# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 225 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #11201–11250 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/225 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/224.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/226.md) ### AOS: Adaptive Optimizer Switching via Training-State Signals for Faster Convergence and Better Generalization Authors: Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01997v1 Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on. We introduce AOS-R (Adaptive Optimizer Switching, Rule-Based), a lightweight controller that monitors six online gradient-space signals -- gradient noise scale (GNS), Hutchinson curvature trace, loss stagnation, update stability ratio, gradient stability index (GSI), and loss improvement ratio (LIR) -- and switches among AdamW, SGD-M, and Lion as the optimization landscape evolves. State-preserving momentum transfer and a 400-step learning-rate bridge prevent accuracy degradation at every transition point. On CIFAR-100/WRN-28x10, AOS-R reaches 78% top-1 in 81 epochs -- 26% fewer than AdamW (109), 43% fewer than SGD-M (143), and 16% fewer than Lion (96). Across eight model-dataset benchmarks, AOS-R achieves best accuracy on 6 of 8 combinations with a mean +0.4 pp gain and 0.80x convergence speedup over AdamW under a single shared hyperparameter configuration. --- ### Long-Horizon Autonomous Architecture Research with a Language-Model Agent: A Behavioural Case Study Authors: Aon Safdar, Mohamed Saadeldin Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01995v1 We study what happens when a single general-purpose large language model acts as the sole researcher on a long-horizon neural architecture design problem. The agent receives a scientific question, an initial hypothesis and motivation, a compute budget, and research affordances (source and experiment management, experiment tracking, literature access, and persistent memory), then autonomously proposes, implements, evaluates, and records experiments over an extended period. The study comprises three phases, separated by human-declared transitions, that progressively expand the agent's tool surface or problem scale. Across approximately 100 sequential experiments, the agent improves a non-standard Vision Transformer from a weak baseline to a stronger, efficient model on small benchmarks and a usable but sub-SOTA model on ImageNet-1K, while producing a dense behavioural trace. We report four findings.(i)Productivity exhibits a clear phase structure: rapid early gains, a multi-dozen-hypothesis saturation wall, and recovery, with recovery triggered by expanding the action surface rather than changing the underlying model.(ii)A single early hypothesis contributes more to accuracy gain, with later improvements long-tailed.(iii)The preference for greedy, incremental hypotheses is largely workflow-induced: a commit-or-discard evaluation rule is isomorphic to greedy hill-climbing; the remainder reflects risk aversion after bold failures and anchoring on familiar literature. (iv)The agent independently rediscovers established results and, in the unfamiliar regime of pure channel attention, overturns a standard design choice. We conclude that workflow design was at least as influential as agent capability in this study and propose diversified search, budgeted moonshot hypotheses, explicit forks, and regime-aware re-validation as testable directions for future autonomous research. --- ### SPARE: Structural Parameter-Free Affinity Regularization for Flow Matching Authors: Zong-Wei Hong, Jinglun Li, Shen Zhang, Yuhan Liu, Linze Li, Yao Tang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01990v1 Denoising diffusion transformers achieve strong generation quality but converge slowly during training. Regularizing their internal representations has emerged as an effective accelerator, yet existing methods split into two families with complementary costs. Target-based methods strengthen representations by aligning them to external features, which requires an external encoder and a learnable projection head to bridge feature spaces. Target-free methods hold no reference at all, and can only repel the model's own features across samples or layers, discarding whatever structure the data contains. Prior work suggests that spatial structure, rather than global semantics, drives the gains of alignment. We therefore ask whether such structure can serve as a target directly, and whether it exists not only within an image but across images. Our key insight is that the clean data latent already carries this structure in the relations among its tokens, where a relation is the similarity between two tokens, a single scalar comparable across feature spaces without a projection head. We propose Structural Parameter-free Affinity Regularization (SPARE), a regularizer that matches the pairwise affinities of intermediate tokens to those of the clean latents. To exploit this structure fully, SPARE extends the matching to token pairs across images, precisely the pairs that prior target-free methods repel by default, and calibrates both relation types with a single learning objective. On ImageNet $256 \times 256$ with SiT backbones under matched 400K-iteration budgets, SPARE adds no encoder, head, or parameters and only 0.08 GB of training memory, yet attains the lowest FID among parameter-free regularizers in every tested setting, recovers 37 to 54\% of REPA's FID reduction, and improves over REPA when combined with it, reaching FID 1.90 under classifier-free guidance at 1M iterations. --- ### Grounding and Explaining Visual Evidence for AI-Generated Image Detection in Human-Centric Scenes Authors: Kun Guo, Yuzhou Yang, Haoyue Wang, Qichao Ying, Sheng Li, Zhenxing Qian Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01988v2 Rapid advances in image generation models call for interpretable AI-generated image detection methods that not only determine authenticity but also provide supporting visual evidence. Existing approaches may produce inconsistencies between generated explanations and localized evidence regions, undermining the reliability of explanations for authenticity decisions. Meanwhile, existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of the diverse human-centric scenes prevalent in generated imagery. To address these limitations, we investigate authenticity detection with grounded and explainable visual evidence in human-centric scenes. We present HAVE (Human-centric AI-generated Visual Evidence), a diverse human-centric dataset comprising 40K real and 39K AI-generated images from 10 recent generators, with 106K localized evidence instances across 8 evidence categories, each annotated with a bounding box and a region-aligned explanation. We further propose PAVE, a Perception-Aware Visual Evidence framework that jointly performs authenticity prediction, visual evidence grounding, and region-aligned explanation generation. PAVE employs a judge-guided alignment reward to assess region--explanation consistency and evidence validity, together with perception-aware regularization that contrasts token-level predictions between original and randomly masked images to promote reliance on visual input. Experiments on HAVE and external datasets demonstrate strong performance in authenticity detection, visual evidence grounding, and explanation quality. Code and data will be released upon publication. --- ### Grounding and Explaining Visual Evidence for AI-Generated Image Detection in Human-Centric Scenes Authors: Kun Guo, Yuzhou Yang, Haoyue Wang, Qichao Ying, Sheng Li, Zhenxing Qian Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01988v1 Rapid advances in image generation models call for interpretable AI-generated image detection methods that not only determine authenticity but also provide supporting visual evidence. Existing approaches may produce inconsistencies between generated explanations and localized evidence regions, undermining the reliability of explanations for authenticity decisions. Meanwhile, existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of the diverse human-centric scenes prevalent in generated imagery. To address these limitations, we investigate authenticity detection with grounded and explainable visual evidence in human-centric scenes. We present HAVE (Human-centric AI-generated Visual Evidence), a diverse human-centric dataset comprising 40K real and 39K AI-generated images from 10 recent generators, with 106K localized evidence instances across 8 evidence categories, each annotated with a bounding box and a region-aligned explanation. We further propose PAVE, a Perception-Aware Visual Evidence framework that jointly performs authenticity prediction, visual evidence grounding, and region-aligned explanation generation. PAVE employs a judge-guided alignment reward to assess region--explanation consistency and evidence validity, together with perception-aware regularization that contrasts token-level predictions between original and randomly masked images to promote reliance on visual input. Experiments on HAVE and external datasets demonstrate strong performance in authenticity detection, visual evidence grounding, and explanation quality. Code and data will be released upon publication. --- ### DiffPrune: differentiable information throttling for token pruning in vision-language models Authors: Landi He, Mingde Yao, Shawn Young, Lijian Xu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01985v1 Visual token pruning reduces the computational cost of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by removing redundant visual tokens. The key is to learn a score that measures whether a token is useful. Existing methods typically rely on Gumbel-Softmax to approximate discrete selection during training. Such selectors make the score depend on the behavior of a relaxed pruning operator, not directly on the consequence of information loss. In this paper, we propose DiffPrune, which gives token scores a direct meaning. During training, DiffPrune keeps all tokens and weakens each token's information according to its score. If weakening a token hurts the task, the scorer is pushed to protect it; if not, the token can receive a lower score. Because the loss is differentiated through this actual information-throttling path, the scorer avoids the unstable surrogate path of relaxed token selection. DiffPrune implements this idea with an Information Throttler, which injects variance-preserving noise into visual tokens, where high-score tokens remain close to their original representations, while low-score tokens carry less original information. At inference, the throttler is removed, and hard top-K pruning is applied using the learned scores. Across ten VLM benchmarks, DiffPrune retains 96.5% of full-model accuracy while accelerating LLM prefill by 2.85x, with only 0.69 ms inference overhead. Code will be publicly available. --- ### AdaThinkV: Adaptive Thinking for Token-Efficient Video Reasoning Authors: Jingqi