# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 69 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #3401–3450 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/69 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/68.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/70.md) ### A Lightweight Multimodal Vision-Language Framework for Early-Stage Anatomical Green Fruit Classification in Commercial Orchards Authors: Ranjan Sapkota, William Bu, Chen Chen, Yunjun Xu, Manoj Karkee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24935v1 Accurate identification of early-stage apple fruitlet anatomical structures, including the calyx, fruitlet body, and peduncle, is essential for robotic thinning, crop-load management, and other precision orchard operations. This study presents a lightweight multimodal vision-language framework that adapts TinyCLIP for fine-grained fruitlet anatomy classification in complex orchard environments. A dataset of 600 high-resolution RGB images collected from Scilate and Scifresh apple orchards was converted into 224 x 224 image patches and annotated for three anatomical classes. Domain-specific language prompts, such as ``a photo of a class,'' were used to guide multimodal alignment between orchard imagery and horticultural structures. A sliding-window inference strategy with a stride of 112 pixels aggregates patch-level predictions into spatial heatmaps, enabling interpretable whole-image localization of fruitlet components relevant to robotic thinning. Patch-level evaluation on an NVIDIA T4 GPU achieved F1-scores of 0.95 for calyx, 0.98 for fruitlet, and 0.85 for peduncle, with a macro-F1 score of 0.93. Deployment-oriented optimization using ONNX and TensorRT enabled efficient inference on NVIDIA Jetson hardware, preserved accuracy under INT8 quantization, and supported model sizes of approximately 127-137 MB with millisecond-level patch inference. These results demonstrate that lightweight vision-language models can provide interpretable and edge-deployable perception for automated fruitlet analysis and future robotic thinning systems. The source code and implementation details are publicly available at https://github.com/WilliamBu1/A-Lightweight-Vision-Language-Model-for-Early-Stage-Fruitlet-Classification-in-Apple-Orchards. --- ### Fusing Perceptual Vision Experts with Multimodal LLMs for Explainable Plant Disease Diagnosis: From Benchmark Imagery to Real-World Robotic Field Validation Authors: Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Pengyao Xie, Nikolaos D. Tselikas, Lirong Xiang, Manoj Karkee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24934v3 Accurate field plant disease diagnosis requires reliable fusion of uncertain and conflicting perceptual evidence. We present the Hybrid Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework (H$^{2}$MAF), combining decision-level fusion of EfficientNet-B3 and ConvNeXt-Tiny with semantic arbitration by open-weight multimodal large language models (MLLMs), Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen3.5 4B, using structured JSON evidence to generate explainable diagnoses, risk levels, treatment urgency, and financial exposure. (H$^{2}$MAF) is evaluated on 14,364 images (1,370 test images) across PlantDoc (2,922 images, 27 classes) and two non-public, continuously captured Cornell robot-acquired field datasets: Stage 2 (20 GB; 4,215 images) and Stage 4 (40 GB; 7,227 images), covering Early Blight, Late Blight, and Septoria Leaf Spot under uncontrolled field conditions. On PlantDoc, Gemma improves accuracy from 63.9% to 68.5%, achieving +7.6 points on the 41.7% CNN-conflict subset. Cornell accuracies reach 99.3% and 98.9%, with only 1.7-4.1% disagreement, demonstrating conflict-dependent MLLM utility. The critical-risk error of gemma is 0.14-0.5 points, whereas Qwen overflags by 3.5-14.4 points. These results establish MLLM arbitration as a promising, yet calibration-dependent, approach for explainable agricultural AI and robotic field decision support. Github Link: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Explainable-AI-Plant-Disease-Detection --- ### Modality Contribution Score - A Per-Patient Framework for Quantifying the Relative Diagnostic Contribution of Structural MRI and Amyloid PET in Alzheimer's Disease Authors: Dawa Chyophel Lepcha, Aaliya Ali, Sophie A. Martin, Deepika Koundal, Pierrick Coupe, Shabbir Syed-Abdul Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24931v1 Multimodal neuroimaging combining structural MRI and positron emission tomography (PET) captures complementary structure-function relationships across the Alzheimer's disease (AD) continuum, yet existing artificial intelligence systems produce a single diagnostic label without quantifying which imaging modality drove that decision for a specific patient. We introduce the Modality Contribution Network (MCNet) and the Modality Contribution Score (MCS), the first per-patient attribution framework quantifying the shift in modality dominance from structural atrophy to amyloid and metabolic dysfunction across the cognitively normal to MCI to AD continuum. MCS is normalised to unity per subject via modality ablation (MCS_MRI_i + MCS_PET_i = 1.0 for every subject i), providing an interpretable, clinically actionable score that fluid biomarkers cannot supply. Applied to 327 ADNI-3 participants balanced across cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and AD groups, MCNet achieved competitive three-class staging performance (AUC=0.881). The MCS revealed a statistically significant monotonic gradient (Kruskal-Wallis p<0.0001), with increasing PET dominance from cognitively normal (MCS_PET 0.412+/-0.229) through MCI (0.489+/-0.289) to AD (0.671+/-0.426), validated against amyloid SUVR (r=0.172, p=0.006) and FDG metabolic biomarkers (r=-0.287, p=0.0005) from separate imaging pipelines. External replication in 1,073 independent OASIS-3 subjects confirmed cross-cohort generalisability (H=166.99, p<0.0001, eta^2=0.156). A mechanistic comparison with SHAP demonstrated that ablation-based MCS captures clinically meaningful modality dependence that deviation-based methods cannot. These findings position MCNet as a foundation for personalised imaging decisions, clinical trial stratification, and trustworthy AI in dementia care. --- ### Auditing the Synthetic Memoir: Measuring Scene-Level Confabulation in LLM-Generated Autobiography Against the Documented Record of the Life It Describes Authors: Heather Renze Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23640v1 When a large language model (LLM) is asked to write a person's life, how much of what it writes actually happened? We present a scene-level case-study audit - the first quantified audit of LLM-generated autobiography against a subject-specific ground-truth corpus that we are aware of, based on an unsystematic literature search. The subject and the author of this paper are the same person: a 366-day "page-a-day" book of first-person anecdotal entries was drafted with a conversational LLM whose documented inputs were a template, two exemplar days, and each day's quote - not her corpus - and every day was subsequently audited at the anecdote-scene level against an independent verification corpus using a four-level rubric fixed before analysis. We define the verification-failure rate as the share of days not rated VERIFIED (scene positively corroborated): 354 of 366 days fail, 96.7% (Wilson 95% CI 94.4-98.1%). Only 12 days contain a corroborated scene; 19 days (5.2%) assert claims actively contradicted by the record; the dominant failure mode is grounded drift - real people, employers, and settings inside invented scenes - though its measured share varies across raters. Independent re-rating replicates the headline (no evidence the original rate was inflated) while showing that the four-way taxonomy has only fair-to-moderate reliability. Regenerating the same days with current named models reproduces 100% verification failure under the same inputs; grounding generation in the subject's corpus significantly improves the verification rate while leaving substantial residual failure (83.3%). We contribute the measurement, a reusable audit instrument whose WEAK/UNVERIFIED boundary we show to be unreliable, and a grounding remedy with quantified effect. --- ### Replicable Conformal Prediction Authors: Marios Papamichalis, Regina Ruane, Theofanis Papamichalis Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23638v1 Two analysts who calibrate the same predictive model on independent samples will deploy different prediction sets every time, because the calibration threshold inherits the randomness of the data. Wherever deployments must be audited, cached, or approved across sites, this instability is costly: no one can verify that two calibrations produced the same object. We ask two questions: when can independent calibrations yield the identical classifier, and what must that agreement cost? Perfect agreement is impossible, since a procedure that almost always returns one fixed answer cannot remain valid