring complete unlearning of unauthorized data. Since each node in a spatio-temporal graph diffuses information globally across both spatial and temporal dimensions, existing unlearning methods primarily designed for static graphs and localized data removal cannot efficiently erase a single node without incurring costs nearly equivalent to full model retraining. To address this, we propose CallosumNet, a spatio-temporal graph unlearning framework biologically inspired by the corpus callosum structure. CallosumNet makes two key technical contributions: (1) it reconstructs subgraphs using biologically-inspired virtual edges; and (2) it restores interlinked spatio-temporal dependencies among subgraphs via a lightweight meta-graph integration layer. Empirical results on four diverse real-world datasets show that CallosumNet achieves complete unlearning while maintaining accuracy very close to the gold model. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wenlu-lab/STGraphUnlearning. --- ### Reviving our data foundations is the most disruptive step to data maturity Authors: Valentina Carapella, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29368v1 The most disruptive step that enterprises of small-medium size and maturity can take to make the most of the latest technological advances in AI is to step back from the hype and focus on establishing or reviving a good knowledge foundation layer. It is a hard message to present to the executive team; therefore, it needs to be backed by evidence, and its implementation needs to be of minimal impact on the existing processes. In this vision statement, we discuss how we need to rethink what evidence speaks to the decision-makers and propose a low-impact data strategy that adapts to the existing and ever-changing data flows and processes across the company. We firmly believe that knowledge graph techniques will increasingly become non-negotiable in the data strategy of an AI-powered enterprise, provided that we approach their design in a modular, dynamic and cross-functional way. --- ### Sketch2Inspire: Structure-Sensitive Evaluation for Product Retrieval Authors: Ge Kong Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29364v1 Early-stage product design retrieval often requires more than category recognition: designers may need reference examples that match both a short semantic intent and a rough structural cue. Existing product-image resources and generic image--text retrieval benchmarks rarely separate category retrieval from within-category structural fit. We present Sketch2Inspire, built from a curated subset of Amazon Berkeley Objects with aligned text queries, edge-based sketch-proxy queries, and fused text--sketch queries. The resource separates broad category-level retrieval from structure-sensitive within-category retrieval and includes a human-graded reference protocol for calibration. We evaluate a lightweight reference system based on pretrained CLIP-family encoders, comparing text-only retrieval, sketch-only retrieval, weighted late fusion, and text-first reranking without updating model weights. Under broad relevance, late fusion obtains the highest score (nDCG = 0.9962). Under automatic structure-sensitive relevance, late fusion again obtains the highest score (nDCG = 0.7015), exceeding text-only retrieval (nDCG = 0.5912). In the human-graded results, late fusion obtains the highest nDCG@10 (0.9133), while text-only retrieval ranks second (0.9030). These results show that the retrieval gain from multimodal input depends on how relevance is defined. Sketch2Inspire therefore provides a diagnostic resource for evaluating modality contribution and supports the development of structure-aware product-retrieval protocols with independent human annotation. --- ### TRACER: Per-Tool Context Retention for LLM Agents via Consequence-Attributed Reinforcement Learning Authors: Ziqi Lin, Ye Wu, Mengying Yang, Xu Liu, Yizhou Liu, Qiang Ke, Qin Guo Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29363v1 Enterprise data agents answer business queries by chaining many tool calls over multiple reasoning steps, routinely accumulating hundreds of thousands of context tokens per session. Existing compression strategies typically allocate retention budgets without accounting for the downstream consequences of removing individual tool outputs. Aggressive compression may therefore trigger costly tool re-invocations that offset the initial savings. We call this the compression--consequence gap. To close it, we propose TRACER, which formulates compression as a sequential per-tool decision problem. A lightweight REINFORCE policy assigns query-conditioned retention ratios using only information available at each compression event. Its consequence-aware objective jointly accounts for task success, total token consumption, and post-compression tool re-invocations. To improve credit assignment, TRACER uses