# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 205 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #10201–10250 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/205 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/204.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/206.md) ### Counterexamples and Sufficient Conditions: Comments on "Optimally-Transported Generalized Method of Moments" Authors: Masahiro Kato Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: econ.EM, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20260v1 We comment on the optimally-transported generalized method of moments (OTGMM) estimator proposed by Schennach & Starck (2026a) and give counterexamples to Theorems 2-6 under their stated assumptions. First, the assumptions used in the small-error analysis are insufficient for consistency in Theorem 2 and asymptotic normality in Theorem 3. Next, we consider the large-error analysis, in which Theorem 4 states that the OTGMM estimator is equivalent to a GMM estimator with modified moments. We show that in a scalar model, Theorem 4 selects a value that differs from the unique OTGMM minimizer and violates the OTGMM sample moment restriction. In an overidentified model satisfying the assumptions used in Theorems 5 and 6, the first component of the Lagrange multiplier has different probability limits under the OTGMM estimator and the GMM estimator with modified moments. Under misspecification, the population value selected by OTGMM depends on the transport metric and on which variables may be adjusted. We give a sufficient condition under which solutions of the modified moment equations also solve the original constrained problem at a given parameter value, and separate conditions for consistency and asymptotic normality of the OTGMM estimator. We also show that Assumption 16 does not imply the matrix bound used in the supplemental proofs and replace Assumption 16 with a matrix condition that yields the bound. --- ### A Two-Stage Multi-Scale Attention-Based Network for Weakly Supervised Cataract Fundus Image Enhancement Authors: Xiaoyong Fang, Yue Wang, Xiangyu Li, Wanshu Fan, Dongsheng Zhou Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20222v1 Cataract is a major cause of vision loss and hinders further diagnosis. However, cataract fundus image enhancement often grapples with challenges such as limited paired cataract retinal images and insufficient recovery of fine details in the retinal images. To mitigate these challenges, we in this paper propose a two-stage multi-scale attention-based network (TSMSA-Net) for weakly supervised cataract fundus image enhancement. Our TSMSA-Net leverages the domain transformation to synthesis paired real-like cataract images, solving the problem of difficult acquisition of paired images. To further extract detailed information from fundus images and reduce the generation of artifacts during the enhancement process, we propose a multi-scale attention-based stage to learn more useful features for cataract image enhancement. Experimental results on Kaggle and ODIR-5K demonstrate that our TSMSA-Net outperforms current state-of-the-art cataract fundus images enhancement even without paired images and exhibits certain generalization ability. Experimental results on Kaggle and ODIR-5K datasets indicate that our TSMSA-Net outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods for cataract fundus image enhancement, even in the absence of paired images. Additionally, it demonstrates a certain level of generalization capability. The enhancement also can improve the performance of vessel segmentation and classification in cataract images. --- ### ZetaDial: dialing net charge of protein binders at inference time for therapeutic developability Authors: Mohammed Sameer Syed, Tamara Dinneen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05451v1 Net charge is a developability-relevant property of therapeutic binders, linked to viscosity, clearance, nonspecific interaction and aggregation, and antibody screens already use charge-related criteria. Yet inverse-folding pipelines expose no way to set it to a target value. ProteinMPNN and BindCraft offer amino-acid biases, weight choices and custom losses, but neither supplies a per-protein feedback loop that measures realised charge after sampling and corrects it to a setpoint. ZetaDial contributes a post-sampling, per-protein secant controller around fixed-backbone ProteinMPNN. On matched stochastic benchmarks the secant loop reduced mean absolute error relative to a fixed-slope loop on RCSB complexes (5.17 vs 6.46 charge units) and Cas13 monomers (5.57 vs 8.23). Relative to the optimised matched global bias, it cut RCSB error from 11.71 to 5.17 (cluster bootstrap p < 0.001) and was statistically indistinguishable on Cas13 (5.47 vs 5.57). Across 800 eight-protein subsets, sensitivity heterogeneity was associated with calibration gain (Pearson r = 0.79); this is descriptive resampling, not a prospective decision rule. Foldability deteriorated as bias magnitude increased. In the full 52-complex seed-0 analysis, reference-based DockQ declined clearly at +/-3 but not at +/-1.5; a selected five-seed replication on eight complexes showed paired declines at every nonzero setting, but does not estimate the effect for all 52. In exploratory BindCraft sweeps, PD-L1 designs moved toward near-neutral charge at similar maximum interface pTM but with overlapping success-rate intervals; IL-7R-alpha responses were non-monotonic and RBD produced no strong designs. A fixed-backbone C-alpha-neighbour analysis found smaller same-sign charge-patch proxies near neutral charge, but this proxy is not a measured electrostatic surface or experimental developability endpoint. --- ### EXAONE Finance 1.0: An Attention-free Time Series Foundation Model for Financial Time Series Authors: Seunghan Lee, Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Minjae Kim, Sungdong Yoo, Junhyeok Kang, Sangjun Han, Soonyoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04239v2 This technical report presents EXAONE Forecast for Finance (EXAONE Finance), a financial time series foundation model (TSFM) tailored to financial forecasting. While recent TSFMs achieve strong zero-shot performance through large-scale pretraining, they are primarily developed for general-domain time series and largely rely on self-attention backbones whose computational cost grows quadratically with sequence length and variate count. Moreover, they assume fully observed inputs and are pretrained on corpora that fail to adequately capture the unique dynamics of financial markets. These limitations hinder their applicability to finance, where long, many-channel, intermittently observed panels are common. To address these challenges, EXAONE Finance adopts an attention-free architecture, replacing self-attention with two simple yet effective linear-time operators: (1) a causal 1D convolution for temporal mixing and (2) a group-aware pooling multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for variate mixing. Furthermore, a masked-context augmentation exposes the model to contiguous missing spans during training, improving robustness to the missingness pervasive in financial markets. EXAONE Finance is pretrained on a synthetic financial corpus whose generative process is designed to reproduce the properties of financial series such as heavy tails, volatility clustering, jumps, regime shifts, and cross-asset dependence, combined with a domain-agnostic synthetic source. On FinVerse, a financial forecasting benchmark covering diverse asset classes, EXAONE Finance attains state-of-the-art performance, ranking first across all three evaluation tiers: point-forecast accuracy, cross-sectional asset ranking, and portfolio profitability. --- ### Enabling Proactive Spoken Turns via a Generalized Style-Aware Full-Duplex Framework Authors: Tianrui Pan, Qinglin Zhang, Chong Deng, Luyao Cheng, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jie Tang, Gangshan Wu, Jie Liu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28630v1 Compared with half-duplex dialogue systems where the system waits for user turn completion before it responds, natural full-duplex dialogue systems require agents to act proactively in real time, including timely interruptions and backchannels. This creates a key challenge: improving turn timing without sacrificing response quality. To address limitations in realistic proactive turn-taking, we build a generalized style-aware full-duplex framework with three key components. Firstly, we propose LPS-TC, a Lightweight Proactive Speech Turn Controller for plug-and-play integration. It features a fine-grained action space covering both reactive and proactive turn behaviors, enabling half-duplex models with full-duplex capabilities and enhancing existing full-duplex models with superior timing control. Secondly, we construct WildTurn, a large-scale, real-world English dataset containing approximately 2,981 hours of filtered multi-turn stereo conversations from face-to-face and telephone conversations, annotated with five turn-taking and five backchanneling styles. Trained on WildTurn, LPS-TC exhibits rich spoken dynamics that are not captured by existing static full-duplex benchmarks. Thirdly, we introduce a two-tier evaluation scheme that assesses both chunk-level timing precision and turn-level interaction quality under realistic streaming constraints. Our experiments, integrating LPS-TC with half-duplex models like Qwen2.5-Omni and full-duplex models like Freeze-Omni, showcase its superior performance in timing appropriateness and response quality. Our framework also demonstrates fine-grained style controllability and strong generalizability, enabling more natural and human-like spoken interactions. --- ### Data Driven Equation Discovery for Phase-Ordering Dynamics : From Allen Cahn to the Ising Model Authors: Partha Sarathi Mondal, Manav Kumar Jalan, Anish Kumar, Shradha Mishra Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cond-mat.soft, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20404v2 Data-driven discovery of governing equations from spatiotemporal data offers a promising route to obtaining coarse-grained descriptions of complex dynamical systems. Here, we investigate the performance of PDE-SINDy for discovering phase-ordering dynamics using the Allen--Cahn equation as a benchmark and the Ising model with Glauber spin-flip dynamics as a microscopic system. We systematically analyze the effects of data availability, size of the candidate library, and noise on the efficiency of the equation discovery. We find that stability-selection PDE-SINDy can robustly identify the relevant terms in the governing dynamics even under limited or noisy data, while the recovered coefficient values are substantially more sensitive to these factors. We further show that enlarging the candidate library can strongly affect both term identification and coefficient recovery. Incorporating library bagging with stability selection reduces this sensitivity and improves the efficiency of equation discovery. For the Glauber spin flip Ising model dynamics, the resulting coarse-grained equation reproduces the characteristic phase-separation and coarsening dynamics of the underlying microscopic system. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of PDE-SINDy for phase-ordering systems while highlighting the importance of carefully assessing the factors that influence the efficiency of equation discovery. --- ### Triangular Fuzzy Rescaling Distance Authors: Eddy Soria, Aida Valls, Ana Beatriz Hernández-Lara Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.GM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19234v1 Decision-making in complex systems often involves dealing with imprecise or uncertain information, frequently represented using fuzzy sets, particularly Triangular Fuzzy Numbers (TFNs). A crucial aspect of many fuzzy methods is the quantification of distance between TFNs. Many distance measures assume that all values are in the same scale, requiring a preliminary normalization stage when applied to heterogeneous attributes with different scales or units. This paper proposes the Triangular Fuzzy Rescaling Distance (d_{TR}), a metric designed to address this challenge. The d_{TR} uniquely integrates Linear Rescaling (LRE) directly into the distance calculation, ensuring normalization during the comparison of fuzzy numbers. We formally prove that d_{TR} satisfies the properties of a metric, including non-negativity, identity, symmetry, and the triangle inequality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that d_{TR} is bounded, scale-invariant, and origin-invariant. These properties, combined with a weighting vector for prioritizing dimensions, make d_{TR} suitable for applications involving heterogeneous fuzzy data, such as the construction of synthetic indicators, distance-based machine learning algorithms or multicriteria-decision aiding. --- ### Active Spiking Perception: The Membrane Potential as a Belief State for Anytime 3D Point Cloud Recognition Authors: Akarsh Jain, Arya Pawa, Ayush Debnath, Smera Rawal, Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19232v2 Spiking point cloud networks usually scan space in a fixed, input-agnostic order, which leaves the most distinctive resource of spiking computation, the temporal evolution of the membrane potential, unused as a locus of decision-making. Active Spiking Perception (ASP) recasts 3D recognition as an iterative decision process in which the network's own leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) membrane potential, read as a running belief over the class, selects the next chunk to observe and triggers confidence-margin early exit. A lightweight Slice-Selection Policy scores unvisited farthest-point-sampled chunks from the membrane state and precomputed geometric descriptors, trains end-to-end through a straight-through Gumbel-Softmax, reduces to an argmax at inference, and adds about 2% of backbone parameters. We prove that leaky integration is the recursive log-posterior update of a Bayesian filter, that the exit rule attains distribution-free selective risk with no multiple-testing penalty at the stopping time, and that streaming state carry-forward is exactly equivalent to prefix recomputation with bounded finite-precision drift. ASP reaches 90.62% and 93.28% on ModelNet40 and ModelNet10, 1.7 points below the strongest spiking baseline at a larger backbone, while adding a certified anytime interface no baseline offers. The mechanism transfers unchanged to dense prediction, giving 83.21 instance mIoU on ShapeNetPart and 48.50 mIoU on S3DIS Area 5, to our knowledge the first spiking results on S3DIS Area 5, and, fixation replacing chunk selection, to a foveated non-spiking transformer, so the policy is not tied to spiking backbones: cost is exactly linear in observations and the threshold is a measured compute dial spanning 2.8x to 1.35x less energy. One limitation is concrete: one S3DIS class is unidentifiable at the crop size we use, and we give the prediction that would fix it. --- ### TorchDCM: A Unified PyTorch-Native Package for Discrete Choice Modeling Authors: Baichuan Mo, Zhengzhong Ricky You, Xiqun Michael Chen, Ruimin Li Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19231v1 Estimating large and simulation-intensive discrete choice models (DCMs) requires repeated evaluation of utilities, probabilities, derivatives, and simulated likelihoods over many observations, alternatives, and draws. Existing DCM software provides mature econometric workflows, while recent GPU-oriented tools accelerate selected models, leaving a gap between econometric coverage and scalable differentiable computation. We introduce TorchDCM, an open Python package for discrete choice modeling that compiles choice data and model specifications into a unified PyTorch-native likelihood engine for estimation, inference, prediction, and structured reporting on CPU or CUDA devices. The package covers the principal econometric functionality available across Biogeme and Apollo, including multinomial, nested, mixed, ordered, latent-variable, and panel likelihoods. It also supports ragged choice sets, constrained parameters, covariance estimation, willingness-to-pay analysis, elasticities, and extensible likelihood components. We evaluate TorchDCM against seven other estimation packages in aligned synthetic and real-data full-estimation experiments. TorchDCM completes all 45 synthetic cases, runs fastest in every comparable synthetic case, and satisfies the prespecified final-log-likelihood tolerance in every comparison with at least two comparable solutions. More precisely, it reduces median runtime by 89.1%-99.7% relative to Biogeme and Apollo across model-data settings. CUDA provides an additional 12.0-71.0x speedup over single-core TorchDCM. These results establish a scalable and reproducible foundation for econometric estimation and differentiable choice-model development. The open-source package and executed examples are available at https://github.com/mbc96325/torchdcm. --- ### Detecting and Discriminating Operator Misspecification in Hybrid PDE-Parameter Learning: a Reference-Free Instrument, with Discrimination Bounded In Sample Authors: Eric Fock Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16925v1 We build an instrument that reads, from a single fit and with no oracle, whether the operator a hybrid PDE-parameter estimator postulates is wrong-and separates that from a merely unidentifiable parameter. On one self-adjoint parabolic inverse problem, an information-matrix statistic with plug-in scale and per-seed parameter has median 0.19 under correct specification, rejection rate $0.033$ against a pre-registered ceiling of $0.10$, and rises to $224$ and $85$ under two misspecifications, firing in every replicate. On a correctly specified but non-identifiable design it stays mute-$0.050$ at $n=200$, Clopper-Pearson $(0.024, 0.090)$-while a rank statistic collapses to zero at a pre-registered boundary $c_5^*=2.15\times10^{-3}.$ Two readings of one fit therefore separate the two failures across the three designs a deployable test reaches. That separation is the contribution; detection alone is a crowded flank. In sample it is a bound, out of sample a direction. It is needed because the usual accuracy check is blind: the misspecified estimator's in-domain RMSE is $2.7\times 10^{-2}$, below the observation noise for $σ\geq 0.05,$ while the coefficient is wrong by $29.7\%$ at zero noise, $31.2\%$ at the loudest. Nor is the failure architectural: a one-parameter curve fit, a bare parameter and multilayer perceptrons of $49$ and $241$ parameters converge to the same pseudo-true, matched in closed form to $0.07\%,$ whereas a physics-informed network, with its composite objective, converges to a disjoint one. We report where the instrument is blind, a pre-registered negative where a neural estimator loses to Tikhonov-regularized inversion at recovery, and the hypothesis under which its guarantee holds but a trained network violates it. --- ### WIP: LLM Odyssey: A Game-Based Platform for Teaching LLM Engineering Concepts Authors: Priyamvada Tripathi Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16924v1 This work-in-progress (WIP) innovative practice category paper presents LLM Odyssey, an open source, browser-based serious gaming platform comprising 13 interactive games for teaching Large Language Model (LLM) engineering concepts. Topics such as tokenization, transformer architecture, prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and production deployment are underrepresented in computer science curricula. Existing interactive tools address individual concepts but lack pedagogical scaffolding or structured learning pathways. LLM Odyssey addresses this gap through three learning tiers aligned with Bloom's revised taxonomy: Cognitive Core (7 foundational games), Systems Forge (5 production engineering games), and Foundry Arena (capstone challenges). Each game incorporates five pedagogical strategies drawn from the literature: immediate formative feedback, scaffolded hints grounded in the Zone of Proximal Development, progressive difficulty informed by flow theory, worked examples to manage cognitive load, and authentic scenarios drawn from production practice. The platform was deployed in Winter 2026 semester at a Canadian college for an initial review. Feedback confirmed functional requirements and identified adaptive difficulty as a priority for future development. A formal mixed methods evaluation protocol (N=50) has been designed, comprising pre and post knowledge tests, validated surveys, engagement analytics, and interviews, and is documented here to enable future evaluation studies with the publicly available platform. --- ### Network Denoising Revisited: A Ricci-Flow-Inspired Graph Diffusion Method Authors: Ye Fang, Chuan-Xian Ren Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.SI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16923v1 Networks provide a fundamental representation of relationships among entities. However, real-world networks are often corrupted by noise caused by measurement errors and inherent stochasticity, hindering the discovery of meaningful structure. Most denoising methods rely on similarity-driven diffusion and ignore the non-Euclidean geometry of graphs, where local variations induce heterogeneous information transport. This motivates a geometric revisit of network denoising. In this work, we propose Ricci-Diffusion, a curvature-guided graph diffusion method inspired by Ricci flow. Specifically, Ricci-Diffusion exhibits a Ricci-flow-like evolution, in which relative edge-level curvature modulates local transport in the diffusion kernel and guides edge-weight updates toward a more regular graph geometry. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that curvature can distinguish graph structures that common similarity-driven diffusion kernels fail to separate, and that curvature induces first-order corrections in one-step diffusion updates. The resulting diffusion process explicitly characterizes transport heterogeneity across local geometries and admits theoretical convergence to a stable denoised network. Results on real-world and synthetic graphs show that curvature-guided updates and curvature homogenization improve structure recovery and downstream performance. --- ### When Agentic Executions Fail: Detecting and Localizing Runtime Faults from Telemetry Authors: Chenkai Zhang, Yiran Li, Yifang Tian, Michalis Bachras, Hans-Arno Jacobsen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14680v1 Reliability in LLM-based agentic systems is a property of the whole execution (its tool calls, model calls, guardrails, and inter-agent messages), not of the final answer alone, yet evaluating only task outcomes reveals little about how or why a run fails. We present AGENTCHAOSBENCH, a benchmark for detecting and localizing runtime faults in agentic systems from their execution telemetry. We run five heterogeneous applications that coordinate agents over the Agent-to-Agent protocol and call tools through the Model Context Protocol, and inject ten types of operational fault (unavailable or slow tools, corrupted or oversized responses, and delayed, looped, or misrouted delegations and bypassed guardrails) at their tool, model, guardrail, and inter-agent boundaries, alongside a no-fault control. The resulting dataset contains 275 sanitized traces: 250 faulty executions spanning ten fault types and 25 no-fault controls. Each faulty trace is aligned with the no-fault execution of the same input; fault-type labels and, where applicable, location labels are held out from diagnosis. On structured single-trace inputs, a first set of zero-shot LLM baselines shows the task is far from solved: local detectors up to 14B parameters reach only 13.6-19.2% top-1 fault-type accuracy and the frontier DeepSeek-v4-pro only 24.8%, while jointly identifying the fault type and its location tops out at 22%; reference-dependent faults (above all a bypassed guardrail) stay near-unsolved from a single trace. An aligned reference improves selected relative faults but does not resolve guardrail bypass. The held-out labels and compact prediction format support reproducible comparison of LLM-based and non-LLM diagnosis methods. --- ### Information-Theoretic Causal Modelling of Semiconductor Process Dynamics Authors: Daniel Sørensen, Giorgio Melchiorre, Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Sandip Halder, Roel Wuyts, Bappaditya Dey Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14678v1 With the progress of the semiconductor industry toward increasingly complex compute devices and tighter process tolerances, advanced process control has become crucial. This work explores a novel framework to infer the underlying dynamics of semiconductor processes, directly from raw equipment log-file time-series data. By modelling the tool dynamics as a stochastic dynamical system comprising (a) a deterministic component and (b) a stochastic component, we estimate entropy transfer rates between variables through the Liang-Kleeman and Pires formalism. Preliminary results indicated that 7.5% of the inferred dependencies were known, 36.0% were plausible, 17.5% represented previously uncharacterised relationships, and 39.0% were inconsistent with established process knowledge. These findings demonstrate the framework's capability to uncover novel causal insights, while motivating further improvements to reduce inconsistent findings. --- ### Offline Ambient-Controlled Latent Diffusion: Architecture, Telemetry, and On-Device Evaluation Authors: Lech Kalinowski, Artur Morys-Magiera, Piotr Miłkowski Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14677v1 Most mobile image-generation applications are thin clients over cloud services, leaving outputs hard to audit. We present an Android latent-diffusion application that runs entirely on-device and is driven by the ambient-light sensor rather than a text prompt, keeping generation, telemetry, and storage local. The contribution is not a new diffusion method but the surrounding measurement workflow: each output is bound to the sensor reading, runtime path, and seed that produced it, giving a per-artifact audit trail for offline analysis. On a single Samsung foldable, one fixed capture of 373 artifacts shows the controller's log-lux input positively associated with output luminance (Pearson $r=0.532$, 95\% CI $(0.455, 0.601)$), confirming the ambient dependency survives denoising and VAE decoding, while the latent UNet/VAE pipeline runs at 552--1334\,ms mean latency across three quality tiers under the Android Neural Networks API (NNAPI). --- ### Phase-Aware CNN for Real-Time 5G/6G Channel Estimation with Hardware-in-the-loop Validation Authors: Javad Zolfaghari-Bengar, Rakibul Rony, Elisa Gomez-de-Lope, Alejandro Villena-Rodriguez, Abhinav Mahadevan, Nicolas Kourtellis Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14676v1 In 5G/6G wireless systems, accurate and timely channel estimation is critical to ensure reliable communication under complex, fast-changing radio conditions. This work focuses on pilot-based channel estimation using deep learning to reconstruct both magnitude and phase across the full subcarrier grid, with particular emphasis on evaluation using emulated data collected from an end-to-end O-RAN testbed. The testbed includes hardware in the loop and controlled channel emulation to better reflect deployment conditions beyond pure software simulation. It addresses major limitations in classical estimators such as LS and MMSE, as well as deep learning-based approaches that struggle with phase prediction due to discontinuities at $\pm π$, poor generalization to different UE and antenna configurations, and computational inefficiency for real-time deployment. The proposed system combines a phase-aware input encoding using sine and cosine representations with a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. This design achieves high accuracy, stable phase reconstruction, strong generalization across testbed-derived datasets, and real-time inference suitable for edge devices. --- ### Local verification cannot detect non-transportability: a cohomological theory of context preservation in agentic reasoning Authors: Suyash Mishra Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.ET, cs.GT, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11252v1 Agentic AI systems routinely transport conclusions across biological, clinical and financial contexts, and the emerging safeguard is local verification: checking at each step that the entity is representable in the chosen tool, that parameters are compatible, and that outputs cohere with the plan. We prove this class of safeguard is structurally incomplete. Modelling a covering of context space by its nerve and evidence by a real-valued 1-cochain, an agent chaining evidence performs path integration: its conclusion is path-independent if and only if the cochain is exact, and disagreement between valid reasoning paths is exactly the holonomy of a first Cech cohomology class. Hodge decomposition partitions evidence conflict into a gradient part (calibration), a curl part (local inconsistency, visible at triple overlaps) and a harmonic part. Our central result is that no family of simplex-supported consistency checks can distinguish omega from omega+h for harmonic h, which nonetheless generates non-zero disagreement between valid paths; detection requires a statistic on a cycle basis. The resulting procedure, Ksetra, estimates by coboundary projection and gates abstention on the harmonic component, which we give a mechanism: it arises from effect modification combined with overlap-specific population composition, and vanishes to machine precision when effect modification is absent. The degrees of freedom of an evidence network partition into calibration, coherence and transport, yielding an exact F-test for the existence of a global claim; we quantify its distortion under unequal precision and supply the precision-whitened form that restores exactness. Foreign exchange, where the arbitrage-free null makes the cochain exactly a coboundary, serves as a calibration bench: the test is correctly sized, fires on loop arbitrage, and ignores triangular arbitrage. --- ### Variable Selection in the Context of AI Fairness Authors: Ivan Luciano Danesi, Chiara Frigerio, Fabio Maccaferri, Giorgio Alessandro Motta, Pietro Zecca Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11251v1 Fairness in AI systems has become more important with recent regulatory demands, such as the EU AI Act. Traditional approaches often do not take into account philosophical ethics and social awareness. Variable selection processes, in particular, can introduce implicit bias, affecting equity across different subgroups. We discuss a mathematical approach that evaluates fairness in AI, aligning mathematical methodologies with ethical considerations and regulatory requirements. Our aim is to advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration to address fairness, emphasizing the importance of understanding broader ethical and societal contexts. Our approach emphasizes maintaining all potentially relevant variables to allow for more granular fairness assessments and to reduce implicit bias. The findings suggest that the exclusion of sensitive or critical variables may compromise equity between subgroups. In contrast, retaining all relevant variables could reduce implicit bias. Thus, the interdisciplinary approach could provide deeper insight into the ethical implications and compliance with regulatory standards. By integrating a mathematical approach with ethical and social awareness, we suggest more equitable outcomes and responsible AI deployment. This work underscores the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in effectively addressing fairness in AI systems aligned with the objectives of the European Union's AI Act, which seeks to promote trustworthy and fair AI systems. --- ### AgonAlpha: Autonomous Alpha Discovery via Prompt Economy and Scalable Agentic Search Authors: Weicheng Ye, Youran Sun, Xingyu Ren, Shunyao Yu, Chugang Yi, Haizhao Yang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA, q-fin.CP, q-fin.PM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11250v1 Language models can propose many plausible trading factors, but an autonomous research system must also allocate its evaluation budget, verify its own evidence, and preserve how each candidate was produced. We present AgonAlpha, an architecture that searches over frozen research artifacts---hypotheses, executable expressions, platform