for every distribution, and exact agreement through shared randomness forces the procedure to ignore its data. Sharing a single random seed and rounding the calibrated threshold up to a coarse shared grid resolves the tension: the deployed classifier becomes identical across analysts with any desired probability, coverage guarantees survive, and the price is a quantified increase in set size and calibration data. Matching lower bounds show that no threshold method can pay less, and the method's one tuning constant vanishes asymptotically. Without any shared seed, a fixed grid still confines all analysts to two adjacent classifiers, and no method does better. Replicability also blocks gaming: selecting the most favorable of many recalibrations barely moves a replicable classifier, while the same selection silently undercovers standard conformal prediction. Experiments on real ImageNet outputs, a four-hospital site split, and four language-model families match the theory, including the measured sample-cost frontier. --- ### Optimizing YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Segmentation in Complex Orchard Environments Authors: Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23636v2 This study presents an architectural and experimental cross-generation analysis of Ultralytics YOLO27 (YOLOv27), YOLO26 (YOLOv26), YOLO11 (YOLOv11), and YOLOv8 for fine-grained robotic perception in complex orchard environments. Fine-grained detection and instance segmentation of early-stage fruit anatomy remain challenging in complex orchard environments because of limited pixel footprints, green-on-green similarity, occlusion, and substantial scale variation. Because YOLO27 has been announced but its public implementation and trainable segmentation models are not yet available, the present study provides an architectural analysis of YOLO27, while controlled experiments benchmark YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26; YOLO27 experiments will be incorporated following public model availability. Five model scales-nano (n), small (s), medium (m), large (l), and extra-large (x)-were evaluated for fruitlet, calyx, and peduncle detection and segmentation using conventional 640 x 640 and small-object-focused 960 x 960 configurations, yielding 30 experiments. YOLO11s-960 achieved the highest observed mask mAP@50:95(0.402) and box mAP@50:95(0.426), whereas YOLO26s-960 achieved comparable values of 0.397 and 0.425 with only 10.37~M parameters and 34.1~GFLOPs. Peduncle remained the most challenging class, and increasing model capacity did not consistently improve accuracy. Overall, compact-to-moderate YOLO models combined with small-object-focused training provided favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, establishing a reproducible benchmark for fine-grained agricultural robotic perception. Code, trained models, and experimental configurations are publicly available, and will be updated through our Github Link: https://github.com/rnjnspkt/Optimizing-and-Comparing-Ultralytics-YOLOv26-YOLOv11-and-YOLOv8-for-Small-Object-Detection-and-Seg --- ### ToolRobustBench: Stage-Wise Perturbation Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Tool-Calling Agents Authors: YiShan Zheng, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23635v1 Large language models (LLMs) rely on tool calling as a fundamental agent capability, enabling them to invoke external systems and complete tasks beyond text generation. However, clean end-to-end (E2E) success cannot identify where a tool-use failure originates or how it propagates through a call. We introduce ToolRobustBench, a stage-wise diagnostic benchmark for tool-calling agents, where a tool-calling agent is an LLM system that selects a tool, supplies structured arguments, and interprets its returned feedback. ToolRobustBench aligns four perturbation families with the tool-use pipeline: tool-interface, user-intent, tool-output/observation, and runtime-environment perturbations. It attributes failures to tool selection, schema grounding, argument binding, tool-output/runtime-feedback handling, and E2E task success. Experiments on 15,456 single-family instances across 7 models, 16 sampled local tools, 4 perturbation families, and 14 subtypes show high but non-uniform clean performance and substantial robustness degradation, with tool-output/observation perturbation the dominant bottleneck. Mixed-family experiments reveal non-additive failure patterns that are not explained by isolated single-family results. Thus, ToolRobustBench provides a deterministic and cascade-aware benchmark for diagnosing robustness beyond clean tool-calling accuracy; --- ### The Blending Ratio Is Not Where the Performance Is: Diagnosing Prototype Blending for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models Authors: Liangzhi Li, Bowen Wang, Yiming Qian, Thorsten Neumann, Xia Xie, Guangshun Li Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23634v1 Many few-shot adaptation methods for vision-language models classify with a convex combination of the zero-shot text prototype and the mean of the K labelled image features, with a single blending ratio routinely tuned on held-out labels, often on the test set itself. We ask what the family's own bias-variance justification invites: what is the right ratio, can it be estimated without validation data, and is finding it where the performance is? First, the ratio minimising prototype mean-squared error has a closed form whose support-set plug-in is exactly a positive-part James-Stein coefficient shrinking towards the text prototype. Across 4,800 cells (ten datasets, five backbones including SigLIP, five shot counts, five seeds, four prompt tiers) this theoretically optimal ratio is a reliable estimate of the wrong quantity: on the 950 primary-tier cells where it is defined it trails a test-set-oracle ratio by 8.5 points. It saturates near 1, discarding the text prior for a nearest-class-mean classifier, because 78% of the text-image prototype distance it treats as bias is a class-independent offset that the arg max largely cancels. We prove the mechanism and bound its share of the damage at 26% by a counterfactual. Second, leave-one-out on the support set alone sets a ratio landing within 0.9 points of the oracle blend, so it is estimable without validation data. Third, validation-free linear probes beat even the oracle-tuned blend: CLAP by +1.9 points and LP++ by +1.5 on average, and at K >= 4 all four validation-free baselines sit above the oracle, the linear probes by margins excluding zero. These results locate the ceiling in the model class, not the hyperparameter: the ratio can be set near-optimally for free, and it is still not where the performance is. Code, cached features, per-cell records: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Liangzhi-Li/clipbench-blending --- ### Function-Level Execution Feedback for Code Preference Optimization Authors: Idris Nechnech, Sehwan Kim, Jimin Seo, Yeongoon Kim, Minhae Oh, Sangwoo Hong, Jungwoo Lee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23632v1 Process supervision has improved mathematical reasoning, where intermediate steps are naturally expressed as chains of thought. In code generation, however, process supervision remains underexplored because there is no standard notion of a step. Supervision can target lines, reasoning traces, or program states, making it unclear what to label and optimize. We propose STEP-KTODER, a framework for code preference optimization that defines steps as module-level functions in decomposed multi-function programs and assigns binary correctness labels via automatically generated unit tests. Our method provides a code-specific instantiation of stepwise KTO, combining function-level process supervision with outcome-level feedback on the full program. We evaluate on HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), BigCodeBench, and LiveCodeBench, showing that STEP-KTODER improves over outcome-only KTO and DPO. Further analysis shows that execution-based labels are essential: LLM-as-a-judge annotations systematically over-predict function failures, corrupt positive step labels, and degrade downstream preference optimization. Code is available at: https://github.com/inechnech/STEP-KTODER. --- ### TRACE: Transition-Aware Residual Control for Multi-Objective Materials Discovery Authors: Kang Zhou, Yujia Tong, Yong Tao, Jingling Yuan Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI, cond-mat.mtrl-sci arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23631v1 Multi-objective materials discovery with LLM agents is often limited not only by how many candidates can be proposed, but by how effectively each costly property evaluation informs the next search step. Existing agents mainly store evaluated candidates and their scores, so they know which materials succeeded but not which executable edits caused useful property changes. This makes local refinement difficult when objectives compete and an edit that improves one property may damage another. We propose TRACE, a