a learned outcome model to compare the predicted consequences of the selected retention ratio with those of fully retaining each tool output. On held-out production queries across three compressor backends, TRACER reduces total token consumption by 29--46% relative to keeping all context while maintaining comparable or higher task success. Compared with a tool-type-conditional static policy, TRACER provides an additional 15--18% of token savings. Interventional rollouts show that the learned per-tool credit scores correlate with measured single-tool consequences. The learned policy also yields positive savings when transferred across agent backbones and compressor architectures, and reduces token consumption by 18--25% on five held-out LOCA-bench environments. These results demonstrate the value of consequence-aware, per-tool context retention for improving the efficiency of long-horizon language agents. --- ### Spectral Analysis for Sparse Matrix Computation: Insights and Potential Authors: Ruifeng Zhang, Xipeng Shen Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.PF, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29362v1 Sparse computations are fundamental to scientific computing, graph analytics, and machine learning, yet their performance is highly sensitive to the diverse sparsity and patterns. This is because cache reuse, memory coalescing, and load balancing depend critically on the sparsity patterns. This work gives the first known exploration of the connections between sparse matrix computation and spectral analysis by treating sparse matrices as two-dimensional signals and analyzing their frequency-domain representations through Fast Fourier Transform. We show that spectral signatures uncover global structural characteristics that are not sufficiently captured by conventional spatial statistics and provide complementary information for understanding sparse computation performance. Experiments on incorporating spectral features into machine-learning-based SpMV format selection demonstrate the usefulness of such spectral analysis over a state-of-the-art spatial-only model. By uncovering the principled connections between spectral characteristics and sparse matrix computations, this work introduces a novel analytical perspective into sparse computation, and provides a new approach to enhancing the current sparse structure characterization and optimization. On pruned LLM decoding, adding spectral features improves kernel selection and yields 1.035--1.245$\times$ kernel speedups. --- ### Spatial Entropy based Partitioning for Spatiotemporal Graph Unlearning Authors: Qiming Guo, Wenbo Sun, Ye Wang, Wenlu Wang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29360v1 Spatiotemporal graphs underpin applications such as traffic forecasting, weather forecasting, and healthcare monitoring. Privacy regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA require the complete removal of unauthorized data from trained models, but achieving this on a spatiotemporal graph is difficult: because information propagates globally through both spatial and temporal message passing, fully erasing a node's influence forces costly full-graph retraining. ST-graph unlearning requires both exactness and efficiency. We propose IsleNet, which uses spatial-entropy-guided partitioning to create balanced, locally coherent subgraphs and reconnects them with lightweight virtual edges. Upon an unlearning request, only the affected subgraph encoder and virtual-edge layer are retrained, ensuring exact removal with low cost. Experiments on four real-world benchmarks show that IsleNet attains up to 94% of full-graph accuracy while reducing unlearning time by up to an order of magnitude. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wenlu-lab/STGraphUnlearning. --- ### LiteSearch-VL: Small Multimodal Search Agents via Trajectory Distillation and Synthetic Step-DPO Authors: Saeed Khaki, Nima Safaei, Kamal Ginotra Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29357v1 Multimodal search agents answer visual questions by interleaving image understanding, web retrieval, tool use, and evidence synthesis. Strong systems exist, but in two expensive regimes: proprietary frontier models such as GPT-5 and Gemini, or large open vision-language backbones trained with substantial agentic data and reinforcement learning. We ask a different question: when released agent trajectories are distilled into much smaller backbones under a single-node budget, what is actually transferred? We study this with LiteSearch-VL, a low-compute recipe for Qwen3-VL-2B and Qwen3-VL-4B that uses only released OpenSearch-VL trajectories, parameter-efficient LoRA adapters, and synthetic step-level preferences: DPO on GPT-5-generated hard negatives targeting five local failure modes (premature answer, wrong tool, weak query, repeated query, ignored image). Across 12,400 GPT-5-judged