# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 194 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #9651–9700 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/194 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/193.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/195.md) ### LC-Implicit-QAOA: Active-Workspace-Capped Exact Objective-and-Gradient Evaluation for Training over Bounded QUBO Light Cones Authors: Chih-Chung Hsu Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05610v1 QAOA training repeatedly queries an objective and all shared gradients, making exact evaluation a feasibility bottleneck even when QUBO terms have bounded causal cones. Building on established causal-cone restriction and adjoint differentiation, LC-Implicit-QAOA profiles cone structure and induced-edge counts before local-amplitude and named-workspace allocation, then jointly selects equal-size microbatches and checkpoint schedules under a named active-evaluator workspace budget. "Implicit" means omitting both global state and global cost table, not implicit differentiation; infeasible requests are rejected before those allocations. An independently implemented complex128/float64 dense adjoint agrees with LC over 1,800 graph-angle comparisons, with a worst relative gradient error of 1.56 x 10^-13. LC completes all 104 target requests in a p=2 bounded-cone grid; under a prespecified n <= 24 validation cap, the matched state-plus-cost reference is executed for 28 requests and deliberately not run on 76. Across 80 budgeted requests, measured allocated evaluator memory stays within budget, reaching at most 0.797 of it. On 3-regular n=512, p=2, the adjoint reaches the same finite-budget endpoint in 101 objective-equivalent calls and 189 s, versus 909 calls and 1,565 s for central differences. LC targets fixed-depth one- and two-local diagonal QUBO costs with a transverse-field mixer; it provides neither global states, sampling, nor a hardware-independent fastest-backend rule. --- ### GAUGE: Granularity-Adaptive Counterfactual Gating of Evidence for Incomplete Multimodal Classification Authors: Yunping Shi, En Yu, Kairui Guo, Jie Lu Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05608v1 Multimodal classification typically assumes all modalities are available, yet real-world inputs are often incomplete. Imputation and dynamic fusion can mitigate such incompleteness, but existing methods operate at a coarse modality level and thus cannot retain reliable components while suppressing misleading ones within the same recovered modality, compromising prediction reliability. To address this issue, we propose GAUGE, a lightweight counterfactual gating framework for incomplete multimodal classification. GAUGE first imputes missing modalities with a frozen imputer and encodes observed and recovered inputs uniformly as fine-grained evidence units. Rather than intervening on each unit explicitly, GAUGE scores the counterfactual effect of replacing every unit with a reference representation through prediction-aware Taylor evidence scores, all obtained in a single forward-backward pass. These scores are mapped to continuous gates, which are converted into additive attention-logit biases for unit-wise evidence modulation without altering the backbone architecture. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that GAUGE outperforms strong baselines across diverse incomplete-input settings. Furthermore, a Taylor remainder theoretical analysis characterizes the error of the first-order approximation relative to the exact counterfactual effect, establishing GAUGE as a principled and scalable framework for fine-grained evidence control under modality incompleteness. --- ### Structured Dimension-Matched Joint Variational Transdimensional Inference Authors: Pingping Yin, Xiyun Jiao Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: stat.CO, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05607v1 Bayesian model selection couples a discrete model indicator with a model-specific continuous parameter space. We introduce structured dimension-matched variational transdimensional inference (SM-VTI) for finite enumerable model spaces. A rooted construction graph expresses a model as a sequence of local stop/child decisions. Each typed edge compiles a declared scientific parent-child edit into an exact native-coordinate dimension-matching lifting; an edge-conditioned flow then learns the residual continuous transport. The resulting local policy and conditional flow define one direct joint variational distribution, without embedding every model in a saturated maximum-dimensional surrogate. We derive its exact path density and optimize the joint reverse-KL objective. On a controlled 15-model target, SM-VTI-Joint recovers terminal masses, local actions, and nonlinear conditional geometry. On a 128-model misspecified robust variable-selection problem, a 10-data-set nearly parameter-matched affine comparison with AVTI shows stronger early model-mass recovery and competitive final joint accuracy under the same target-evaluation budget. --- ### Enhancing Anomaly Resilience in Research Networks: A Large-Scale Forecasting Benchmark for Dynamic Security Baselining Authors: Mohammad Arafath Uddin Shariff, Byrav Ramamurthy Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05605v1 Research and Education Networks (RENs) serve as critical infrastructure for scientific discovery, yet they face a unique security paradox: their normal traffic patterns which are characterized by massive, bursty "elephant flows" are statistically indistinguishable from volumetric attacks such as DDoS to conventional monitoring systems. This similarity leads to high false-positive rates in anomaly detection, blinding security operators to genuine threats. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a high-fidelity traffic forecasting framework designed to establish dynamic security baselines for RENs. Leveraging an exclusive 57-day Internet2 dataset spanning ten backbone routers (13.7 billion packets), we perform the first large-scale benchmark of anomaly-aware forecasting models in this domain. We systematically evaluate six model families, from SARIMA to state-of-the-art long-sequence architectures (TiDE, PatchTST), across 960 experimental configurations. Our results demonstrate that these advanced architectures, particularly TiDE, reduce baseline prediction error by 30-42% compared to traditional methods ($p < 0.001$), significantly improving the distinction between legitimate scientific bursts and potential anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce a novel anomaly-integration strategy that improves model robustness by 3.3% in the presence of noise. This work provides the first statistically validated framework for distinguishing scientific workflows from network attacks, enabling more autonomous and resilient network security operations. --- ### SkillZip: Contract-Preserving Graph Compression for Scalable Agent Skill Libraries Authors: Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05604v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents whose procedural knowledge is stored in reusable skill packages and loaded at inference time. As skill libraries grow, a central challenge is to expose the smallest sufficient executable context under a limited context budget. Existing systems struggle to reuse routines below the whole-skill level, preserve procedural contracts during compression, keep compressed routines executable and expandable, and update the compressed library as skills evolve. These challenges reveal a unit mismatch: skills are retrieved as packages, compressed as text, and converted into execution graphs only after retrieval, whereas reliable reuse requires a contract-bearing procedural unit. We propose SkillZip, an execution-aware procedural abstraction framework that performs contract-preserving compression over section-level graphs. SkillZip rewrites recurring contract-valid motifs into reversible ported macros while preserving boundary signatures, dependency closure, verifier reachability, and source-level expansion. At inference time, it hydrates a compact, dependency-closed context and expands macros only when required. ReZip further integrates new skills and revises risky macros using execution evidence. Comprehensive experiments1 on technical and embodied agent benchmarks show SkillZip consistently outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 12.2 points, while achieving a 3.46x compression ratio with 99.2% dependency preservation and 98.7% verifier reachability. Scaling analyses further confirm robust retrieval across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 100K skills. --- ### Epistemic Trustworthiness in Generative AI: A Normative Framework for Warranted Reliance in High-Stakes Workflows Authors: Nimisha Karnatak, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05602v2 Generative AI systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes professional contexts, where their outputs shape what users believe, how they reason, and what they treat as settled. This raises a central question for responsible AI: under what conditions is reliance on generative AI outputs epistemically warranted rather than behaviourally induced? Existing frameworks largely ask whether AI outputs are accurate, fair, explainable, safe, or trusted by users. These questions remain necessary, and each can contribute to warranted reliance. However, they do not directly specify warranted reliance as a distinct evaluative target: the conditions under which users are justified in treating AI outputs as inputs into their own reasoning. We argue that this requires an account of epistemic trustworthiness: what makes a system epistemically worthy of reliance. Drawing on philosophical accounts of trustworthiness as competence and audience-orientation, we develop a constitutive normative framework comprising three jointly necessary and non-fungible conditions. First, epistemic humility requires systems to represent and communicate the limits of their competence. Second, epistemic access requires systems to enable users to inspect, question, and contest outputs in context. Third, resistance to epistemic injustice requires systems to recognise users as legitimate epistemic agents and avoid marginalising their knowledge and experience. Through real-world case analyses in legal reasoning, medical reasoning, and hiring, we show how failures of epistemic humility, epistemic access, and resistance to epistemic injustice can produce consequential harms that standard measures of accuracy, fairness, and usability do not address on their own. We conclude by outlining design and evaluation implications for GenAI systems organised around epistemically warranted reliance rather than output correctness alone. --- ### Epistemic Trustworthiness in Generative AI: A Normative Framework for