transition-aware residual control framework that treats evaluated edits as the basic unit of feedback. TRACE records each local refinement as a parent-edit-child transition with observed property deltas, aggregates transition evidence to estimate reusable edit effects, and ranks future edits by their predicted ability to reduce the current candidate's remaining constraint violations while avoiding damage to already satisfied objectives. In a controlled same-backbone comparison, TRACE improves over LLEMA, the state-of-the-art LLM-agent baseline, raising macro-average hit rate from 18.13\% to 25.96\%. --- ### Macro-Operator Generation and Predicate Selection for TAMP Operator Learning Authors: Can Emir Bora, Emre Ugur Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23629v2 Creating symbolic operators by hand is one of the main bottlenecks in deploying Task and Motion Planning systems (TAMP). Recent works show that these operators can instead be learned directly from demonstration data. Existing methods, however, typically learn each action in isolation and cannot capture the recurring multi-step structure of manipulation tasks, so the search becomes intractable on long sequential tasks. A further inefficiency arises in the symbolic state: every provided predicate is evaluated at every search node, even when it never appears in any learned operator. We present a system that addresses both problems together. Its central component is the automatic generation of macro-operators, composite actions that compress a recurring sequence of individual actions into a single planning step. Our system discovers causally linked action pairs directly from the training data, where one action produces exactly the condition that the next one requires, and turns each pair into a new operator. Alongside this, our system prunes every predicate that no learned operator references, which shrinks the symbolic state evaluated at each search node. Together, these changes shorten the effective planning horizon, and the benefit they bring grows with the length of the task. Across four TAMP domains, our method reaches up to a 4.6x planning speedup compared to the baseline method, namely Learning Operators for TAMP. More importantly, it solves a long sequential task that the baseline cannot solve. Macro-operator discovery thus not only accelerates planning but, in certain domains, determines solvability in practice. --- ### From Triage to Discharge: A Survey of NLP Tasks, Methods, and Open Challenges in the Emergency Department Authors: Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi, Salil Kanhere, Padmanesan Narasimhan Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23627v1 Emergency departments (EDs) operate under time pressure, generating multimodal data such as clinical conversations, triage notes, and discharge documents. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), particularly pretrained transformers and large language models, have created new opportunities to support language and time-intensive stages of emergency care. Yet existing surveys map clinical NLP across the broader hospital workflow or focus on specific tasks. This survey analyses 46 papers spanning the three phases of ED: triage, diagnosis, and disposition, covering tasks such as triage classification, clinical summarisation, automatic diagnosis, report generation, and discharge documentation. We examine modelling paradigms, evaluation practices, and emerging benchmarks and shared tasks. Across tasks, we identify common trends, including a shift from task-specific neural architectures to pretrained language models, growing interest in interactive clinical systems, and increasing attention to clinically grounded evaluation. Finally, we detail open challenges such as limited generalisability, noisy clinical inputs, and workflow constraints that inform future ED-NLP research. --- ### A survey detection channel overrides the pixels in an astronomical foundation model, and biases tomographic mean redshifts Authors: Ihor Kendiukhov Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI, astro-ph.IM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23626v1 Foundation models for astronomy are trained on survey pixels together with the catalogue products derived from those pixels. Those catalogues are incomplete at a measurable rate, and a model trained on both inherits that incompleteness as a systematic. We audit AION-1, a 39-modality transformer trained on more than 200 million objects, using causal interventions on its inputs. Holding the image tokens byte-identical and editing only the survey segmentation map changes every quantity the model reports -- flux, size, ellipticity, redshift -- by 110-4400 times a matched placebo. The mechanism is detection gating, presence at the field centre (r = 0.47), not the light the mask encloses (r = 0.30); across 322 real blends the model ignores how the pipeline partitioned the light (R = -0.006). Nor is the preference specific to that channel: contradicted catalogue photometry leaves the model nine times worse than supplying no metadata at all. The Legacy Survey pipeline leaves 3.68% of targets with no segment covering their position. Propagating that rate, with a miss represented by the fields the pipeline actually returns, shifts tomographic mean redshifts by a median 0.71 times the LSST DESC requirement over 40 assignments and exceeds it in 12; observed positional errors take the worst bin to 8.3 times. Drawing the misses by their measured magnitude dependence rather than uniformly does not change it. Spectroscopy removes the effect, withholding the detection channel removes it at no measurable cost, and the effect grows with model scale. Two further limits lie in the tokeniser: its image codec resolves 28 effective states on source patches against 934 for the spectrum codec, and the redshift readout is quantisation-limited. Sparse dictionaries are unreliable causal handles: across 15, recovery spans 26-75% and moves up to 18 points on the seed alone. --- ### Physical Agentic AI: An Architecture for Orchestrating a Robot Crew with LLMs Authors: Xinyuan Liu, Eren Sadikoglu, Riana Chatterjee, Ransalu Senanayake Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22657v1 Agentic AI frameworks interpret open-ended task goals and decompose them into multi-step plans. Richer information about embodiment-specific capabilities, physical preconditions, and cross-robot coordination improves grounding, but does not eliminate infeasible, mistimed, or unsafe physical actions. Physical robot crews therefore require an explicit architectural interface between semantic planning and execution, where every planned action is verified against robot capabilities, system state, and workflow constraints before actuation. This paper introduces Physical Agentic AI, a framework for skill-grounded robot agent orchestration, in which each robot exposes a typed library of executable skills while a foundation model planner decomposes a task into phases and assigns each phase to a robot-skill pair. A Robot Orchestration layer exposes the skill library, robot state, named locations, and workflow contracts to a non-actuating Mission Planner, while a deterministic Robot Orchestrator validates and authorizes one skill at a time. We evaluate on a drone-UGV search-and-dispatch mission, where every mission in every condition is executed live in Gazebo, and on a humanoid-quadruped transportation task using hardware-equivalent skill interfaces plus two physical trials on a Unitree G1 and Go2. Varying planner knowledge and runtime enforcement independently, we find that retrieval raises skill grounding from 51% to 96% yet leaves informed planners dispatching 23-29% of faulted steps. Per-dispatch enforcement reduces false dispatch to 0% with no false blocks, and a held-plan ablation confirms that the gate, not plan variation, is responsible. Live execution makes the difference physical: without enforcement all eight injected faults crossed the orchestration boundary and six produced robot motion; with enforcement all eight were refused before motion. --- ### Multiple View Neural Regression of a Facial Shape Model Authors: Xiang Li Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22655v1 Creating re-topologized 3D facial meshes is essential for high-quality facial animation but remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. This dissertation explores more efficient approaches for capturing production-ready facial meshes through: (1) the development of VarIS, a custom light sphere for capturing high-resolution stereo geometry and reflectance maps; (2) analysis of camera parameters affecting automatic 2D and 3D landmarking; (3) synthetic-data methods for training neural face regression; and (4) techniques for improving neural multi-view face-shape regression. While VarIS enables photorealistic face capture, its operational and processing costs motivate a more scalable approach. A deep learning framework is therefore proposed to directly predict re-topologized facial meshes from synthetic