rollouts on SimpleVQA, FVQA, LiveVQA, and VDR-Bench-testmini, the dominant effect is behavioral rather than a uniform accuracy lift: full-trajectory supervised fine-tuning transfers the agent contract, taking the 2B model from almost never emitting a usable answer (1,237/1,240 no_answer rollouts) to 28.4% macro Pass@1, matching or slightly exceeding the off-the-shelf 4B base (25.6%). Synthetic preference learning and compact tool distillation act as refinements rather than phase transitions (best 4B configuration: 30.8% macro Pass@1). Finally, a controlled VDR step-budget ablation shows that extra search turns convert abstentions into wrong_entity errors rather than correct answers, identifying answer verification, not search depth, as the next bottleneck for small multimodal agents. --- ### Plant-Inspired AI: Plants as Inspiration for Novel Problem Formulations, and Two Case Studies Authors: Deepayan Sanyal, Joel Michelson, Carla E. Cao, Adam B. Roddy, Maithilee Kunda Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29356v1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been inspired by studies of biological intelligence. Reinforcement learning, for instance, drew inspiration from studies involving animal learning and is now a powerful paradigm for solving many real-world problems. Recently, plant biologists have uncovered a wide range of complex behaviors in plants that enable them to flexibly adapt to variable environments. Here, we argue that such behavior can motivate new AI frameworks encompassing a range of problems overlooked by existing problem-solving frameworks such as supervised learning, tree search, and constraint satisfaction. We illustrate this idea with two examples of intelligent problem-solving in plants: (1) leaf mimicry in Boquila trifoliolata, a vine capable of altering its leaves' morphology to resemble those of multiple host trees simultaneously; and (2) coordinated root-shoot growth, wherein plants allocate resources across organ systems exploring distinct environments. While leaf mimicry is highly specific to Boquila, coordination of root-shoot growth is shared across most plants. For both examples, we capture underlying computational principles and identify problems fitting these frameworks that are currently unaddressed by AI. Finally, we outline preliminary task formulations and discuss how these formulations may be applied to non-plant problems. --- ### APPSolver: Adaptive Patch Partitioning for Point-Wise Ship Flow Prediction on Unstructured Meshes Authors: Wenhua Huo, Fenglei Han, Wangyuan Zhao, Xiao Peng, Chunhui Wang, Jialin Wu, Jiayi Han Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29355v1 Large non-uniform point sets make direct attention-based surrogate modeling costly for ship hydrodynamics. We introduce APPSolver, a point-wise flow-prediction framework built around Adaptive Patch Partitioning (APP), a deterministic quadtree representation for fixed two-dimensional horizontal slices extracted from ship CFD simulations. APP assigns finer patches near the hull and coarser patches farther away, downsamples patch contents, and recovers predictions to the full reference point set. Under a corrected protocol that constructs natural $(t,t+1)$ pairs before splitting, reuses training-set normalization statistics, and reports three model seeds, learned tokenizers are more accurate than APP-Transformer, and a persistence baseline has lower one-step MAE on all three ShipBench hulls. The supported benefit of APP is therefore computational rather than universal predictive superiority: on a representative DTC input, APP-Transformer requires 1.815 GFLOPs and 1.309 ms per model forward, while a matched ablation shows that adaptive partitioning reduces MAE by 16.4-24.9\% relative to a uniform partition augmented with learned slicing. Condition encoders provide setting-dependent gains in leave-one-hull-out evaluation, but the current absolute next-state objective does not establish accurate long-horizon dynamics. These results characterize APP as a compact spatial representation with an explicit accuracy--efficiency trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/wenhuahuo/APPSolver . --- ### Cross-Relational Preference Learning for Better LLM Instruction Following Authors: Runsheng Li, Kai Sun, Bin Shi, Bo Dong Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29352v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) still exhibit limited capability in following complex instructions. While existing approaches often rely on preference learning to enhance this ability, they typically overlook the relationships between the permissible response spaces of different instructions, which restricts a model to align with subtle and diverse constraint variations. To address this, we propose Cross-Relational Preference Learning (CRPL), a novel framework for constructing preference data that explicitly models