evidence, rationales, and review status---rather than formulas alone. To our knowledge, AgonAlpha is the first alpha-mining system to combine verified artifact search, a fresh-context adversarial reviewer with re-execution and veto authority, and pending-aware parallel budget allocation, together with a complete public evidence trail. Independent deployments on WorldQuant BRAIN produced SPECTACULAR-grade alphas across five users and six model backends, with Fitness reaching 9.50 and Sharpe reaching 3.48, while retaining prompt-to-expression provenance for every submission. --- ### Diffuse to Compress: Leveraging Diffusion LMs for Lossless Compression Authors: Angelo Nardone, Paolo Ferragina Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11249v1 We study the problem of lossless text compression, motivated by the rapid growth in the collection and storage of digital textual data - including plain text, source code, and structured formats such as XML - and by recent advances in neural language model-based compression. In particular, recent LLM-based approaches, whether built on symbol-ranking pipelines or paired with a statistical compressor, have demonstrated compression ratios significantly superior to general-purpose compressors such as zstd, gzip, or bzip on text and code. However, these neural approaches suffer from severe throughput limitations, making them not yet practically usable. For the first time in the context of lossless neural text compression, we introduce Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) as an alternative inference paradigm to autoregressive LLM-based approaches. We argue that replacing autoregressive LLMs with DLMs within the same compression framework could overcome the throughput bottleneck caused by their one-symbol-per-step limitation. However, achieving these improvements requires addressing algorithmic challenges introduced by applying DLMs to lossless compression, where the architecture allows the number and positions of symbols encoded at each forward pass to be decided independently. We design efficient and effective strategies to solve these challenges and evaluate them experimentally against LLM-based and general-purpose compressors on enwik8, a well-established textual benchmark. Our results show that the newly proposed DLM-based framework advances the state of the art in lossless text compression. Moreover, as DLMs are still a relatively young paradigm, recent advances toward increasingly capable and efficient models suggest substantial room for further improvements. --- ### Real-time physics inversion for retrieval of sub-pixel wildfire temperatures from VSWIR imaging spectroscopy Authors: William R. Keely, Philip G. Brodrick, Katherine Mistick, Adam Chlus, Robert O. Green, Philip E. Dennison Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07580v1 In this work, we present a wildfire temperature retrieval framework for VSWIR imaging spectroscopy data, employed on data from NASA's Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-3). The retrieval framework utilizes a full-physics approach in which a forward model is employed to resolve both solar and emitted radiance derived from a temperature distribution and utilizes the full spectral range in the residual fit. To optimize the forward model retrieval, we use state-of-the-art nonlinear least squares methods implemented for fast convergence on the on-board GPU, allowing for estimation of effective fire temperature within flight cadence. We verify the forward model assumptions on simulated spectra with an injected thermal signature and find good agreement with an RMSE of $41.8$ Kelvin (K). We apply the retrieval over the full 2025 FireSense AVIRIS-3 campaign, totaling 168 overflights with probable active fire spectra, and demonstrate a residual radiance fit of $\leq 10\%$ across bands in the short-wave infrared (SWIR). Lastly, we verify the applicability of the retrieved posterior fire temperature parameters to generalize to space-borne imaging spectrometers such as EMIT, by retrieving at coarsened spatial resolution. We find that the posterior distribution exhibits good coverage of the underlying sub-pixel temperature range with an absolute error of $30$ K across quantiles and a mean absolute error of $27.16$ K between spatial resolutions. --- ### Geometry Beats Estimated Depth: RGB-Only Multi-Camera 3D Tracking under Sim2Real Authors: Abdullah Naeem, Anav Katwal, Ayon Dey, Noman Khan, Md Tamjidul Hoque Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07579v1 The AI City Challenge 2026 Track 1 evaluates multi-camera 3D perception in large indoor warehouses under a synthetic-to-real (Sim2Real) setting; depth is available only for training and validation, so inference is RGB-only. We use two RGB-only routes as a controlled test of one hypothesis: that cross-view geometric consistency, not monocular depth accuracy, governs performance under Sim2Real. The first is a geometry-first pipeline: YOLO11x detection, homography lifting to the world frame, class-level 3D size priors, multi-camera fusion, world-coordinate tracking, and offline tracklet stitching. The second is estimated-depth pseudo-LiDAR: monocular depth (D4RT, Metric3D~v2) back-projected into a fused point cloud and passed to a 3D detector (V-DETR), mirroring prior point-cloud winners that used depth. The gap is decisive: geometry-first reaches 13.0 3D HOTA (51.6 LocA), whereas pseudo-LiDAR collapses to 0.12 (9.2 LocA). We trace the collapse to cross-view inconsistency of monocular depth---scale correction is necessary but not sufficient---which domain-adaptation fine-tuning does not repair within budget. Within the geometry pipeline, offline stitching is the only intervention that helps; SAHI detection, appearance Re-ID, learned lifting, RT-DETR ensembling, test-time augmentation, and domain randomization all fail to beat the baseline detector. The bottlenecks are complementary: detection quality bounds the geometry route (DetA), localization consistency bounds pseudo-LiDAR (LocA). We release a complete, reproducible RGB-only pipeline and ablation. --- ### Open-World Hierarchical Perception: Taxonomic Abstraction over Class-Agnostic Proposals for the Safe Handling of Out-of-Vocabulary Road Objects Authors: Felix Schaller Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07577v1 A closed-set detector for autonomous driving must assign every object one of a fixed set of labels. On an object outside that set (a horse-drawn carriage, road debris, livestock on a rural road) it can only force a confident but wrong specific label or drop the object. Prior work in this series replaced the flat label set with a hierarchical taxonomy and a runtime abstraction rule, but evaluated it only on the boxes a closed detector already produces. This paper takes the layer open-world: we place taxonomic abstraction on top of class-agnostic region proposals so objects the closed detector never boxes can still be classified or flagged; we report a feasibility study of three open-world signals (class-agnostic segmentation, appearance-based out-of-distribution scoring, monocular depth) that shows why no single 2D cue suffices and how they compose; and we run the evaluation the earlier papers could not, a ground-truth leave-classes-out benchmark on real annotated objects. Holding out seven COCO classes and classifying their 235 ground-truth crops, a flat closed head emits a confident wrong specific label 100% of the time (37% of them in the wrong super-category, e.g. an animal named as a vehicle), whereas the hierarchical layer emits zero confident wrong specific labels and safely handles 94% of the objects (a correct super-category, or an explicit UNKNOWN OBSTACLE). We are explicit that this is a safety result, not a specificity one: the correct super-category is recovered only 26% of the time and the remaining 69% are conservatively flagged unknown. The contribution is an open-world perception layer that never makes a confident categorical mistake on an out-of-vocabulary object, together with an honest account of its cost. --- ### Beyond Isotropic Assumptions: Continuity-Constrained Segmentation and GPU Morphometry for Nanoscale GBM Analysis Authors: Arash Fatehi, Robin Ebbestad, Linus Butt, Hans Blom, Sigrid Lundberg, Hannes Olauson, Hjalmar Brismar, David Unnersjö-Jess, Thomas Benzing, Katarzyna Bozek Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07575v1 Confocal microscopy of optically cleared and swelled tissue resolves complex biological structures in 3D, but such acquisitions are highly anisotropic: along the under-sampled axial direction the structure can appear discontinuous, hampering reconstruction and automated quantitative analysis. The usual remedy upsamples the axial dimension to an isotropic volume before training a segmentation model, which requires dense annotations in the upsampled space, a prohibitive labeling burden. We present an end-to-end, GPU-accelerated framework that overcomes this without additional annotations. The model is trained on the native acquisition volume; random rotation of training patches leverages the well-resolved lateral plane to supply the missing axial information, and a z-axis continuity loss keeps neighboring slices consistent. We adapt both a convolutional (3D U-Net) and a transformer (SwinUNETR) backbone, aggregate overlapping patches by Gaussian consensus, and compute point-spread-function-corrected membrane thickness by ray-surface intersection on the GPU. We apply the method to the glomerular basement membrane (GBM), a thin, highly convoluted part of the kidney's filtration barrier that grows more irregular in disease. Segmentation accuracy matches inter-expert agreement. Continuity-aware training improves reconstruction smoothness and suppresses a periodic terracing artifact at minimal accuracy cost. We quantify GBM thickness across the reconstructed 3D surface and capture disease-related thickening, enabling fully automated anisotropic 3D morphometry of biological structures without dense volumetric labels or image restoration. --- ### Multimodal Skin Lesion Classification with Swin Transformer and Clinical Metadata Fusion Authors: Nethmi Pathirana, Isuru Munasinghe, Dileeka Alwis Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07574v1 Skin lesion classification plays an important role in supporting the early diagnosis of skin cancer. However, automated analysis remains challenging due to class imbalance, inter-class similarity, and intra-class variability in dermoscopic images. This paper proposes a multimodal classification framework that combines Swin Transformer-based image features with structured clinical metadata to improve diagnostic performance through integrated visual-context learning. Experiments on a publicly available dataset show that the proposed model achieves a test accuracy of 92.55% and a macro F1-score of 91.33%, with strong performance across minority classes. Temperature scaling