Warranted Reliance in High-Stakes Workflows Authors: Nimisha Karnatak, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05602v1 Generative AI systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes professional contexts, where their outputs shape what users believe, how they reason, and what they treat as settled. This raises a central question for responsible AI: under what conditions is reliance on generative AI outputs epistemically warranted rather than behaviourally induced? Existing frameworks largely ask whether AI outputs are accurate, fair, explainable, safe, or trusted by users. These questions remain necessary, and each can contribute to warranted reliance. However, they do not directly specify warranted reliance as a distinct evaluative target: the conditions under which users are justified in treating AI outputs as inputs into their own reasoning. We argue that this requires an account of epistemic trustworthiness: what makes a system epistemically worthy of reliance. Drawing on philosophical accounts of trustworthiness as competence and audience-orientation, we develop a constitutive normative framework comprising three jointly necessary and non-fungible conditions. First, epistemic humility requires systems to represent and communicate the limits of their competence. Second, epistemic access requires systems to enable users to inspect, question, and contest outputs in context. Third, resistance to epistemic injustice requires systems to recognise users as legitimate epistemic agents and avoid marginalising their knowledge and experience. Through real-world case analyses in legal reasoning, medical reasoning, and hiring, we show how failures of epistemic humility, epistemic access, and resistance to epistemic injustice can produce consequential harms that standard measures of accuracy, fairness, and usability do not address on their own. We conclude by outlining design and evaluation implications for GenAI systems organised around epistemically warranted reliance rather than output correctness alone. --- ### LC-GRPO: Bridging Train-Inference Gap for Flow-Based GRPO with Langevin Correction Authors: Yingqing Guo, Hui Yuan, Zijian He, Mengdi Wang, Zheng Ding Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05600v1 Flow-based generative models are typically sampled by solving a deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE), whereas online reinforcement learning requires stochastic rollouts for policy exploration and optimization. Existing GRPO methods for flow models therefore replace the inference-time ODE with a stochastic differential equation (SDE) during training. Although the ODE and SDE share the same marginal distributions in continuous time, their finite-step discretizations can differ substantially. In particular, SDE rollouts often become blurry as the exploration noise increases, creating a mismatch between the samples used for reinforcement learning and those generated by the test-time ODE sampler. We introduce LC-GRPO, a flow-based GRPO framework with Langevin correction. Each rollout transition first takes an inference-aligned ODE Euler step and then applies a stochastic Langevin correction targeting the marginal distribution at the resulting timestep. The required score is recovered directly from the flow velocity, requiring no additional score model, while the resulting transition remains an isotropic Gaussian with a tractable likelihood for policy optimization. We theoretically show that, under suitable conditions, one Langevin correction step reduces the Wasserstein error of an imperfect ODE Euler step. At a matched randomness level, we further show that the proposed transition can be more accurate than the standard Euler--Maruyama discretization of the reverse SDE. Experiments on SD3.5-Medium, FLUX.1-Dev, and HunyuanVideo demonstrate that LC-GRPO consistently improves reward optimization across text-to-image and text-to-video tasks, preserves generation quality, and substantially narrows the gap between stochastic training rollouts and deterministic test-time ODE inference. --- ### Uncertainty-Aware World Model for Aerial Image-Goal Navigation Authors: Deyi Zhu, Haoyu Fan, Yinan Zhu, Weichen Zhang, Shilin Ma, Xinlei Chen, Yansong Tang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05597v1 Aerial image-goal navigation requires an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to reach a target location specified by a goal image. Existing world-model-based methods rank candidate trajectories using predicted futures, but typically rely on only one or a few point predictions, which is inadequate for large-scale outdoor environments with substantial future-state uncertainty. To address this limitation, we propose the Uncertainty-Aware Navigation World Model (UA-NWM), an efficient latent world model for aerial image-goal navigation, which formulates trajectory scoring as conditional out-of-distribution detection. UA-NWM represents plausible futures with an uncertainty subspace and decomposes the prediction--goal discrepancy into uncertainty-explainable and unexplainable components. Only the unexplainable residual is used for scoring, enabling robust selection without multiple future samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UA-NWM consistently outperforms existing navigation world models while maintaining low inference latency. Real-world UAV experiments further validate its practical applicability. Project page: https://duryi.github.io/UA-NWM-Project-Page --- ### How Much Reconstruction Does Quantum Machine Learning Need? Late Fusion of Independently Trained Quantum Subcircuits Authors: Prabhjot Singh, Adel N. Toosi, Rajkumar Buyya Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: quant-ph, cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05595v1 Circuit cutting lets a large quantum neural network (QNN) run as independent subcircuits on small devices, but rebuilding its outputs by reconstruction carries a classical sampling overhead exponential in the number of cuts - the dominant runtime cost in prior work. We ask whether, for machine-learning tasks, this step is necessary, and replace it with late fusion: each subcircuit is trained and measured independently, and a small classical head combines their outputs - a linear-cost, decision-level combination borrowed from multimodal learning. To characterize the trade-off we introduce a quantumness dial $Q$, a tunable reconstruction budget interpolating from pure fusion to full reconstruction, and a cut-entanglement diagnostic that indicates how much reconstruction a task needs (Spearman $ρ=0.59$ over $104$ runs). Across synthetic and standard datasets, independently trained late fusion matches full reconstruction accuracy within $0.04$ at every point of the controlled sweep and on every classical benchmark, at exponentially lower cost; it is also markedly more robust to shot and device noise. Controlled entangled-data experiments locate the boundary where fusion must fail. We do not claim advantage over classical machine learning - consistent with recent benchmarking, quantum offers no accuracy edge on these datasets. Late fusion is thus an efficient, noise-robust, self-characterizing alternative to reconstruction for circuit-cutting QML. --- ### Beyond Frame Selection: Rethinking Long-Video Understanding with MLLMs Authors: Ziling Huang, Yuki M. Asano, Shin'ichi Satoh Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05592v3 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made strong progress in video understanding, yet long videos remain difficult: the visual token budget grows with video length, so temporally sparse evidence is easily lost. Existing methods, whether frame selection or agent-based exploration, ultimately rely on a single frame set that must trade off broad temporal coverage against fine-grained, question-relevant evidence: mixing both dilutes decisive evidence, while focusing on either sacrifices the other. We propose VideoRouter (VR), which rethinks long-video understanding as coordinating complementary evidence views rather than selecting a single subset of frames. VideoRouter first organizes each video into a question-agnostic temporal hierarchy that partitions it into coarse-to-fine temporally coherent segments. Upper-level nodes capture broad storyline context and event progression, while lower-level nodes preserve fine-grained local details and evidence-bearing moments. This gives rise to two complementary views: a global view for coverage-oriented reasoning and a local view for detail-oriented evidence recovery. We further introduce a verification-guided router that judges which view is better supported by its own selected evidence and decides the final answer. Across six backbones, routing improves over both views in all settings, and the choice of view is shown to be dataset-dependent, confirming that no single evidence granularity is universally preferable. On VideoMME and LongVideoBench, our method outperforms state-of-the-art frame-selection methods by 2.5 and 1.3 points, respectively, under the LLaVA-Video-7B backbone. We will release the code. --- ### Beyond Frame Selection: Rethinking Long-Video Understanding with MLLMs Authors: Ziling Huang, Shin'ichi Satoh Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05592v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong progress in video understanding, yet it remains challenging because the token limitation makes MLLMs difficult to capture temporally sparse evidence. Existing methods typically rely on uniform sampling, or frame selection, but these strategies usually optimize either broad temporal coverage or local relevance, making it difficult to preserve both global storyline context and fine-grained evidence. We propose VideoRouter(VR) that rethinks long-video understanding as coordinating complementary evidence views rather than selecting a single subset of frames. It first organizes each video into a question-agnostic temporal hierarchy, which partition the video into coarse-to-fine temporally coherent segments. In this hierarchy, upper-level nodes capture broad storyline context and event progression, while lower-level nodes preserve fine-grained local details and evidence-bearing moments. This naturally gives rise to two complementary views: a global view for coverage-oriented reasoning and a local view for detail-oriented evidence recovery. We further introduce a verification-guided router to determine which view is better supported by the selected evidence and select the final answer. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed design through extensive experiments, showing that the verification-guided router effectively coordinates global and local reasoning, and that, on VideoMME, our method outperforms state-of-the-art frame selection methods by 2.9 points, respectively, under the LLaVA-Video-7B backbone. We will release the code. --- ### Search-Aided Joint Agent-Environment Reinforcement Learning for Robust Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding with Rotations Authors: He Jiang, Jingtian Yan, Yulun Zhang, Yimin Tang, Tanishq Duhan, Rishi Veerapaneni, Guillaume Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05588v1 Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents that continuously receive new goals upon reaching their current ones. While many learning-based planners have been proposed for LMAPF, most rely on oversimplified kinematic assumptions that may overlook motion constraints critical to real-world performance. In this work, we study a more realistic LMAPF model derived from many real-world automated warehouse systems, termed LMAPF-R2, which incorporates robust safety constraints and in-place rotation constraints. These constraints substantially increase coordination difficulty, particularly in highly constrained spaces. To address these challenges, we propose Search-Aided Joint Reinforcement Learning (SJRL). We first augment neural policies with Causal PIBT, a single-step search-based planner that resolves agents' collisions and propagates their intentions. We then introduce a unified RL formulation that jointly optimizes agent and environment policies, where the environment policy learns graph edge costs to provide global movement guidance via backward Dijkstra search. Experiments demonstrate that SJRL achieves significant improvements over the strong search-based planner, Causal-PIBT, across multiple high-density maps. We further validate SJRL in a challenging mixed-reality warehouse environment with 8 physical robots and 248 virtual robots. --- ### StepReflect: Structured UI Transition Reflection for Mobile GUI Agents Authors: Linqiang Guo, Wei Liu, Li Gu, Yang Wang, Tse-Hsun, Chen Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05587v1 Autonomous mobile GUI agents require accurate action reflection for reliable long-horizon execution. Existing approaches rely on open-ended multimodal reasoning after each action, which is costly and poorly matched to the structured nature of GUI state transitions. We propose StepReflect, which formulates per-step GUI reflection as supervised structured prediction conditioned on explicit transition specifications and paired visual evidence. StepReflect is trained through a staged pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning, teacher-student distillation, and preference- and reward-based refinement. Offline, the resulting 8B model achieves 82.16% transition-level accuracy on AndroidWorld, exceeding zero-shot GPT-5.2 by 11.83 percentage points under the same structured input. Online, across M3A, Agent-SAMA, MAI-UI-8B, and Seed-2.0-Pro, StepReflect achieves higher task success in three of four agent configurations and remains within one successful task of the GPT-5.2 Reflection Agent in the fourth. It also reduces paid API charges relative to GPT-based reflection in all four configurations. These results establish StepReflect as a practical, locally deployable alternative to repeated frontier-model reflection for long-horizon mobile GUI agents. --- ### The Judgment-Consequence Gap: LLM Moral Reasoning in Healthcare Decisions Authors: Hadi Hosseini, Samarth Khanna, Leona Pierce Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05583v1 As large language models (LLMs) enter high-stakes domains such as healthcare, understanding their moral reasoning becomes essential. Decisions about scarce medical resources often hinge on judgments of responsibility, particularly when patients' own actions contribute to illness. We investigate how LLMs reason about responsibility and its consequences, tracing their judgments across successive levels, from the behavior, to the resulting illness, to the denial of care. We evaluate a wide range of LLMs, spanning different model families and capability levels, on various clinical vignettes adapted from prior studies. Our results identify a judgment-consequence gap: LLMs largely agree with humans that patients bear responsibility for health-harming behaviors, yet overwhelmingly refuse to let that judgment influence how they allocate scarce resources. Specifically, LLMs default to random allocation, whereas humans consistently favor the less-culpable patient. Compared to humans, LLMs also place greater emphasis on access to information, reducing responsibility judgments when health-risk knowledge is unavailable. These findings reveal that LLMs apply a systematically different moral framework than humans when responsibility and resource scarcity intersect, surprisingly often amplifying normative disagreement with humans as reasoning capability increases. --- ### Where Models Converge and Humans Diverge: A Coverage Framework for Distributional Pluralism in Open-Ended Generation Authors: Zini Yang, Emily Wenger, Richard So Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05576v1 When a large language model (LLM) writes Harry Potter fanfiction, it reliably produces fundamental elements of the Hogwarts universe, such as recognizable places and characters. Human-written Harry Potter fanfictions, however, typically include these fundamentals and much more, incorporating stylistically irregular content and relationship-diverse plotlines. This gap between LLM and human writing has been noted across a variety of domains. LLMs tend to produce "average" writing, while human writing contains more diverse content that covers a broader distribution. Existing work has shown the existence of this distributional "gap", but no work has proposed a systematic way to measure it. Our paper proposes a human-grounded framework that uses the empirical distribution of human writing on a topic to measure the distributional breadth of LLM-generated content on that same topic. We propose two metrics, LLM Coverage (LLM-Cov) and In-Boundary Rate (IBR), that separate the plausibility of LLM content from its distributional breadth. Across ideation and narrative tasks, we find that current LLMs produce plausible but narrow content that concentrates near the center of the human response space. Our framework can enable researchers to better assess the distributional breadth of LLM-authored content, which we term its "cultural reach". --- ### SkillTV-Bench: Benchmarking How Well Judges Perform on Skill-Augmented Agentic Execution Authors: Zhi Han, Chenxi Zeng, Liuhaichen Yang, Zihan Guo, Ming Zhou, Yang Li Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05573v1 LLM agents increasingly execute long-horizon tasks through tool use and environment interaction, shifting evaluation from final-response scoring to verification of complete executions. For skill-augmented agents, verification additionally requires the procedural knowledge encoded in task-time skills, because this knowledge indicates what evidence to inspect and which failures are task-critical. However, existing judge benchmarks often expose final responses or static trajectories, and rarely combine task-time skills with directly inspectable artifacts and environments. We therefore introduce SkillTV-Bench, a 681-case benchmark of real agent trajectories from 50 tasks across eleven domains, designed to evaluate skill-aware trajectory verification for both LLM-as-a-Judge and Agent-as-a-Judge methods. Additionally, we propose SkillTV-Evolve, which externalizes verification knowledge as a reusable JudgeSkill that guides an agent judge to plan targeted inspections and issue evidence-grounded verdicts. On a disjoint development pool, an automated evolution loop further refines the JudgeSkill using misjudged cases. On SkillTV-Bench, the refined skill increases the same agent judge's accuracy by 14.8 percentage points. In offline rollout-pool selection, it increases selected-trajectory success from 22.9% with one rollout to 45.5% with ten rollouts. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HanZhi306/SkillTV-Bench --- ### Align-RAG: Alignment Is All You Need for TSFM In-Context Learning Authors: Mohammad Asadi, Soheil Hor, Bardiya Akhbari, Jack W. O'Sullivan, Tahoura Nedaee, Layne C. Price, Raviteja Anantha, Euan Ashley, Ehsan Adeli Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05571v1 Retrieval-augmented forecasting promises to adapt frozen Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) to new domains without fine-tuning, but recent methods typically rely on learned fusion modules, i.e., trained adapters that merge retrieved examples into the backbone's forecast, based on the assumption that frozen backbones cannot dynamically incorporate retrieved context on their own. We show this assumption is unnecessary. We introduce Align-RAG, a training-free method that applies a closed-form per-pair amplitude rescaling and integer-lag phase shift to retrieved past-future windows before they enter a frozen backbone's context. With no learned parameters, Align-RAG outperforms the state-of-the-art trained retrieval adapter on a frozen Chronos-Bolt on all seven datasets of the standard benchmark (avg -3.75% MSE), showing that the gains previously attributed to learned fusion are recoverable without any training. Align-RAG further improves zero-shot MSE on four additional frozen TSFMs with various architectures by 2.5% to 13.7% per backbone with no per-backbone tuning. To probe why alignment helps, we compare the frozen backbone's prediction shift under aligned demonstrations to the closed-form ridge prediction shift on the same pairs. We find that aligned demonstrations induce prediction shifts that track a closed-form ridge predictor on the same pairs, with a future-shuffle control ruling out a futures-averaging account. Together, these results indicate that frozen TSFMs already support dynamic in-context use of retrievals, and that closed-form alignment should be the default baseline for retrieval-augmented forecasting before any fusion module is trained. Code available at: https://github.com/masadi-99/align-rag --- ### A Multi-Layer System for Ultra-High-Resolution Static 360-Degree Telepresence Authors: Jiapeng Chi, Gerd Bruder, Carsten Neumann, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Dirk Reiners Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05570v1 360-degree video telepresence offers strong immersive potential but remains constrained by the limited resolution of current capture and display hardware. Many telepresence installations feature fixed viewpoints and largely static scenes, yet optimization strategies tailored to such setups have received limited attention. We present a multi-layer, ultra-high-resolution system for static 360-degree telepresence that combines an 8K panoramic camera with a rotatable 4K pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. Our approach builds a three-layer representation: (1) a tile-based ultra-high-resolution panoramic background, generated by offline stitching high-detail 4K PTZ scans onto the base 