inter-instruction relationships through two key techniques: Cross-Relationship Perturbation and Cross-Region Pair Sampling. This enables the generation of more diverse preference data that captures a wide spectrum of constraint variations. Additionally, we introduce an atomic constraint-based verification mechanism to rigorously assess response satisfaction, ensuring high-quality preference pair construction. Extensive experiments across multiple preference learning methods (e.g., DPO, KTO), LLM backbones and four instruction-following benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial improvements over prior baselines and exhibits strong generalization. --- ### Information-Based Calibration of Uncertainty Quantification in Product-of-Experts Gaussian Process Models Authors: Yean Hoon Ong, Paolo Barucca, Wei Pan, Jun Wang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29349v1 Gaussian process (GP) regression with a single global GP (GP-glo) incurs cubic computational cost, limiting scalability to large datasets. Product-of-experts GP models (GP-pro), which combine local GP models to capture global correlations, alleviate this computational burden. However, training local experts on disjoint data subsets can lead to overestimated posterior variances. We propose GP-pro-c, a product-of-experts GP model that calibrates these variances using an information-based method. The method exploits the monotonicity and submodularity of information gain in GPs to define a calibration ratio that reduces the posterior variance of individual local GP models. We evaluate GP-pro-c using negative log-likelihood (NLL), root mean squared error (RMSE), and expected normalised calibration error (ENCE). Experiments on four synthetic functions and six regression datasets show that GP-pro-c achieves average reductions of 2.3% in NLL and 12.0% in ENCE compared with the uncalibrated GP-pro model. The proposed method mitigates posterior variance overestimation while maintaining predictive accuracy and reducing computational complexity. GP-pro-c provides a promising approach for uncertainty estimation in scalable GP models and may serve as a useful surrogate model for Bayesian optimisation with high-dimensional and large-scale data. --- ### Extending TotalSegmentator: Predicting Patient and Acquisition Characteristics from CT and MR Images Authors: Jakob Wasserthal, Joshy Cyriac, Michael Bach, Kimia Mozahheb Yousefi, Minh-Son To, Máté Sik, Cédric Hémon, Thomas Weikert, Marwan Abbas, Martin Segeroth Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29348v2 Background: Patient details and acquisition metadata are important for clinical decisions, image quality control, and automated research pipelines, but may be missing or unreliable in imaging archives. Purpose: To develop and evaluate a fast open-source model that predicts patient and acquisition characteristics directly from CT and MR images. Materials and Methods: Separate 3D ResNet-10 ensembles for CT and MR were trained on 57,291 and 43,200 clinical examinations acquired from 2011 to 2025. Both predicted weight, height, age, sex, contrast presence, vertebral coverage, and image noise. The CT model additionally predicted scanner manufacturer, tube voltage, tube current, convolution kernel, and post-injection time; the MR model predicted sequence class. Performance was evaluated on internal CT (n=501) and MR (n=636) test sets and an external CT dataset (n=54). Results: Internal CT MAEs were 3.90 kg, 3.68 cm, and 4.42 years for weight, height, and age, with sex F1=0.990; corresponding MR results were 4.34 kg, 4.62 cm, 7.13 years, and F1=0.970. The CNN outperformed a segmentation-derived XGBoost baseline for all four core targets in both modalities (adjusted P<=.042). F1 scores were 0.963 for CT contrast, 0.953 for MR sequence, and 0.823 for MR contrast. External CT MAEs were 4.45 kg, 4.05 cm, and 5.17 years, with sex F1=0.971. CPU inference required 20 seconds for CT and 12 seconds for MR. Conclusion: One 3D multitask model per modality can rapidly recover patient and acquisition characteristics from heterogeneous CT and MR examinations. Models are available in TotalSegmentator: https://github.com/wasserth/TotalSegmentator --- ### GSPotential: Camera Potential Field for Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Zeyuan An, Yanghang Xiao, Zhiying Leng, Yijun Feng, Xiaohui Liang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29346v1 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic rendering, yet it suffers from severe overfitting and geometric artifacts in sparse-view scenarios due to the inherent deficiency of photometric supervision. Recent advances have attempted to regularize optimization by incorporating external priors, such as depth, point clouds, or diffusion models. However, these methods typically overlook the non-uniform distribution of supervision across the viewing space, resulting