# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 214 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #10651–10700 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/214 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/213.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/215.md) ### DocTrace: Towards Traceable Long Document VQA via Hierarchical Evidence Graph Reasoning Authors: Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03292v1 Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages. Existing approaches, including end-to-end MLLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and document agents, often lack explicit mechanisms to represent and verify how grounded evidence is progressively composed during reasoning, limiting both answer accuracy and traceability. In this paper, we cast LongDocVQA as an explicit evidence graph reasoning problem rather than implicit answer prediction. To this end, we propose DocTrace, a hierarchical framework that progressively performs evidence localization, structured document parsing, and evidence graph reasoning to enable explicit evidence provenance. To effectively learn these capabilities, we develop a two-stage training framework: joint Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) first initializes evidence localization and graph reasoning abilities, followed by task-specific Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with dedicated rewards to further optimize these capabilities. Extensive experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, and SlideVQA demonstrate that DocTrace consistently outperforms both existing open-source baselines and proprietary MLLMs. Compared with the Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct backbone, DocTrace achieves absolute improvements of 14.4, 11.3, and 11.7 points on the three benchmarks, respectively. Beyond competitive performance, DocTrace constructs traceable evidence graphs with explicit node-level provenance, enabling transparent and verifiable reasoning for long document understanding. --- ### The Tell-Tale Trace: Detecting Reasoning Failures in LLMs Using Chain-of-Thought Dynamics Authors: Shashwat Sourav, Aishwarya Balwani Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03291v1 Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model (LLM) performance while also providing an observable interface to the model's reasoning process. Existing approaches that leverage verbalized CoTs to monitor reasoning correctness, however, largely evaluate the semantic correctness or consistency of individual intermediate steps, rather than how the reasoning process evolves across the trace. As a result, failures distributed across the reasoning trajectory, rather than those localized to a single incorrect step, remain comparatively underexplored. Furthermore, verbalized CoTs need not faithfully reflect the model's internal reasoning, motivating analyses that do not treat individual statements as literal accounts of internal computation. In this work, we therefore ask whether the dynamics of visible CoT can be leveraged to systematically distinguish successful from failed reasoning without assuming such semantic faithfulness. We study a range of LLMs on verifiable Boolean satisfiability tasks with variable complexity, enabling controlled comparisons near each model's capability frontier. Tagging CoT sentences by reasoning function reveals premature verification collapse on SAT problems: incorrect traces enter clause checking earlier, repeat similar operations, and finalize sooner. On UNSAT problems, models presumptuously move towards incorrect SAT conclusions, checking candidate assignments rather than deriving contradictions across constructed cases. Subsequently, a targeted proof-search prompt intervention raises Llama3-70B accuracy from 13.3% to 85%, correcting 84.6% of these errors. These results show that capability failures can manifest as distributed, task-dependent changes in the structure of visible reasoning, and that CoT dynamics agnostic to whether the verbalized trace reflects the model's internal computations can help diagnose and correct failures. --- ### Test-Time Scaling for Safe Text-Guided Image Generation via Intermediate Clean Estimates Authors: Jinya Sakurai, Shueicheng Yan, Xun Xu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03284v1 Ensuring safety and policy compliance in text-to-image diffusion models remains a critical challenge, as benign or adversarial prompts can often elicit prohibited content, e.g. nudity and protected intellectual property. While training-based unlearning methods are effective, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic interference with general capabilities. Conversely, existing test-time defenses are primarily prompt-centric, relying on modifying textual descriptions only, and overlook the visual signals for detection. In this paper, we propose to leverage the intermediate clean image estimated during the generation process and employ a sparse margin objective to detect prohibited concepts. When a violation is detected, we immediately intervene by optimizing a structured low-rank residual in the text-conditioning space via truncated backpropagation. This design allows weight-preserving detection, keeps non-violating inference latency nearly unchanged as the maximum budget increases, and offers flexibility in safety performance via test-time scaling. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion v1.4 and v3.5 across nudity removal, IP protection, and style erasure demonstrate superior performance across suppression, fidelity and preservation compared to prior weight-preserving baselines, providing a scalable and flexible solution for safe generative deployment. --- ### AgentPanel: Toward a New Paradigm for Human--AI Collaboration in Exploring Scientific Questions Authors: Zhiyao Cui, Qianyi Wang, Haoyang Yan, Yiqun Zhang, Siyue Ren, Hangfan Zhang, Zelin Tan, Hao Li, Chunjiang Mu, Dexian Cai, Shao Zhang, Chen Zhang et al. Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03283v1 Identifying promising scientific ideas remains an important challenge in research practice. Researchers commonly rely on small-group discussions or one-to-one interactions with a single large language model, yet these approaches often expose them to only a limited range of perspectives and directions. We present AgentPanel, a multi-agent forum for human--AI collaboration in scientific exploration. Heterogeneous agents asynchronously discuss scientific questions in a forum-style environment, while researchers can submit questions, browse and organize candidate ideas, engage agents in follow-up interactions, and optionally generate post-hoc summary reports. We evaluate AgentPanel in terms of idea quality, exploration breadth, interaction effectiveness, candidate-selection efficiency, and practical utility. Offline experiments show that AgentPanel outperforms a centralized multi-agent debate baseline. A human study with 20 participants further shows that users value AgentPanel for perspective diversity and exploration support. In experience-based comparisons with commonly used LLM tools, 65\% of participants favored AgentPanel for both breadth of research directions and overall suitability for early-stage exploration. The platform is publicly available at https://agentpanel.cc/. --- ### 3DGSI-Assessor: A Large-Scale Dataset and An LMM-based Method for 3D Gaussian Splatting Image Quality Assessment Authors: Yuke Xing, Jiarui Wang, William Gordon, Zhu Li, Guangtao Zhai, Yiling Xu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03279v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a dominant representation for real-time novel view synthesis (NVS), yet its storage footprint makes compression indispensable for practical deployment. 3DGS training and compression introduce representation-specific distortions such as floating artifacts and surface scattering, which conventional image quality assessment (IQA) metrics fail to capture. Moreover, the independent compression of geometric and color attributes may lead to decoupled dimension-specific distortions that must be diagnosed separately, yet existing metrics report only a single overall score. To address these gaps, we present 3DGS-IEval-15K+, a large-scale, multi-dimensional IQA dataset for compressed 3DGS, comprising 15,200 images from 10 diverse scenes, produced by 6 representative 3DGS algorithms at systematically designed compression levels and rendered from 20 strategically selected viewpoints spanning both training views and challenging novel views, annotated with 45,600 mean opinion scores (MOSs) across overall, geometry, and color quality. Based on 3DGS-IEval-15K+, we propose 3DGSI-Assessor, an all-in-one 3DGS IQA framework that integrates global semantic and dimension-specific local features within a large multimodal model (LMM), predicting all three dimensions in a single forward pass. 3DGSI-Assessor achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3DGS-IEval-15K+, and exhibits competitive generalization on other NVS benchmarks. Dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/YukeXing/3DGSI-Assessor. --- ### Noise-Aware Shrinkage for Differentially Private Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models Authors: Lele Zheng, Weifeng Kong, Xinyi Zhang, Ke Cheng, Tao Zhang, Yulong Shen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03277v1 Differentially private zeroth-order optimization (DP-ZO) enables memory-efficient private fine-tuning of large language models using only forward evaluations. Existing aggregation-based DP-ZO methods reconstruct model updates at a fixed scale, ignoring that the strength of useful signals varies throughout training. Consequently, noise-dominated updates may receive excessive weight and degrade model utility. To address this issue, we propose SAGE, a noise-aware shrinkage method that adaptively attenuates privatized estimates according to their estimated signal quality. SAGE subtracts the known Gaussian noise variance from the observed second moment to estimate the underlying signal energy, stabilizes this estimate through temporal tracking, and compares its current signal-to-noise level with a warm-up reference to derive a bounded shrinkage factor. As pure post-processing, SAGE requires neither additional privacy budget nor model queries and introduces only constant additional state. Our theoretical analysis shows that shrinkage reduces the quadratic update-risk term faster than the linear descent term, preserving useful descent while limiting the influence