8K panorama to achieve effective resolution beyond native capture, and represented as a set of spatial tiles; (2) a dynamic update layer that composites foreground motions from the 8K stream via real-time high-resolution background matting; and (3) a region-of-interest 4K layer that streams a real-time PTZ view of the selected region and additionally updates the corresponding background tiles over time. We evaluate the proposed system through comparisons with representative video super-resolution approaches and a user study assessing perceived detail and immersive experience. Our results indicate that tile-based background refinement, together with user-guided updates, provides a practical way to balance panoramic fidelity and interactivity in static 360-degree telepresence. --- ### CoordRefer: Coordinate-Aware 3D Visual Grounding from Multiview Images Authors: Haijie Li, Jiaxin Zhang, Dave Zhenyu Chen, Youyu Chen, Yanmin Wu, Jian Zhang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05569v1 Multiview image-based 3D visual grounding predicts a coordinate frame to define a coordinate system and then regresses a 3D bounding box for localization. However, existing methods jointly optimize coordinate frame selection and box regression, leading to coordinate-relative box ambiguity and degraded grounding performance. This ambiguity arises because the same box admits different numerical representations across coordinate frames, creating multiple optimization targets and yielding invalid compromise predictions. To tackle this challenge, we propose CoordRefer, a coordinate-aware framework that decouples coordinate frame selection from coordinate-conditioned grounding. CoordRefer first selects a reference frame to define the coordinate system and then conditions 3D box prediction on the coordinate system. We perform coordinate-aware supervised fine-tuning to establish coordinate frame selection and coordinate-conditioned box regression, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization with 3D IoU-based rewards to align both stages with downstream grounding quality. On ScanRefer with Qwen3-VL-2B, CoordRefer achieves gains of 11% in Acc@0.25 and 7% in Acc@0.5 over the coordinate-agnostic baseline, while its geometrically refined variant surpasses methods using explicit 3D inputs. --- ### EffectLearner: World-Aware Object-Effect Reasoning for Real-World Video Object Removal Authors: Feier Wu, Wanke Xia, Xu He, Zilang Zhou, Si Chen, Dongxia Liu, Liyang Chen, Qimeng Wu, Zhengbo Zhang, Wenming Yang, Zhiyong Wu Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05565v1 Video object removal must eliminate not only the target object but also its induced effects while maintaining high-fidelity and spatiotemporally coherent restoration. Existing methods mainly learn object-effect correspondences implicitly from predefined effect categories and fixed data distributions, limiting their generalization to complex real-world scenes involving compositional effects, spatially detached or weakly correlated effects, long-tail physical phenomena, and dynamically evolving interactions. We propose EffectLearner, a semantic-reasoning-enhanced framework that combines a VLM-based Object-Effect Reasoner with a DiT-based Video Eraser. Guided by a structured effect-analysis prompt, the Reasoner performs cross-modal reasoning over a target-highlighted video and extracts compact effect-aware context, which guides the Video Eraser toward comprehensive object-effect removal. Motion-aware mask guidance and motion-consistency supervision further improve removal coverage and spatiotemporal stability under object motion and evolving scene dynamics. To fully exploit the framework in challenging real-world scenarios, we further construct EffectWorld, a paired video dataset specifically designed for complex object-induced effects, and introduce a progressive training curriculum that combines common supervision with complex-effect data. On the standard ROSE-Bench, EffectLearner outperforms existing baselines on most metrics and achieves clear advantages on both EffectWorld-Eval and the challenging EffectWorld-Wild, demonstrating its ability to deliver high-quality video object removal in complex real-world scenes. --- ### When Experience Becomes Instruction: Trajectory Poisoning in Self-Evolving Agent Skill Systems Authors: Jialuo Chen, Lingqi Jiang, Xinhao Deng, Xiaohu Du, Jianan Ma, Yunhao Feng, Yuqi Qing, Zhihao Yuan, Linkang Du, Jingyi Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05563v2 Self-evolving skill (SES) systems distill agent trajectories into persistent skills, allowing untrusted experience to become trusted instruction. We introduce PoisonedEvolution, a trajectory-poisoning attack on this promotion process. Our skill-visible black-box attacker can inspect a target skill and contribute bounded evidence, but cannot observe private pools or evolution logic or edit the skill bank. Artifact poisoning requires Inclusion, Evolution Attribution, and Realization. Attribution is the distinctive bottleneck: the target behavior must appear causally useful, recurrent, and generalizable before promotion. We evaluate four representative security-effect families using inert canary specifications. At 10% attacker support, across six mainstream LLM evolvers in SkillClaw, PoisonedEvolution embeds target behaviors in 546/600 trials (91.0% SER). On the structurally different Trace2Skill pipeline at the same ratio, it embeds target behaviors in 369/600 trials (61.5% SER), demonstrating transfer across evolution architectures. In a representative controlled study, three consistent attacker records suffice in a 30-record batch, whereas a single record is much weaker. Ablations identify recurring support, causal framing, and domain-aligned encoding as the main determinants of success. These findings expose evidence promotion as a security boundary for self-evolving agents. --- ### When Experience Becomes Instruction: Trajectory Poisoning in Self-Evolving Agent Skill Systems Authors: Jialuo Chen, Lingqi Jiang, Xinhao Deng, Xiaohu Du, Jianan Ma, Yunhao Feng, Yuqi Qing, Zhihao Yuan, Linkang Du, Jingyi Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05563v1 Self-evolving skill (SES) systems distill agent trajectories into persistent skills, allowing untrusted experience to become trusted instruction. We introduce PoisonedEvolution, a trajectory-poisoning attack on this promotion process. Our skill-visible black-box attacker can inspect a target skill and contribute bounded evidence, but cannot observe private pools or evolution logic or edit the skill bank. Artifact poisoning requires Inclusion, Evolution Attribution, and Realization. Attribution is the distinctive bottleneck: the target behavior must appear causally useful, recurrent, and generalizable before promotion. We evaluate four representative security-effect families using inert canary specifications. At 10% attacker support, across six mainstream LLM evolvers in SkillClaw, PoisonedEvolution embeds target behaviors in 546/600 trials (91.0% SER). On the structurally different Trace2Skill pipeline at the same ratio, it embeds target behaviors in 369/600 trials (61.5% SER), demonstrating transfer across evolution architectures. In a representative controlled study, three consistent attacker records suffice in a 30-record batch, whereas a single record is much weaker. Ablations identify recurring support, causal framing, and domain-aligned encoding as the main determinants of success. These findings expose evidence promotion as a security boundary for self-evolving agents. --- ### From Sports to Safety: Benchmarking Proactive Risk Inference in MLLMs Authors: Jiawei Qiu, Yichen Xu, Jianzhe Ma, Mingyang Yu, Wenbin Zhu, Yang Han, Pinzheng Lv, Wenxuan Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05560v1 Timely anticipation of physical hazards is essential for real-world safety, yet existing MLLM evaluations focus on harmful content or general risks, leaving proactive physical hazard prediction underexplored. Sports provide a well-suited testbed: accident causes span diverse injury dimensions and pre-accident spatiotemporal cues draw on reasoning capabilities shared with broader safety domains such as autonomous driving and fall detection. We introduce SPRINT (Sports Proactive Risk INference Testbed), a benchmark of 2,888 real-world sports videos (2,440 accident, 448 safe controls) spanning 14 sports and 3 environmental settings. Accident videos feature fine-grained annotations of early hazard cues, accident timing, and hierarchical causes; safe videos are manually verified as accident-free and serve to diagnose prompt-induced false alarms. Evaluating state-of-the-art MLLMs under diverse prompts and temporal windows reveals a sharp gap between hazard sensitivity and understanding: the best model exceeds 95% in signaling hazards yet falls below 50% in identifying their causes. Diagnostic experiments further show that explicit danger queries trigger severe false alarms even on hazard-free videos. These findings indicate that current MLLMs exhibit only superficial proactive safety, lacking stable, cause-grounded early warning, and underscore the need for reliable proactive safety in dynamic physical environments. Data and code will be open-sourced upon acceptance. --- ### Turing's First Imitation Game: Design Concepts and a Human-Approximates-Machine Reading Authors: Sharon Temtsin, Christoph Bartneck Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05558v2 This paper examines Turing's 1948 report, "Intelligent Machinery", as an important conceptual source for the later imitation games. Its first contribution is to identify and integrate the design concepts underlying the 1948 chess-based imitation game: the possibility that intelligent machines may make mistakes, the exclusion of irrelevant physical features, the role of the human judge, and Turing's claim that intellectual activity consists mainly of search. The paper's second contribution is to argue that restricting the human contestant to a rather poor chess player increases the role of intellectual search and makes human behaviour more comparable to machine behaviour. This interpretation presents the 1948 game as a human-approximates-machine game and suggests that the imitation game framework can be used not only to ask whether machines imitate humans, but also to examine when human intelligence becomes machine-like under specific task constraints. --- ### Turing's Frist Imitation Game: Design Concepts and a Human-Approximates-Machine Reading Authors: Sharon Temtsin, Christoph Bartneck Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05558v1 This paper examines Turing's 1948 report, "Intelligent Machinery", as an important conceptual source for the later imitation games. Its first contribution is to identify and integrate the design concepts underlying the 1948 chess-based imitation game: the