multiview images generated with Visage Craft, an in-house physically based rendering system using an Appearance 3D Morphable Model (A3DMM). The system produces standardized meshes ready for rigging and animation with minimal human supervision. Results show that incorporating accurate camera intrinsics and extrinsics improves landmark accuracy and geometric consistency, while 3D landmark regularization further improves reconstruction quality. --- ### Evaluating Inference-Time Defenses Against Package Hallucination in LLM-Generated Code Authors: Alberick Euraste Djire, Iyiola E. Olatunji, Melissa Tessa, Earl T. Barr, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22652v1 LLMs are increasingly used for code generation, yet they frequently hallucinate non-existent software packages, creating exploitable entry points into the software supply chain. We make four contributions to this problem. First, we show that prior evaluation methodologies systematically inflate hallucination rates by misclassifying standard-library modules as hallucinations in some languages. For Python, the overestimation reaches 9.4 percentage points. Second, we evaluate seven inference-time defenses for mitigating package hallucinations, including five guided decoding strategies (Greedy, Contrastive, DoLa, Nudging, and Active Layer-Contrastive Decoding), an iterative self-refinement approach (Self-Refine), and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based defense.. Across eight models spanning five families and four programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust), RAG reduces the package hallucination rate (PHR) in 18 of 32 model--language configurations. Third, we introduce Package Utility (PU) to assess whether defenses preserve valid and task-relevant recommendations. Among strategies evaluated, Greedy decoding provides the strongest average mitigation--utility trade-off. Fourth, we stress-test all strategies under adversarial prompts seeded with fabricated package names and find that PHR surges by up to 45 percentage points relative to standard prompts, with Ruby consistently the most vulnerable language (80.9--95.2\%). Under adversarial conditions, RAG and Self-Refine outperform all decoding-only strategies, indicating that robust defense requires either external grounding or iterative self-verification when prompts are actively hostile. Our results recast package hallucination as both a measurement problem and a decoding-time control problem, and they demonstrate that the choice of defense must be matched to the threat model and recommendation utility. --- ### Iteration Without Elaboration: A Simple ReAct Architecture Suffices for Text-to-SQL Generation Authors: Jian Lu, Haiwei Yu, Raymond M Xiong, Anru Zhang, Danyang Zhuo Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22651v1 Modern text-to-SQL systems have become increasingly elaborate, relying on schema-linking modules, retrieval-augmented prompting, candidate generation, and multi-stage refinement pipelines. While effective, these additions introduce substantial latency and engineering overhead. To this end, we present \textbf{ReAct-SQL}, a simple yet effective zero-shot ReAct-style framework built solely on iterative reasoning and a constrained action space defined by a typed Domain-Specific Language (DSL) of 15 relational operations, rather than free-form SQL generation. The model incrementally issues DSL calls, observes compiled-SQL execution feedback, and revises its reasoning through interaction. On corrected BIRD mini-dev and EHR-SQL, ReAct-SQL achieves \textbf{84.5\%} and \textbf{73.9\%} accuracy, respectively, matching substantially more elaborate baselines while running up to $8\times$ faster. Incremental ablations further show that iteration primarily improves grounding, while the DSL improves compositional reliability. --- ### Lightweight Multi-scale Hierarchical Anomaly Detection and Localization for Geospatial Big Data Applications at the Edge Authors: Thomas Benton Townsend, Joshua Bean, Benjamin K Tkach, Narcisa Gabriela Pricope, Dimitrios Michael Manias Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22648v1 As an increasing number of critical applications, including environmental, emergency, meteorological, and agricultural, rely on real-time anomaly detection in geospatial data streams, challenges related to the storage, processing, and communication of this data arise. Traditionally, large volumes of data have been sent to centralized processing locations for insight extraction. Given the big data context of these applications, this approach becomes increasingly infeasible as data volume and velocity continue to increase. This paper proposes a lightweight edge-oriented approach for anomaly detection and localization for geospatial data streams. By leveraging the H3 discrete global grid system and a multi-scale drill-down logic, the proposed approach significantly reduces computational overhead, achieving a 99.7\% reduction in evaluations compared to traditional flat-scan methods. Furthermore, by filtering out noise-induced flickering anomalies at lower resolutions, spatially-persistent anomalous signals can be efficiently identified. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively distills massive geospatial data into actionable insights. --- ### CAI-DLLM: Convergence Aware Inference for Diffusion Language Models Authors: Farhana Amin, Sabiha Afroz, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22646v1 Diffusion language models can generate many tokens in parallel, but they still require repeated denoising steps during inference. This makes generation costly, especially when the model continues to recompute tokens that are already stable. To address these limitations, we propose CAI-DLLM, a training-free inference method that uses first-step confidence to guide denoising and reduce inference time. Specifically, CAI-DLLM commits easy tokens earlier, allocates more denoising steps to harder tokens, and adjusts decoding schedules across output blocks. As it relies only on first-step confidence signals, it does not require retraining, extra predictors, or weight updates. We evaluate CAI-DLLM on LLaDA-8B-Instruct and Dream-7B-Instruct across math, code, reasoning, commonsense, and long-context tasks. CAI-DLLM achieves up to 18.2x wall clock inference speedup on LLaDA GSM8K while improving accuracy from 76.27% to 77.41%, and up to 13.1x speedup on Dream HumanEval while achieving higher pass@1 than no-cache inference, 48.17% compared with 46.95%. On harder reasoning tasks, speedups reach 44.8x, with a largest accuracy drop of 4.4 points, while energy consumption is reduced by up to 95.3%. --- ### Advanced LLM-Enhanced Intent-Based 5G Network Management using Dynamic Semantic Routes Authors: Thomas Benton Townsend, Dimitrios Michael Manias Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22644v1 As the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is becoming common in everyday applications, their ability to interpret natural language has increased significantly. An emerging application of AI is integration with network management and orchestration practices. An instance of this integration is LLM-enhanced intent-based networking, where network operators will control a network using natural language. This work presents the use of dynamic routes with a semantic router to identify an intent from a network operator's prompt and extract necessary details for intent fulfillment in intent-based 5G+ core networks. Furthermore, the performance of static route selection is assessed by evaluating multiple encoders and dynamic route detail extraction accuracy against a series of realistic operator prompts. The presented results show that static and dynamic routes are successful in detail extraction and schema formatting. --- ### NeuroPrefetcher: Storage-Aware Sparse LLM Inference via Delta Prefetching Authors: Nobel Dhar, Md Romyull Islam, Xuechen Zhang, Gongjin Sun, Sahidul Islam, Bobin Deng, Kun Suo Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22643v1 Deploying large language models on edge devices is increasingly limited by a widening gap between model size and available memory. Existing approaches such as quantization, smaller models, and offloading can raise the effective memory limit, but they still assume that the model can be compressed or partitioned to fit within some budget. We target the harder model-exceeds-memory setting, in which the model remains larger than resident memory throughout execution and storage becomes an active source of weights on the critical path. We observe that MLP activity during autoregressive decoding has strong temporal locality: approximately 82-85% of active neurons persist from one token to the next. This means that most sparse weights needed for the current token are already resident, and only the newly needed rows must be fetched from storage. We present NeuroPrefetcher, a storage-backed LLM inference system that exploits this property through predictive delta prefetching. After layer 0, a single GPU-resident predictor, occupying 2.86% of base model parameters, predicts sparse activity for all downstream MLP layers in one forward pass. The runtime compares these predictions against resident GPU buffers and issues application-scheduled NVMe reads only for incoming delta rows, replacing reactive operating-system demand paging with explicit, model-aware weight movement. On real unified-memory edge hardware, NeuroPrefetcher achieves 7.9-12.0x speedup over llama.cpp across constrained memory budgets. --- ### Mol-JEPA: A multimodal Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Molecules Authors: Florian Rottach, Sebastian Schieferdecker, William Rudman, Randall Balestriero, Carsten Eickhoff Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22642v4 Despite recent advances in molecular foundation models, several limitations remain, such as chemically invalid augmentations, modality collapse, and incomplete representation of biochemical environments. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{Mol-JEPA}, a scalable framework for learning molecular world models. Rather than relying on suboptimal molecular perturbations, our model uses modality masking to exploit information from molecular structures, cellular phenotypes, binding affinities, ADMET profiles, quantum chemistry simulations and other drug discovery data. Across various benchmarks, we show that the representations learned by Mol-JEPA deliver strong performance, demonstrating the value of incorporating biochemical context through latent space prediction. --- ### Do Not Copy/Paste: Soft Barriers for Copying in AI-Assisted Programming Authors: Iyiola E. Olatunji, Alberick Euraste Djire, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22638v1 Copying a function from a chat window into an editor takes less than a second. For many uses of AI coding tools, that speed is the point; in settings such as programming education, code review, and security-sensitive development, it can also be the problem. This paper frames copy-paste as an \emph{AI code handoff problem}: the moment model-generated text crosses from a conversational context into executable or committed software is a design boundary that current tools leave largely unmanaged. We argue that AI coding assistants should not only be evaluated by the code they generate, but also by how they mediate the transfer of that code into software artifacts. We propose \emph{soft barriers} as one class of handoff-aware mechanisms. Soft barriers preserve access to AI assistance while making unexamined transfer less frictionless. As an initial technical probe, we instantiate this idea using Unicode output perturbations that preserve visual readability but disrupt naive copy-paste execution. We introduce Copy-Paste Resistance (CPR), the fraction of functionally correct clean solutions that become syntactically invalid after perturbation. Across HumanEval and MBPP with four LLMs and four perturbation families, we find that output-level barriers can achieve high copy-paste resistance, but their effectiveness is highly model- and task-dependent. An exploratory pilot with 18 participants provides early evidence that soft barriers can shift users from direct transfer toward editing and reconstruction. We do not present Unicode perturbations as a deployment-ready solution; rather, we use them as a minimal probe for a broader research agenda on practical, transparent, and policy-aware AI code handoff. --- ### OmniCAD: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Spatial Reasoning in Robotics Assemblies Authors: Mingjia Wang, Taiting Lu, Ziwei Dong, Sisong Bei, Jingying Zeng, Runze Liu, Kaiyuan Lin, Hongxing Pan, Kai Zhang, Yizheng Hou, Yangshoudu Zheng, Chenchen Guo et al. Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22637v1 Recent vision-language models (VLMs) show strong capabilities in robotic perception and spatial reasoning, yet their ability to reason about complex mechanical assemblies remains underexplored. We introduce OmniCAD, a large-scale benchmark for assembly-aware 3D spatial reasoning across diverse industrial systems, including robotic mechanisms, automotive components, aerospace structures, and agricultural machinery. OmniCAD contains 25k mechanical assemblies, with an average of 12 parts per assembly and 21 types of mate relationships. Each assembly includes a human-verified ground-truth 3D model and renderings from 20 viewpoints. The benchmark evaluates three capabilities: (1) component-level 3D spatial reasoning, requiring prediction of part positions and orientations; (2) part-to-part relational reasoning, requiring identification of mating relationships and assembly constraints; and (3) tool-augmented agentic reasoning, where models iteratively select viewpoints, inspect visual evidence, and refine predictions. Experiments show that current VLMs struggle with industrial assembly reasoning, often producing inaccurate poses, invalid mating relationships, part interpenetration, and degraded performance as assembly complexity increases. We will open-source the benchmark, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to support research on accurate, physically valid, and scalable 3D assembly reasoning. --- ### Q-Learning with Stable Infinite-Dimensional Linear Function Approximation Authors: Shengbo Wang Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22636v1 Q-learning with linear function approximation can be unstable because an arbitrary approximation architecture need not preserve the Bellman contraction. We develop a stable infinite-dimensional linear function approximation framework for Q-learning from a single Markovian behavior-policy trajectory. The learning variable is a coefficient field $θ\in C(\mathbb L)$ on a compact latent metric space $(\mathbb L,ρ)$. The framework uses a reconstruction operator that maps $θ$ to a continuous Q-function and a compression operator that maps Bellman updates back to latent coordinates. Nonexpansiveness of both operators induces a contractive latent Bellman map on $C(\mathbb L)$, with a unique fixed point $θ^*$ whose reconstruction approximates the optimal Q-function up to representation error. We propose two stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms and establish their sup-norm convergence bounds with a leading term of order $\widetilde O(n^{-1/2})$. The infinite-dimensional formulation provides a powerful abstraction for identifying the structures that govern statistical difficulty. Smoothness of the compression map in $ρ$ is inherited by $θ^*$ and the SA iterates, allowing uniform estimation errors to be controlled through covering numbers of $(\mathbb L,ρ)$ rather than the dimension of $C(\mathbb L)$. Remarkably, the SA algorithms we propose are agnostic to the choice of $ρ$, and thus can automatically adapt to both the smoothness and the geometry. We further illustrate the framework through Q-measure-learning with linear density approximation and output-layer neural weight training under a frozen pretrained network. --- ### GeoRisk-RAG: A Hierarchy-Aware Risk Framework for Improving RAG Reliability through Selective Answering Authors: Meenu Ravi, Shailik Sarkar, Lulwah AlKulaib, Yordanos Tessema, Chang-Tien Lu Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22634v1 Current work on improving reliability in large language model (LLM)- generated answers has primarily leveraged Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), knowledge-graph augmentation, and reinforcement learning. While these methods are adept at enhancing and measuring reliability through semantic similarity and faithfulness, they often struggle to distinguish semantic similarity from geographic validity. This is especially critical in natural hazard management domains where geographic granularity (i.e., town vs. city vs. state) is significant for decision-making, as responses valid in one municipality may not transfer to another. In such domains, a confidently wrong answer carries greater risk than abstaining. We present GeoRisk-RAG, a novel hierarchy-aware framework that addresses this geographic-validity gap through selective answering. This framework explicitly estimates geographic applicability using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based distance for context retrieval before response generation. Experiments on a novel held-out wildfire-related question-answering (QA) dataset show that GeoRisk-RAG significantly reduces false confidence rates for location-dependent questions, lowering the rate to 0.009 compared with ~0.090 for standard semantic similarity and reranking baselines, while consistently achieving higher human preference alignment. This work provides a more comprehensive assessment of end-to-end RAG pipelines by integrating geographic validity and selective-answering behavior for safer decision-making in geospatial domains. --- ### Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents Authors: Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22631v3 Terminal agents are a compelling application of large language models (LLMs), with the potential to integrate deeply into users' daily workflows. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key technique for improving their capabilities, making scalable training environments a central challenge. Since public real-user interaction data are scarce, synthetic environments provide a practical alternative, but often suffer from domain gaps and limited fidelity, leading to poor generalization. Existing work mainly scales the quantity and diversity of synthetic environments, while reward-signal quality and the mechanisms governing generalization remain under-explored. We study how RL improves terminal agents and propose the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis: rather than teaching new domain-specific skills from scratch, RL primarily shapes high-level decision-making behaviors that compose and route low-level skills acquired during pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This account is consistent with our empirical results and suggests that verifier quality, which determines which behaviors are reinforced, is more important than simply increasing environment quantity or diversity. Motivated by this insight, we propose River, a simple training recipe that improves reward quality by filtering low-quality environments and augmenting outcome rewards with process-level behavior regularization. Using this recipe, our RL-trained agent achieves the best performance among evaluated open-source RL-trained 8B models across four terminal-agent benchmarks. River also generalizes across model families, scales, agent harnesses, and RL objectives. Using fewer than 30% of the TMax training environments, River improves RL gains by 106% and 30% on average for models ranging from 2B to 27B on Terminal-Bench-Lite and Terminal-Bench-v2.1, respectively. --- ### Teaching LLMs How ICU Physicians Approach Clinical Reasoning Through OMOP-Aligned Retrieval Improves Reasoning Across Clinical Domains Authors: Miguel Contreras, Scott Siegel, Subhash Nerella, Jessica Sena, Jiaqing Zhang, Heng Sun, Hruday Tej Akkaladevi, Peiyu Lu, Jordan Rosen, Sumit Kapoor, Sasank Desaraju, Grace R. Thompson et al. Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22622v1 Clinical decision-making relies on identifying relevant patient information to guide diagnosis and treatment, a challenge that is especially difficult in the data-dense and rapidly changing intensive care unit (ICU). Large language models (LLMs) could support this task. However, existing applications and datasets mostly emphasize surface-level retrieval or factual recall rather than the inductive and deductive reasoning clinicians practice to select and reason over decision-relevant evidence. We hypothesized that training LLMs on expert ICU reasoning could yield clinical reasoning skills that generalize beyond critical care. Here we introduce ICU-REACT, a reasoning dataset developed with 19 clinicians through a clinician-in-the-loop framework to teach LLMs to perform information retrieval and context-aware clinical reasoning in the ICU. Using ICU-REACT, we fine-tuned Clin-REACT models spanning 8B-70B parameters and three model families. Across five clinical reasoning benchmarks, Clin-REACT consistently outperformed its backbone models and open-source general-purpose and medical LLMs. Gains extended to different tasks including script concordance tests, and downstream diagnosis and treatment tasks. These findings suggest that expert reasoning supervision in critical care can improve broader clinical reasoning, although prospective evaluation is needed before real-world clinical use. --- ### GET: Generative Embedding Translation for Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Md Maklachur Rahman, Md Hasan Al Banna, Saraf Anjum, Mahmudul Hasan, Tracy Hammond Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22619v1 Generative segmentation provides an alternative to direct pixel-wise prediction by operating on learned latent representations, but effective image-to-mask translation must preserve target structure while remaining computationally efficient. We propose Generative Embedding Translation (GET), a structured embedding-translation framework that progressively transforms image embeddings into mask embeddings within the frozen latent space of a Stable Diffusion VAE. GET uses a U-Net-style Embedding Translation Network with 1.07M trainable parameters, combining Mobile Bottleneck Convolutions, Subsampled Self-Attention, and Multi-scale Feature Enrichment for local modeling, global context, and multi-scale refinement. Across five medical segmentation datasets, GET outperforms generative, CNN, and Transformer baselines. Compared with the strongest generative baseline, GMS, GET improves average Dice and IoU by 0.93% and 1.26%, reduces HD95 by 0.81 pixels, and uses 31.41% fewer trainable parameters. Under bidirectional BUS-BUSI domain shift, GET further improves Dice and IoU by 3.51% and 3.39%, while reducing HD95 by 27.37 pixels. Our code is available at: https://github.com/maklachur/GET. --- ### KMGen: A Skill-based Approach for Synthetic Individual Patient Data Generation Authors: Jalen Jiang, Chufan Gao, Ethan Rasmussen, Stephen Z. Xie, Jimeng Sun Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22618v1 Individual patient data (IPD) from clinical trials is the substrate for survival modeling, meta-analysis, and safety research, yet IPD is rarely released. Prior work has addressed only half of this gap: reconstructing Kaplan-Meier (KM) curves from published plots -- typically requiring manual digitization or human-in-the-loop correction -- while offering no mechanism for generating the adverse-event (AE) streams that constitute the other half of a patient record. We introduce KMGen, the first end-to-end framework that (i) fully automates KM curve extraction at accuracy competitive with human-guided tools, and (ii) generates synthetic per-patient AE trajectories from public trial registry records. The extraction stage is a fully automated agentic pipeline -- an agent generates code to extract each step in the KM curve -- achieving a mean Integrated Absolute Error (IAE) of 0.0151 on a 32-plot benchmark spanning clean, edge-case, and adversarial conditions. The IPD generation stage decouples patient archetype extraction from statistical sampling: an LLM distills the trial record into arm-specific statistics, adverse events, patient demographics, and risk multipliers. A mechanistic sampler generates patient events via clinical archetypes, bootstrap rank-correlation coupling to the empirical KM curve (preserving the marginal survival distribution exactly), and cycle-based AE scheduling with an induction/maintenance split. Across three held-out oncology trials spanning an order of magnitude in cohort size and 30 independent regenerations per trial, KMGen achieves mean integrated KM absolute difference $Δ_{\text{KM}}\,{\leq}\,0.051$, sex/ECOG JSD ${\leq}\,0.013$ on 5 of 6 demographic slots, and recovers ${\geq}\,71\%$ of the top-15 AEs by exact MedDRA term under a single fixed parameter set. The pipeline is released as open source at https://github.com/chufangao/kmgen. --- ### AI-based worker guidance in assembly and disassembly operations using multimodal ego/exo-centric data capture and structured task knowledge Authors: Vivek Chavan, Jörg Krüger Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22617v1 Assembly and disassembly processes rely on expert knowledge that is difficult to document, reuse, and transfer. This paper presents a data-centric approach for extracting structured task knowledge from expert demonstrations using egocentric and exocentric recordings. Temporal and multimodal information from video and narration is jointly encoded to derive structured task representations that enable procedural documentation and context-aware worker guidance. The approach is evaluated on a real-world disassembly case study, demonstrating that video-based representations capture procedural structure and execution context beyond static image-based methods. The results highlight the potential of egocentric video understanding for repair, training, and circular manufacturing applications. Project website: https://indego-assistant.github.io/ --- ### DeepSAGE: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Structured CBT Counseling Dialogue Authors: Qi Zhang, Heajun An, Prakriti Dumaru, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Jin-Hee Cho Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22615v1 Large Language Model (LLM)-based counseling agents can generate fluent and supportive responses, but they often lack the structured, goal-directed progression required to conduct a coherent therapeutic session. We present DeepSAGE (Strategic AI Guidance Engine), a hybrid LLM--Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for stage-aware counseling dialogue grounded in the first session of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). DeepSAGE represents the session as eleven stages with explicit therapeutic objectives, with an external controller determines stage completion and the