is applied as a post-hoc calibration method, resulting in a reduction in expected calibration error and improving prediction reliability, while uncertainty estimation is incorporated to further assess the confidence of model predictions. Qualitative explainability analysis further shows that the model focuses on lesion regions during inference. Therefore, the results demonstrate that multimodal fusion, combined with calibration and interpretability analysis, provides an effective and trustworthy approach for automated skin lesion classification. --- ### BRACE: Taming Sharp Irregularities via Barycentric Rational Forecasting for Fast Diffusion Transformers Inference Authors: Jinlong Yang, Jinke Wu, Lizilin, Yao Zhou Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07572v2 Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in high-fidelity image and video generation. To alleviate their massive computational overhead, temporal feature caching has been proposed to bypass redundant computations. However, existing cache-then-forecast methods driven by derivative-based polynomials often cause severe quality degradation under high acceleration due to unstable long-step predictions. To address this bottleneck, we propose Barycentric Rational Forecasting with Chebyshev Enhancement (BRACE). Motivated by the observation that DiT feature trajectories are globally smooth yet frequently exhibit sharp irregularities and local non-smoothness, BRACE shifts the paradigm from derivative-driven polynomial extrapolation to feature-driven rational forecasting. Specifically, it maintains a local sliding window to cache sparse historical features and leverages adapted Chebyshev weights to formulate a barycentric rational function, directly aggregating these raw features to ensure numerical stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BRACE achieves state-of-the-art quality-efficiency trade-offs across various DiT architectures with negligible computational overhead. --- ### A Review of Vision-Based Vehicle Detection for UAV-Based Traffic Monitoring: Experimental Insights and Future Directions Authors: Jianlin Ye, Christos Kyrkou Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07571v1 In Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based surveillance offers an innovative solution to traffic surveillance with wide coverage and real-time data collection capabilities. In comparison to fixed ground-based infrastructure, UAVs are able to respond to dynamic traffic but present challenges such as vehicle detection at varying altitudes, compensation for motion-induced image variations and efficient processing of high-resolution images. Deep learning has been largely beneficial on improving the detection accuracy; however, for practical deployment, a critical assessment of the accuracy, latency, and harmonization with current transportation systems needs to be carefully considered. This survey reviews recent advancements in the UAV-based traffic monitoring, with a primary focus being deep neural network models for traffic analytics in various urban settings. Three main challenges identified in the literature are ensuring compatibility with traffic control systems, achieving real-time processing to optimize traffic flow, and maintaining robust detection in different environmental conditions. Existing solutions often lack comprehensive frameworks for utilizing UAV captured data to respond to incidents and manage traffic effectively. Future research should focus on optimal detection models, edge processing, and adaptive control integration to improve the responsiveness of urban traffic management. --- ### COMEX: A Composition-Grounded Benchmark and Learning Framework for Explainable Aesthetic Image Cropping Authors: Rui Yang, Wei Zhou, Dingyong Gou, Xiaohui Cui, Cong Li, Yinyin Gong, Yipo Huang, Jiliang Zhao Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07570v1 Explainable aesthetic image cropping requires not only localizing a visually pleasing crop but also explaining why it is preferred. Existing crop-and-explain methods largely treat explanation as post-hoc text generation and overlook composition, a key aesthetic factor that links crop decisions with interpretable reasoning. In this paper, we reformulate explainable aesthetic image cropping as a structured crop-composition-explanation problem. To support this setting, we introduce COMEX, a new benchmark built through image expansion and an IO-reversal pipeline. COMEX contains 33,161 quadruples, each consisting of an expanded image, a crop box, a composition category, and a composition-grounded explanation, enabling joint learning of crop localization, composition understanding, and explanation generation. We further propose a two-stage SFT+GRPO framework, where supervised fine-tuning establishes the structured output protocol and basic cropping ability, and GRPO further improves crop quality, composition prediction, and explanation faithfulness. We benchmark 15 large vision-language models and existing cropping methods on COMEX, establishing a comprehensive testbed for composition-grounded explainable aesthetic cropping. Experiments on both COMEX and prior benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of our framework, with strong performance across evaluation metrics. --- ### Latent-Frequency Validity: Fast Spectral Editing with Screened Video-VAE Transfer Operators Authors: Bowen Xue, Jiafeng Xiong, Xin Quan Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07569v1 Direct spectral editing in video-VAE latents can control noise, flicker, smoothness, and frequency content without a decode--filter--reencode pass. However, video VAEs may redistribute pixel-space frequency bands across latent channels, and latent edits can disrupt VAE round-trip dynamics. We introduce \emph{latent-frequency validity} (LFV), which learns a compact VAE-specific spectral response and deploys it only when it improves decoded-target fidelity without worsening round-trip drift. LFV follows a validation-selected path from a diagonal per-frequency calibrator (C1) to full channel mixing (CM), making cross-channel capacity a controllable per-edit resource. Across 544 VAE--edit cells spanning six spectral families, LFV emits 423 cheap operators: 277 are handled by C1, while 146 (34.5\% of emitted operators) require channel mixing. On the primary 120-cell radial sweep, 99/100 emitted operators pass source-video-grouped held-out evaluation. Across five additional filter families, all 323 emitted operators pass held-out evaluation. Fully frozen OpenVid-fitted operators, including the validation-selected path coefficient, pass all 20 tested CogVideoX and HunyuanVideo generated-domain cells without adaptation. The selected response matches direct latent-filter latency and is about $3\times$ faster than pixel filter--reencode. The resulting maps reveal distinct VAE regimes, including strongly channel-coupled CogVideoX responses and a sharp Open-Sora high-band stability frontier. --- ### Learning to Predict Middle-Layer Attention in MLLMs for Visual Token Pruning Authors: Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang, Hao Geng, Minjun Yu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06411v2 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, but their efficiency is limited by the cost of processing numerous visual tokens. Visual token pruning can reduce this cost, but requires accurate token importance estimates. Recent studies have demonstrated that text-to-vision attention from middle language model layers can effectively guide visual token pruning, typically using attention from a predefined middle layer to select the visual tokens to retain. Two problems therefore remain. First, our analysis shows that the layer whose attention is most responsive to the question varies substantially across samples, making a fixed layer suboptimal. Second, obtaining attention from the appropriate middle layer requires processing numerous visual tokens through several language model layers, by which point considerable computation has already been spent. To address both problems, we propose Middle-layer Attention Prediction (MAP), which uses Question Contrastive Teacher Selection to identify a sample-specific teacher layer by contrasting attention under the original and reference questions, and distills attention from the selected layer into a lightweight predictor that estimates visual token importance from multi-modal input features. During inference, MAP combines the predicted importance scores with a diversity criterion to prune visual tokens before the first language model layer. Thus, MAP requires no attention maps for pruning and remains compatible with existing inference acceleration techniques. Across ten benchmarks on LLaVA-NeXT-7B, MAP retains 97.5% of the unpruned model performance with only 5.56% of the visual tokens, yielding a 3.09x end-to-end speedup. --- ### Post-Hoc Trajectory-Risk Certification for Modular LLM-Based Security Agents Authors: Zhenpeng Li Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05199v1 Autonomous security agents operate as staged pipelines, such as classifying network traffic and then attributing attacks to a specific technique. Split conformal prediction gives each stage finite-sample coverage, but deployment requires a trajectory-level guarantee across the full chain. These guarantees do not compose automatically when stages are independently trained and calibrated. Bonferroni allocation is distribution-free but conservative under correlated errors. We show that a natural pairwise-correlation extension to three or more stages is invalid because it gives a lower rather than an upper bound, and derive a valid spanning-tree alternative. We distinguish whether stages are dependent from whether an audit sample is large enough to certify that dependence, and give matching upper and information-theoretic lower sample-complexity bounds. We also show that coarse-to-fine label selection can create near-perfect measured correlation without learned dependence. On a two-stage intrusion-detection pipeline across 6 open LLMs and 2 datasets, removing this artifact reduces measured correlation from near 1 to 0-0.78. A direct audit of trajectory failure becomes 13.7% tighter than Bonferroni once the audit reaches the required sample size, but is worse when undersized. A modular certificate using per-stage certificates and a pairwise overlap bound yields a positive average gain of 0.6%, quantifying the cost of lacking joint access. Same-model, cross-model, and permuted-pairing tests show that residual dependence reflects shared sample difficulty, not shared model representations. Average trajectory coverage across 12 configurations is 92.7% +/- 2.4% at alpha = 0.10. Under cross-dataset deployment, single-step miscoverage reaches 100% even when accuracy remains 78%, showing that distribution shift destroys calibrated confidence before raw