possibility that intelligent machines may make mistakes, the exclusion of irrelevant physical features, the role of the human judge, and Turing's claim that intellectual activity consists mainly of search. The paper's second contribution is to argue that restricting the human contestant to a rather poor chess player increases the role of intellectual search and makes human behaviour more comparable to machine behaviour. This interpretation presents the 1948 game as a human-approximates-machine game and suggests that the imitation game framework can be used not only to ask whether machines imitate humans, but also to examine when human intelligence becomes machine-like under specific task constraints. --- ### Hierarchical Flow Matching for 3D Point Cloud Generation Authors: Linhao Wang, Qichang Zhang, Ye Su, Hao Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05557v1 Generating high-quality 3D point clouds requires capturing both global shape topology and local geometric details. Existing flow-based methods rely on continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) that demand expensive ODE solving and trace estimation during training, while diffusion models require hundreds of iterative denoising steps. Moreover, most approaches adopt single-level generation directly in point space, disregarding the hierarchical structure natural to 3D shapes. We propose Hierarchical Flow Matching (HFM) that extends flow matching to bilevel structure for unconditional 3D point cloud generation. HFM decomposes the task into two levels via optimal-transport flow matching: a \textit{Latent Flow Matching} models the global shape manifold in a compact latent space, and a \textit{Conditional Point Flow Matching} reconstructs detailed point clouds conditioned on the latent code. Both flows are trained with simple MSE regression losses. The resulting straight OT paths enable efficient sampling with as few as 15 Euler steps per flow, while the structured latent space supports downstream tasks including classification. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet benchmarks demonstrate that HFM achieves competitive or even best performance compared with prior state-of-the-art methods. --- ### Behavioral Residualization for Unsupervised Intrusion Detection in Automotive CAN Networks Authors: Chandan Hegde, Mukundh R Reddy Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05548v1 Modern vehicles rely on the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, whose design prioritizes low cost and real-time performance but provides no message authentication or encryption. An attacker with physical or remote access can therefore inject arbitrary frames, making intrusion detection an important defense-in-depth mechanism. Most published CAN intrusion detection systems rely on presence-based features, such as novel arbitration IDs, frozen payload bytes, or anomalous DLC values. These features perform well on public datasets containing easily separable attacks but fail when attackers reuse legitimate arbitration IDs. We present per-ID behavioral residualization, a CAN-specific representation that extracts fourteen temporal, protocol, and payload features from sliding windows and residualizes them against each arbitration ID's normal baseline. Our central claim is that this representation, rather than any individual detector, drives the performance gains. Across six unsupervised detectors and two datasets, residualization improves mean F1 in the majority of evaluations (21/24 on HCRL and 30/36 on ROAD across five seeds). On the more realistic ROAD dataset, where attacks reuse legitimate IDs, the representation achieves recall >= 0.99 with high ROC-AUC on targeted signal-manipulation attacks. Two limitations are explicitly quantified: novel-ID flooding (HCRL DoS, F1 = 0.02) and cross-ID fuzzing (ROAD, F1 = 0.27), defining the measured coverage boundary of the proposed representation. --- ### Vibe Compiler: A Research-Logic Synthesis Tool That Runs without Prompt Engineering -Toward Enhancing Metacognition for Sustaining Agency in the Age of Generative AI- Authors: Riichiro Mizoguchi, Tomoki Aburatani, Kento Koike, Machi Shimmei Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05545v2 Used as a capable servant, generative AI has greatly accelerated intellectual work, yet it also risks eroding human epistemic agency by encouraging uncritical acceptance of AI-generated reasoning. Preserving that agency calls for mechanisms that augment human metacognition during AI-assisted work. We therefore propose the Synthesis-Analysis Reciprocity Model, which views intellectual construction as a reciprocal interaction between two cognitive functions. Synthesis selects and combines the components of the artifact; Analysis evaluates them critically against objective indicators and constrains the Synthesis that follows. Grounded in this model, we present the Vibe Compiler, a research-logic compiler that helps researchers turn vague intuitions (Vibes) into coherent research logic. The system attempts to compile those intuitions against a paper ontology of 16 academic parameters. It treats compilation failures as signs that logical components are missing. Rather than fill those gaps autonomously, it returns reflective questions that prompt researchers to develop the missing reasoning themselves. We further characterize the origins of structural gaps along two orthogonal dimensions: cognitive function (Synthesis versus Analysis) and executing agent (human versus AI). The four resulting types of origin give a principled way to identify where breakdowns in intellectual construction arise. Crucially, our design implements the type in which the AI probes its own synthesized output, itself driven by the user's Vibes, and thereby stimulates human metacognition. This choice raises researchers from passive "Makers" of the output into "Managers" who critically direct and validate what the AI produces. In a prototype on NotebookLM and Gemini, AI behavior depended less on prompting than on the structure of the knowledge supplied. The framework spans a learner layer and a researcher layer. --- ### Vibe Compiler: A Research-Logic Synthesis Tool That Runs without Prompt Engineering -Toward Enhancing Metacognition for Sustaining Agency in the Age of Generative AI- Authors: Riichiro Mizoguchi, Tomoki Aburatani, Kento Koike, Machi Shimmei Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05545v1 Generative AI used as a capable servant has greatly accelerated intellectual work, but it also risks eroding human epistemic agency by encouraging uncritical acceptance of AI-generated reasoning. This creates a need for mechanisms that preserve human agency by augmenting metacognition during AI-assisted intellectual work. To address this, we propose the Synthesis-Analysis Reciprocity Model, which views intellectual construction as a reciprocal interaction between Synthesis, which combines components into an artifact, and Analysis, which critically evaluates them against objective indicators and constrains subsequent synthesis. Grounded in this model, we present the Vibe Compiler, a research-logic compiler that helps researchers transform vague ideas (Vibes) into coherent research logic. The system compiles these ideas using a research paper ontology of sixteen academic parameters. Compilation failures indicate missing logical components; rather than filling them autonomously, the system prompts researchers with reflective questions that encourage them to develop the missing reasoning. The framework characterizes structural gaps along two dimensions: cognitive function (Synthesis vs. Analysis) and executing agent (human vs. AI), yielding four origin types that identify where breakdowns arise. Our design emphasizes AI probing its own synthesized output to stimulate human metacognition, encouraging researchers to remain managers who critically direct and validate AI-generated reasoning rather than passive recipients. Experience with a prototype built on NotebookLM and Gemini suggests that effective AI-assisted reasoning depends less on sophisticated prompting than on the knowledge structure provided to the AI. This paper was developed using the proposed Vibe Compiler. --- ### Hyper-ES: Effective Evolution Strategies for LLM Reasoning via Descent Direction Merging Authors: Yu Gu, Zhi Zheng, Yunpeng Ba, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhenkun Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05541v1 Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, directly applying ES to billion-parameter LLMs is highly ineffective. In such high-dimensional parameter spaces, most random perturbations are nearly orthogonal to useful update directions, leading to unstable optimization. We propose Hyper-ES, a subspace-based ES framework that avoids the weakness of ES in full-parameter search while exploiting its strength in low-dimensional optimization. Instead of asking ES to discover useful directions from random perturbations in the LLM parameter space, Hyper-ES first performs a small number of inexpensive gradient-based fine-tuning runs to obtain descent directions. Although each direction may provide only a limited improvement on its own, their span forms a compact adaptation subspace that captures useful reasoning updates. Hyper-ES then applies CMA-ES to optimize layer-wise DARE-TIES merging coefficients within this subspace, allowing ES to search over combinations of meaningful descent directions rather than over arbitrary full-model perturbations. We evaluate Hyper-ES on three Qwen2.5-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill backbones across six mathematical reasoning datasets. Results show that Hyper-ES consistently outperforms GRPO-LoRA by 1% while requiring 10% fewer space-consuming gradient updates. Code at https://github.com/kuangrepi/Hyper-ES. --- ### OmniMech: All-in-one Multimodal Mechanical Benchmark for 3D Reconstruction Authors: Taiting Lu, Runze Liu, Ziwei Dong, Sisong Bei, Jingying Zeng, Mingjia Wang, Zhenghao Li, Kaiyuan Lin, Yi-Shan Wu, Yangshoudu Zheng, Hongxing Pan, Kai Zhang et al. Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05539v1 Recent vision-language models (VLMs) can generate executable CAD programs from images, but existing methods mainly target coarse, general-purpose 3D objects and rarely address the fine-grained geometry and millimeter-level tolerances required in industrial mechanical design. We introduce OmniMech, the first million-scale benchmark for evaluating VLMs on executable CAD generation from industrial manufacturing data. OmniMech contains more than 251,000 fully dimensioned and toleranced 2D orthographic drawings, paired with native CAD models, multi-view renderings, mesh, STEP and B-rep representations, and rich semantic annotations. The benchmark includes four tasks: (1) parametric CAD program synthesis from engineering drawings; (2) diagram-to-3D reasoning for geometrically and structurally consistent reconstruction; (3) annotation-grounded reasoning over dimensions, symbols, feature callouts, and manufacturing constraints; and (4) tool-augmented agentic reasoning using visualization, measurement, CAD execution, and verification tools. Experiments show that current VLMs and CAD-specialized models still struggle with executable program synthesis, fine-grained 3D reconstruction, and reliable enforcement of dimensions and tolerances. We will release the benchmark data, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to support future research. --- ### HERA: Historical Evidence Routing Adapter for Physical Prediction in Latent World Models Authors: Yuanruyi, Yue Cao, Haojia Gao, Guanqiu Guo, Ziyuezhang, Shangqin, Junbo Tan, Bokui Chen, Zhuo Zou, Xueqian Wang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05523v1 Predictive video models have emerged as promising world models by learning latent visual dynamics from large-scale video. Yet these models remain challenged by physical events under occlusion, where later predictions may depend on object evidence that is no longer available in the current view. Addressing this challenge requires historical evidence not only to be preserved but also to remain accessible when it becomes relevant to a subsequent prediction. Existing approaches mainly enlarge the temporal context, cache generic video features, or impose explicit object-centric states, thereby improving the capacity or structure of retained history. However, they do not directly address how relevant historical evidence can be selectively retrieved and integrated into a pretrained predictor without interfering with its native latent workspace. Accordingly, we introduce HERA (Historical Evidence Routing Adapter), a framework for routing retained historical evidence into a frozen latent predictor, and instantiate it with Register-Routed Patch Memory (RRPM), a lightweight adapter comprising a Structured Memory Bank, Memory Registers, and Workspace Registers. On the IntPhys2 Main split, HERA with RRPM improves the pairwise AvgSurprise accuracy of V-JEPA 2-G from 52.57% to 54.35%. Subgroup analysis shows particularly strong improvements on fixed-camera continuity, from 46.15% to 57.69%, and fixed-camera immutability, from 46.15% to 63.46%. These results support historical evidence routing as a practical adaptation strategy for physical prediction in latent world models. --- ### Equation-Free Period-Aware Forecast-Error Contraction for Estimating Negative Largest Lyapunov Exponents from Short Trajectory Ensembles Authors: Andrei Velichko, N'Gbo N'Gbo, Viet-Thanh Pham Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: nlin.CD, cs.LG, physics.data-an arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05522v1 Estimating positive largest Lyapunov exponents from data is comparatively natural because neighboring trajectories separate, whereas stable dynamics require resolving contraction before measurement noise or finite precision erases the signal. We introduce a period-aware forecast-error contraction procedure for estimating a dominant negative Lyapunov exponent from ensembles of short scalar trajectories without using governing equations or an analytical Jacobian. A k-nearest-neighbor predictor is trained on trajectory histories, the geometric-mean absolute forecast error is evaluated at phase-consistent horizons, and the exponent is obtained from the slope of the logarithmic error profile. Unlike data-driven approaches that reconstruct local evolution matrices or differentiate a learned surrogate, the proposed method extracts the contraction rate directly from out-of-sample forecast errors. Two adaptations are essential: the forecast step is synchronized with the detected orbit period, and candidate slopes are accepted only when they form a stable consensus across several transient lengths. On the logistic map, the method recovers 92 of 112 negative-exponent parameter values with a mean absolute error of 0.0253 and $R^2=0.886$. On a two-dimensional map without fixed points, independent scalar pipelines based on the three observables $x_n$, $y_n$, and $z_n$ give mean absolute errors of 0.00879--0.01145 and $R^2=0.983$--$0.986$. Because the estimation stage uses only observed trajectories, the framework provides a basis for repeated-relaxation experiments in which short sensor responses are available but the governing equations and analytical Jacobian are unknown. Experimental validation remains a subject of future work. --- ### EcoAgent-Bench: Evaluating Economic Decision-Making in Budget-Constrained LLM Agents Authors: Jie Wu, Ming Gong, Feixiang Cheng, Qinqin Zhao Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05519v1 Agent benchmarks usually measure task completion and treat resource use as an auxiliary statistic. In deployment, however, the choice among a local lookup, broad search, composite research tool, stronger model, or human escalation is part of the task itself. We introduce EcoAgent-Bench, in which every task specifies priced actions and an explicit budget. Its 304 real-derived tasks span five families adapted from GAIA, HotpotQA, and MuSiQue, and test four decisions: avoiding unnecessary escalation, escalating when local evidence is insufficient, selecting a model tier, and stopping on unsupported premises. We evaluate seven LLM agents in tool-API and workspace-CLI settings, together with four oracle scripted controls. Micro-averaged accuracy rewards one-sided policies: always-escalate controls achieve high micro success while failing save-oriented tasks. We therefore also report an economic-consistency score (the worse of accuracy on upgrade-oriented and save-oriented family groups) which exposes this failure. Tool-API agents attain only 3.9-24.0% micro strict success (at most 7.3% economic consistency), often either stopping before warranted escalation or overspending on cheap tasks. A threshold-crossing budget sweep changes GPT-5.4's escalation rate from 0% to only 3%. These results show that completion under a budget and economical action selection are distinct properties. We release the task bundle, transformation pipeline, frozen evaluation environments, and integrity-bound result artifacts needed to study both. --- ### Different Perturbations, Different Mechanisms: Understanding Continued Pre-training for Zero-Shot Dialect Robustness Authors: Aarohi Srivastava, David Chiang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05510v1 Dialectal variation remains a major challenge for multilingual language models. Perturbation-based continued pre-training (CPT) has emerged as a promising approach to improving robustness, yet existing work largely evaluates individual perturbation strategies in isolation and provides limited insight into why they work. We present a systematic study of perturbation-based CPT for multilingual dialect robustness in LLMs, comparing six training conditions across nine German, Italian, and Arabic dialect tasks. Perturbation-based CPT, especially character-noised CPT, consistently improves zero-shot dialect robustness while largely preserving standard variety performance. More importantly, we show that methods with similar downstream performance induce distinct mechanisms of robustness, exhibiting different patterns of language model adaptation, representational alignment, and prediction repair. Our results provide a more complete understanding of how synthetic surface variation improves robustness and offer practical guidance for selecting CPT strategies in multilingual and dialectal settings. --- ### DynaPix: Can Vision-Language Models Identify the Exact Future? Authors: Thong Nguyen, Vinh-Hien Do, Quynh Vo, Cong-Duy Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05505v1 Acting in a physical scene requires knowing its real later state, not a plausible one. Current evaluations often accept words or a realistic-looking image, so the predicted state is never checked against the true one. We introduce DynaPix (Dynamic Pixels), a benchmark that makes prediction checkable. Given a video clip that stops before a key event and a question about a later moment, a model must pick the true future image from close candidates or a large gallery. The scenes come from a physics simulator, so the correct image and its time are known exactly and the wrong options are deliberately similar. Models often succeed when a visible event marks the target moment, but are near chance when only elapsed time marks it. Gallery search is harder still, as the true image rarely ranks first. People handle the elapsed-time items well, so the difficulty lies with the models, not the questions. Training on scene accounts drawn from the simulator's true record, not a teacher's guess, repairs much of this but not the longer elapsed time case. DynaPix thus exposes a temporal-anchoring gap: models attach a prediction to an event far better than to time itself. --- ### An Inertial Block Proximal Linearized Method with Adaptive Momentum for Nonconvex and Nonsmooth Optimization Authors: Weifeng Yang Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05502v1 In this paper, we consider a class of multiblock nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, which covers many applications such as the analysis of pre-earthquake anomalies and machine learning. To solve this class of problems, we propose the inertial block proximal linearized method with two-phase adaptive momentum (IBPL$^+$-TP). Compared to the current methods, our method possesses three main advantages: (1) it introduces a two-phase adaptive momentum strategy to effectively update the extrapolation parameters, (2) it allows using two different extrapolation points to accelerate the convergence, (3) it allows the extrapolation parameters of these two extrapolation points to be independent of and unconstrained by all other parameters. While maintaining the above advantages, we prove that our method ensures the monotonic convergence of the objective function of this class of problems, and we also prove that the sequence generated by our method globally converges to a critical point, as well as establish the convergence rate of our method. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to solve two nonconvex and nonsmooth machine learning problems, namely sparse nonnegative matrix factorization with $\ell_0$-constraints and sparse nonnegative CP decomposition with $\ell_0$-constraints. The numerical experimental results on solving these problems show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. --- ### APQF: Agentic Profiling-Guided Structured Pruning and Mixed-Precision Quantization with Adaptive Fine-Tuning Authors: Sadegh Jafari, Mohiuddin Bilwal, Fan Zhou, Brian Gelder, Ali Jannesari Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05499v1 Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance, but their scale makes them costly and slow, especially on resource-constrained edge devices. Pruning and quantization address this, but rely on manual, expert choices and on algorithms that are hard to apply across architectures. Uniform settings also ignore how differently individual layers respond to compression, which costs accuracy. We introduce APQF, an agentic profiling-guided framework that combines structured pruning, mixed-precision quantization-aware training, and accuracy recovery in one automated pipeline. A profiling agent measures how cost is distributed across the model and how sensitive each part is to pruning, and this evidence drives per-layer pruning ratios, per-layer bit-widths, and the recovery strategy, all proposed by LLM planners and validated before execution. To our knowledge, APQF is the first framework to combine LLM-guided, profiling-grounded decisions with a fully training-aware pruning and quantization pipeline for both CNNs and vision transformers. We evaluate APQF on ResNet, VGG7, ViT, DeiT, and Swin using ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-10. On ImageNet it cuts compute to 5.6-7.7 percent of the original bit-operations, a 13-18x reduction, while keeping accuracy close to the baseline, and under a 200K-image budget it stays roughly 17 points higher in Top-1 than existing joint pruning and quantization methods. On CIFAR-10 it compresses further than that method on four of five architectures. On VGG7 it reaches 93.15 percent using only 0.41 percent of baseline bit-operations, the only method at that compression level to improve on its full-precision baseline. Ablations show that uniform compression loses the most accuracy at matched compute, and that withholding profiling data from the planner hurts every model. Six LLM planners, including free open-weight ones, all reach 97.4-97.9 percent on Swin-Tiny. --- ### Learning Context-Free Grammars for Grammar-Constrained Decoding via Declarative Agentic Programming with Guarantees Authors: Kevin Cheang, Geoff Hulette, Rahul Kumar, Felipe R. Monteiro, Federico Mora, Robin Salkeld, Lin Tan, Serdar Tasiran Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.PL, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05493v1 Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to interact with external services via programs written in domain-specific languages (DSLs). Unfortunately, since DSLs are often low-resource and esoteric, LMs frequently produce syntactically invalid programs in these languages. Grammar-constrained decoding can eliminate such failures, but requires syntactic constraints. These are usually in the form of a context-free grammar for the target language, an artifact that is hard to come by for third-party DSLs. In this work, we define an agent, called Autogrammar, that automatically learns context-free grammars from documentation and execution data. Autogrammar is formalized as a Kripke structure whose nondeterministic choices are resolved by a language model, enabling declarative control of agent behavior via linear temporal logic constraints. We evaluate four versions of Autogrammar on three DSLs (i.e., Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights, Dynatrace Query Language, and Datadog Search Syntax) and find that it generates grammars that achieve near perfect precision on unseen data; that temporal restrictions reduce execution time by 3.8x without incurring statistically-significant loss in precision; that execution data is crucial while documentation is dispensable; and that grammar-constrained decoding using Autogrammar-generated grammars significantly improves end-to-end LM performance on eight out of ten real tasks, matching or exceeding the performance of a professionally-maintained grammar. In comparison, the context-free grammars generated by existing LM baselines and a state-of-the-art formal technique perform significantly worse over the same evaluation. --- ### Innovation-Residual Auditing of Autonomous Analysis Agents: Localization, Detection Limits, Error Control, and Identifiability Authors: Ahmed Hassoon, Mark Dredze Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05490v1 Autonomous agents now carry out entire data analyses, selecting cohorts, joining tables, and fitting models with little step-by-step supervision. When such an analysis turns out to be wrong, someone must determine which operation caused it. A recent approach does this without any labelled mistakes, learning instead from analyses known to be sound and flagging operations that depart from what that model predicts; how reliable such audits are has not been studied. This paper supplies that analysis. The choice of score determines whether an error can be localized at all. If each operation is scored by how surprising it is given the operation immediately preceding it, then operations that merely inherit an earlier error are indistinguishable from correct ones, so one mistake produces one flag; scores computed against a longer reconstruction of the intended analysis instead spread a single mistake across many operations. We quantify how far they spread, and how to choose the comparison length when an error accumulates gradually rather than at once. We then give procedures that control the proportion of falsely flagged operations within a single audited analysis, requiring only that sound analyses be exchangeable rather than that the fitted model be correct, and we quantify how much the guarantees weaken when the model is imperfect or when the analysis was selected for review in a way that depends on its content. Finally we establish a limit on what any such audit can report: errors below a certain magnitude cannot be attributed at all, being indistinguishable from ordinary variation among sound analyses. This limit falls so slowly as more sound analyses are collected that at the representation sizes now in use a hundredfold increase reduces it by under two percent, so the dimension of the representation rather than the volume of training data is the binding constraint. --- ### VideoArgus: Agentic Rubric-Grounded Unified Evaluation for Video Generation and Editing Authors: Ziyun Zeng, Zixuan Wang, Yongsheng Yu, Hang Hua, Jiebo Luo Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05485v1 Evaluating generated videos remains challenging because existing benchmarks rely on fixed evaluation content, cover only a subset of generation and editing settings, and provide limited evidence for their scores. We introduce VideoArgus, a unified rubric-grounded framework covering five video generation and editing settings. For each input instance, VideoArgus generates an output-blind, sample-specific rubric once and reuses it to evaluate all corresponding candidate videos. The rubric defines concrete criteria, scoring rules, failure modes, and evidence plans, which guide criterion-specific VLM QA and visual tools to produce evidence-grounded criterion scores, rationales, and a diagnostic report. We further construct VideoArgus-Bench, containing 1,026 curated input instances built from 653 high-quality images and 416 high-quality videos, with all benchmark rubrics pre-generated, frozen, and released. On a separate 1,260-video human-alignment set, VideoArgus achieves higher within-input Spearman and Kendall correlations with human judgments than the corresponding benchmark-specific evaluators across all five tasks. Model rankings also remain largely consistent across different rubric-generation and evaluation-VLM backbones. All code and data are released. Visit our project page: https://zzzmyyzeng.github.io/VideoArgus --- ### CDSeg: A Renderable Gaussian Carrier for Image-to-3D Label Transfer Authors: Wentao Sun, Yiping Chen, Zhengsen Xu, Jonathan Li, John S. Zelek Published: 2026-08-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05482v1 Modern image models provide strong cues about \emph{what} should be segmented in each view, but their masks do not by themselves determine \emph{where} those labels should persist in 3D. We present Cross-Domain Segmentation via Gaussian Splatting (CDSeg), a label-transfer interface that requires no task-specific 3D segmentation training and uses Gaussian primitives as a renderable label carrier. An external mask source supplies the labels, while renderer-derived visibility determines which 3D primitives receive them. The carrier is instantiated either by completing each input point into one Gaussian, preserving its index, or by reusing the native primitives of an optimized Gaussian scene. CDSeg records pixel--primitive associations during rendering and fuses multi-view masks through voting and a local filter. The resulting labels can be returned to the original points, retained on the native Gaussian scene, or rendered into other views. CDSeg covers promptable, automatic instance, semantic, and LiDAR settings and processes scenes with millions of primitives in seconds. It obtains 92.35\% mIoU on DesktopObjects-360, 95.89\% on NeRDS-360, and 65.77\% on the full ScanNet-v2 validation split using the provided 2D semantic annotations. CDSeg thereby provides one interface for reusing 2D masks across point clouds, Gaussian scenes, and image views without a task-specific 3D segmentation network. --- ### MIAR: Medical Image Super-Resolution With Autoregressive Modeling Authors: Fang Li, Yinglong Li, Hongyu Wu, Yang Gao, Minwei Zhao, Aimin Hao Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26103v1 Medical Image Super-Resolution (MISR) aims to enhance spatial resolution without requiring hardware modifications. Although deep learning has yielded promising results, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off: diffusion-based methods suffer from prohibitive inference latency and compromised structural fidelity, whereas regression-based models typically produce over-smoothed results that lack perceptual realism. To address these limitations, we propose MIAR, which reformulates super-resolution as a conditional and progressive next-scale prediction task through a multi-scale autoregressive framework. To ensure structural fidelity, we augment the autoregressive backbone with a Scale-Adaptive Structural Decoder. Furthermore, we integrate a hierarchical beam search strategy during inference to mitigate the recursive error accumulation inherent in autoregressive generation, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in medical images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIAR establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks while maintaining superior fidelity. Notably, our framework achieves a 7.86% improvement in the perceptual metric MUSIQ compared with the state of the art, while simultaneously delivering a 2.02x speedup over diffusion-based methods. --- ### Leakage-Safe Empirical Benchmarking of EEG-Based Machine Learning Pipelines for Dementia Classification Authors: Haitian Wang, Chamara Madarasingha, Redowan Mahmud, Aneesh