in limited specificity in prior use and primitive control. In this paper, we propose GSPotential, a framework that quantifies view-space supervision imbalance using a Camera Potential Field. Our key insight is to identify supervision valleys where photometric constraints are most deficient, and use the potential field to guide reconstruction from two complementary aspects. First, we devise a probabilistic spherical sampling strategy that places informative virtual cameras in low-potential regions. Point-cloud renderings from these views then provide targeted geometric guidance. Second, the same field provides a directional coverage cue for conservative Gaussian updates in weakly covered spatial sectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GSPotential achieves high reconstruction fidelity while maintaining competitive training efficiency. --- ### BIRD-History: A Benchmark for History-Driven Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Knowledge Annotations Authors: Yunfan Zhou, Qiming Shi, Yizhou Yang, Di Weng, Yingcai Wu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29345v1 While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based text-to-SQL systems achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks, they struggle when user queries implicitly rely on domain-specific knowledge, such as business logic, data conventions, and analytical practices, that is neither captured by the schema nor explicitly stated in the natural language question. Historical SQL query logs offer a valuable source of such knowledge, yet existing benchmarks do not adequately support evaluation of history-driven approaches. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-History, a benchmark consisting of 1,393 tasks across 11 databases, designed to evaluate text-to-SQL systems' ability to ground underspecified natural language questions using historical SQL scripts. Each task is annotated with ground-truth labels specifying which historical queries contain relevant knowledge and which SQL clauses encode it, enabling systematic evaluation of both retrieval effectiveness and knowledge utilization. Alongside the benchmark, we propose a plug-in retriever that extracts five types of external knowledge from historical SQL scripts, then retrieves and reranks relevant fragments for query generation. The retriever integrates seamlessly into existing few-shot text-to-SQL pipelines without requiring prompt modifications. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across four text-to-SQL systems, highlighting the value of leveraging historical query logs for handling underspecified queries. Dataset and code are open-sourced on https://github.com/zjuidg/BIRD-History. --- ### FISICA: A Deployed Service for Plantar-Pressure and Posture Assessment with Ontology-Grounded Recommendation Authors: Juhwan Song, Heejung Kim, Juntae Noh, Jonghak Ryu, Huiju Park, Junseong Lee, Dohyeon Ahn, Byungwoo Jo Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29336v1 FISICA is a body-assessment and recommendation service running in production. One standing session with two photographs returns foot-loading measures, posture coordinates, a driven 3D avatar, a visual report, and ranked shoe and exercise candidates. Measurement comes from a purpose-built scale carrying 634 force-sensitive elements on a 1 cm grid and four load cells, and a rule-based evaluator controls every recommendation while a language model only explains the stored result. The method contribution is the avatar. Instead of mapping a measured angle onto a rig through a tuned gain, we measure the avatar with the same function used on the subject and solve until the two agree, on a sampling-invariant spinal metric that separated a normal from a kyphotic record by 7.2 degrees against 0.9 degrees for a single-joint formulation. In production, general APIs respond at a 0.023 s median, plantar-pressure analysis at 0.45 s, and recommendation at 2.16 s to 2.26 s with the rule-based portion under one second in every trial. The served keypoint graph reaches 0.960 PCK@0.2 on public data, and the catalog holds 699 shoes with 10,500 typed facts. An approved study supplies the radiographic reference for the validation still ahead. --- ### GenFirst: Generation Before Reconstruction for Stable End-to-End Latent Generative Modeling Authors: Guangting Zheng, Yiyuan Zhang, Tao Yang, Yunpeng Chen, Rui Zhu, Jiajun Deng, Yanyong Zhang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29335v1 Latent generative models typically follow a two-stage pipeline, training a variational autoencoder for reconstruction and then a generative model on the frozen latent space. Since reconstruction-optimized latents are not necessarily generation-friendly, jointly training both models is an appealing alternative. However, direct end-to-end training remains challenging, as it is prone to latent collapse and faces a