Tian, Haoji Zhang, Lin Chen, Hongbo Jin, Haonan Xu, Tianrui Zhu, Xingming Shui, Shilin Ma, Wenjing Yang, Yansong Tang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01980v1 Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve performance on difficult video questions but often wastes decoding tokens on simple ones. We study whether a video multimodal large language model can adapt its reasoning effort to each question. We propose AdaThinkV, an adaptive framework for video reasoning that learns whether to reason explicitly without offline difficulty labels, manually tuned confidence thresholds, or an external router. During reinforcement learning, AdaThinkV samples matched rollouts in explicit reasoning and direct answering modes for each prompt. ThinkGain estimates the prompt-level utility of explicit reasoning by balancing its accuracy gain against additional response length, providing supervision for both conditional response generation and autonomous mode selection. For difficult prompts, limited rollout exploration can yield groups in which every response is unsuccessful and accuracy rewards show little variation, providing insufficient signal for learning. We therefore introduce Variance Recovery Policy Optimization (VRPO), which retains and progressively expands these groups to recover informative signals from prompts that are difficult yet solvable. At inference, AdaThinkV selects a response mode and generates the response in a single autoregressive sequence. Across a unified suite of video reasoning evaluations, AdaThinkV achieves a mean accuracy of 40.79 with an average of 257.20 output tokens, outperforming the strongest evaluated adaptive baseline by 2.98 points while using 22.7% fewer tokens. Project page: https://trilarflagz.github.io/AdaThinkV/ --- ### ET-Prune: Evidence-Aware Dynamic Budgeting for Visual Token Pruning in Text-Rich MLLMs Authors: Zizhong Ding, Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Shaoqiu Zhang, Xiao Xiao, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01979v2 Visual token pruning reduces the inference cost of multimodal large language models, but a fixed token ratio is poorly matched to text-rich inputs. In OCR-centric tasks, decisive evidence can be a small number, label, or field whose relevance is specified by the question; indiscriminate pruning can erase that evidence while retaining visually salient but irrelevant regions. We present ET-Prune, a training-free framework that casts pruning as evidence allocation. It derives question-conditioned evidence from a decoder-side partial query-key block, safeguards text-like spatial regions, and converts evidence uncertainty and density into a sample-specific token floor. Three progressive middle-layer events then move the sequence toward this budget, retaining more tokens for diffuse or text-dense evidence and pruning concentrated evidence more aggressively. At the observed point estimates from one deterministic pass per configuration, ET-Prune leads or ties among pruned methods in all six backbone-benchmark comparisons at roughly half tokens. On OCRBench-v2, it leads the strongest pruned baselines by 1.80 and 0.68 percentage points on Qwen3-VL-8B and InternVL3.5-8B, respectively, while retaining about half of the visual tokens; on MMBench v1.1, it reaches 0.8467 circular exact-matching accuracy versus 0.8437 for Vanilla at 54.45% average visual-token retention. These results show a favorable observed quality-cost trade-off for evidence-aware dynamic budgeting in text-rich multimodal inference. --- ### ET-Prune: Evidence-Aware Dynamic Budgeting for Visual Token Pruning in Text-Rich MLLMs Authors: Zizhong Ding, Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Shaoqiu Zhang, Xiao Xiao, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01979v1 Visual token pruning reduces the inference cost of multimodal large language models, but a fixed token ratio is poorly matched to text-rich inputs. In OCR-centric tasks, decisive evidence can be a small number, label, or field whose relevance is specified by the question; indiscriminate pruning can erase that evidence while retaining visually salient but irrelevant regions. We present ET-Prune, a training-free framework that casts pruning as evidence allocation. It derives question-conditioned evidence from a decoder-side partial query-key block, safeguards text-like spatial regions, and converts evidence uncertainty and density into a sample-specific token floor. Three progressive middle-layer events then move the sequence toward this budget, retaining more tokens for diffuse or text-dense evidence and pruning concentrated evidence more aggressively. At the observed point estimates from one deterministic pass per configuration, ET-Prune leads or ties among pruned methods in all six backbone-benchmark comparisons at roughly half tokens. On OCRBench-v2, it leads the strongest pruned baselines by 1.80 and 0.68 percentage points on Qwen3-VL-8B and InternVL3.5-8B, respectively, while retaining about half of the visual tokens; on MMBench v1.1, it reaches 0.8467 circular exact-matching accuracy versus 0.8437 for Vanilla at 54.45% average visual-token retention. These results show a favorable observed quality-cost trade-off for evidence-aware dynamic budgeting in text-rich multimodal inference. --- ### Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching: Real-Time One-Shot Emotion-Controllable Portrait Animation Authors: Haijie Yang, Jindi Bao, Yixuan Dong, Hongliang Zhang, Jian Bi, Hao Tang, Zhenyu Zhang, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01978v1 Audio-driven portrait animation has advanced rapidly with diffusion-based generative models, yet real-time one-shot generation with expressive emotion control remains challenging. Existing methods often suffer from insufficient emotion-aware motion priors and expensive appearance computation during multi-step denoising. To address these issues, we propose Proxy Avatar Meets Low-Rank Caching, a cascaded framework for real-time one-shot emotion-controllable portrait animation. Instead of directly generating the target portrait from audio, our method uses a Gaussian-based emotion proxy avatar as a reusable motion generator, which is trained once on a single identity to produce expressive driving videos from audio and emotion labels. Since the proxy avatar only provides motion rather than target appearance or geometry, a large-scale one-shot retargeting model further extracts identity-independent motion from the proxy performance and adapts it to arbitrary target portraits. To improve inference efficiency, we introduce zero-shot appearance reuse with low-rank caching, which caches reference appearance features at the initial denoising step and models subsequent feature variations using lightweight low-rank adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves stronger emotional expressiveness, better identity-preserving animation, and substantially reduced inference cost, enabling real-time one-shot portrait animation. --- ### SVGEval: A Vision-Grounded Framework for Perceptual-Quality Benchmarking and Evaluation in Text-to-SVG Generation Authors: Yiming Wang, Ye Chen, Hanqi Chen, Bingbing Ni Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01977v1 Multimodal large models are increasingly used to generate scalable vector graphics (SVG), but reliable evaluation remains underexplored. Existing protocols are often code-centric or borrow raster-image metrics after rendering SVGs, which fail to reflect human perception and overlook SVG-specific qualities such as geometry and spatial composition. We introduce SVGEval, a vision-grounded multimodal benchmark for human-aligned SVG quality assessment. SVGEval explicitly incorporates visual renderings to evaluate whether models can judge the rendered outcome rather than only inspect SVG code, and provides high-quality annotations obtained via multi-round human labeling with expert refinement. Systematic evaluations across representative multimodal models reveal a clear gap: models perform relatively well on semantic alignment and aesthetics, yet struggle on geometry- and layout-related judgments. Building on SVGEval, we train an explainable SVG quality scorer that outputs multi-aspect scores with textual rationales. Ablations show that explicit visual grounding and reasoning supervision are crucial, especially for spatial and geometric assessment. SVGEval offers a reliable testbed and practical scorer for evaluating and improving SVG generation in the era of multimodal models. --- ### Detecting Nonproperness of Likelihood Equations Authors: Xiaoxian Tang, Bican Xia, Tianqi Zhao Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, cs.SC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01976v1 Given an algebraic statistical model, a challenging problem is classifying the data according to the number of positive critical points of the likelihood function. The positive critical points are the positive solutions to an algebraic system, say likelihood equations. So, identifying the number of positive critical points is a real root classification problem for the likelihood equations. A discriminant variety of a likelihood-equation system geometrically describes the data for which the number of real solutions becomes unusual. As an essential component of the discriminant variety, the nonproperness set collects the data such that the likelihood-equation system has a solution at infinity. So, the number of real solutions varies when the data passes the nonproperness set, and identifying the nonproperness set plays a crucial role in the real root classification. In this work, we develop a novel method for computing nonproperness sets of likelihood-equation systems. We prove the correctness of this method. We show experimentally that it is far more efficient than the known methods in the literature. --- ### TELLER: Non-intrusive Cross-Layer Root-Cause Analysis for LLM Inference Authors: Ruilin Xu, Junyi Li, Pengfei Chen, Zongxuan Xie Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01975v1 Large language model (LLM) inference has evolved from an offline workload into a continuously operated software service, yet root-cause analysis remains difficult because a single request spans the inference engine, Python/C++ backend, host CUDA APIs, GPU kernels, and distributed communication. Existing profilers expose raw timelines, while log-based diagnosis often misses cross-layer execution semantics and request-level structure. We present TELLER, a non-intrusive Trace- and Log-aware LLM inference Root-cause analysis framework. TELLER first collects NVTX/CUPTI traces and service logs without modifying model binaries, then reconstructs per-request call-chain trees and aligns log lines with the corresponding execution steps. We introduce a dependency-aware causal-context slice that preserves parent-child structure, temporal order, and communication relations, and a Trace Pair Encoding (TPE) tokenizer that compresses such slices into compact structural token sequences with