of noise-dominated updates. Experiments on RoBERTa-large, OPT-1.3B, and OPT-6.7B demonstrate that SAGE outperforms existing baselines in most settings under the same privacy budgets while preserving the forward-only memory efficiency of DP-ZO. --- ### TaskPress: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Compression via Task-Guided Pruning Authors: Wonpyo Park, Seung-won Hwang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03276v2 Long-context inference with large language models is constrained by the linear growth of the key-value cache to sequence length. While pruning offers mitigation, prevailing methods determine query-specific token importance that cannot be reused across unseen queries. In contrast, we introduce TaskPress, a framework for task-guided, query-agnostic KV cache eviction. Instead of optimizing the cache for a single query, TaskPress constructs a reusable memory representation conditioned on a high-level task guide. The guide functions as a meta-query during prefill to filter irrelevant tokens before downstream queries are issued. In addition, TaskPress leverages quantization scale factors as a zero-cost signal for detecting influential representation outliers, providing an efficient proxy for token importance. Experiments on conducted on various tasks with long context input demonstrate that TaskPress efficiently creates a compact, reusable cache across diverse queries. --- ### TaskPress: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Compression via Task-Guided Pruning Authors: Wonpyo Park, Seung-won Hwang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03276v1 Long-context inference with large language models is constrained by the linear growth of the key-value cache to sequence length. While pruning offers mitigation, prevailing methods determine query-specific token importance that cannot be reused across unseen queries. In contrast, we introduce TaskPress, a framework for task-guided, query-agnostic KV cache eviction. Instead of optimizing the cache for a single query, TaskPress constructs a reusable memory representation conditioned on a high-level task guide. The guide functions as a meta-query during prefill to filter irrelevant tokens before downstream queries are issued. In addition, TaskPress leverages quantization scale factors as a zero-cost signal for detecting influential representation outliers, providing an efficient proxy for token importance. Experiments on conducted on various tasks with long context input demonstrate that TaskPress efficiently creates a compact, reusable cache across diverse queries. --- ### MoEGen: Mixture-of-Experts for Instance-Adaptive LoRA Generation Authors: Yiming Zeng, Lei Lu, Zexin Li, Zhuochun Li, Dehai Min, Shuoqiu Li, Shuyi Liao, Xidong Wu, Zeyu Zhang, Minmei Wang, Yu Zhao, Tingting Yu et al. Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03275v2 Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables efficient adaptation of large language models, but existing MoE-based PEFT methods typically improve capacity by storing multiple full LoRA experts, causing adapter storage to grow linearly with the number of experts and restricting adaptation to a fixed expert pool. We ask whether MoE-based PEFT can produce instance-specific adaptations without explicitly storing a separate LoRA module for each expert. To address this gap, we propose MoEGen, an adaptation framework that shifts MoE-based PEFT from expert selection to expert-conditioned parameter generation. Instead of storing each expert as a full LoRA adapter, MoEGen represents each expert as a small learnable vector, termed an expert code. It routes each input over these vectors and uses their weighted combination to condition a lightweight hypernetwork that generates input-specific low-rank updates. This design decouples expert capacity from adapter storage while enabling instance-conditioned adaptation. Experiments on eight commonsense reasoning benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong static and MoE-based PEFT baselines across three backbones. MoEGen also performs strongly in joint medical and legal-domain adaptation. --- ### MoEGen: Mixture-of-Experts for Instance-Adaptive LoRA Generation Authors: Yiming Zeng, Lei Lu, Zexin Li, Zhuochun Li, Shuoqiu Li, Shuyi Liao, Xidong Wu, Zeyu Zhang, Minmei Wang, Yu Zhao, Tingting Yu, Shangqian Gao Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03275v1 Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables efficient adaptation of large language models, but existing MoE-based PEFT methods typically improve capacity by storing multiple full LoRA experts, causing adapter storage to grow linearly with the number of experts and restricting adaptation to a fixed expert pool. We ask whether MoE-based PEFT can produce instance-specific adaptations without explicitly storing a separate LoRA module for each expert. To address this gap, we propose MoEGen, an adaptation framework that shifts MoE-based PEFT from expert selection to expert-conditioned parameter generation. Instead of storing each expert as a full LoRA adapter, MoEGen represents each expert as a small learnable vector, termed an expert code. It routes each input over these vectors and uses their weighted combination to condition a lightweight hypernetwork that generates input-specific low-rank updates. This design decouples expert capacity from adapter storage while enabling instance-conditioned adaptation. Experiments on eight commonsense reasoning benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong static and MoE-based PEFT baselines across three backbones. MoEGen also performs strongly in joint medical and legal-domain adaptation. --- ### GUI-Lens: Coarse-to-Fine Cropping for GUI Grounding with General-Purpose VLMs Authors: Zichuan Fu, Shirong Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Guojing Li, Yimin Deng, Jingtong Gao, Junjia Qi, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiaopeng Li, Wanyu Wang, Xian Wu et al. Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03270v1 GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the VLM selects the region and scale of the next view, which is cropped and enlarged to provide finer visual details. This process continues over successively focused views until the target is determined. Proposed crops and clicks are checked against the instruction throughout the process, and the final local position is mapped back to the original screen coordinates. Experiments on four GUI grounding benchmarks and three general-purpose VLM backends show that GUI-Lens improves overall grounding accuracy by up to 24.9 percentage points and achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-5.5. --- ### Efficient Video Dataset Distillation via Cluster-Guided Prototype Blending Authors: Chongle Ren, Guang Li, Wenbo Huang, Naoki Saito, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03269v1 Video dataset distillation aims to compress a large video dataset into a compact surrogate set that preserves its training utility. Most existing approaches synthesize condensed videos through iterative optimization, whose cost is amplified by the temporal dimension. Rather than further reducing the number of optimized variables, we investigate whether effective distilled videos can be constructed without gradient-based optimization of the stored videos. Such a construction-based approach must address three challenges: selecting informative temporal segments, covering diverse intra-class variations under a limited videos-per-class budget, and increasing the information carried by each stored sample. To this end, we propose ProtoBlend, an efficient select-allocate-blend framework. First, teacher-guided temporal clip selection retains a high-confidence segment from each source video. Second, cluster-guided prototype allocation partitions the selected clips in the teacher feature space and assigns one distilled slot to each intra-class cluster. Third, each prototype is blended with an in-cluster anchor, while their teacher predictions are combined using the same coefficient to provide mixture-source supervision. Experiments on four trimmed action-recognition benchmarks demonstrate that ProtoBlend achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off without iterative optimization of the distilled videos. --- ### Impacts of Single-objective Landscapes on Multi-objective Optimization Authors: Shoichiro Tanaka, Keiki Takadama, Hiroyuki Sato Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03266v1 This work revealed a relationship between a multi-objective optimization problem and single-objective optimization problems that exist in the multi-objective problem. This work focused on combinatorial problems and investigated the relations between the local optima networks of the single-objective problems and the Pareto optima network of the multi-objective problem. Each of their networks has a graph structure. We divided the entire network into subgraphs. Each subgraph was called a component and characterized by overlapping relations between the single-objective local optima networks and the multi-objective Pareto optima network. Results on multi-objective landscape problems showed that most Pareto optimal solutions were reachable from the single-objective local optimal solutions. This tendency was emphasized by increasing the number of objectives and the objective correlation. The number of co-variables impacted the number of cross-link relations between the single-objective local optima networks and the multi-objective Pareto optima network. The results suggested that searching for single-objective problems is a clue to multi-objective optimization. --- ### Hear to See: Discerning Stateful Listening for Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation Authors: Leiye Liu, Miao Zhang, Jiahong Jiang, Jingjing Li, Jialong Zhong, Kai Peng, Tingwei Liu, Wei Ji, Yongri Piao, Huchuan Lu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.MM, cs.CV, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03264v1 Audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) requires accurately identifying and tracking individual sounding objects with pixel-level masks. Existing methods struggle to match overlapping acoustic events with visual instances and handle asynchronous audio-visual dynamics. Therefore, two critical questions arise: how can a model establish precise correspondence between overlapping sound sources and visual instances, and how can a model maintain robust tracking when audio and visual signals are temporally misaligned?This paper proposes Hear to See (H2S), addressing these challenges through two mechanisms. The Acoustic-Semantic Projector (ASP) disentangles mixed audio and establishes hierarchical correspondence from semantic to spatial domains. The Asynchronous Dynamics Modulator (ADM) adaptively adjusts state transitions via audio-modulated Mamba, prioritizing current information during dynamic variations and maintaining continuity in stable periods.Experiments on AVISeg show H2S achieves SOTA performance, attaining 48.54 mAP with a COCO pretrained ResNet50 and surpassing the previous by 7.8\%. The code will be open-sourced once the paper is accepted. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/leiyeliu/H2S. --- ### The Ignition Is Real, and It Lives at the Readout: Latent composition, difficulty-clocked ignition, and the interface-constituted commit in a recurrent-depth reasoner Authors: Simon Lam-Muir Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03263v1 We test whether the "compositional ignition" reported in latent-reasoning models is real computation, an instrument artifact, or inherited from verbal training data. We grow an independent realization of a published 30M-parameter recurrent-depth reasoner from scratch (same recipe and seed), film its development, certify fidelity through a pre-registered whole-signature gate, and measure resolution in two channels at once: the vocabulary readout and the hidden state. The ignition is real and lives at the readout: arrival time rises lawfully with problem depth, resolution is sharp and holds, and the signature reproduces across two same-seed realizations with divergent training trajectories. At commitment the decision margin jumps 5.8-8.0 logits in one iteration, exceeding the 90th percentile of near-threshold non-event steps in 96% of cases; the signed margin's zero-crossing there is definitional and carries no evidential weight, so the evidence is that conditioned magnitude. The hidden-state direction snaps in raw geometry, meeting its pre-registered criterion (in the decoder's LayerNorm coordinates it attenuates just below our bar, so the composite decoder-coordinate claim is not confirmed), and then freezes in both (descriptively so in decoder coordinates; angular steps 52.9 to 1.2 degrees over eight iterations), while subsequent displacement is predominantly radial (0.961 of squared-norm) and readout-null to a measured bound (radial logit effect <=5.7e-6). An earlier velocity-trough claim is withdrawn: pre-registered normalization controls showed it coordinate-dependent. Intermediates were never recoverable through the tied readout (relay 0.00). All criteria were frozen before their data; the predictions ledger, including this paper's own withdrawn headline, ships in the companion repository. --- ### ED-DiT: Physics-Guided Diffusion Pretraining for Transferable Molecular Representations from Electron Density Authors: Liang Shuang, Haocheng Wang, Jiayi Song, Shuquan Ye, Ben Fei Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03260v1 Pretraining has shown strong potential for learning transferable representations, yet it remains underexplored for electron-density-based molecular learning. Electron density provides a continuous three-dimensional description of molecular electronic structure, capturing both local spatial patterns and global physical quantities. This raises a key question: can electron-density fields be used for self-supervised pretraining to learn a shared representation that transfers across diverse electronic-structure-related tasks? We propose ED-DiT, a physics-guided Diffusion Transformer for self-supervised pretraining on electron-density point clouds. ED-DiT learns reusable representations by reconstructing corrupted and partially masked log-density fields across diffusion noise levels. An electron-number consistency constraint is further introduced to preserve the total electronic mass. The pretrained encoder can be adapted to property prediction, open-/closed-shell classification, molecule-electron-density retrieval, and molecule-conditioned electron-density prediction. Experiments on six EDBench tasks show that ED-DiT consistently outperforms the same architecture trained from scratch, especially under limited supervision. For molecule-conditioned electron-density prediction, it reduces RMSE from 2.2474 to 1.3753 and surpasses the available baseline. With only 10% labels, it improves orbital energy prediction RMSE from 0.0293 to 0.0138. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of physics-guided electron-density pretraining for learning transferable molecular representations. --- ### FinVerse: Financial Time-Series Benchmark Authors: Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo, Seunghan Lee, 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.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03259v2 As time-series foundation models have emerged, the need for benchmarks that can evaluate their forecasting ability in meaningful ways has become increasingly important. Existing time-series forecasting benchmarks provide useful standardized comparisons, but they often evaluate heterogeneous series with uniform error-based metrics. Strong performance under such metrics does not necessarily imply that a model's forecasts will support the best real-world decisions across domains. For example, in stock forecasting, correctly predicting whether a price will rise or fall can be more directly relevant to realized returns than minimizing point-wise forecast error alone. To this end, we introduce FinVerse, a finance-domain time-series forecasting benchmark that takes a first step toward more realistic evaluation. The released FinVerse data artifact contains 116,897 financial time series with 171.1M observations, of which 60,232 series with 17.4M observations are selected as evaluated targets based on their economic relevance to financial decisions. Unlike generic forecasting benchmarks that primarily emphasize uniform point-forecast or probabilistic accuracy, FinVerse defines 11 metric families comprising 78 evaluation metrics and assigns the most appropriate evaluation metrics to each individual time series based on its underlying economic meaning. Our analysis of 43 public time-series forecasting foundation models shows that strong performance under generic forecasting criteria does not necessarily translate into useful financial forecasts. This finding highlights the need for domain-aware benchmarks that evaluate models under objectives closer to real-world decision making. --- ### FinVerse: Financial Time-Series Benchmark Authors: Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo, Seunghan Lee, 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.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03259v1 As time-series foundation models have emerged, the need for benchmarks that can evaluate their forecasting ability in meaningful ways has become increasingly important. Existing time-series forecasting benchmarks provide useful standardized comparisons, but they often evaluate heterogeneous series with uniform error-based metrics. Strong performance under such metrics does not necessarily imply that a model's forecasts will support the best real-world decisions across domains. For example, in stock forecasting, correctly predicting whether a price will rise or fall can be more directly relevant to realized returns than minimizing point-wise forecast error alone. To this end, we introduce FinVerse, a finance-domain time-series forecasting benchmark that takes a first step toward more realistic evaluation. The released FinVerse data artifact contains 116,897 financial time series with 171.1M observations, of which 60,232 series with 17.4M observations are selected as evaluated targets based on their economic relevance to financial decisions. Unlike generic forecasting benchmarks that primarily emphasize uniform point-forecast or probabilistic accuracy, FinVerse defines 11 metric families comprising 78 evaluation metrics and assigns the most appropriate evaluation metrics to each individual time series based on its underlying economic meaning. Our analysis of 43 public time-series forecasting foundation models shows that strong performance under generic forecasting criteria does not necessarily translate into useful financial forecasts. This finding highlights the need for domain-aware benchmarks that evaluate models under objectives closer to real-world decision making. --- ### NanoMorph-3D: An End-to-End Physics-Driven Unrolling Framework for Nanomaterial Reconstruction Authors: Beiyuan Zhang, Hesong Li, Ziqi Wu, Ruiwen Shao, Ying Fu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03257v1 Precise 3D characterization of nanomaterials is essential for unlocking structure-property relationships. However, standard electron tomography is fundamentally limited by the missing wedge problem. Consequently, conventional algorithms suffer from severe geometric distortions, a challenge further complicated by pervasive noise interference. Current learning-based methods either rely on physics-blind post-processing or employ end-to-end architectures constrained by local receptive fields, failing to capture complex 3D topologies. We propose NanoMorph-3D, a unified end-to-end framework grounded in a comprehensive Nanomorphological Taxonomy. Powered by a large-scale synthetic dataset explicitly modeling non-linear electron attenuation, we design a Physics-Driven Unrolled Network mapping proximal gradient descent into a learnable architecture. To capture complex internal topologies, we formulate a hierarchical attention mechanism with Physics-Normalization for long-range 3D dependencies and scale invariance. Crucially, our Dual-Domain strategy leverages Sinusoidal Attention to explicitly model physical projection trajectories, enforcing strict sinogram consistency to mitigate missing wedge artifacts. Finally, an unsupervised dual-stream mechanism bridges the simulation-to-reality gap. Experiments demonstrate NanoMorph-3D reconstructs diverse topologies with superior fidelity and speed. --- ### Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection for Multi-Focus Image Fusion Authors: Yicheng Zhang, Haoyou Deng, Zhiqiang Li, Wenti Yin, Nong Sang, Changxin Gao Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03252v1 Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) aims to generate an all-in-focus image from multiple images of the same scene focused at different regions. Most existing deep learning-based methods lack explicit interaction between the source images, which limits their performance and