Krishna, Ryu Takechi Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22092v1 Electroencephalography (EEG) is a low-cost and non-invasive signal source for dementia screening, yet existing EEG-based studies remain difficult to compare because preprocessing, EEG segmentation, feature design, classifier choice, and validation protocols vary across studies and are often evaluated in isolation. This variability limits the derivation of robust pipeline recommendations. This paper presents a leakage-safe empirical benchmark for resting-state EEG-based dementia classification and uses it to identify a practical best-practice pipeline. Using the public OpenNeuro ds004504 dataset, the benchmark evaluates artifact correction, fixed-length EEG segmentation, training-only augmentation, multi-domain feature extraction, fold-internal feature selection, classical machine-learning (ML) classifiers, subject-level aggregation, and interpretation under leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation. The best-performing pipeline in this benchmark combines Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) followed by Independent Component Analysis (ICA), 10 s EEG epochs with training-only amplitude scaling and Gaussian-noise augmentation, spectral, complexity, and pairwise connectivity features, mutual-information top-100 selection, linear support vector machine classification, and mean-probability aggregation. It achieves 87.69 percent accuracy, 88.89 percent F1-score, and 91.20 percent AUC on Alzheimer disease (AD) versus cognitively normal controls (CN) classification while retaining 100 features from 1596 raw descriptors. The results support compact multi-domain EEG features as an interpretable and leakage-safe baseline for subject-level dementia classification. --- ### Rewarding Efficient Reasoning Improves Abstention on Underspecified Tasks in Reasoning Models Authors: Polina Tsvilodub, Max Höth, Michael Franke, Björn Deiseroth, Carina Kauf Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20846v1 While modern large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at providing correct answers in many tasks, we provide additional evidence for the observation that they often struggle with a critical capability: knowing when to abstain from answering. We analyze this gap by comparing LRM behavior to results from a human study, revealing that human reasoning effort on unanswerable tasks is upper-bounded by answerable tasks, whereas LRMs waste computational resources by generating longer Chains of Thought (CoTs) on unanswerable than on answerable prompts. To overcome this inefficiency, we take inspiration from a resource-rational perspective on human cognition and introduce a novel GRPO reward that encourages efficient reasoning about whether the task contains all the information needed to solve it. Fine-tuning several 4B LRMs with this reward leads to human-like abstention performance gains (+12.8% on average) while retaining answering capabilities and boosting the models' efficiency (44% shorter CoTs on average). --- ### Reading Less While Writing: A Closed-Form Bandwidth Dial for Streaming Multimodal Decoders Authors: Yasir Mehmood, Kashif Javed Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20845v1 A decoder that turns video or audio into text conventionally consumes the entire input before emitting a word. Offline this is merely more than the task requires; live it is impossible, since a caption cannot wait for a match to end. Streaming systems bolt on a fixed rule such as wait-$k$, which waits for the same number of input tokens before every word, regardless of the input's length or pace. We replace the fixed offset with ZENDAYA, a schedule governed by a single continuous parameter $γ$. It makes the visible source prefix a closed-form function of generation progress, scaled by the input's own predicted length, so an ordinary offline decoder and a real-time streaming decoder become two endpoints of one family rather than separate models. The same scalar fixes, in closed form, the mean fraction of source consumed per emitted word, $\bar{E}(γ) \approx 1/(1+γ)$, making it at once a latency dial and an interpretable budget. We prove a structural dependency theorem: under any schedule fixed in advance and non-decreasing, no emitted token can depend on input that has not yet arrived. The guarantee holds for trained and untrained weights alike, and extends to unbounded streams under arbitrary asynchronous arrival. The empirical result is counterintuitive: seeing less can produce better text, because a flood of source dilutes attention exactly when the model has the least of its own output to anchor on. Trained from scratch across two modalities and three public corpora (Charades-STA, ActivityNet Captions, LibriHeavy), a compact 29M-parameter decoder matches or beats the fixed schedule while reading less of the source, with the sharpest gains at the lowest latencies, where a fixed offset collapses. Streaming METEOR gains are statistically significant on all three corpora. --- ### Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Traces Authors: Zihan Wang, Hao Wang, Boyuan Jiang, Yiqun Zhang, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Yiwen Ye, Jianghang Lin, Xiaozhong Ji, Jinghao Lin, Kai Wu Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20844v1 Deepresearch (DR) agents interact with real-world web environments through multi-turn search and visit, causing their contexts to grow rapidly over time. We observe that, even after DR Agentic Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL), 61.6% of the model's remaining prediction errors can still be attributed to insufficient long-context understanding, including longcontext hallucination and failures in cross-document evidence integration. It motivates us to further break the bottleneck of DR-RL by strengthening the model's long-context ability. However, effective LongContext training requires more than simply increasing context length. To bridge the data gap, we propose `DR Rollouts to LongContext-QA (DR-to-Long)'. The method repurposes DR-RL trajectories, which naturally contain search histories, visited webpages, evidence snippets, and final-answer supervision. It then replaces the compact snippets and webpage summaries in each trajectory with the full contents of their corresponding URLs, producing substantially longer multi-document contexts while preserving the original evidence relationships. Building on DR-to-Long, we introduce DLD (DR -> LongQA -> DR)-RL. DLD-RL first performs a short DR-RL stage to collect rollout trajectories, which are then converted into LongQA instances at zero annotation cost. The model is subsequently optimized with LongQA-RL to strengthen LongContext ability, followed by full DR-RL to continue improving its DR capability. Experiments show that DLD-RL outperforms standard DR-RL by 7.3% on three Deepresearch benchmarks and improves performance by 13.5% on three long-context benchmarks. --- ### Condition aware learning enables robust prediction of oligonucleotide melting behavior across diverse chemistries and assay conditions Authors: Danielle L. Ferreira, Lifeng Lin, Adam Aslam, Nicholas Chang, Rebekah G. Baig, Edgar Baculi, Zoey Cao, Melanie Senn Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05454v1 Oligonucleotide melting temperature is a fundamental determinant of nucleic acid hybridization and underpins the design of molecular diagnostics, polymerase chain reaction assays, and many other biotechnology applications. However, accurately predicting melting behavior remains difficult because it depends not only on sequence composition, but also on experimental conditions and chemical modifications commonly used in modern assay design. Existing thermodynamic models rely on fixed parameterizations that are often difficult to extend across diverse reaction environments and nucleotide chemistries. Here we show that a condition-aware nucleotide language model can accurately predict oligonucleotide melting behavior across diverse experimental conditions and both unmodified and chemically modified oligonucleotides. By combining contextual sequence representations with explicit information describing the reaction environment, the framework achieves sub-degree prediction accuracy and reduces prediction error for locked nucleic acid-modified oligonucleotides by up to 25% relative to nearest-neighbor thermodynamic approaches. The model also more accurately captures the thermal effects introduced by nucleotide modification and maintains strong performance on independent benchmark datasets spanning experimental conditions substantially different from those represented during training. Our results demonstrate that learned sequence representations can complement classical thermodynamic models by capturing context-dependent effects that are difficult to encode using fixed parameter tables alone. More broadly, this work provides a scalable framework for predicting oligonucleotide melting behavior across diverse chemistries and assay conditions, supporting more reliable molecular assay design. --- ### Whose Judgments Count? Representation Gaps in Crowdsourced Content Moderation Produce Unequal Protection from Perceived Toxicity Authors: Zhaodi Chen, Byungkyu Lee Published: 2026-08-05 Categories: cs.SI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01625v1 Content moderation is a central form of digital governance, yet people disagree over what content should be removed from shared online spaces. While platforms aggregate human judgments to build moderation systems, it remains unclear how this process shapes which users are protected from content they perceive as toxic. We address this gap by combining large-scale judgment data with counterfactual simulations that trace how the demographic composition of moderator pools shapes the distribution of protection across users. Applying this framework to removal judgments from 16,221 U.S. respondents evaluating 102,463 comments from Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan, we find demographic heterogeneities in moderation demand. We further reveal a consistent pattern of in-group protection: reductions in perceived toxicity accrue disproportionately to users who share the demographic identities of the moderator pool. Crucially, moderator pools that mirror the demographic composition of self-identified moderators on Prolific widen these disparities relative to a nationally representative baseline, while even fully representative pools fail to ensure equal protection: Black and LGB users remain underprotected unless they are represented well beyond their population share. These findings show that unequal protection from perceived toxicity can arise structurally from the aggregation of stratified removal standards, making the demographic composition of moderation inputs a key determinant of who is protected online. ---