parent, depth, and duration attributes. On top of these representations, TELLER combines numeric candidate localization with a multimodal root-cause model that jointly predicts abnormal steps, localizes suspicious operators, and generates natural-language explanations. Experiments on multi-node GPU inference workloads show a clear compression-accuracy trade-off: a moderate TPE vocabulary reduces per-step trace length by more than 80% while achieving the best overall performance on both horizontal (cross-node communication) and vertical (within-node execution stack) views, whereas more aggressive compression substantially degrades diagnosis quality. Further analyses under low-fault priors, strengthened baselines, modality ablations, explanation-quality checks, and tracing overhead show that TELLER provides a practical triage and evidence-localization substrate for LLM inference RCA. --- ### Roomer: Reflective Object-Grounded Model Editing and Repair for 3D Indoor Layout Synthesis Authors: Lingwei Dang, Ziyan Qiu, Jiajia Cheng, Shishuo Shang, Zhenhao Zhang, Yufei Zhu, Qingxin Xiao, Pan Liu, Shenghui Huang, Yun Hao, Juntong Li, Qingyao Wu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01973v1 Existing indoor layout generators produce globally plausible layouts yet may retain local violations such as collisions, out-of-bounds placements, obstructed openings, and blocked circulation. Most prior work focuses on full-scene synthesis or scene-level optimization, with limited support for identifying responsible objects and locally repairing affected regions. We present Roomer, a reflective repair framework that casts these violations as sparse, object-grounded repair problems. Roomer encodes layouts as ``RoState'' and uses ``RoReview'' to bind measured violations to implicated objects. A geometry-conditioned vision-language model planner proposes a structured local edit, while a deterministic solver validates it and generates a finite set of candidate edits when needed. Each candidate is committed only if full-scene verification confirms that it resolves the target violation without new hard violations or broken protected constraints. We train the planner on Roomer-CC, a controlled-corruption dataset that pairs faulty layouts with object-grounded violation evidence and known-feasible inverse StatePatches. Since existing benchmarks rarely assess whether physically valid layouts are usable, we introduce Roomer-Eval to assess distributional quality, physical validity, and practical usability. Experiments show that Roomer repairs residual violations while preserving valid regions, improves physical validity and usability, and transfers across external generators. --- ### Music Restoration via Latent Operator Optimization and Diffusion Model Priors Authors: Michal Švento, Eloi Moliner, Valtteri Kallinen, Lauri Juvela, Vesa Välimäki, Pavel Rajmic Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01972v1 Music restoration seeks to recover a clean signal from an observed recording degraded by an unknown effect, distortion, or corruption. Existing systems often rely on paired training data and distortion-specific supervision, which limits their use when the forward process is not known in advance. We propose LOUDAR (Latent-space Optimization of Unknown Distortion for Audio Restoration) a general-purpose restoration method that operates in the latent space of a pretrained audio autoencoder and models the unknown distortion as a learnable latent operator. At inference time, LOUDAR alternates between estimating the clean latent variable and updating the latent operator parameters. An unconditional latent diffusion model provides a prior over clean audio and regularizes this inference by steering the latent estimate toward the manifold of clean recordings. Because the degradation model is adapted per input, the approach is broadly applicable across diverse restoration problems. We evaluate LOUDAR on singing voice effect removal and restoration, as well as guitar distortion removal, and show that it consistently improves over degraded inputs and is competitive with supervised and unsupervised baselines in waveform and latent domains. --- ### ChaosProbe: A Neurochaotic Lens on Frozen Transformer Input-Embedding Spaces Authors: Kunal Kumar Pant, Nithin Nagaraj Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01968v1 Transformer models are most often understood through what they do: their benchmark performance, generation quality, or behavior on downstream tasks. Yet frozen transformer input-embedding spaces may also be examined through their responses to a controlled deterministic probe before contextual computation or task-specific adaptation. Guided by this response-based view, we introduce \emph{ChaosProbe}, a deterministic neurochaos-inspired method for constructing response-based fingerprints of frozen transformer input-embedding spaces. For each prompt-level embedding matrix, ChaosProbe applies a chaotic trajectory-based transformation and summarizes its Firing Rate and Entropy channel responses with complementary representation-level measures, producing a fixed-length signature for each model. In a bounded proof-of-concept study of $80$ neutral prompts and four pretrained models---GPT-2, DistilGPT2, BERT-base-uncased, and RoBERTa-base---Pearson correlation, Spearman correlation, and cosine similarity each recover all four same-family nearest-neighbor assignments and both expected mutual family pairs. Euclidean distance recovers three of the four assignments and one of the two mutual family pairs. Paired bootstrap resampling supports the stability of the Pearson and Spearman pairings over the observed prompt set, and signature-validity checks show that constant or collapsed responses do not dominate the reported fingerprints. These results provide a cohort-dependent proof of concept that deterministic neurochaotic response signatures can expose broad structure among frozen transformer input-embedding spaces. --- ### LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Tasks Authors: Ziyu Ma, Hailang Huang, Shun Zou, Yong Wang, Shidong Yang, Yiming Hu, Fei Wei, XiangXiang Chu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01964v1 Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly undertake long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning, tool use, and revision across many interdependent steps. However, existing agent harnesses maintain task execution, task state, and completion assessment within a growing context, making the state difficult to track and allowing incorrect self-assessments to propagate into later decisions. We reformulate long-horizon execution as a task-state management problem and propose LongHorizon-Harness, which maintains the task state explicitly outside execution and updates it only with facts independently verified from the environment. Its Manage-Execute-Audit(MEA) loop uses a manager to maintain the task state and determine the next subtask, a fresh-context executor to perform it, and a read-only auditor to verify the resulting environment state before the next round. A lightweight AgentAdapter supports interchangeable model and harness backends without modifying their native agent loops. LongHorizon-Harness improves Qwen~3.7-Plus from 51.8% to 80.7% on WeaveBench, from 69.7% to 77.2% on Terminal-Bench~2.1, and from 2.8% to 8.3% on OSWorld~2.0. It also raises Claude Opus~4.7 from 20.0% to 34.3% on an OSWorld2.0 subset, demonstrating consistent gains across models, harnesses, and interaction domains. --- ### OSSDD - a New Open Dataset for Sentinel-1 Ship Detection Authors: Horst Hammer, Sylvia Hochstuhl, Antje Thiele, Tobias Brosch, Padraig Davidson, Tim Remiger, Michael Teutsch Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01963v1 Ship detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images plays an important role for maritime situational awareness, especially with respect to different illegal activities at sea such as illegal fishing, smuggling or border violations. Modern ship detection methods using neural networks usually require large training datasets, which are considerably scarcer in the SAR domain than in the electro-optical domain. While several free datasets exist for this task, their availability and usability vary. In this paper, OpenSARShip-Ship Detection Dataset (OSSDD), a new dataset based on the well-known OpenSARShip 1.0 dataset is proposed for training neural networks for SAR ship detection. OSSDD is freely available and contains 15,197 Sentinel-1 amplitude patches in VV and VH polarization, binary ship masks, axis-aligned bounding box and rotated bounding box annotations for a total of 55,759 ships. The construction of the dataset, the contents and structure of the downloadable data and experiments with three common detector models (Faster R-CNN, FCOS, DETR) are shown and discussed. The results serve as benchmarks for future experiments. The dataset is available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sylviaHoch/OpenSARShip-Ship-Detection-Dataset. --- ### FAST-GS: Frequency Aware Space-time Gaussian Splatting for Photorealistic Dynamic Novel View Synthesis Authors: Zhengyang Zhang, Ziyu Lu, PengCheng Li, Hongbo Duan, Yi Liu, Pengting Luo, Peiyu Zhuang, Xinghui Li, Shaohua Ma Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01958v2 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) excels in dynamic 3D reconstruction and real-time novel view synthesis via efficient 4D Gaussian representations and parallelizable rendering. However, existing 4DGS approaches rely on a single polynomial to model motion, which limits performance in complex dynamic scenes where high-frequency motion components are prevalent, and fails to ensure long-term stability due to cumulative trajectory drift. To address these issues, we propose a Fourier Motion Modeling module: this paradigm decomposes motion into frequency-based sinusoidal components, capturing both low-frequency global trajectories and high-frequency local details to model complex motion patterns accurately. It retains the real-time rendering capability of 4DGS while improving complex motion fitting and long-term coherence. Additionally, we integrate a motion-aware regularization strategy into the loss function: it uses frequency-dependent weights to suppress high-frequency jitter while preserving low-frequency motion coherence. Extensive experiments on N3V and Google Immersive datasets from multiple scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. --- ### FAST-GS: Frequency Aware Space-time Gaussian Splatting for Photorealistic Dynamic Novel View Synthesis Authors: Zhengyang Zhang, Ziyu Lu, PengCheng Li, Hongbo Duan, Yi Liu, Pengting Luo, Peiyu Zhuang, Xinghui Li, Shaohua Ma Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01958v1 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) excels in dynamic 3D reconstruction and real-time novel view synthesis via efficient 4D Gaussian representations and parallelizable rendering. However, existing 4DGS approaches rely on a single