DRL model selects therapeutic intentions that guide LLM response generation. We evaluate DeepSAGE against six retrieval-, prompting-, stage-, and policy-based alternatives. DeepSAGE elicits higher simulated client engagement and openness and achieves the strongest balance of stage-goal completion and dialogue efficiency among stage-structured systems. Domain expert review further indicates that the generated conversations exhibit broadly plausible emotional trajectories and recognizable CBT processes. Because the evaluation relies primarily on simulated clients and model-based metrics, these findings demonstrate comparative dialogue-control improvements rather than clinical effectiveness. These results suggest that combining stage-structured dialogue with learned strategy selection is a promising approach for AI counseling, though clinical effectiveness, safety, and real-world utility require further human evaluation. --- ### What AstroPT knows about galaxies, and what that can teach us about LLMs Authors: UniverseTBD, :, Kshitij Duraphe, Aman Kumar, Michael J. Smith, Shashwat Sourav Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, astro-ph.IM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22614v1 Interpretability research increasingly asks when concepts emerge during training and whether linear probes recover real structure, but in language models these claims are hard to validate because language offers little ground-truth ordering of concepts or relationships among them. We propose the use of astronomical ground truth through AstroPT, a transformer trained on millions of galaxy images, as a calibration testbed. AstroPT is an LLM-like model trained within a domain where the difficulty ordering of concepts and the relations among them are known in advance. Probing frozen representations across checkpoints, layers, model sizes, and objective choices, we find that galaxy properties emerge in a fixed order that tracks their known difficulty---quantities written almost directly into the pixels (band magnitude) become decodable early in training and shallow in the network, while multiband/spectra based and inferred quantities (such as redshift and specific star formation rate) emerge later and deeper. This order is invariant to our tested training objectives, and scales in magnitude but not in sequence with capacity. Our linear probe directions further recover the known physical structure among galaxy properties. Our findings suggest that astronomy offers a controlled sandbox for calibrating mechanistic interpretability methods we otherwise apply to LLMs blind. --- ### Coalition-Aware Skill Reliability for Self-Evolving Agents Authors: Qiyan Zhao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Bo Liu, Minda Chen, Wei Xiong, Jingyang Chen, Guanting Ye, Wenhao Yu, Xiaosong Yuan, Shijie Han, Da-Han Wang, Jianmin Ji et al. Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22610v1 Agent skills, structured artifacts distilled from interaction trajectories and dynamically reused from skill banks, have become a central mechanism for enabling large language model (LLM)-based self-evolving agents to learn from past experience. Yet existing work has largely focused on the operational aspects of skills, such as acquisition, evolution, and retrieval, while leaving a more fundamental reliability question unresolved: Do accumulated skills in an agent's skill bank actually make positive mechanistic contributions? We investigate this question through systematic skill-bank audits across alternative bank compositions and deployment domains, measuring the resulting changes in agent behavior. These audits reveal two recurring reliability failures: coalition pollution, where bank-level gains conceal negative coalition-level skill contributions, and cross-domain utility reversal, where source-beneficial skills reverse their effects after transfer. These findings motivate two reliability interventions: coalition-aware skill selection during skill accumulation and label-free skill masking after transfer. Coalition-Aware Skill Selection (CASS) selects more reliable candidate skills for the current bank using sampled Shapley marginals. Unsupervised Skill-Masked Coalition Optimizer (u-SMCO) masks transferred skills whose exclusion improves retrieval quality on unlabeled target-domain data. Agentic experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, HotpotQA, and ALFWorld show that CASS and u-SMCO consistently improve task performance and cross-domain generalization over strong skill-based self-evolving agent baselines. Beyond accuracy, coalition-conditioned reliability modeling reduces sensitivity to noisy outcome-reward fluctuations during reinforcement learning and exposes the limits of isolation-based skill evaluation. --- ### Mitigating Explanation Leakage in Financial Fraud Detection Systems Authors: Muhammad Waleed Gul, Elaheh Homayounvala Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22607v1 Financial fraud detection relies heavily on centralized machine learning models. This creates serious data privacy risks. Federated Learning (FL) decentralizes data processing, but financial regulations still require models to be transparent. This means using Explainable AI (XAI) tools such as TreeSHAP. Recent cybersecurity research shows a problem with this approach. Sharing high-fidelity SHAP explanations exposes the federated network to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). This dissertation proposes and evaluates DP-FedSHAP. It is a new architecture that applies client-level differential privacy only to post-hoc TreeSHAP vectors. It is compared against a Weight-Level DP baseline, which perturbs the trained model directly instead. Using the highly imbalanced IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection dataset, this study measures the trade-off between explanation fidelity, privacy preservation, and the model's Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC). --- ### Adversarial Agents on Topology Optimization: Understanding the Fragility and Robustness of Deep Learning-based and Physics-Based Design Models under Adversarial Perturbation Authors: Hoang Anh Nguyen, Yuan Hong, Hongyi Xu Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22606v1 Topology optimization, using both physic-based approaches and deep learning surrogates, serves as a cornerstone for generative design agents in cyber-manufacturing systems. While deep learning surrogates have gained widespread adoption due to their speed in online design generation, this work demonstrates their vulnerability under input perturbations. In this work, we present a mechanics-grounded reliability evaluation framework that formulates an adversarial agent targeting the generative design models. We investigate a strictly non-intrusive threat model where bounded perturbations are introduced exclusively to the initial-density channel, while physical boundary conditions, compliance-gradient channels, network architectures, and solver routines remain intact. Evaluating surrogate models across U-Net, convolutional, and generative architectures with varying physics-gradient conditioning depths demonstrates that bounded initialization noise can cause catastrophic mechanical failure, increasing compliance by multiple orders of magnitude through severed load paths and disconnected supports. Furthermore, we discover that incorporating richer physics-gradient conditioning in the deep learning surrogates does not guarantee monotonic robustness across surrogate families. Finally, physics-in-the-loop recovery demonstrates that initializing the classical SIMP optimizer with perturbed topologies mitigates design performance degradation, having a high probability of restoring compliance to near-baseline levels across tested instances. These findings demonstrate that learned surrogates should serve as physics-verified initializers instead of replacing physics-based solvers entirely in a resilient cyber-manufacturing system. Moreover, the proposed adversarial agent provides a foundation for future training generative design agents robust against noise and targeted perturbations. --- ### Scale-invariant Optimal Sampling for Rare-events Data with Sparse Models Authors: Jing Wang, HaiYing Wang, Qiang Zhang, Hao Helen Zhang Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22597v1 Subsampling is effective in tackling computational challenges for massive data with rare events. Overly aggressive subsampling may adversely affect estimation efficiency, and optimal subsampling is essential to mitigate the information loss. However, existing optimal subsampling probabilities depend on data scales, and some scaling transformations may result in inefficient subsamples. This problem is more significant when there are inactive features, because their influence on the subsampling probabilities can be arbitrarily magnified by inappropriate scaling transformations. We tackle this challenge and introduce a scale-invariant optimal subsampling function in the context of sparse models, where inactive features are