interpretability. This paper presents a novel Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection Network (CSNet), to bridge direct information exchange for MFIF. Specifically, by contrasting the clarity differences between source images within our proposed Clarity Contrast Attention Module (CCAM), we mutually enhance sharp features while suppressing blurry ones. This allows us to identify the exactly focused regions in each source and locate the focused-defocused boundaries. Moreover, the Defocus Spread Effect (DSE) degrades pixels in all source images around the boundaries. To further refine these ambiguous areas, we introduce a Similarity Selection Strategy, which reconstructs an initial clear image from source images and selects optimal pixels by comparing the similarity among them. Through this interactive approach, CSNet effectively preserves focused regions as well as recovering natural boundaries to fuse an all-in-focus output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code is available on Github: https://github.com/ZYC-HUST/CSNet. --- ### From Wearable Data to Personalized and Actionable Health Insights Authors: Esther Brown, Karis Moon, Victoria Dean, Finale Doshi-Velez Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03251v1 Commercial wearable devices continuously capture rich physiological data (e.g., heart rate, respiration), opening new possibilities for monitoring health conditions, notably around stress. Despite their promise, turning raw wearable physiological data streams into visualizations that surface stress-related insights in daily activities, and that ultimately foster reflection, awareness, and better stress management, remains a significant challenge. The data are noisy and context-dependent: the same spike in heart rate can come from sprinting, a tense presentation, or laughing with friends. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that combines user annotations with wearable data to support better stress management. We introduce a web framework offering interactive visualizations that layer daily activities, stress events, and interventions onto raw physiological streams, enabling users to reflect and identify trends. In a four-week pilot with seven university graduate and undergraduate student participants who logged 269 events, our tool revealed patterns between different types of interventions and stress: social interaction reduced average heart rate by 4.35 to 5.0 beats per minute, deliberate rest reduced average Garmin stress scores by 10.03 to 13.83 points, and mindfulness activities decreased average HRV by 6.61 to 13.22 milliseconds. --- ### ShielDroid: A Hybrid Approach Integrating Machine and Deep Learning for Android Malware Detection Authors: Md Faisal Ahmed, Zarin Tasnim Biash, Abu Raihan Shakil, Ahmed Ann Noor Ryen, Arman Hossain, Faisal Bin Ashraf, Muhammad Iqbal Hossain Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03250v1 The rapid advancement of modern technology has led to a significant increase in the use of smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, resulting in the widespread adoption of mobile applications. Although applications are required to undergo malware screening before being published on official app stores, many malicious applications successfully evade detection by concealing sophisticated malware variants. These malicious behaviors are often activated only during runtime, making them difficult to identify through conventional static analysis. As a result, malware may remain undetected until after installation, potentially causing irreversible damage to users and their devices. This study presents a real-time Android malware detection framework that analyzes application behavior to accurately identify and classify complex malware. The proposed approach employs a hybrid dynamic analysis technique to distinguish malicious applications from benign ones. After preprocessing and filtering the collected dataset, the applications are classified using multiple machine learning algorithms. A comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted to compare the effectiveness of different classification techniques in terms of detection accuracy and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that a hybrid model combining Random Forest and a Multilayer Perceptron achieves the best overall performance, attaining an accuracy of 97.5% with an execution time of 22.945 seconds. The proposed framework can enhance mobile device security by enabling timely detection of malicious applications and reducing the risk of cyberattacks. --- ### One Knob to Rule Them All: A Unified Optimal Transport View of Cold-Start Active Learning Authors: Ning Zhu, Xiaochuan Ma, Juntao Xu, Jingze Liang, Mengfei Zhao, An Chen, Liang-Jian Deng Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03249v1 Cold-Start Active Learning (CSAL) aims to select a valuable subset from an unlabeled pool without any prior knowledge or human assistance. Existing methods take diverse routes based on typicality, coverage, or diversity. Each rests on its own inductive bias and therefore performs well on some tasks yet poorly on others. We argue that the real challenge is not to design yet another selection heuristic, but to make CSAL adapt automatically to the data and task at hand. To this end, we revisit CSAL through the lens of optimal transport. First, we propose a generalized transport selection framework that reveals the shared allocation structure of existing methods and exactly subsumes representative formulations. Second, we introduce a theoretical analysis that characterizes the trade-off controlled by entropic regularization and establishes a task-agnostic minimax bound for cold-start selection. These results provide a principled foundation for adapting the regularization strength to the unlabeled data. Third, we derive a data-adaptive regularization rule and present a novel Sinkhorn-based CSAL algorithm, termed $ε$-Adaptive Selection ($ε$-AS). Extensive experiments on six public datasets and multiple annotation budgets show that $ε$-AS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. On ImageNet-1k, it improves the average accuracy over ActiveFT by 1.29% while reducing selection time by 56.2%. Code will be released at https://github.com/Z-yiwei/OT-CSAL --- ### CIGTSurv: Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal Survival Prediction with Local Prototype Association and Global Feature Alignment Authors: Jing Dai, Qibin Zhang, Weiwei Zhou, Mingde Xu, Jingsong Liu, Jingdong Zhang, Hongming Xu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03247v1 Multimodal learning has significantly advanced survival prediction by integrating pathology images with genomic data. However, clinical information, despite its critical role in reflecting a patient' s overall health, remains underutilized due to its discrete, sparse, and low-dimensional nature. Furthermore, the inherent heterogeneity across these modalities pose significant challenges in modeling cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose CIGTSurv, a Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal framework for Survival prediction. Specifically, we first design a holistic text template and use pretrained foundation models to transform clinical tabular data into high-dimensional tokenized embeddings. Using clinical information as an anchor, we then introduce a dual-level interaction mechanism: 1) a local prototype association (LPA) module based on cross-attention to explicitly learn token-level correspondences between different modalities, and 2) a global feature alignment (GFA) loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to implicitly enhance cross-modal distribution consistency. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that CIGTSurv achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) survival prediction performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/CIGT-Surv.git. --- ### UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation Authors: Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Zeyu Jiang, Changhao Chen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03244v1 Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts. We present UniNav, a unified world-action model that generates future visual observations and continuous waypoint trajectories through a single diffusion process. Given history frames and a goal image, UniNav jointly denoises visual and waypoint tokens within a single transformer, unifying future prediction and action generation in a shared framework. To improve spatial grounding, we incorporate geometry-aware camera tokens. We also train on both trajectory-labeled navigation data and video-only data, enabling the model to benefit from diverse videos without waypoint annotations. Based on this unified framework, we introduce two variants: UniNav-Full jointly predicts interpretable future observations and their corresponding trajectories, while UniNav-Fast removes future-image tokens at inference for efficient trajectory prediction. Experiments on navigation benchmarks show that UniNav outperforms the strongest baseline in ATE across all datasets. With one-step inference, UniNav-Fast achieves a latency of 0.1s without a substantial accuracy drop. Code will be released. --- ### Relational Priors as Convergence Pressure in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Ming Shen, Chao Shang, Sadat Shahriar, Devang Kulshreshtha, Yi Zhang, Sandesh Swamy, Yanjun Qi Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03239v1 Large language model-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) are designed through roles, debate protocols, and aggregation rules. These choices create implicit social expectations: agents may be expected to trust, challenge, defer to, or collaborate with peers. We study the effects of making inter-agent relation semantics explicit. We use a minimal signed-network formulation of relational priors and inject natural-language renderings into agent system prompts while holding the task protocol fixed. Across a commons-governance simulation and multi-agent debate, relational priors primarily act as convergence pressure: increasing relational positivity tends to make agents coordinate or agree more readily. This pressure can help when utility rewards behavioral alignment, as in sustainable resource governance and subjective consensus. It does not, however, reliably improve accuracy. In objective QA debates, higher positivity can increase agreement even when correctness-conditioned agreement does not improve and may decline in some settings. Effects vary by model backbone, relation type, and topology; explicit neutrality is not equivalent to omitting relational framing. We argue that relational priors should not be a default add-on for LLM-MAS. Their safer use is diagnostic and task-specific: compare against a no-prior baseline, monitor correctness-conditioned metrics when truth matters, and omit the relational layer when validation does not justify it. --- ### On the Diversity of Analogy Making in Large Language Models Authors: Yuanhao Shen, Daniel Xavier de Sousa, Caio César Sifuentes Barcelos, Hongyu Guo, Xiaodan Zhu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03233v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for analogy making, a core cognitive capability that drives novelty and creativity. While prior research has extensively investigated the applications and underlying mechanisms of LLM-based analogy making, its output diversity remains largely unexplored, despite being essential for broadening cross-domain connections and fostering scientific innovation. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of analogy diversity across ten state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs. Our findings highlight a concerning issue of domain homogeneity, a prevalent tendency for LLMs to generate analogies from a narrow set of target domains, limiting both inter-query and intra-model diversity. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off in existing LLM diversity-enhancement methods: increasing output diversity often comes at the expense of output quality. Finally, our causal analysis of LLM information flow reveals substantial differences in the model-sensitive regions governing analogy diversity across LLMs, suggesting a potential mechanism for the observed diversity-quality trade-off. To our knowledge, this is among the first studies to systematically investigate output diversity in LLM-based analogy making. --- ### Structure-Aware Robust Fine-Tuning: Defending Vision-Language-Action Robots Against Physical Attention Hijacking Authors: Jinquan Zhang, Dongfu Yin, Run Yang, Yufeng Yan, Zhen Tian, F. Richard Yu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03231v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies promise general robotic manipulation, but their robustness against physical-world attacks remains fragile. In particular, we show that physically realizable adversarial patches can reliably induce failures by triggering a mechanism we call policy-critical action-to-vision attention hijacking, where action-conditioned attention is diverted from task-relevant regions to a localized patch. To demonstrate the threat, we propose Attention-Guided Semantic Disruption (AGSD), an Expectation-over-Transformation (EOT) optimized printable patch that jointly (i) concentrates action-to-vision attention on the patch and (ii) disrupts vision-language semantic alignment, yielding strong cross-task and cross-architecture transfer. To mitigate such attacks, we introduce Structure-Aware Robust Fine-Tuning (SARF), a zero-inference-overhead defense that fine-tunes only the visual encoder using feature anchoring, policy-critical attention correction, and language-guided geometric consistency restricted to semantically relevant regions. On LIBERO, SARF reduces OpenVLA's failure rate under AGSD from 100% to 14.2%-56.8% (28.6% average) across suites while preserving clean performance, and on a real PiPER manipulator it improves average success under AGSD from 23.0% to 65.0%. These results highlight mechanism-level robustness as a practical path to securing VLA robots against physical attention hijacking. --- ### SAKI: Score-Aware Low-Rank Key Indexing with Random-Matrix Noise Correction for KV Retrieval Authors: Lin Zhang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03228v2 Existing low rank KV cache methods preserve either model weights or key variance, neither of which directly reflects the attention scores used during inference. We derive the expected attention score distortion caused by rank r key compression and show that it yields a covariance weighted low rank objective. Under a margin condition, controlling this distortion also improves top k recall. The optimal rank r solution has a closed form asymmetric factorization obtained from the SVD of the covariance weighted query key operator. This motivates SAKI, a training free KV cache index that directly preserves attention scores rather than key reconstruction quality. Across LLaMA 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Mistral 7B v0.1, and Llama 3.2 3B, SAKI outperforms key PCA at every tested rank. At rank 32, it removes 13 to 30 percent of PCA's remaining top 64 recall error, including improvements from 0.748 to 0.799 on LLaMA 3.1 8B and from 0.786 to 0.850 on Qwen 2.5 7B. It improves 68 to 89 percent of attention heads per model, with the largest gains in deeper layers. Predicted score MSE reductions closely match empirical measurements, with a Pearson correlation of 0.997, while ablation studies confirm that the gains arise from optimizing the attention score objective rather than covariance weighting alone. Analysis of the scoring operator further explains why weight only, invariant subspace, and key reconstruction methods can be suboptimal. SAKI uses random-matrix theory to separate genuine covariance signal from autocorrelated sampling noise, matching PCA with only 512 calibration tokens and adding value exactly where PCA sees no reliable signal. --- ### Open-Linguistic Concept Unified Learning for Cross-Site Interpretable Dermatology Image Diagnosis Authors: Chengyu Wu, Junpeng Tan, Wanxiang Luo, Yaqi Wang, Yandong Wen, Yefeng Zheng Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03225v1 Human-interpretable computer-aided diagnosis is crucial for clinical decision making. Concept-based models excel by providing transparent reasoning and enabling post-hoc, clinician-in-the-loop interventions. However, their rigid dataset-specific adaptation inherently restricts cross-site generalization. Applying them across diverse modalities, such as dermoscopic and clinical photographs, is challenging due to heterogeneous concept taxonomies varying in availability, granularity, and semantics across cohorts. Consequently, adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models (FVLMs) demands costly label engineering and repeated post-training. Existing intervention mechanisms remain rigidly tied to predefined concepts, lacking adaptability and hindering scalable dermatology CAD deployment. To address these bottlenecks, we propose UniCon, an open-linguistic unified concept learning framework for multimodal interpretable vision-language diagnosis. UniCon resolves these challenges through three contributions: (1) A shared semantic representation space via a unified concept prototype codebook, seamlessly coordinating heterogeneous concept systems across modalities without dataset-specific retraining. (2) Open-linguistic based multi-faceted semantic specifications to overcome sparse textual label limitations, improving boundary sensitivity in uncertain clinical contexts. (3) A robust, cross-site adjustable intervention interface powered by reliability-gated bottleneck aggregation, enabling consistent reasoning and transferable clinician corrections. Extensive experiments demonstrate that beyond securing top-tier diagnostic accuracy, UniCon successfully bridges disparate clinical taxonomies, unlocking unprecedented cross-site intervention capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/wuchengyu123/UniCon. --- ### Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping Authors: Ranxu Zhang, Guinan Chen, Chenshaodong, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhou Xu, Sunzhe, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03223v1 Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit. Training-only privileged skills can provide denser supervision by allowing the same frozen policy snapshot to rescore fixed tokens from skill-free trajectories while conditioned on task-matched procedural skills. Existing methods, however, do not jointly calibrate teacher scores across interaction steps, relate teacher confidence to realized returns, and integrate the resulting signal into native reward-to-advantage construction. We introduce Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping (ADRS), a framework for constructing return-associated token-level credit for multi-turn language agents. ADRS centers and normalizes privileged token scores within each step, modulates them with a return-associated Teacher Value Advantage (TVA) gate based on within-group confidence--return association, and incorporates the gated token signal into native RL credit construction. Together, these components determine what the teacher prefers, when that preference is return-relevant, and how it enters the native reinforcement-learning credit path, while keeping rollouts and inference skill-free. Finally, experiments across three interactive benchmarks show that ADRS consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks, with gains persisting across RL backbones, reduced-data settings, unseen tasks, and extended training. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/ADRS-arxiv --- ### Fail-Fast, Restart-Smart: Early Failure Prediction and Restart for SWE Agentic Tasks Authors: Chenyu Wang, Yunbo Lyu, Junda He, Zhou Yang, Chenxing Zhong, Yaniv Harel, David Lo Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03222v1 Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion. Early termination, however, risks interrupting trajectories that would otherwise succeed; conversely, an unsuccessful trajectory may still contain useful repository edits. We present FailFast-RestartSmart, a two-stage controller for a single active trajectory. FailFast is a lightweight 0.6B monitor trained with terminal and dense fail-to-pass supervision to predict failure from observable prefixes without policy logits or hidden states. Upon an alarm, RestartSmart launches a fresh same-policy rollout without prior prompt history and offers the interrupted repository diff as an optional overlay that the agent may inspect, apply, or discard. On SWE-bench Verified, a monitor trained solely on Qwen3.6-27B trajectories transfers to three other policies, including a closed-API model, and saves 14.6%-20.4% of execution tokens at a target 5% false-positive rate; on Qwen3.6-27B, its 20.4% saving exceeds the 12.5% achieved by our per-step AgentStop adaptation. At a target 25% false-positive rate, RestartSmart raises Qwen3.6-27B resolution from 66.6% to 71.8%, whereas cold restart reaches only 66.8%. Together, these results support early termination with sequential same-policy recovery. --- ### Reachability Is Not Realization: Tracing the Sources of LLM Benchmark Gains Authors: Yanchao Li, Wanhao Liu, Jiaqing Xie, Ben Gao, Yanbo Wang, Tianfan Fu, Yuqiang Li Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03219v1 Benchmark gains are often treated as evidence of greater LLM capability. Yet the same gain can reflect different changes in model behavior. A model may reach new answers, or produce answers that were already within reach. Aggregate scores do not distinguish these changes question by question. We establish a question-level audit under fixed budgets, temperatures, and answer formats. A question is realized when the default deployment procedure produces the correct answer. A question is reachable when a specified probe finds that answer within a fixed budget. We first test whether inference-time layer routing can expand reachability. Under a matched budget, random routes match or exceed structured search in all 43 model and task settings. Answer-blind procedures retain almost none of this gain, which instead requires access to the correct answer. We then ask why reachable answers sometimes fail to appear. Across six cases spanning 0.5B to 31B, silencing one identified MLP block repairs 68 to 92 percent of a predefined failure set. We next test whether training closes the gap by expanding reachability. In five of six matched evaluations, deployed performance rises while the reachable ceiling remains flat or falls. For DAPO, the deployed score rises by 14.7 points while the reachable ceiling falls by 13.3 points. Across the settings we audit, realization and reachability therefore do not always change together. Claims of capability expansion should report both realized performance and reachability under matched evaluation conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/LiZaiyuan0619/reachability-not-realization --- ### Self-Supervised Representation-Guided Generative Dataset Distillation Authors: Mingzhuo Li, Guang Li, Linfeng Ye, Jiafeng Mao, Takahiro Ogawa, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Miki Haseyama Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03218v1 Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while retaining its downstream utility. Most existing methods target randomly initialized networks, whereas modern vision systems often adapt frozen pretrained encoders with lightweight modules. Distilled samples should therefore preserve the discriminative geometry of the pretrained representation space, which existing generative objectives do not explicitly consider. We propose self-supervised representation-guided generative dataset distillation (SRG), a framework that translates the SSL geometry into diffusion guidance. Specifically, SRG constructs class-wise prototypes from real-image SSL representations and performs guidance through three SSL-space objectives for prototype alignment, inter-class discrimination, and intra-class assignment. During diffusion sampling, it adopts a stage-wise guidance strategy: early denoising is anchored to the latent of the real image whose SSL representation is nearest to the assigned prototype, whereas later denoising is guided by the SSL-space objectives. This division preserves the visual realism provided by the generative prior while progressively steering samples toward representative and class-discriminative regions of the SSL representation space. SRG consistently outperforms the evaluated generative baselines across multiple datasets and IPC settings. A cross-encoder evaluation further indicates transfer across pretrained representation spaces. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of representation-guided generation for dataset distillation with pretrained SSL models. --- ### iFAN: Inference-Aware Learning for Plain Mask Transformers Authors: Fang Li, Yu He, Haoyang Tong, Lichen Ma, Jingling Fu, Wenxiao Fan, Tongxuan Liu, Luohang Liu, Ke Zhang, Junshi Huang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03216v2 Query-based mask transformers assemble segmentation outputs through pixel-wise competition among query predictions of the final layer, yet this inference process is not explicitly optimized during training. We identify two key mismatches: the query with the highest probability-mask score does not necessarily produce the most accurate mask, and final-layer decoding may discard superior predictions from intermediate layers. To address these issues, we propose Inference-Aware Learning (iFAN), a general training framework for plain mask transformers. iFAN introduces Adjusted Probability-Mask Ranking (APMR), which aligns query competition with predicted mask quality and suppresses high-confidence but inaccurate competitors. We further employ Cross-Layer Self-Distillation (CLSD) to transfer stronger intermediate predictions to the final layer. The ranking and distillation objectives are training-only, while inference retains efficient final-layer decoding. Experiments on COCO, ADE20K, and Cityscapes demonstrate consistent improvements across panoptic, instance, and semantic segmentation, as well as across different architectures, backbone scales, and input resolutions. Overall, iFAN improves performance by an average of 1.20 PQ, 1.30 AP, and 0.63 mIoU, with negligible additional parameters, FLOPs and inference latency. --- ### iFAN: Inference-Aware Learning for Plain Mask Transformers Authors: Fang Li, Yu He, Haoyang Tong, Lichen Ma, Jingling Fu, Wenxiao Fan, Tongxuan Liu, Luohang Liu, Ke Zhang, Junshi Huang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03216v1 Query-based mask transformers assemble segmentation outputs through pixel-wise competition among query predictions of the final layer, yet this inference process is not explicitly optimized during training. We identify two key mismatches: the query with the highest probability-mask score does not necessarily produce the most accurate mask, and final-layer decoding may discard superior predictions from intermediate layers. To address these issues, we propose Inference-Aware Learning (iFAN), a general training framework for plain mask transformers. iFAN introduces Adjusted Probability-Mask Ranking (APMR), which aligns query competition with predicted mask quality and suppresses high-confidence but inaccurate competitors. We further employ Cross-Layer Self-Distillation (CLSD) to transfer stronger intermediate predictions to the final layer. The ranking and distillation objectives are training-only, while inference retains efficient final-layer decoding. Experiments on COCO, ADE20K, and Cityscapes demonstrate consistent improvements across panoptic, instance, and semantic segmentation, as well as across different architectures, backbone scales, and input resolutions. Overall, iFAN improves performance by an average of 1.20 PQ, 1.30 AP, and 0.63 mIoU, with negligible additional parameters, FLOPs and inference latency. --- ### GROW: Group-Relative Advantage-Weighted On-Policy Reinforcement Learning of Autoregressive-Diffusion Text-to-Speech model Authors: Guanrou Yang, Tian Tan, Qian Chen, Ziyang Ma, Yakun Song, Zhikang Niu, Qi Chen, Wenming Tu, Haitao Li, Shan Yang, Xie Chen Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03215v1 Reinforcement learning for flow-matching text-to-speech is complicated by deterministic ODE sampling: trajectory-level policy-gradient methods typically convert the ODE into an SDE and track per-step likelihood ratios, introducing stochastic perturbations and substantial overhead. We propose GROW, a group-relative advantage-weighted on-policy RL method that acts directly on the standard flow-matching objective. For each prompt, GROW samples a group of on-policy utterances, separately standardizes intelligibility and speaker-similarity rewards within the group, and combines them to reweight flow-matching regression. A Wasserstein-2 velocity penalty anchors the updated model to a frozen pretrained reference. A group-mean reward baseline is introduced to convert reward weighting into advantage weighting. For strong pretrained TTS models with concentrated rewards, positive exponential weighting is dominated by reward-agnostic self-imitation, whereas a zero-mean signed advantage preserves effective within-group credit assignment. Instantiated on DiTAR and evaluated on LibriSpeech and Seed-TTS EN/ZH, GROW reduces average WER from 2.016 to 1.558 and raises speaker similarity from 0.676 to 0.715 while keeping UTMOS. With 10-NFE training rollouts and 32-NFE evaluation, GROW retains comparable performance while training 2.9x faster than 32-NFE DiTAR-GRPO. We will open-source complete GROW codes, faithful DiTAR reproduction, and all model checkpoints. --- ### The Agent Operating System (AOS): A Reference Operating Architecture for Distributed Agentic Systems Authors: Ankur Sharma, Deep Shah Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03214v1 Large language models have transformed artificial intelligence from isolated prediction services into components of long-running, distributed systems that reason, invoke tools, retrieve external state, delegate tasks, and act on behalf of users and organizations. The surrounding ecosystem has responded with agent frameworks, workflow engines, model-serving platforms, memory systems, communication protocols, and observability tools. These technologies improve execution, but they do not provide a stable, implementation-independent operating architecture for governing intent, selecting capabilities, preserving authority across delegation, controlling uncertainty, coordinating runtime behavior, and reconstructing why consequential actions occurred. This paper proposes the Agent Operating System (AOS), a vendor-neutral reference operating architecture for distributed agentic systems. AOS contains two internal planes: a Control & Governance Plane responsible for intent, policy, trust, authority, confidence, auditability, observability, and human oversight; and a Runtime & Coordination Plane responsible for agent lifecycle, workflow coordination, model and tool routing, context and memory coordination, scheduling, traffic management, and runtime assurance. Platform services, Linux or Windows, container runtimes, and physical infrastructure remain outside the AOS boundary and are integrated through explicit interfaces. The paper specifies AOS concepts, invariants, interface objects, optimization objectives, deployment profiles, and reliability responsibilities. It also identifies tradeoffs and unresolved research questions. AOS is not presented as a replacement for existing frameworks or infrastructure; it is proposed as the operating architecture through which heterogeneous components can be composed into governable, reliable, observable, and interoperable agentic systems. --- ### CrossScope: A Role-Asymmetric World Model for Joint Dual-Scope Surgical Video Prediction Authors: Wanhao Liu, Jinsong Lin, Rulin Zhou, Chi Kit Ng, Wenbin Pan, Zhiqing Tang, Dongyue Li, Liwei Luo, Yanshen Wu, Panshuo Li, Zhiyong Xiong, Huxin Gao et al. Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03211v1 Visual world models typically learn future dynamics from a single observation stream, limiting their ability to model cooperative systems with multiple independently moving observers. We investigate this challenge in Mother--Child endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), where two flexible scopes provide complementary yet role-dependent views without a calibrated stereo relationship. Unlike conventional multi-view fusion that assumes symmetric information exchange, we formulate \textbf{role-asymmetric dual-scope future prediction}, where cross-view evidence is selectively transferred according to the prediction target and its underlying spatial requirements. We propose \textbf{CrossScope}, a dual-stream surgical world model that preserves view-specific experts while enabling target-specific evidence routing through geometry-guided residual interactions. CrossScope learns two complementary communication directions: geometric motion cues from the Mother view guide Child-view future dynamics, while pose-aligned Child appearance supports Mother-view prediction only when valid spatial correspondence is established. This design allows each scope to contribute task-relevant evidence without compromising its view-specific representation. To evaluate this problem, we establish a paired dual-scope benchmark comprising synchronized phantom and real-world ERCP episodes, with evaluations assessing visual fidelity, structural preservation, target localization, and motion consistency. Experiments demonstrate that CrossScope consistently outperforms strong surgical video generation baselines, validating the importance of role-aware evidence routing for multi-observer visual world modeling. --- ### ICO: Enhancing Semantic-Shift Jailbreaks via Iterative Context Optimization Authors: Hujian Zhu, Yihao Huang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Xinfeng Li, Peng Zeng, Simeng Qin, Qing Guo, Geguang Pu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03210v1 Foundation models have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks, but they remain vulnerable. To investigate such vulnerabilities, semantic-shift jailbreaks have recently emerged as a promising attack paradigm. They bypass explicit safety mechanisms by replacing harmful terms in original harmful questions with benign alternatives and leveraging contextual information to induce the target model to reinterpret these alternatives as their corresponding harmful concepts. However, existing semantic-shift jailbreaks often achieve limited effectiveness. In this work, we reveal that this limitation arises from overlooking the semantic-shift capability of contexts. Through systematic analysis, we find that contexts exhibit substantially different abilities in inducing semantic shifts: contexts with stronger semantic-shift capabilities are more likely to guide models toward recovering harmful meanings and achieving successful jailbreaks. Based on this finding, we systematically identify and distill the characteristics of effective contexts and propose a black-box context-aware semantic-shift jailbreak framework with Iterative Context Optimization (ICO). In each iteration, ICO leverages these characteristics and feedback from the target model to optimize contexts. Extensive experiments on three datasets and eight target foundation models demonstrate that ICO consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average attack success rate of 74.6%. --- ### DRIFT: Derailing Denoising Trajectories of Flow-Matching VLAs with Adversarial Patch Attack Authors: Hoseong Tae, Jong-Seok Lee Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03207v1 Flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) models such as pi0 generate robot actions by integrating a learned denoising velocity field, and have been reported to resist adversarial perturbations that readily fool autoregressive VLAs. We show that this robustness is largely illusory: it stems from prior attacks ignoring the multi-step denoising ODE. We introduce DRIFT (Denoising Redirection via Input perturbation of the Flow-matching Trajectory), a test-time universal adversarial patch placed on the robot's gripper that attacks the denoising velocity field of an off-the-shelf policy. Our central finding is counterintuitive: attacking only the first denoising step is both stronger and cheaper than attacking a wider window of steps, which we explain through a gradient conflict unique to input-space optimization and which is exactly opposite to the training-time backdoor regime. On pi0 and pi0.5 across four LIBERO suites, DRIFT breaks essentially all originally-solvable tasks with a small single patch, far exceeding action- and embedding-space attack baselines. --- ### EduClaw-Bench: A Long-Horizon Benchmark for Pedagogical LLM Agents with Simulated Learners Authors: Unggi Lee, Sookbun Lee, Yeil Jeong, Eunjoo Lee, Minchul Shin, Hoilym Kwon Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03206v1 Large language models (LLMs) power educational applications from tutoring to essay scoring, but each is a point solution to a single task, and only recently have these point solutions been integrated into agents operating over a learning management system (LMS). Yet tutoring is long-horizon, since a learner improves over days and weeks rather than in a single turn, and no benchmark evaluates an agent tutor across a sustained relationship. We introduce EduClaw-Bench, a benchmark that places an agent tutor in a continuous 30-day relationship with a simulated learner grounded in knowledge tracing (KT), whose knowledge-concept mastery, from a KT model trained on real-student data, drives its answers and is probed for learning gain across 55 scenarios. Each agent is scored on three primary axes (learning gain, responsiveness, and helpfulness) and two curriculum-design axes (Gagné and Rosenshine), with helpfulness and the curriculum axes judged by a cross-family panel of three LLM judges. Evaluating 10 agent adapters over three base-model tiers yields two findings that single-tier, single-session evaluation cannot reach. First, tutoring quality belongs to the base model and the agent harness together rather than either alone. Second, almost no combination sustains good tutoring over the full horizon. A calibration check ($\text{ECE}=0.049$) and a live-classroom field study confirm that the simulated learner and its measurements track reality. Our work is a step toward trustworthy AI tutors for future education. --- ### Aligning Large Vision-Language Models at Test Time: A Trajectory-Guided Structured Sampling Approach Authors: Tianbao Jiang, Weicong Ni, Gerard de Melo, Linlin Wang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03204v1 Post-training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are commonly used to align large vision-language models (LVLMs) with human intent and the requirements of visual reasoning tasks. However, existing RL-based alignment methods are often resource-intensive and encounter mismatches between training objectives and inference-time distributions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel test-time alignment approach that leverages trajectory-guided structured sampling for dynamic inference-time refinement, achieving better alignment with visual grounding and ensuring logical consistency. Our approach begins with curating a reasoning memory bank via a trajectory learning algorithm, which decomposes complex question solving into ordered sequences of predefined reasoning patterns. It subsequently accomplishes inference-time alignment by first collecting trajectories from reasoning memory bank to establish a global structural reasoning prior, and then using an iterative Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for localized multi-objective refinement of the reasoning trace. Experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves accuracy without incurring prohibitive inference overhead. These results establish trajectory-guided test-time sampling as a scalable and effective alternative to traditional post-training alignment, particularly for complex visual reasoning tasks. --- ### When Refusal Looks Safe: The Refusal-Cue Shortcut in Safety Guard Models Authors: Yu Feng, Chunting Zang, Chen Shen, Rui Miao, Ge Teng, Weidong Cai, Jieping Ye Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03201v1 Safety guards are widely used to filter harmful content and are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning on labeled prompt-response pairs. We audit two widely used safety-guard training datasets, WildGuardMix and GR-Train, and find that among responses to harmful prompts, refusal expressions co-occur almost exclusively with unharmful labels. This imbalance motivates what we term the refusal-cue shortcut: inserting a refusal cue into a harmful response could flip the guard's verdict from harmful to unharmful. The shortcut affects not only guards trained on these datasets but also officially released models such as LlamaGuard3 and Qwen3Guard whose training data is undisclosed. It persists across response positions and is generally stronger in smaller variants within a family. To mitigate it, we adapt sparse complementary masking as a lightweight post-hoc intervention that identifies and suppresses a small set of shortcut-associated attention heads and MLP neurons without retraining. On two primary benchmarks, the intervention achieves an approximately 79% relative reduction in response-initial detection failures induced by refusal cues, while preserving standard detection performance. Although optimized using cues at a single response position, the suppression effect transfers to unseen positions and datasets, suggesting that shortcut manifestations across positions are partly mediated by shared internal components. Further analysis provides evidence that shortcut reliance and legitimate refusal recognition are partially functionally separable, as suppressing the shortcut