generation-reconstruction conflict. We revisit this problem by analyzing how different objectives shape the latent space and identify two key insights. First, the entropy term in the Kullback-Leibler divergence objective is essential for preventing collapse: reconstruction and prior fitting tend to shrink the posterior, while entropy preserves non-degenerate latent uncertainty. Second, reconstruction and generation exhibit asymmetric learning dynamics: reconstruction is fast and strongly supervised, whereas generation is slower and harder to optimize. Based on these insights, we achieve the first direct end-to-end training without latent collapse and propose GenFirst, a simple generation-before-reconstruction strategy. The generative objective first shapes the latent space under weak reconstruction pressure, after which reconstruction is progressively strengthened to recover visual details. We validate GenFirst with continuous autoregressive priors with exact likelihoods and SiT priors with implicit likelihoods. With our end-to-end objective and GenFirst, SiT achieves a gFID of 0.97 with CFG and 1.45 without CFG on ImageNet-256, while MMDiT reaches a GenEval score of 0.90 on text-to-image generation. Beyond image generation, we extend the framework to shared visual latents for generation and representation learning, and to continuous unified text-image generation. These results demonstrate the generality of stable end-to-end latent learning across generative priors and modalities. --- ### Neural video codecs quality assessment dataset and benchmark Authors: Nikolay Safonov, Nikita Gornostaev, Alexandra Dubonos, Dmitriy Vatolin Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29331v1 Video traffic constitutes a significant share of global web traffic. To reduce its volume, video codecs have been developed and continuously improved. While the industry has achieved substantial progress in traditional video coding, neural video codecs (NVCs) have recently emerged as a new approach that applies deep learning to video compression. This creates new challenges for compression quality assessment, which is essential for the further development and improvement of such codecs. In particular, it is important to evaluate the novel temporal compression paradigms introduced by NVCs. In this work, we present a large-scale subjective dataset of videos compressed with both neural and traditional video codecs. The subjective scores were collected through crowd-sourced pairwise comparisons. The proposed dataset provides a valuable resource for the development and benchmarking of video quality metrics tailored to neural video codecs. The dataset is available at the following link: https://videoprocessing.github.io/nvc-dataset-benchmark --- ### When to Adapt: Conditional Memory Adapters for Retention-Preserving Domain Specialization Authors: Jiayu Hou, Lei Wang Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29327v1 Large language models deployed in specialized domains must improve in-domain performance without sacrificing general capabilities. Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods are typically always on: their learned perturbations are applied to every input, which can degrade out-of-domain (OOD) performance. We propose Engram Adapter, a framework that repurposes pretraining-time conditional memory as a post-hoc adapter for frozen LLMs. It uses multi-channel matching over local n-gram patterns with explicit occupancy tracking as a lightweight selectivity prior, making residual injection more likely on in-domain inputs while a learned scalar gate suppresses incoherent OOD retrievals. We evaluate on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B with AG-News and MedMCQA as adaptation tasks and OOD benchmarks spanning reasoning, translation, code generation, and legal reasoning. Engram Adapter improves in-domain accuracy while preserving 99.4%--100.1% of average OOD performance; on LegalBench it slightly exceeds the frozen base model on average, whereas comparable always-on baselines degrade sharply. Mechanistic analyses show that although OOD activations are non-zero, gate and projection attenuation reduce residuals to approximately 0.08% of hidden-state norm, yielding small KL drift and negligible accuracy change. These results suggest conditional activation is a promising route toward modular, retention-preserving domain specialization over frozen backbones. --- ### StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue Authors: Yuxiong Wang, Ziwei Lin, Bo Wang, Yu Zhang, Shiguang Ni Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29326v2 Positive psychology dialogue aims to support emotional distress and positive resource building, requiring models to produce not only empathetic replies but also coherent progression through a multi-turn support process. Existing resources often reduce supervision to turn-level strategies or