polynomial to model motion, which limits performance in complex dynamic scenes where high-frequency motion components are prevalent, and fails to ensure long-term stability due to cumulative trajectory drift. To address these issues, we propose a Fourier Motion Modeling module: this paradigm decomposes motion into frequency-based sinusoidal components, capturing both low-frequency global trajectories and high-frequency local details to model complex motion patterns accurately. It retains the real-time rendering capability of 4DGS while improving complex motion fitting and long-term coherence. Additionally, we integrate a motion-aware regularization strategy into the loss function: it uses frequency-dependent weights to suppress high-frequency jitter while preserving low-frequency motion coherence. Extensive experiments on N3V and Google Immersive datasets from multiple scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. --- ### Agentic Self-Healing for Data and AI Pipelines: An Affordable Vendor-Agnostic Architecture using Open-Source Software Authors: Solomon Eshun, Dennis Murage, Sharleen Muoki, Chih-Chun Chen, Stephen Adjignon, Matteo Staar, Oliver Angélil Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.ET, cs.AI, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01955v1 Modern organizations rely on data, machine learning, and software delivery pipelines to move data, train models, deploy applications, refresh dashboards, and support business-critical decisions. However, these pipelines often fail because of data quality issues, schema changes, upstream source changes, infrastructure problems, orchestration failures, and model workflow issues. Existing ZeroOps, observability, and AI operations platforms can help teams detect incidents, investigate root causes, and in some cases recommend or execute fixes. However, many of these solutions are expensive, vendor-specific, or difficult for smaller teams to adapt across different tools and environments. This paper first compares existing off-the-shelf solutions for AI-assisted pipeline monitoring, root-cause analysis, and automated remediation, including their strengths, limitations, and practical trade-offs. Based on this comparison, we find that the main gap is architectural rather than technological: the required ingredients for self-healing pipelines already exist, but they are fragmented across vendor-specific platforms, observability tools, incident systems, and open-source components. We therefore propose an affordable, vendor-agnostic reference architecture for agentic self-healing pipelines using open-source and low-cost tools. The proposed architecture combines monitoring, pipeline metadata, incident history, deterministic policy checks, AI-assisted diagnosis, approval workflows, and controlled remediation actions to help teams detect, diagnose, repair, verify, and learn from pipeline issues with less manual effort. The goal is to provide a practical reference architecture that can be adapted across data engineering, machine learning operations, and software delivery environments. --- ### StyleForge: Indoor Furniture Styling by Counterfactual Reasoning in a Hypergraph Field Authors: Lingwei Dang, Shishuo Shang, Pan Liu, Jiajia Cheng, Ziyan Qiu, Zhenhao Zhang, Yufei Zhu, Shenghui Huang, Qingxin Xiao, Yun Hao, Juntong Li, Qingyao Wu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01954v1 Fixed-layout indoor furniture styling requires selecting assets that form a coherent room without changing the prescribed furniture categories, positions, orientations, or scales. Existing approaches typically retrieve each asset independently or rely on static local relations, making them prone to shape, material, and color conflicts after scene composition. We introduce StyleForge, a scene-level structured selection framework built on a dynamic hypergraph style field. A frozen multimodal large language model extracts structured style priors from an open-ended style request and the fixed layout, while StyleForge maintains a learnable candidate distribution for each furniture slot. Conditioned on the target style, the dynamic hypergraph style field adaptively activates and weights layout-induced hyperedges to capture higher-order dependencies among furniture. Counterfactual style preference learning then treats each candidate as a local substitution in the current style field and evaluates its contextual compatibility using Mahalanobis energies. Training alternates between optimizing the style field and the candidate logits. At inference, the model remains frozen and test-time training updates only room-specific candidate logits, progressively correcting cross-slot style conflicts as the global scene context evolves. Experiments on 3D-FRONT demonstrate state-of-the-art furniture retrieval and scene-level style coherence, producing more coherent fixed-layout furniture arrangements than object- and scene-level retrieval baselines. --- ### Look Ahead Before You Distill: Future Trajectory Validation of Teacher Guidance for Agentic On-Policy Distillation Authors: Chishui Chen, Yaoyou Fan, Te Sun, Yi Yang, Chenghao Sun, Delin Mao, Hongbo Qiao, Zuowei Zhang, Junxi Wang, Chenxing Sun, Yangen Hu, Lu Pan et al. Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01953v2 On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on states visited by the student, reducing the distribution gap between training and inference. However, in multi-turn agentic tasks, student deviations may accumulate over time, gradually moving the trajectory away from states where teacher guidance remains effective. Our quantitative analysis further shows that high-disagreement states offer promising opportunities for teacher guidance, but determining whether such guidance is beneficial requires examining its effect on subsequent student trajectories. We propose FutureBridge-OPD (FTB), which executes a short teacher bridge at a high disagreement state and uses the resulting student continuation to assess whether the bridge increases the density of positive distillation signals relative to the teacher. On ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld, under the main Qwen3-32B teacher to Qwen3-1.7B student setting, FTB outperforms vanilla OPD and TCOD by an average of 16.6 and 7.6 points, respectively, and remains effective across student scales and teacher settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChenChiShui/FutureBridge-OPD. --- ### Event ActivityNet: A Large-Scale Simulated-Event Benchmark for Untrimmed Action Understanding Authors: Cheng-Yao Hong, Ting-Wei Lin, Yun-Chung Lai, Hua-Wei Lee, Hwann-Tzong Chen, Tyng-Luh Liu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01948v1 Long-horizon event-based action understanding remains underexplored because existing datasets largely comprise short, trimmed clips, while collecting native event streams with dense temporal annotations is costly. We introduce Event ActivityNet, a large-scale simulated-event benchmark derived from human-annotated, untrimmed ActivityNet videos. It comprises 3,263 videos, 200 action classes, and 106.94 hours, with matched 5-bin and 9-bin event-voxel representations, temporal action annotations, and timestamped captions. The benchmark supports annotated-segment action recognition, auxiliary event-language alignment, and causal online temporal action localization. We generate event voxels directly from non-interpolated source videos in decoded frame order, retain per-video rational nominal or average frame-rate metadata for approximate time mapping, and use action-center reconstruction LPIPS as a soft diagnostic of retained reconstructable content. We establish baselines for adaptive event framing, prompt-caption alignment, and event-only, RGB-only, and RGB-event localization. Under a progressive nested-scale training protocol, recognition Top-1 accuracy increases from 52.25 to 66.42, while online temporal localization average mAP improves from 21.7 to 29.0. Moreover, staged Event ActivityNet pretraining followed by native-event fine-tuning consistently outperforms target-only and joint-from-scratch training across multiple supervision budgets. Event ActivityNet provides a scalable benchmark for long-horizon event modeling, although native-camera evaluation remains essential for deployment-oriented conclusions. --- ### Divisive Normalization Shapes Low-Rank Slow Manifolds for Continuous Working Memory Authors: Zhaotian Gu, Jie Su, Weiwei Wang, Chang Liu, Tianyi Qian, Dahui Wang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01947v2 The ability to robustly maintain and update continuous variables is a hallmark of working memory. While classical continuous attractor networks suffer from severe fine-tuning fragility, standard artificial recurrent neural networks (RNNs) like GRUs and LSTMs typically fail to stably learn continuous manifolds, instead shattering the state space into discretized point attractors. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from divisive normalization, a canonical neural computation widely observed across cortical circuits, and propose the Recurrent Divisive Normalization Network (RDNN), a minimal and algebraically isolated model of dynamic division. Through dynamical systems analysis on canonical working memory tasks, we demonstrate that this biophysical constraint allows the network to converge to robust, high-fidelity slow manifolds. Furthermore, we analyze the gradient dynamics of divisive normalization during Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), showing that it introduces an activity-dependent local gradient scaling. This scaling dampens parameter updates in highly active regimes, which empirically aligns with a significant self-compression of the network's effective rank, confining the recurrent dynamics to a tight, low-dimensional subspace while avoiding the optimization pathologies associated with explicit low-rank factorization. Finally, ablations demonstrate that while subtractive inhibition can maintain static memories, divisive normalization is mathematically essential to prevent manifold shattering under time-varying inputs. Our findings identify divisive normalization not merely as a biological artifact, but as a critical computational mechanism for learning high-fidelity continuous representations. --- ### Divisive Normalization Shapes Low-Rank Slow Manifolds for Continuous Working Memory Authors: Zhaotian Gu, Jie Su, Weiwei Wang, Chang Liu, Tianyi Qian, Dahui Wang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01947v1 The ability to robustly maintain and update continuous variables is a hallmark of working memory. While classical continuous attractor networks suffer from severe fine-tuning fragility, standard artificial recurrent neural networks (RNNs) like GRUs and LSTMs typically fail to stably learn continuous manifolds, instead shattering the state space into discretized point attractors. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from divisive normalization, a canonical neural computation widely observed across cortical circuits, and propose the Recurrent Divisive Normalization Network (RDNN), a minimal and algebraically isolated model of dynamic division. Through dynamical systems analysis on canonical working memory tasks, we demonstrate that this biophysical constraint allows the network to converge to robust, high-fidelity slow manifolds. Furthermore, we analyze the gradient dynamics of divisive normalization during Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), showing that it introduces an activity-dependent local gradient scaling. This scaling dampens parameter updates in highly active regimes, which empirically aligns with a significant self-compression of the network's effective rank, confining the recurrent dynamics to a tight, low-dimensional subspace while avoiding the optimization pathologies associated with explicit low-rank factorization. Finally, ablations demonstrate that while subtractive inhibition can maintain static memories, divisive normalization is mathematically essential to prevent manifold shattering under time-varying inputs. Our findings identify divisive normalization not merely as a biological artifact, but as a critical computational mechanism for learning high-fidelity continuous representations. --- ### UniMoCa: Unifying Motion and Camera Controls as Visual Proxies for Faithful Human Video Generation Authors: Liming Tan, Ye Chen, Hao Zhang, Lirong Qian, Feifei Li, Bingbing Ni Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01944v1 Controlling human motion and camera movement is essential for faithful human-oriented video generation, yet remains challenging in multi-person scenes with large body motions, occlusions, and dynamic cameras. Existing pipelines typically rely on visual motion sequences, such as skeleton maps, pose maps, or rendered body representations, for motion control, while using camera embeddings for camera control. Such heterogeneous control interfaces force video generation models to reconcile pixel-aligned visual cues with non-visual geometric embeddings, making motion-camera attribution difficult and sensitive to camera estimation errors. We propose \textbf{UniMoCa}, a representation-driven framework that unifies motion and camera controls in visual space. At the core of UniMoCa is \textbf{Motion-Camera Visual Proxy} (\textbf{MCVP}), a mutually-sharable novel representation that converts 3D human motion and camera trajectories extracted from driving videos into an identity-neutral visual proxy. MCVP renders temporally aligned human geometry under the recovered camera trajectory and augments it with explicit camera trajectory markers, replacing heterogeneous visual-parametric controls with distinguishable visual cues. As both control factors are represented in the same visual space, they become mutually compatible rather than heterogeneous, enabling consistent joint reasoning and editing during video generation. We further curate a \textbf{MCVP-Video} dataset covering complex actions, multi-person interactions, and diverse camera trajectories. Experiments based on the Wan2.2 I2V show that UniMoCa achieves substantial gains in human motion control, camera control, temporal consistency, and camera-aware robustness with minimal additional complexity. More details are shown in our Project page: https://tanliming-daniel.github.io/UniMoCa/. --- ### CultureVidBench: Benchmarking Cultural Understanding in Text-to-Video Generation Authors: Xianjing Han, Yuhan Su, Yang Deng, Dong Ma, Wee Peng Tay, Bin Zhu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01942v2 Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to represent diverse cultural contexts remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on perceptual quality, physical plausibility, and text-video alignment, but do not directly assess whether generated videos capture culturally specific objects, actions, rituals, visible text, or audio cues. We introduce CultureVidBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cultural understanding in T2V generation. CultureVidBench contains 1,000 curated prompts covering 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects organized into three categories: material culture, social practice & performance, and ritual & ceremony. Designed specifically for video generation, CultureVidBench emphasizes dynamic and multimodal cultural representation, including social interactions, ritual procedure, and culturally appropriate visible text and audio. We evaluate seven representative T2V models through human user studies and MLLM-based automatic assessment across cultural faithfulness, multimodal cultural rendering, semantic adherence, and perceptual quality. Results show that although current models achieve strong semantic adherence and visual quality, they often fail to faithfully capture fine-grained cultural details, particularly for underrepresented regions, rituals, and multimodal cultural cues. --- ### CultureVidBench: Benchmarking Cultural Understanding in Text-to-Video Generation Authors: Xianjing Han, Yuhan Su, Yang Deng, Dong Ma, Wee Peng Tay, Bin Zhu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01942v1 Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to represent diverse cultural contexts remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on perceptual quality, physical plausibility, and text-video alignment, but do not directly assess whether generated videos capture culturally specific objects, actions, rituals, visible text, or audio cues. We introduce CultureVidBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cultural understanding in T2V generation. CultureVidBench contains 1,000 curated prompts covering 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects organized into three categories: material culture, social practice & performance, and ritual & ceremony. Designed specifically for video generation, CultureVidBench emphasizes dynamic and multimodal cultural representation, including social interactions, ritual procedure, and culturally appropriate visible text and audio. We evaluate seven representative T2V models through human user studies and MLLM-based automatic assessment across cultural faithfulness, multimodal cultural rendering, semantic adherence, and perceptual quality. Results show that although current models achieve strong semantic adherence and visual quality, they often fail to faithfully capture fine-grained cultural details, particularly for underrepresented regions, rituals, and multimodal cultural cues. --- ### A Contractualist Argumentation Framework for Moral Decision-Making Authors: Luis Marcos-Vidal, Giulio Antonio Abbo, Tony Belpaeme Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01937v1 Autonomous agents operating in shared environments must make decisions that affect multiple individuals with potentially conflicting interests. We propose a formal framework for moral decision-making grounded in Scanlon's contractualism, an ethical theory that evaluates the permissibility of actions in terms of principles that no one could reasonably reject. To operationalise contractualist reasoning, we use ASPIC+, a structured argumentation framework, extended with value-based filtering to model how each agent's values determine which reasons are morally relevant in the first place. The result is a Contractualist Argumentation Framework in which agents' reasons are formally represented, compared, and evaluated through argumentation semantics. We illustrate the approach through a worked example in a domestic setting and discuss its relation to existing value-based argumentation approaches. --- ### Semantic Networks as Clues: A Theoretical Foundation and Process Optimization for Semantic Network Construction Authors: JinWoo Ha, Dongsoo Kim Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.SI, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01936v1 The subject matter of this paper is twofold. One is to review the theoretical foundation of a specific type of Semantic Networks (SNs) representing textual non-propositional knowledge. The other involves proposing a framework (ClueNetwork) for ranking candidate SNs generated through various Semantic Network Construction (SNC) processes for the type. In the first fold, it is clarified that the type serves as clues, not surrogates, of reality, making gold standards elusive. Then, it is discussed why this type nevertheless holds scientific legitimacy in terms of abduction. Grounded in this legitimacy, the three main stages of SNC, comprising Automatic Keyphrase Extraction (AKE), Edge Weighting (EW), and Community Detection (CD), are reviewed alongside their objectives and operations. In the second fold, evaluation criteria (comprising two established and one reformulated) for achieving the objectives are first defined and justified, followed by illustrative experiments based on the criteria. Thereafter, SNC is reformulated as a Process Optimization Problem (POP), and its global objective function that integrates the local criteria is defined and justified. Based on these, ClueNetwork is ultimately proposed. --- ### Automatic Annotation of Ancient Greek Vowel Length Authors: Albin Thörn Cleland, Eric Cullhed Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01935v1 Prior work in Ancient Greek NLP relies on corpora that do not disambiguate the phonemic vowel length of alpha, iota, and ypsilon, together known as the dichrona. Depending on lexeme, morphology, sandhi, syntax, and conventions of period, genre, and verse form, each of these letters can represent either a long or a short vowel. Deciding and marking the correct length is known as "macronizing", a long-tail problem given the sheer mass of word forms and the context dependency of individual instances. No macronized corpus of Ancient Greek is publicly available at scale, so a stand-alone macronizer is needed. While previous work has shown how to build a static, corpus-bespoke vowel-length dictionary, the present paper constructs the first general-purpose macronizer for arbitrary Ancient Greek input. Given input carrying lemma, part-of-speech, and morphological annotation in the standard CoNLL-U format, a set of recursive modules lets less common word forms inherit markup from more common forms of the same lexical word. The macronizer's chief application is generating training data for machine learning: we show that a small character-level transformer trained on the macronizer's own output learns to generalize past the cases the rule-based system leaves unmarked, matching or exceeding its accuracy on a gold-standard, manually annotated benchmark of verse and prose. We also show that macronization can improve downstream prosodical NLP tasks like verse scansion. --- ### Recompute or Reuse? Diagnosing and Mitigating Textual Shortcuts in VLM Self-Reflection Authors: Wenxiao Fan, Jingling Fu, Fang Li, Luohang Liu, Yu He, Lichen Ma, Zhiyang Yu, Weishan Bi, Junshi Huang, Yan Li, Gu Simiu, Kan Li Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01930v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to