broadly preserves the guard's ability to recognize genuine refusals. --- ### Bridging Online and Offline Handwriting via Differentiable Physical Rendering Authors: Seonmi Park, Seunghyun Shin, Vihaan Misra, Dongmin Shin, Ukcheol Shin, Jean Oh, Hae-Gon Jeon Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03198v1 Realistic handwritten text generation plays an important role in numerous applications, such as font design, biometric authentication, and robotic calligraphy. Existing methods are typically divided into two independent paradigms: online approaches that estimate handwriting trajectories and offline approaches that synthesize realistic handwriting images. While online models capture structural and temporal dynamics, they often lack fine-grained textures, whereas offline models reproduce realistic appearance but discard stroke order. However, unifying online and offline models remains challenging due to (1) the lack of an explicit physical model linking stroke kinematics to pixel-level appearance and (2) the absence of paired trajectory-image datasets. Moreover, enabling end-to-end learning requires a differentiable rendering process across motion and appearance domains. To address these challenges, we propose a compact physical brush model that bridges stroke dynamics and visual appearance, together with a differentiable rendering module that converts stroke trajectories into stylized images. By integrating these components, we propose a unified online-offline handwriting generation framework via differentiable brush rendering. The proposed framework consists of four core modules: 1) a text-to-stroke generator that predicts the target stroke conditioned on the given text and style image, 2) a brush parameter observer that extracts brush model parameters from style references, 3) a differentiable brush renderer that maps a stroke sequence and physical brush parameters into a handwritten image, and 4) a zero-shot image refiner that refines rendered images via diffusion models. Extensive experiments and real-world robotic calligraphy demonstrations validate our approach, achieving both structural and visual fidelity. --- ### On the Implicit Flatness Bias of Sharpness-Aware Minimization: A Linear Stability Analysis with Quantitative Hyperparameter Bounds Authors: Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03197v1 Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by seeking parameters whose loss is robust to local adversarial perturbations, but the quantitative mechanism underlying its implicit bias toward flat minima remains unclear. In particular, the perturbation radius $ρ$ is typically treated as an isolated tuning parameter, despite defining the neighborhood in which SAM measures sharpness. We analyze mini-batch SAM near an interpolating minimum through linear stability. Under local linearization and gradient-noise alignment assumptions, we prove that every linearly stable minimum satisfies $λ_{\max}\leq\sqrt(3){bΓ/(2ρη^2)}$, where $λ_{\max}$ is the largest Hessian eigenvalue, $b$ is the batch size, $η$ is the learning rate, and $Γ$ bounds the gradient norm. The bound quantitatively characterizes SAM's implicit flatness bias: holding the other quantities fixed, a smaller batch size, a larger learning rate, or a larger radius restricts linearly stable SAM to flatter minima. It also exposes a necessary trade-off: $ρ$ should be large enough to promote flatness, yet remain local enough to preserve the approximation and stable training. We validate this prediction in a controlled study of 900 models on CIFAR-100 with ResNet-18 and VGG-19, where increasing $ρ$ is consistently associated with a smaller largest Hessian eigenvalue across batch-size and learning-rate settings. Finally, we instantiate the analysis in Taylor-Locality Controlled SAM (TLC-SAM), which adjusts $ρ$ using the observed Taylor-approximation error and further reduces the top Hessian eigenvalue relative to fixed-radius SAM. Our results provide quantitative hyperparameter bounds and a stability--locality perspective for analyzing and designing SAM variants. --- ### TumorBoard: Evidence-Grounded Multi-Agent Decision Support for Longitudinal Neuro-Oncology Authors: Yantong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Runpeng Liu, Mu Xitang, Seong-Yoon Shin, Hyun-Ae Lee Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03190v1 Neuro-oncology decisions require coordinated interpretation of serial MRI, pathology, molecular markers, treatment history, performance status, and evolving guidelines. We present TumorBoard, a multi-agent decision-support system built around a shared longitudinal case state and an auditable claim-evidence ledger. Specialist agents for radiology, neuropathology, molecular diagnosis, guidelines, and therapy planning produce atomic claims with provenance. An adversarial critic exposes contradictions, and a safety governor releases, qualifies, or defers recommendations according to evidence sufficiency and temporal validity. On a 360-case hidden benchmark at a matched token budget, TumorBoard achieved an action F1 of 0.772 and evidence entailment of 0.914. It exceeded the strongest typed-council baseline by 3.1 percentage points (95% CI: 1.6 to 4.7, adjusted p = 0.0012), while recommendation-to-evidence coverage reached 0.927. Under evidence deletion, the system deferred 84.2% of unsafe cases and limited harmful recommendations to 5.8%. The safety governor reduced harmful release by 7.8 percentage points at a false-deferral cost of 4.3 percentage points. Ablation studies of the ledger, critic, and governor produced the predicted failure patterns, establishing structured coordination as the source of the measured multi-agent advantage. --- ### NeuroMosaic: Anatomically Grounded Multimodal Large Language Modeling for Molecularly Aware Glioma Reasoning from 3D MRI and Clinical Narratives Authors: Yantong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Runpeng Liu, Mu Xitang, Seong-Yoon Shin, Hyun-Ae Lee Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03187v1 Multimodal medical large language models remain structurally weak for neuro-oncology because volumetric evidence is compressed into generic visual tokens and diagnostic conclusions often lack an auditable link to MRI regions. We present NeuroMosaic, a 3D multimodal language model that converts multi-sequence brain MRI into anatomy-indexed regional tokens, aligns them with clinical narrative and molecular concepts, and generates evidence-linked outputs. The architecture combines a multi-resolution volumetric tokenizer, a neuroanatomical graph router, a molecular concept memory, and selective risk control. Across four glioma cohorts, NeuroMosaic achieved an internal subtype macro-F1 of 0.827 and external macro-F1 values of 0.784, 0.761, and 0.742. On UPenn-GBM, it improved over the strongest matched-input baseline by 3.6 percentage points (95% CI: 1.8 to 5.4, adjusted p = 0.0018), with IDH, 1p/19q, and MGMT AUROCs of 0.918, 0.861, and 0.781. Evidence pointing accuracy reached 0.703, and targeted evidence deletion reduced correct-answer probability by 0.187, compared with 0.046 for random deletion. These results establish anatomy-indexed routing as a measurable mechanism for accurate, grounded, and calibrated volumetric medical-language reasoning. --- ### CRIL-U-Net: Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning for Focal Cortical Dysplasia Segmentation from T1w and FLAIR MRI Authors: Soumen Ghosh, Amit Soni Arya, Tilottama Goswami, Subhojit Mandal, John Phamnguyen, Rajat Vashistha Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03185v1 Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) type II is an important structural cause of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, but its small size, heterogeneous appearance, and subtle MRI characteristics make automated segmentation challenging. Conventional multimodal networks commonly concatenate T1-weighted (T1w) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images, requiring subsequent layers to learn useful cross-modal relationships implicitly. We propose CRIL-U-Net, a 3D U-Net incorporating a Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning module that combines local spatial features, voxel-wise cross-modal mixing, and bidirectional ratio-inspired interactions. CRIL-U-Net was compared with a conventional 3D U-Net and an input self-attention U-Net using five-fold cross-validation on 85 FCD subjects and 25 healthy controls. Each architecture was trained independently using Dice-binary cross-entropy (Dice-BCE) and Focal Tversky-Focal (FTF) losses. With FTF, CRIL-U-Net achieved the highest mean Dice score (0.196 +/- 0.262), compared with 0.136 +/- 0.224 for the U-Net and 0.135 +/- 0.214 for the attention comparator. It produced nonzero lesion overlap in 44 of 85 cases, compared with 36 for the U-Net. Under FTF, CRIL-U-Net significantly outperformed both comparison architectures after false-discovery-rate correction. These findings suggest that compact cross-modal representation learning can improve FCD segmentation within a controlled U-Net setting when combined with an imbalance-aware objective, although the remaining zero-overlap rate of 48.2% highlights the need for further validation and methodological development. --- ### EditFlow3D: Automated Local Editing of 3D Assets with Trajectory Preservation Authors: Rui Nie, Chuang Wang, Haitao Zhou, Jiahe Song, Buyu Li, Sheng Wang, Qian Yu Published: 2026-08-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03179v1 Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D editing. Given a source asset and an edit instruction, a VLM-driven workflow interprets the editing intent and automatically constructs a visual guidance image and a refined 3D editing mask, enabling localized editing in the native representation space of a pretrained 3D generative model. Specifically, mask-guided differential flow focuses the edit on the target region, while step-wise trajectory preservation maintains consistency between non-target regions and the source asset without directly replacing intermediate features. Since the existing Edit3D-Bench covers only a limited range of local editing categories, we further introduce EditFlow-Bench as a complementary benchmark encompassing a broader variety of structural and appearance edits, and evaluate EditFlow3D on both benchmarks. Quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and a user study demonstrate that EditFlow3D achieves more accurate target-region editing and better preserves non-target regions than existing 3D editing methods. ---