accuracy. --- ### MS-MLB: An Open Machine Learning Benchmark for Blood-Based MS Classification Authors: Adam Simson, Ankush Dutta, Quang Bui Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05196v1 Multiple sclerosis (MS) is diagnosed through clinical assessment, magnetic resonance imaging, laboratory evidence when appropriate, and exclusion of better explanations. Blood RNA expression data may contain disease associated immune signal, but a blood RNA classifier cannot be treated as a replacement for clinical diagnosis. This paper presents MS-MLB (Multiple Sclerosis Machine Learning Benchmark), a reproducible open benchmark for machine learning based MS research classification from whole blood RNA expression data. MS-MLB uses the public GSE17048 cohort, converts it into an MS versus healthy control task, and evaluates multiple algorithms under a shared, leakage controlled pipeline that a researcher can rerun without reconfiguring the evaluation. The evaluation includes nested cross-validation, an untouched stratified holdout set, bootstrap confidence intervals, ROC and precision recall analysis, calibration measurement, and an exploratory MS Research Score. In the final benchmark summary, Gradient Boosting ranked first by MS Research Score on the holdout set, with an MS Research Score of 93.83, AUC-ROC of 0.989, sensitivity of 0.950, specificity of 0.778, $F_{1}$ score of 0.927, and Brier score of 0.050. Prior studies have applied machine learning to MS blood transcriptomic data, including PBMC stage classification and whole blood diagnostic signature modeling. The contribution here is different and narrower. To our knowledge, MS-MLB is the first open benchmark focused on MS versus healthy control classification from GSE17048 whole blood RNA expression data with a documented external model submission pathway built into the framework. The score is intended for research comparison only and has not been clinically validated. The benchmark is accessible here: https://github.com/duckyquang/MS-MLB. --- ### OneDayAgent: Towards a Long-Horizon Harness for Autonomous Agents Authors: Jingsheng Zheng, Xinyuan Fang, Jintian Zhang, Zhengke Gui, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05013v1 LLM agents are increasingly applied to open-ended everyday requests that span work, study, and life. These tasks are long-horizon, cross-environment, and multimodal, forcing the agent to preserve goals and constraints across many steps while navigating heterogeneous tools and attachments. While prior work has addressed individual failure modes such as goals drift, states loss, and context overflow, whether a single harness can manage them jointly and remain effective across backends has received less study. We present OneDayAgent, a long-horizon harness for autonomous agents. OneDayAgent turns an open-ended request into a managed execution process that decomposes tasks into bounded subtasks, maintains execution memory under context pressure, and verifies and repairs the final deliverable. We evaluate OneDayAgent on AgentIF-OneDay across 104 tasks. With the GLM-5.2 backend, OneDayAgent sets a new state of the art with an overall score of 0.821. The same harness runs across five backend LLMs from three model families, indicating the harness generalizes across backends without tuning, even as different models induce distinct execution styles under the same workflow. --- ### Binding Biometrics with AI Agent Identifiers for Delegation of Authority Authors: Joseph Geo Benjamin, Anil K Jain, Karthik Nandakumar Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04292v2 The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems has raised serious questions about the accountability for tasks performed by AI agents. Ideally, an AI agent must not be allowed to perform critical tasks without explicit authorization by a human operator. Since biometric recognition is one of the most reliable approaches for authenticating individuals, it has the potential to enable authenticated delegation of authority to AI agents. In this work, we present a framework called BIND, which leverages ideas from the field of biometric cryptosystems, to securely bind biometric data of the human user to the AI agent identity (ID) and authority scope (task-specific constraints) at the time of agent authorization. This token/identifier can be presented by the AI agent to an Identity Auditor, who simultaneously performs biometric authentication and recovers the agent ID and scope, thereby enabling real-time user authentication and establishing a non-repudiable proof of human control and delegation of authority. We also provide a practical implementation of the proposed BIND framework based on face features extracted using standard deep neural network models. To facilitate this implementation, we propose a feature adaptation module that transforms real-valued feature embeddings into fixed-length binary representations suitable for a fuzzy commitment construct based on turbo error correcting codes. Experiments demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed face cryptosystem, achieving a True Match Rate of $96\%$ at zero False Match Rate and supporting $1024$-bit agent tokens. --- ### Binding Biometrics with AI Agent Identifiers for Delegation of Authority Authors: Joseph Geo Benjamin, Anil K Jain, Karthik Nandakumar Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04292v1 The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems has raised serious questions about the accountability for tasks performed by AI agents. Ideally, an AI agent must not be allowed to perform critical tasks without explicit authorization by a human operator. Since biometric recognition is one of the most reliable approaches for authenticating individuals, it has the potential to enable authenticated delegation of authority to AI agents. In this work, we present a framework called BIND, which leverages ideas from the field of biometric cryptosystems, to securely bind biometric data of the human user to the AI agent identity (ID) and authority scope (task-specific constraints) at the time of agent authorization. This token/identifier can be presented by the AI agent to an Identity Auditor, who simultaneously performs biometric authentication and recovers the agent ID and scope, thereby enabling real-time user authentication and establishing a non-repudiable proof of human control and delegation of authority. We also provide a practical implementation of the proposed BIND framework based on face features extracted using standard deep neural network models. To facilitate this implementation, we propose a feature adaptation module that transforms real-valued feature embeddings into fixed-length binary representations suitable for a fuzzy commitment construct based on turbo error correcting codes. Experiments demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed face cryptosystem, achieving a True Match Rate of $96\%$ at zero False Match Rate and supporting $1024$-bit agent tokens. --- ### SafeCommit: Certifying When Memory-Grounded Agents May Safely Act Authors: Mayur Akewar, Ravi Ranjan Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04289v1 Long-horizon agents increasingly use persistent memory and tools to take actions with external side effects. A central failure mode is premature commitment: an agent acts before resolving whether its memory grounding is stale, conflicting, incomplete, or corrupted. We formalize this problem as safe commitment under memory uncertainty and introduce SafeCommit, a risk controlled layer between agent reasoning and external execution. The layer constructs a calibrated set of plausible latent worlds from memory, observations, tool outputs, provenance, and policy constraints. It permits a side effectful action only when a conformal action certificate shows that the action is safe in every retained world. Otherwise, it selects a low-side-effect probe that targets the worlds blocking certification, or returns a conservative fallback. Under calibrated world coverage, the probability of an unsafe certified commit is at most the target level α; with imperfect world proposal, the bound separates calibration and representation error. A dependency-free controlled simulator illustrates the safety-utility tradeoff and reproduces all reported results with one command. The goal is to offer a concrete approach for deciding not only what an agent should do, but when the available evidence is sufficient to safely do it. --- ### Sample Complexity of Multicalibration for Multilevel Properties Authors: Jiuyao Lu, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Aleksandr Podkopaev, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04288v1 Calibration requires a predictor to be unbiased after conditioning on its own predictions. Multicalibration asks for this guarantee simultaneously across a collection of groups. Many prediction tasks ask for several related features of the same conditional outcome distribution: variance is defined relative to the mean, skewness relative to both mean and variance, and conditional value at risk relative to a quantile. We study multicalibration for a sequence of $k$ properties in which each property is identifiable once the preceding properties are fixed. This framework includes Bayes pairs but does not require the properties to arise from a single loss. For every fixed $k\ge2$, we establish matching upper and lower sample-complexity bounds up to logarithmic factors under regularity conditions. Even with only polylogarithmically many binary groups, achieving multicalibration error $\varepsilon$ requires $\widetildeΩ(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)})$ samples. Conversely, for any finite group family $\mathcal G$, we give a randomized learner using $O(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)}+\varepsilon^{-2}\log|\mathcal G|)$ samples. Thus the sample complexity is $\widetildeΘ(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)})$ for polynomial-size group families. We instantiate the theory for three canonical examples. --- ### Eliciting Intrinsic Hallucinations in LLMs via Semantically Equivalent Adversarial Attacks Authors: Atri Vivek Sharma, Brian Formento, Alessio Lomuscio Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04286v1 Large language models (LLMs) are often used in conjunction with external knowledge sources to improve their factual accuracy and decrease hallucinations, through methods such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, these systems remain susceptible to intrinsic hallucinations, where the model generates unfaithful or fabricated information that is not supported by the retrieved evidence. We propose a novel framework to assess model robustness against this phenomenon by stress-testing using natural, semantically equivalent variations of a user query found via adversarial optimization methods. We apply our framework, which enforces strict semantic equivalence constraints and an intrinsic hallucination objective, to a range of adversarial attack techniques across white-box, gray-box, and black-box adversarial settings. Evaluating these attacks on 5 open-source and 5 closed-source generator models across 3 datasets, we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models are highly susceptible to meaning-preserving perturbations, which significantly degrade contextual faithfulness (by up to 50% for GPT-5-mini). Our findings indicate that faithful use of in-context evidence remains fragile even in state-of-the-art LLMs, motivating architectures and training objectives that enforce robust grounding independent of surface query form. Code is available at: https://github.com/atriviveksharma/intrinsic_hall --- ### The RAIL Principles for Neurosymbolic AI: Reasoning, Assurances, Interfacing and Learning Authors: Agnese Chiatti, Michael Cochez, Cristina Cornelio, Sebastijan Dumancic, Artur d'Avila Garcez, Luis C. Lamb, Lia Morra, Mathias Niepert, Robert Peharz, Alberto Speranzon, Maarten Stol, Annette Ten Teije et al. Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04285v1 Neurosymbolic AI systems that integrate machine learning and symbolic reasoning are rapidly gaining attention. They complement the data-intensive statistical approaches of neural networks and language models with symbolic reasoning algorithms to function in high-stakes domains or in low-data regimes that characterize many real-world applications. We argue that the neurosymbolic combination of machine learning and formal reasoning is not a niche approach within AI, but rather includes many already successful techniques that are of crucial importance to the development of reliable, efficient and, ultimately, trustworthy systems. This perspective prompts a re-examination of the design of current AI systems. We show that many leading AI systems, including some that are not traditionally considered as neurosymbolic, can be analysed from the perspective of four principles of neurosymbolic AI design: Reasoning, Assurances, Interfacing and Learning (RAIL). Applying the RAIL framework offers a unified view of seemingly disparate AI systems, ranging from physics-aware machine learning to neuro-guided search (such as Google DeepMind's Alpha-* suite), causal learning and tool-augmented Large Language Models. Importantly, the RAIL principles will enable engineers to make better-informed and more principled decisions about the design and deployment of production-level AI systems. In this article, we introduce the RAIL principles, examine how they can be applied across major areas of AI, and illustrate how they may guide practitioners to integrate neurosymbolic methods into next-generation AI technologies. --- ### EA-Graph: Artifact-Anchored Verification Memory for Coding Agents under Upstream Drift Authors: Hwai-Jung Hsu, Cheng-Jan Chi, Hanna Everett Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04278v1 Coding agents increasingly work across sessions, but prose notes can preserve a conclusion without the program state that supported it. After an upstream change, a repository may still build even though earlier verification claims are no longer valid. EA-Graph is an artifact-anchored memory for verification claims. It represents artifacts at sub-path granularity, resolves aliases to leaf definitions, anchors each claim to the content used to establish it, and keeps evidence strength separate from freshness. When replacement content is unavailable, the claim becomes unprovable rather than guessed. EA-Graph is evaluated on generated repositories whose behavior-to-artifact ground truth is known by construction. The task is to classify prior claims as unaffected, affected, or unprovable after value drift, logic drift, and deliberately withheld upstream content. The analysis covers 42 sessions across seven clean worlds, 14 model-world instances, three memory conditions, and two model tiers. In the Haiku round, artifact-anchored memory outscored prose notes and no persistent memory in all seven worlds; each exact paired Wilcoxon comparison yielded p = 0.0156. In the Sonnet round, the anchored condition was perfect, but frequent control ceilings left the preregistered contrasts non-significant. No session fabricated withheld content. These results support a bounded claim: artifact-anchored memory improved the smaller model's provability judgments in this testbed. An exploratory comparison further suggests that structured claim memory may narrow a capability gap by externalizing in-session re-derivation, but it does not establish cross- model equivalence. The study makes no claim about efficiency or repair quality. --- ### Compass: Continuously Aligning Social Media Feeds via In-Situ Reflections Authors: Aadit Barua, Leijie Wang, Amy X. Zhang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04274v1 Social media recommendation feeds often optimize for users' immediate impulses rather than preferences they would hold after deeper reflection. Some systems address this misalignment by incorporating users' explicit preferences via a configuration page or in-feed controls instead of just behavioral signals. However, users typically have evolving preferences, and their stated preferences and behavior naturally diverge, necessitating continuous reflection and feed realignment. But existing strategies require the user to take initiative and are often effortful; as a result, in practice they are rarely invoked. We present Compass, a system that aligns a user's feed with their reflective preferences by helping users reflect on and articulate their preferences given their behavior. To enable continuous reflection during everyday browsing, Compass surfaces in-situ reflections via lightweight notifications, while feed alignment is achieved by periodically simulating behavioral signals and directly manipulating feed content. We embedded Compass within YouTube Shorts and compared it against a baseline without continuous support through a 10-day field study (N=15). We found that Compass promoted more reflective and purposeful feed consumption, iterative preference adjustment, and stronger feed alignment, without sacrificing the casual nature of feed browsing. --- ### LLM-based Vulnerability Discovery in Business Process Documentation Authors: Ben Falchuk, Himanshu Garg, Euthimios Panagos, Sioan Zohar Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04271v1 Just like software and hardware, business processes are susceptible to vulnerabilities that can lead to product quality issues, delays, and increased costs. Business process vulnerabilities can arise from a variety of sources, including conflicting requirements, ambiguous documentation, invalid measurement spec-ifications, omission of quality checks, or implementations that differ from speci-fications. MIRABELLE is a system that identifies and characterizes business logic (BL) vulnerabilities from available business process representations, in-cluding ISO 9000/9001 documentation, user guides, work instructions, and pro-cess execution logs. MIRABELLE leverages recent advances in AI/ML to pro-cess available business process documentation and generate attributed graph rep-resentations of the business logic that can be processed using both graph and for-mal logic approaches for identifying potential vulnerabilities. However, extract-ing the business logic (e.g., operation execution sequences, decisions, input/out-put resources) from mostly natural language artifacts is challenging due to the required domain expertise, inherent process complexity, and the sometimes very large volumes of information. This paper focuses on our experimentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) and their role within MIRABELLE. We report on the performance of several LLMs across vital stages of vulnerability detection, from grammatical and technical error-flagging in short phrasings, to complete process structure recovery and extraction. --- ### The Fairness Collapse Phenomenon: Bias Amplification in Language Models Trained on Synthetic Data Authors: Irina Proskurina, Antoine Gourru, Julien Velcin Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04268v1 Generative models trained on artificially generated data have been shown to exhibit model collapse, resulting in significant performance degradation. As synthetic content increasingly contaminates the training corpora of language models, this raises critical concerns about the use of open data in continued pretraining. Although previous work has demonstrated model collapse in language models, it remains unclear whether exposure to synthetic data amplifies or attenuates the social biases already present in pretrained models. Because language models are known to reproduce and amplify demographic stereotypes, recursive training on self-generated data may create a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which biased associations become progressively stronger across generations. We call this hypothesized phenomenon fairness collapse. In this work, we construct controlled training regimes in which models are repeatedly trained on synthetic data using the Bias in Bios dataset. Across experiments, we observe a consistent and concerning pattern: fairness degradation emerges before substantial degradation is reflected by standard language-modeling metrics. This result highlights a critical risk associated with synthetic data contamination in language model training: bias can increase silently before strong indicators of model collapse become apparent. --- ### Strategic Evaluation of Planning Strategies for LLM Agents in Cyber-Physical Systems Authors: J. de Curtò, I. de Zarzà Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04265v1 Evaluations of LLM planning agents largely ask whether a task succeeds or a declared plan is followed. In strategic cyber-physical systems, a stronger question is whether the planning architecture remains appropriate after autonomous participants respond and physics constrains the outcome. We introduce a controlled, physics-grounded benchmark built around planning-induced control trajectories: the ordered planning operations and directives through which an execution architecture acts on other agents and the physical process. It implements predefined, sequential, hierarchical, and search executors in a smart-grid demand-response system with 40 heterogeneous prosumers and an independently simulated radial feeder. The LLM is bounded to typed policy declaration and short operator messages, while schedule construction, prosumer dynamics, and power flow remain explicit code. The protocol uses paired forced-mode counterfactuals, common random response draws, and event-level deadline feasibility. Three properties follow. Architecture materially changes outcomes: forced search is the oracle in all five baseline seeds. Execution fidelity needs more than mode agreement: objective substitution holds agreement at 1.0 while increasing voltage shortfall by 2.68x. A 144-scenario, 576-episode bank has feasible oracles from three of the four architectures. A prespecified stress-held-out ridge has mean regret 90.7 (95% interval (73.8, 108.6)) and no detectable value over fixed sequential; applying known deadline feasibility before quality prediction cuts regret to 29.0 and improves over fixed sequential by 61.1. An all-feasible ablation does not beat fixed search, localising the remaining challenge to within-feasible quality selection. A five-model extension separates stress-conditioned, state-blind, and invariant declarers; latency tails show that live feasibility should be treated probabilistically. --- ### Towards End-to-End Multilingual Metaphor Processing: Integrating Detection, Translation, and Evaluation Authors: Jiahui Liang, Lifeng Han Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04260v1 Metaphorical language remains a major challenge for multilingual natural language processing because successful interpretation and translation require reasoning beyond literal lexical meaning. Existing research has largely investigated metaphor detection, machine translation, and translation evaluation as separate tasks, while little work has explored how these components can be integrated into a unified computational framework. This PhD proposal aims to develop an end-to-end framework for multilingual metaphor processing consisting of three complementary research directions: (1) robust metaphor detection across languages, (2) metaphor-oriented translation evaluation for both human assessment and automatic quality estimation, and (3) joint modelling that connects metaphor detection with translation evaluation. The proposed research will combine linguistic theory with recent advances in large language models to develop new datasets, annotation methodologies, evaluation benchmarks, and automatic evaluation approaches for metaphor-aware machine translation. The expected outcome is a unified framework that improves both the development and evaluation of multilingual NLP systems when processing figurative language. --- ### Geometry-Informed Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Pre-trained Molecular GNNs for Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability Prediction Authors: Marco Vieto Vega, Long D. Nguyen, Binh P. Nguyen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04257v1 Blood-brain barrier permeability (BBBP) prediction is a critical screening task in central nervous system drug discovery, where candidate molecules must be assessed for whether they can cross, or should be prevented from crossing, the blood-brain barrier. However, this task remains challenging because of limited, class-imbalanced datasets and sensitivity to molecular structure. Recent advances in deep learning have established graph neural networks (GNNs) as a powerful approach for molecular representation learning, while pre-trained molecular GNNs provide transferable knowledge for downstream tasks. However, full fine-tuning is often parameter-inefficient and prone to overfitting, whereas existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods mainly adapt node features or the two-dimensional covalent graph, limiting their ability to capture three-dimensional geometry and second-order interactions. To address these limitations, we propose BBBP-GeoPEFT, a geometry-informed PEFT framework for pre-trained molecular GNNs. BBBP-GeoPEFT constructs distance-based graphs at multiple cutoffs and their corresponding line graphs from molecular conformers to capture spatial atom and second-order edge interactions. Lightweight auxiliary geometric graph encoders generate cutoff-specific representations, which are incorporated into each pre-trained layer through node-wise cutoff attention and gated residual connections. This design preserves pre-trained knowledge while incorporating permeability-relevant geometric information with a small trainable-parameter budget. Experiments on a curated BBBP dataset show that BBBP-GeoPEFT achieves competitive performance compared with full fine-tuning and representative PEFT baselines. Under both random and scaffold splitting, BBBP-GeoPEFT achieves competitive or improved ROC-AUC and accuracy in most experiments while updating only 10.1% of the model parameters. --- ### PriDyG: Privacy-preserving Dynamic Graph Inference with LLM-GNN Collaboration Authors: Yuyang Xia, Ruixuan Liu, Li Xiong Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04255v1 Graph inference over relational data can expose sensitive edge information, and this risk becomes more severe in dynamic graphs, where repeated model updates cause privacy loss to accumulate. We formulate Edge-level Differentially Private Dynamic Graph Inference (EDG) and propose PriDyG, a private inference framework that combines GNN-based structural learning with LLM-based semantic reasoning. PriDyG introduces incremental private multi-hop aggregation, which buffers newly arrived edges and processes each edge exactly once. By parallel composition, the total privacy cost equals that of a single static release, independent of the number or schedule of model updates. Compared with geometrically decaying budget allocation, incremental aggregation avoids exponentially increasing noise while preserving exact one-hop signals and at least half of two-hop information transfers. PriDyG further complements privatized GNN outputs with LLM predictions derived solely from node text, incurring no additional edge-level privacy cost. Experiments on four benchmarks for node classification and link prediction show that PriDyG consistently outperforms geometrically decaying baselines under the same privacy budget and matches the utility of naive per-update retraining while reducing cumulative privacy cost by up to three orders of magnitude. --- ### When Is a Conformal Guarantee Fair? Auditing Silent Subgroup Under-Coverage in Alzheimer's Disease Longitudinal Prediction Authors: Lujia Zhong, Xinkai Wang, Shuo Huang, Yonggang Shi Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04254v1 Longitudinal prediction of Alzheimer's disease biomarkers increasingly informs clinical decisions, and a forecast is only useful if it also reports how much to trust it. Conformal prediction supplies this by wrapping any forecaster in a prediction band with a finite-sample coverage guarantee under exchangeability. However, standard population-level conformal prediction guarantees only marginal coverage and may mask substantial under-coverage within clinically important subgroups. We introduce a general mechanism-driven framework for auditing and repairing such subgroup under-coverage. Across two cohorts (ADNI, OASIS-3), two base forecasters, and nine attributes spanning genetic risk, demographics, and clinical severity, we find that population-level bands under-cover high-risk subgroups in 57 of 68 audited combinations, despite achieving nominal marginal coverage. We trace these failures to two mechanisms: (A) \emph{rarity}, where a group-conditional band calibrated on only $n$ patients covers at most $k/(n+1)$; and (B) \emph{tail-heaviness}, where a population-wide band is too narrow for a heavy-tailed subgroup and additional data cannot close the gap. Under-coverage falls disproportionately on patients with high genetic risk and disease severity (6.1 pp mean deficit, 95\% CI (3.3, 8.9)), while demographic groups remain at the target level on average (0.0 pp, CI ($-1.9$, 1.7)). We pair each mechanism with a corresponding conformal correction: cross-conformal pooling for rarity, per-subgroup calibration for tail-heaviness, and a coverage-safe marginal floor when both arise. Together, these corrections restore target coverage for nearly every high-risk subgroup across both cohorts and forecasters. --- ### Dynamical Lie Algebras Cannot Describe Shallow QAOA: Cragged Terrains, Barren Plateaus, and Empirical Hardness Models Authors: Harrison Copp, Charlton Li, Anžej Margeta-Cacace, Amy Qiao Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: quant-ph, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04252v1 The dynamical Lie algebraic (DLA) theory of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) predicts commonplace exponentially vanishing loss and gradient variances for sufficiently deep parametrized circuits. In this work, we show that these predictions fail dramatically in the shallow-circuit (and particularly constant-depth) regime for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the maximum independent set (MIS) problem. In a large-scale numerical study across $\sim$23,000 problem instances, we find that barren plateaus are rare, while landscapes whose variances polynomially increase with system size---which we term "cragged terrains"---are common across graph families. This aggregate polynomial growth persists both for generic, low-symmetry random graphs and for highly symmetric vertex-transitive graphs, indicating that DLA-based variance predictions do not describe landscape scaling in this regime. As a stopgap alternative to the theory, we train empirical hardness models to predict instance-wise hardness metrics for QAOA-MIS. While these models generalize poorly, they nonetheless recover the correct landscape scaling class (barren plateau vs. cragged terrain) with high fidelity. Taken together, our results identify shallow QAOA for MIS as a prototypical setting in which asymptotic, unitary-design-centric predictions may be fundamentally insufficient to describe shallow variational quantum algorithms more broadly, emphasizing the need for more empirically-informed models of VQA loss landscapes. --- ### SAFECAST: Robust Failure Detection for VLA Policies with Contrast-Set Training and Calibration Authors: Harshitha Rajaprakash, Aditeya Prajapati, Rong Xue, Abrar Anwar, Jesse Thomason Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04246v1 Vision-language-action policies often fail under deployment-time distribution shifts such as clutter, distractor objects, lighting changes, novel objects, altered initial states, and reworded instructions. Hidden-state-based risk probes combined with functional conformal prediction can detect rollout failures, but their reliability depends on calibration data matching deployment conditions. We introduce SAFECAST, which leverages contrast set perturbations to improve hidden-state probe training and calibration for deployment time shift. SAFECAST statistically significantly improves failure detection ROC-AUC scores over a state of the art baseline in both real-world DROID and LIBERO simulation experiments across multiple VLM backbones. We further find that SAFECAST benefits most when both visual and language contrast set perturbations are used to augment data, and that with contrast set perturbations, sim-to-real calibration leads to better probes than using real rollout data only. ---