revise their reasoning when visual evidence changes. Failures to do so are often attributed to insufficient visual attention or contextual inertia, leaving unclear what models reuse instead of recomputing from the current image. We show that evidence-bearing reasoning in a prior chain of thought (CoT) can form a textual shortcut that competes behaviorally with visual recomputation. Across 16 VLMs, a matched counterfactual analysis identifies evidence-bearing content as the most robust carrier of prior-CoT influence. Removing this evidence-bearing content shifts answer preference more than removing length-matched non-evidence context or the final-answer span, with prior control weakening progressively as more stale evidence is removed. Reordering this evidence also weakens prior control, showing that its organization modulates shortcut strength. Beyond the immediate answer, the shortcut can retain residual influence after answer correction: weakening current-image support shifts preference back toward the prior answer, while repeated prior answers and reused premises arise mainly when the shortcut remains active. To limit this influence, we introduce Fresh-State Attention Firewall (FSAF), a training-free intervention that isolates fresh computation from the prior CoT. Across five VLMs, FSAF raises visual update rate from 35.28% to 53.61% and reduces prior-answer rate from 39.22% to 3.67%. Reliable VLM self-reflection therefore requires more than looking again: fresh visual recomputation must be protected from stale textual reuse. --- ### Effective and Efficient Context Retrieval via Partial Dependency Graph for Repository-Level Code Generation Authors: Zhongxin Liu, Zhonghao Jiang, Zhifan Ye, Haoye Wang, Jiakun Liu, Xiaoxue Ren Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01927v1 LLM-based repository-level code generation aims to generate code using the context available in a software repository, requiring LLMs to reason over complex code dependencies. Due to limited context windows and insufficient repository-specific understanding, LLMs typically rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate relevant code. Early RAG approaches primarily employ similarity-based retrieval, which often fails to retrieve code snippets that the target function depends on. Recent work introduces graph-based retrieval to model such dependencies, but typically relies on manually designed rules and static global graphs, leading to limited flexibility and high construction and maintenance costs. In contrast, human developers collect helpful context by implicitly constructing a partial dependency graph and iteratively inspecting along it. Inspired by this behavior, we propose DyRetriever, an efficient context retrieval method via partial dependency graphs. DyRetriever uses an LLM to first select a set of entry-point functions and then perform multi-hop reasoning along the code dependency graph. During multi-hop reasoning, it uses the LLM's semantic understanding to validate whether a function can help generate the target function, eliminating manually designed rules and enabling flexibility across scenarios. Instead of statically constructing a global dependency graph, DyRetriever builds a partial graph on demand and discards it after use, reducing construction and maintenance costs. We integrate DyRetriever with a similarity-based code retriever to build DyCoder and evaluate it on CoderEval and DevEval. Experimental results show that DyCoder achieves relative Pass@1 improvements of 25.63% and 59.73% on CoderEval and DevEval, respectively, compared with existing RAG-based methods, while being 7.4x faster than baselines based on static dependency graph construction. --- ### ProWorld: Progress-Aware Hyperbolic World Models for Long-Horizon Visual Goal Reaching Authors: Zihan Liu, Yuzhe Zhuang, Yuanzu Li, Wanshuang Gou, Jiahong Liu, Min Zhou, Menglin Yang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01926v1 JEPA-style visual world models offer an effective paradigm for visual goal planning by predicting future latent representations. Existing methods typically learn local transition consistency through next-step representation prediction. However, in long-horizon tasks, accurate local prediction alone need not ensure sustained progress toward the goal. First, multi-step rollouts can remain locally plausible while drifting away from goal-relevant trajectories. Second, locally similar future states can correspond to substantially different long-term progress, making them difficult to distinguish in a latent space optimized mainly for local consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce goal-conditioned progress order, a relative ordering of states according to how they advance toward a given goal. This order exhibits an asymmetric, coarse-to-fine structure: early states retain broader future possibilities, while later states concentrate on more specific goal-relevant regions. Such a structure is well suited to hyperbolic geometry. Motivated by this observation, we propose ProWorld, a progress-aware hyperbolic visual world model. ProWorld leverages goal-conditioned progress order to organize visual latent-space dynamics, maintains directional progress within trajectories via hyperbolic entailment learning, and mitigates progress ambiguity among locally similar future states via hyperbolic future discrimination. Furthermore, we design a progress-aware planning objective that scores candidate rollouts by jointly considering proximity to the goal and sustained progress across intermediate states. Experiments on four visual goal-reaching tasks demonstrate that ProWorld achieves an average absolute success-rate gain of 9.67 over LeWM. The code will be released after the paper is accepted. --- ### TransNRank: Towards Accurate Neoantigen Ranking with Transformer Authors: Zhiyin An, Yuenan Hou, Shumeng Duan, Yiming Zhou, Yuanting Zheng, Leming Shi Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01924v2 Personalized neoantigen prediction is challenging due to the scarcity of positive samples, the noise of the experimental data, the severe class imbalance trait and the complex of immunogenicity features. Prior arts, such as linear regression and XGBoost fail to model long-range dependencies and contextual relationships within peptide features, therefore the performance of neoantigen positive recall rate is limited. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework based on Transformer, coined as TransNRank. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism, our model captures both local and global feature contexts, enabling more accurate recognition of immunogenic neoantigens. A positive-aware training objective is utilized to handle the class imbalance problem, assigning more weights to those few positive samples. Extensive experiments are performed on NCI, TESLA and HiTIDE datasets. Notably, our TransNRank can push the upper bound top 20 recall rate of neoantigen prediction from 46.9% (45 from 96) to 53.1% (51 from 96), while reducing the training epochs from 200 epochs to 20 epochs. Furthermore, we analyze the features contribution based on TransNRank and find that the mutation at anchor and TCGA expression level play an unexpected important role in neoantigen prediction, and removing insignificant features to reduce the input dimensionality of peptides does not drastically impair the overall performance of the model. Our paradigm not only streamlines the prediction pipeline but also sets a new state-of-the-art for neoantigen discovery, with broad implications for accurate immuno-oncology. --- ### TransNRank: Towards Accurate Neoantigen Ranking with Transformer Authors: Zhiyin An, Yuenan Hou, Shumeng Duan, Yiming Zhou, Yuanting Zheng, Leming Shi Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01924v1 Personalized neoantigen prediction is challenging due to the scarcity of positive samples, the noise of the experimental data, the severe class imbalance trait and the complex of immunogenicity features. Prior arts, such as linear regression and XGBoost fail to model long-range dependencies and contextual relationships within peptide features, therefore the performance of neoantigen positive recall rate is limited. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework based on Transformer, coined as TransNRank. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism, our model captures both local and global feature contexts, enabling more accurate recognition of immunogenic neoantigens. A positive-aware training objective is utilized to handle the class imbalance problem, assigning more weights to those few positive samples. Extensive experiments are performed on NCI, TESLA and HiTIDE datasets. Notably, our TransNRank can push the upper bound top 20 recall rate of neoantigen prediction from 46.9% (45 from 96) to 53.1% (51 from 96), while reducing the training epochs from 200 epochs to 20 epochs. Furthermore, we analyze the features contribution based on TransNRank and find that the mutation at anchor and TCGA expression level play an unexpected important role in neoantigen prediction, and removing insignificant features to reduce the input dimensionality of peptides does not drastically impair the overall performance of the model. Our paradigm not only streamlines the prediction pipeline but also sets a new state-of-the-art for neoantigen discovery, with broad implications for accurate immuno-oncology. --- ### TRAM: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Trajectory-Derived Auxiliary Memory Authors: Kang Liu, Zijing Wang, Yongkang Liu, Mengjie Zhao, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01922v1 Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have achieved strong performance on tasks requiring visual understanding and multi-step inference. However, as reasoning trajectories grow, models may become less effective at using information established earlier in the context, increasing the risk of reasoning errors. Existing approaches primarily address this problem by sustaining visual grounding throughout reasoning. However, reasoning also transforms visual observations into task-specific relations, constraints, and intermediate conclusions whose influence may weaken over long trajectories. Our attribution analysis suggests that correctness is not consistently separated by image attribution alone, but is more closely associated with whether trajectories retain and integrate such reasoning-derived information across stages. Motivated by this, we introduce TRAM (TRajectory-derived Auxiliary Memory), a training-free method that augments standard decoding with an auxiliary memory pathway derived from the model's own reasoning trajectory. TRAM consolidates completed reasoning into a compact latent memory, updates it online through fast and slow recurrent streams, and feeds it back into selected decoder layers through a lightweight residual pathway. Experiments across four MLRM variants on eight benchmarks show that TRAM improves performance over