holistic preference labels, leaving process position, support function, and local repair targets implicit. We introduce StageWell, a process-aligned Chinese corpus for positive psychology dialogue, together with HQS, a structured protocol for data construction and evaluation. StageWell organizes support into a six-stage support process and uses a multi-agent whole-dialogue rewriting workflow to construct 12,445 SFT instances, 1,849 DPO preference pairs, and a GroundTruth subset of 120 expert-revised dialogues and 977 QA pairs. Guided by HQS, DPO pairs are built as process-localized repairs: flawed model outputs are used as rejected responses, and targeted rewrites under the same context and stage constraint are used as chosen responses. Across four 9B-14B open-source LLMs, this supervision yields robust gains in process control, response quality, and safety. Averaged across models, BERTScore improves by 0.037, Q-Overall increases by 1.32 points, S-exact increases by 0.236, and the H-critical rate decreases by 0.167. These results highlight the value of modeling supportive dialogue as a structured multi-turn support process rather than as single-turn response generation. --- ### Padārtha: Ontology-Grounded Fine-Grained NER Benchmark for Classical Sanskrit Authors: Sujoy Sarkar, Pretam Ray, Paramhans Shah, Manoj Balaji Jagadeeshan, Akash Gairola, Arjuna S R, Pawan Goyal Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29324v1 Annotation schemas are not neutral. When applied to classical literature, tag sets developed for modern journalistic texts impose source-culture definitions on texts they were never designed to describe. We instead ground a schema in the tradition of the text itself introducing \textit{Padārtha}, the first ontology-grounded fine-grained Named Entity Recognition (NER) benchmark for Sanskrit, built on the \textit{Mahābhārata} epic. Our tag set derives from \textit{Nyāya-Vaiśesika}, a classical Indian ontological system, yielding 18 fine-grained categories organized under 10 ontological nodes and mapped onto five standard coarse tags, ensuring interoperability with existing benchmarks. Expert annotators label over 12.6K entries from a scholarly index of named entities, linked to corresponding mentions in the \textit{Mahānāma} corpus, producing fine-grained annotations for 108,335 entity mentions across 73,632 verses, along with a 5,000-verse expert-verified test set sampled to stress rare mentions. We present the first systematic benchmarking of generative NER against traditional architectures for Sanskrit, finding that fine-tuned generative models perform comparably to task-specific systems. However, all systems show a sharp decline from coarse to fine granularity and struggle with out-of-entity mentions unseen during training. The limitation is not due to data scarcity alone, as fine-tuned models recall unseen entities far worse than seen ones and tend to default to the majority sense under lexical ambiguity. --- ### Test-Time Scaling for Video Diffusion Models via Diagnosis-Guided Candidate Recycling Authors: Hangzhou He, Lunhao Duan, Shanshan Zhao, Kaiwen Li, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Yanye Lu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29322v1 Recent video diffusion models have achieved remarkable generation quality, but high-fidelity results still largely depend on closed-source systems or costly large-scale infrastructure. Test-time scaling (TTS) offers a training-free way to improve lightweight generators by spending additional inference compute, yet existing methods mostly remain within a noise-search paradigm: they sample, select, or perturb denoising trajectories and discard low-scoring candidates after expensive generation. This generate-and-discard process wastes not only computation but also the partial motion, layout, or appearance structure already encoded in recoverable samples. We present \textbf{GEARS} (\textbf{G}uided \textbf{E}diting for \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{R}ecycling \textbf{S}earch), a training-free framework that introduces {diagnosis-guided candidate recycling} into video TTS by turning such candidates into editable priors through a generation-evaluation-editing loop. GEARS consists of two collaborative components. The \textbf{Stage-Aware Scheduler} determines what to repair, when to repair it, and which candidates should be preserved, recycled, or discarded. The \textbf{Candidate Recycler} diagnoses recoverable failures from keyframes and multi-dimensional reward feedback, derives candidate-specific repair prompts, and repairs the corresponding candidates through manifold-aware latent SDEdit. The repaired candidates are recycled into the search pool, creating refinement paths beyond standard noise perturbation while preserving useful structure. Under matched NFE budgets, GEARS consistently outperforms existing video TTS methods on VBench, bringing a 1.3B model to a total score comparable to a 14B counterpart, and ablations verify the necessity of adaptive scheduling, diagnosis-conditioned editing, and manifold-aware re-denoising. Code is available on GitHub. --- ### SGE: Semantically-Guided Exploration for Unstructured Environments via Image-Space Waypoint Sampling Authors: Christopher Tatsch, Yu Gu Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29315v1 This work introduces Semantically-Guided Exploration (SGE), a modular exploration framework for ground vehicles that integrates pixel-level semantic segmentation into sampling-based waypoint selection and receding-horizon route optimization. Unlike conventional geometric exploration methods, SGE evaluates candidate exploration goals directly in the image space using a semantic-aware utility function that accounts for terrain traversability, obstacle proximity, objects of interest, and depth-based exploration reward. Sampled waypoints are projected into 3D and ordered through a real-time Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) formulation, enabling receding-horizon goal selection. To address real-world navigation uncertainty, the framework introduces mechanisms, including temporary taboo regions to handle navigation failures and a graph-based relocation strategy for efficient backtracking across explored areas. We evaluate SGE in standardized simulation benchmarks against state-of-the-art exploration planners and demonstrate competitive performance in volumetric coverage, while enabling semantic task biasing that cannot be achieved by purely geometric methods. The framework is further validated through real-world experiments using multiple robotic platforms in indoor campus buildings and in limestone and coal mines. Results show consistent performance and adaptability across platforms and domains. --- ### All You Need Is Non-Commutative Words Authors: Carla M. Quispe Flores, Stanley Salvatierra, Renan Cabrera Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29314v1 We represent lexical tokens as unitary matrices and encode each sentence as their ordered product. The noncommutativity of matrix product captures word order without positional encodings (PEs). The same algebra yields several capabilities, including antisymmetric self-attention with no query, key, or value projections, and parallel composition of variable-length text chunks at a reduced attention cost. Furthermore, it provides a canonical-coset readout layer that encodes all true unitary degrees of freedom compactly, while supporting continual learning through nested group extensions that enlarge the operator space with each new task preserving prior representations exactly. Across standard text-classification benchmarks, the method matches or exceeds bag-of-words baselines. Achieving higher accuracy on IMDB and comparable performance on AG News. Notably, this is accomplished by replacing the conventional $\sim$30,000-dimensional vocabulary space with a dense, 64-parameter real-valued encoding, highlighting the expressive efficiency of our parameterization. --- ### Hyper3-CLIP: Hierarchy-Conditioned Hyperbolic Vision-Language Training Authors: Matin Mahmood, Antonio Rueda-Toicen, Mohamed ElBassat, Seifeldin Elkerdany, Weixing Wang, Gerard de Melo Published: 2026-08-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29313v1 CLIP-like vision-language models (VLMs) trained with contrastive objectives learn strong global image-text representations, but their Euclidean embeddings and global pooling fail to encode relational structure such as part-whole and parent-child relations. Hyperbolic VLMs address this gap with entailment-based objectives, and text-conditioned variants improve fine-grained alignment through sentence- and phrase-level queries. However, these two lines of work remain separate: hyperbolic VLMs use static image and region features, while query-conditioned methods lack hierarchical geometric structure. We present Hyper3-CLIP, a hierarchy-conditioned hyperbolic VLM that combines global, local, and global-local contrastive learning with query-conditioned visual pooling. To train the model, we construct lightweight query hierarchies from text, comprising full captions, sentence fragments, localized part descriptions, and extracted phrases. Each query conditions the pooling of visual patches, and the resulting representations support image-text, whole-part, and parent-child entailment losses. Query-conditioned pooling is active only during training. Hyper3-CLIP improves R@5 and R@10 retrieval on COCO and Flickr, as well as multi-label classification on VOC and COCO, while remaining competitive on hierarchy metrics. We also audit zero-shot prompt sensitivity under fixed prompt regimes and study the effect of the localized GRIT part budget used during training. Code is available at https://github.com/Hyper3Labs/hyper3-clip. ---