vanilla decoding on mathematical, scientific, and general visual reasoning tasks without additional training. --- ### HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses Authors: Luan Zhang, Ruochen Zhou, Dandan Song, Zhengyu Chen, Yuhang Tian, Jun Yang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Guangyuan Feng, Xudong Li, Yizhou Jin, Yan Xu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01918v1 Harness design plays a critical role in agent performance by shaping how large language models (LLMs) perceive, reason over, and act within executable environments. Recent work has proposed automatic harness evolution, which iteratively improves the harness from agent--environment interactions. However, existing methods often overfit to the evolution tasks, rely exclusively on trajectory-derived signals, and optimize harness components jointly, causing interference across components. We propose HarnessCompass, a novel automatic harness evolution framework built around constrained evolution, proactive feedback, and component-wise optimization. HarnessCompass first enforces global constraints on evolution, restricting modifications to task-agnostic harness changes that generalize beyond the evolution tasks. It then augments trajectory-derived evidence with proactive first-person feedback from the agent about harness usage, yielding richer signals for evolution. Finally, it decouples the optimization of different harness components before consolidating them into a unified harness, reducing cross-component interference while preserving component synergy. On SWE-bench Verified with GPT-5.4, HarnessCompass improves Pass@1 from 54\% to 66\% in only 5 evolution iterations, outperforming AHE in both effectiveness and evolution efficiency. In addition, the evolved harness transfers effectively to held-out tasks and other models, demonstrating substantially stronger generalization than prior automatic harness evolution methods. --- ### Finite-Time Analysis of Discounted Exponential-Utility Reinforcement Learning Authors: Ankur Naskar, Vivek T A, Aditya Kumar, Gugan Thoppe, Prashanth L. A Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01917v1 Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning. A recent work \citep{thoppe2026reinforcement} addressed this difficulty by introducing a Bellman-compatible surrogate and two model-free fixed-point algorithms for optimizing it over stationary policies. However, their main convergence results are asymptotic. In this work, we establish finite-time rates of $\tilde{O} (1/\sqrt{n})$ for the aforementioned two algorithms under asynchronous Markovian sampling, where $n$ is the iteration index and $\tilde{O}$ hides logarithmic expressions. Importantly, we employ parameter-free choices for the stepsize parameter to derive these rate results. For the algorithmically simpler one-timescale method, the main challenge is that its update equation is not directly aligned with the contraction geometry of its underlying power-law operator. We overcome this mismatch by exploiting the boundedness, monotonicity, and homogeneity of the operator to obtain a local pseudo-contraction property for the relative-error dynamics. We then use a Moreau-envelope-based Lyapunov function and Polyak--Ruppert averaging to obtain the stated convergence rate with parameter-free stepsizes. For the two-timescale method, the main challenge is to control a tracking error on the faster timescale. These results provide the first finite-time guarantees for model-free discounted exponential-utility reinforcement learning. --- ### CHOW-SLAM: Compact Hybrid Representation with Complementary Overlap Window Optimization for RGB-D SLAM Authors: Wenxuan Ji, Jin Xiao, Xiaoguang Hu, Jiaqi Shi, Zichong Jia, Baochang Zhang Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01914v1 Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) enables dense, continuous scene reconstruction. However, existing systems operating with limited online resources struggle to simultaneously construct two types of constraints, namely, compact yet discriminative spatial constraints derived from scene representations and persistent temporal constraints derived from historical observations. To address this challenge, we propose CHOW-SLAM, a dense RGB-D SLAM framework that explicitly constructs these complementary spatial and temporal constraints. Spatially, we propose a compact parametric-hash (P-H) hybrid representation that organizes components based on planes and grids across scales in P and H branches. A unified multi-output decoder further aligns the ray termination distributions induced by TSDF and density, preserving geometry and appearance under a compact parameter budget. Temporally, we propose a complementary overlap-window strategy to prevent optimization from being dominated by short-term overlap or weakly related historical observations. Within a fixed budget, the strategy retains recent frames, selects high-overlap local frames, and introduces temporally distributed historical keyframes. Loss-aware keyframe insertion and bundle adjustment scheduling further adapt optimization to tracking quality. In addition, ORB-based tracking and geometric pose estimation are used for pose initialization, followed by neural rendering optimization to improve tracking stability. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that CHOW-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both scene reconstruction quality and camera tracking accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinjidexiaohuoban/CHOW-SLAM. --- ### Diagnosing Search Behavior and Failure Modes in Long-Horizon Search Agents Authors: Qi Liu, Jiaxin Mao, Fengbin Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01913v1 Deep search agents answer difficult information-seeking questions by iteratively issuing search queries to gather supporting evidence, but it remains unclear whether and how greater search effort leads to better answers. We study these questions through a trajectory-level diagnosis of long-horizon search agents. Using human-annotated document-level relevance judgments, we evaluate the evidence retrieved at each search step and separate two stages of agent behavior: what evidence an agent retrieves and how effectively it uses that evidence. This distinction further allows us to decompose failures into retrieval gaps, where the necessary evidence is never found, and utilization gaps, where relevant evidence is retrieved but not used correctly. With the retrieval model and evaluation harness held fixed, we compare six agents on BrowseComp-Plus and further validate our findings on BrowseComp with an open-web search API. Across settings, we find that search effort and answer quality are only weakly aligned. Answer accuracy is better correlated with the quality of retrieved evidence, especially cumulative retrieval recall, than with the number of searches or the amount of context consumed. Useful evidence often appears early in the trajectory, yet agents tend to continue searching, producing a long tail of low-yield retrieval steps. At the query level, exploratory reformulations remain useful, but the best-performing agents issue far fewer redundant queries. Overall, by systematically characterizing the search behavior and failure modes of long-horizon search agents, this work points to practical directions for building better deep research systems, including stronger query formulation, more effective evidence selection and context management, and stopping criteria based on whether sufficient supporting evidence has been retrieved. --- ### PNEC-Mamba: Prototype-Guided Positive-Negative Evidence Calibration for Hyperspectral Image Classification Authors: Mingzhen Xu, Can Xu, Di Wang, Haonan Guo, Bo Du Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01910v1 In real-world hyperspectral scenes, pixel representations are often ambiguous due to factors such as spectral similarity, mixed pixels, and local context interference, which may simultaneously encode discriminative evidence and interfering information. Existing methods mainly focus on learning more powerful representations or modeling broader contexts, but rarely investigate whether the learned representations provide reliable evidence or introduce interference into classification decisions. To address this issue, we view hyperspectral image classification from the perspective of pixel-level evidence reliability modeling and propose PNEC-Mamba, a prototype-guided positive-negative evidence calibration framework. The framework progressively establishes semantic references, separates class-related evidence from interference, estimates pixel-level reliability, and performs selective calibration. First, a full-image state-space encoder extracts pixel representations, while dynamic class prototypes provide semantic references that evolve jointly with the feature space. Subsequently, positive and negative evidence is derived from pixel-prototype competition, explicitly separating discriminative cues that support classification from confusing signals associated with competing classes. Based on these evidence relationships, a multi-source uncertainty estimation strategy is introduced to assess pixel-level reliability, enabling stronger evidence calibration for uncertain regions. Finally, a full-resolution consistency refinement step is applied to recover local spatial details and improve boundary coherence in the final predictions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that PNEC-Mamba achieves superior classification performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. --- ### Assessing the Benefits of Combining Advanced Deep Learning Techniques for Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment from UAV Imagery Authors: Huy Quang Ung, Guillaume Habault, Roberto Legaspi, Hao Niu, Lian Cao, Masato Taya Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01906v1 Rapid and accurate post-disaster building damage assessment is essential, yet remains a challenging task. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery offers a timely and high-resolution view of affected areas, but existing Computer Vision (CV) models often demand large annotated datasets, generalize poorly across geographic regions and their assessment policies, and are confined to the specific tasks they were trained for. Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) offer a promising alternative through their strong reasoning and generalization capabilities, but fall short on precise, low-level perception tasks such as object detection and accurate bounding box generation. Furthermore, they often require a substantial amount of data for effective fine-tuning on domain-specific tasks. In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework that decouples detection from damage assessment, combining the precision of CV models with the reasoning power of LVLMs. A CV model first detects buildings and generates bounding boxes on the image that are then passed to an LVLM for damage classification and contextual interpretation. We evaluated our framework on two real-world benchmarks: RescueNet and FloodNet. In particular, the best combination under this framework accurately counts intact, partially damaged and completely destroyed buildings, surpassing isolated baselines by up to 2.1 R^2 points, while requiring only limited annotated data for the detection stage. Beyond reporting aggregate gains, we provide a detailed analysis of failure scenarios and edge cases, offering practical insights for practitioners and concrete directions for future work. Our source code and data are publicly available to the research community via the following repository: https://github.com/ungquanghuy-kddi/VLM_GDINO.git --- ### PhotoHOI: Synthesizing 3D Hand-Object Interactions from a Single RGB Photograph Authors: Zhenhao Zhang, Jiajun Zhang, Wei Min, Yebin Liu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01905v2 Hand-object interaction (HOI) is a fundamental human behavior with broad applications in AR/VR, digital humans, and embodied interaction. Existing methods typically require predefined object geometry, object trajectories, or task-specific conditions, limiting their use with natural real-world inputs. To address this, we study a more practical problem of synthesizing 3D hand-object interaction sequences from a single RGB photograph and an open-vocabulary language instruction, and introduce PhotoHOI. PhotoHOI first uses a vision-language model to parse the input image and instruction into a structured task specification, including the interaction object, target region, and spatial relation. It then recovers a compact task-relevant 3D scene and plans a smooth collision-aware object trajectory based on the recovered object states, support relations, and surrounding scene geometry. To synthesize hand motion that generalizes to real-world photographs and unseen objects, it learns transferable task-conditioned contact and contact-conditioned grasp priors from large-scale affordance and HOI data. The grasp is further refined in a learned latent space, constraining the optimization to a plausible hand-pose manifold. Experiments on GRAB and H2O demonstrate improved contact quality and reduced penetration over representative baselines. Results on real-world photographs further demonstrate higher task success and scene consistency, together with generalization to unseen objects and open-vocabulary instructions. --- ### CoEvoKG: Co-Evolving Knowledge Graphs with Self-Evolving Search Agents Authors: Zhaoyang Li, Zenghuang Fu, Qiuyuan Ai, Ping Jiang, Haoyu Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, Jie Song, Guannan He Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01904v1 Large language models can improve with reinforcement learning for search agents, yet existing self play agents repeatedly generate tasks while discarding the knowledge gained during successful searches. We introduce CoEvoKG, a framework that turns a knowledge graph into both a source of verifiable training tasks and a persistent evidence memory for agent evolution. CoEvoKG jointly trains a task generator and a search agent: the generator creates multihop questions from entity chains sampled from the knowledge graph, while the agent learns from rewards for answer correctness and search trajectories whose entity paths are supported by graph evidence. When a search succeeds, CoEvoKG verifies and deduplicates the retrieved evidence, then writes it back to the corresponding graph nodes and edges. Future rounds reuse this enriched graph for task generation and reward computation, closing the loop between model self evolution and knowledge accumulation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks (NQ, TriviaQA, PopQA, HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and Bamboogle) with three backbone models show that CoEvoKG improves macro average accuracy over the corresponding base models by +11.2, +10.1, and +11.6 points on Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, respectively. Under matched training budgets, CoEvoKG further improves over competitive self play baselines and RL baselines for search agents by +2.6 to +3.7 macro average points across the three backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/lazzy1225/CoEvoKG. --- ### SpatioLM: Towards General Physical Spatial Intelligence in Vision-Language Models Authors: Jing Wu, Jianhua Wu, Jiayi Guan, Jiahong Chen, Jinghui Lu, Hangjun Ye, Bingzhao Gao, Long Chen Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01899v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on commonsense reasoning tasks but struggle with visual spatial reasoning. Most existing solutions introduce extra 3D prior inputs or external spatial encoders, which increase complexity and degrade the underlying VLMs' general-purpose capabilities after spatial fine-tuning. To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient \textit{\textbf{Spatio}-vision \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{M}odels (SpatioLM)}, that enhances spatial intelligence without extra 3D prior inputs or third-party spatial encoders. Concretely, we design a plug-and-play and non-invasive spatio-vision module that elicits the spatial knowledge inherent in VLMs. Furthermore, we innovatively leverage pseudo depth and camera information as supervision to guide the model in learning physically coherent representations. Extensive experiments show that SpatioLM achieves significant improvements in diverse tasks, including spatial perception and understanding while effectively limiting the degradation of general capabilities. Notably, the model achieves an impressive score of 71.6 on the VSI-Bench (the first model to surpass 70). In addition, it attains competitive performance when transferred to embodied manipulation tasks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiaomi-research/spatio-lm}{\faGithub~spatio-lm}. --- ### Understanding and Correcting Low-Frequency Bias in EEG Foundation Model Authors: Junjie Yu, Zihan Deng, Jianyu Zhang, Junrong Mu, Jiahui An, Wenxiao Ma, Ziling Lu, Yue Wang, Yan Zhu, Kexin Lou, Quanying Liu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01898v1 Increasing EEG pretraining data scale or model capacity does not consistently improve downstream performance. We identify a persistent low-frequency bias in representations learned by diverse EEG foundation models, which remains across dataset scales, model capacities, and pretraining objectives. Our analysis links this bias to the interaction between EEG's $1/f^α$-like spectral structure and neural networks' tendency to preferentially learn low-frequency components. In masked autoencoders, the $\ell_2$ reconstruction objective further amplifies this imbalance: under comparable relative reconstruction errors, high-power low-frequency components contribute disproportionately to the loss. To address this issue, we introduce FAME, a frequency-balanced masked autoencoding framework that reconstructs time--frequency activity in predefined EEG bands from masked EEG inputs. FAME independently standardizes the reconstruction targets within each band and assigns equal weight to all band-specific losses, thereby balancing supervision across the EEG spectrum. Evaluated on 41 downstream tasks in OmniEEG-Bench, FAME learns more spectrally balanced representations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on 24 of them. These results underscore the importance of balanced spectral supervision for learning transferable EEG representations. --- ### GeoCore-9B: Towards Geo-Aware Generative Foundation Models in Earth Observation Authors: Jeonghyeok Do, Munchurl Kim Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01896v1 Existing generative models for earth observation (EO) predominantly rely on fine-tuning natural image priors, which limits their scalability and introduces perspective biases that conflict with geospatial constraints. To address this, we introduce GeoCore-9B, a 9-billion-parameter generative foundation model, which is the first of its scale to be trained from scratch exclusively on EO data. Unlike previous EO foundation models, GeoCore-9B is built upon a Flow Matching-based Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and natively conditions generation on text descriptions and continuous geospatial metadata, including ground sample distances, latitudes, and longitudes. To overcome the convergence and spatial disorientation challenges of training at this scale, we propose a Geospatial Semantic Alignment loss. This objective distills structural Earth surface priors (e.g., terrain and urban areas) from a frozen specialist teacher network, constraining the diffusion latent trajectory during training without adding inference overhead. Pre-trained on the global-scale Git-10M dataset, GeoCore-9B demonstrates strong downstream versatility. Beyond standard proxy generative tasks, we show that GeoCore-9B can be effectively adapted for practical EO applications, including highly challenging tasks such as cloud removal and SAR-to-optical cross-modal translation. Extensive evaluations confirm that GeoCore-9B establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and geographic structural accuracy. --- ### Energy-Efficient LLM Serving via Disaggregated Attention--FFN and Flexible Frequency Scaling Authors: Cunchen Hu, Liangliang Xu, Tian Liu, Min Lyu, Yongkun Li, Sa Wang, Shuo Quan, Yanan Yang, Wenda Tang, Yiduo Wang, Fu Yu, Jie Wu Published: 2026-08-03 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01891v1 Large language model (LLM) serving spans diverse applications with stringent service-level objectives (SLOs), often requiring GPUs to run at maximum frequencies and increasing energy consumption. Existing energy-management approaches adapt GPU frequencies only at the request or inference-phase level, overlooking operator-level differences in frequency sensitivity between Attention and feed-forward networks (FFNs). We find that the energy-optimal frequencies of Attention and FFN (A/F) differ and vary with the inference phase, workload, and system configurations. However, runtime variability and independent A/F frequency control create a large search space and high communication overhead. To address these challenges, we present AFlex, a framework that jointly optimizes resource provisioning and GPU frequency scaling for disaggregated A/F serving. AFlex introduces a global scheduler and a local operator-level dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) controller to determine A/F resource allocations and frequencies. It further introduces an interleaved A/F pipeline with dynamic microbatch depth and adaptive request batching to reduce pipeline bubbles. We implement AFlex in SGLang and evaluate it on NVIDIA A800 GPUs using Qwen3-32B and Mixtral-8$\times$7B under production Conversation and Coding traces. \AFlex reduces energy per token by up to 49\% over state-of-the-art disaggregated serving and 48\% over frequency-scaling systems while satisfying TTFT and TPOT SLOs. ---