commonly assumed. Instead of focusing on estimating model parameters, we define an optimal subsampling function to minimize the prediction error, using adaptive lasso to outline the estimation procedure and study its theoretical guarantee. We first introduce the adaptive lasso estimator for rare-events data and establish its oracle properties, thereby validating the use of subsampling. Then we derive a scale-invariant optimal subsampling function that minimizes the prediction error of the inverse probability weighted (IPW) adaptive lasso. Finally, we present an estimator based on the maximum sampled conditional likelihood (MSCL) to further improve the estimation efficiency. We conduct numerical experiments using both simulated and real-world data sets to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods. --- ### Sparse Additive Off-Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning with Potentially Limited Number of Trajectories Authors: Tuoyi Zhao, Chengchun Shi, Zhengling Qi, Lan Wang Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22595v1 We develop a new framework for flexible, nonlinear, and interpretable off-policy evaluation for infinite-horizon reinforcement learning. To handle large state spaces and support transparent decision-making, we model the Q-function using a nonlinear function class with a sparse additive structure. We derive high-probability finite-sample error bounds for estimating the value function of a target policy and show that the bounds depend only logarithmically on the ambient dimension $d$, thereby alleviating the curse of dimensionality. In contrast to most existing theory for off-policy evaluation, which typically assumes access to many trajectories, our analysis guarantees accurate value estimation when either the number of trajectories or the time horizon is sufficiently large. In addition, we propose a group-sparsity-based feature screening procedure that identifies, with high probability, a reduced feature set containing all relevant covariates. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. --- ### Tabular foundation models for non-tabular tasks Authors: Goran Nakerst, John Brennan, Wouter Beugeling, Masudul Haque Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22594v1 Tabular foundation models (TFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for machine learning on tabular data, offering the ability to generalize across datasets without task-specific training. Since many machine learning datasets can be represented as tables, this raises the question: does TFM capability extend beyond tasks traditionally regarded as tabular? We address this question by using TabPFN v3 on three non-tabular classification problems: handwritten digit recognition on MNIST, language identification of French and German words, and image classification on Tiny ImageNet. In each case, the original data are represented as rows of a table and classification is formulated as prediction of a missing label. We evaluate performance as a function of the number of context samples provided to the pretrained model, with no additional training or fine-tuning. Despite having no explicit access to the spatial or sequential structure characterizing the data, TabPFN v3 in some cases achieves accuracies comparable with that of models or methods geared specifically toward the corresponding tasks. --- ### GCA: Global Centroid Alignment in Federated Learning Authors: Jong-Ik Park, Harry Jiang, Logan Blakely, Georgios Fragkos, Shamina Hossain-McKenzie, Carlee Joe-Wong Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22593v1 Autoencoder (AE)-based federated learning (FL) is attractive for anomaly detection when clients have limited local data. However, conventional FL exchanges AE parameters or gradients, incurring substantial communication overhead and potentially exposing input training data information, since AEs are explicitly optimized to reconstruct their inputs. We introduce \emph{Global Centroid Alignment (GCA)}, a latent-code-mediated FL protocol that coordinates clients without transmitting AE parameters or gradients. In each round, (1) clients first train their local AEs using a \emph{reconstruction} update and upload a small subset of encoder latent codes to the FL server. (2) The server pools these codes, fits a clustering model, and broadcasts only \emph{global latent centroids and their support counts}. (3) Each client then updates its encoder by aligning its local latent codes with the \emph{nearest} centroid using \emph{inverse-count} weighting to emphasize globally underrepresented patterns. Steps (1)--(3) repeat over communication rounds. Because GCA exchanges only sampled latent codes and centroid statistics, its communication cost depends on latent dimensionality and the numbers of uploaded codes and returned centroids rather than on AE model size. Across five tabular and two vision benchmarks, GCA yields higher reconstruction error under a server-side client data extraction attack in all 21 comparisons and clearly lower cosine similarity in 20 of 21 comparisons with FedAvg, FedProx, and FedNova, showing its ability to protect training data. It even improves test accuracy over FedAvg by up to $5.76\%$. GCA achieves extraction defense comparable to DP-FedAvg, remains effective when DP-FedAvg does not reduce target resemblance, and lowers per-round communication by up to $99.15\%$. --- ### Vision-Language Models for Occupational Physical Exposure Assessment: Estimating External Hand Forces in Manual Material Handling Tasks from RGB Video Authors: Mohammad Sadra Rajabi, Aanuoluwapo Ojelade, Sunwook Kim, Maury A. Nussbaum Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22586v1 External hand forces are important inputs to biomechanical analyses of occupational physical exposure and injury risk, yet continuous force measurements during manual material handling (MMH) typically requires instrumented objects or specialized sensing. We evaluated a vision-language model (VLM)-based pipeline that combines task-specific textual cues, visual representations, and known box mass to estimate dynamic, triaxial, bilateral external hand forces from RGB video. Thirty-five healthy young adults performed five MMH tasks involving lifting, carrying, pushing, and pulling with box masses of 6, 9, and 12 kg. The pipeline used text-guided localization of participant and handled-object regions of interest (ROIs), pretrained vision-transformer feature extraction, and transformer-based temporal regression. Performance was evaluated using leave-one-subject-out validation across seven camera-view conditions (three single-view and four multi-view conditions) and four ROI strategies. Overall, root mean square error was ~4.7-5.6 N for the horizontal and mediolateral force components and ~10.6-11.0 N for the vertical component. Including the handled object as a second ROI generally improved force estimation, with some of the largest benefits under single-camera conditions, whereas pixel-level segmentation provided little additional improvement. Multi-camera capture provided the clearest benefit for peak-force estimation, particularly for the vertical component, whereas differences in overall frame-level error among camera configurations were comparatively modest. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of estimating continuous, bilateral, directional hand-force estimates from RGB video and known load mass without requiring sensors on the worker or handled objects as model inputs, supporting the development of more scalable occupational physical exposure and risk assessments. --- ### Weakly supervised concept Bottleneck Learning for Robust Two stage Object centric visual reasoning Authors: Sparsh Tiwari, Gesina Schwalbe, Bettina Finzel Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22584v1 Two-stage neuro-symbolic architectures provide an elegant paradigm for visual problem solving by cleanly separating connectionist perception of predefined symbols from possibly later defined relational reasoning thereon. However, anchoring high-level predicates into visual frames typically necessitates annotations that are expensive to acquire. In this work, we introduce the Dynamic Orthogonal Concept Bottleneck (D-OCB), an object-centric slot- VAE framework designed to extract human-aligned symbolic predicates under extremely weak supervision. D-OCB eliminates the arduous manual tuning of loss-balancing coef- ficients by dynamically learning optimal hyperparameter allocations during training. To infuse prior knowledge on independence of concept categories, in addition to standard re- construction self-supervision we penalize correlation across concept subspaces. Crucially, to combat the instability of very low supervision regimes, D-OCB incorporates a dynamic di- mensionality allocation mechanism; this adaptive formulation allows well-represented con- cepts to yield latent dimensions to underperforming concepts that are lagging behind, effectively preventing representation collapse and significantly improving overall concept accuracy. Through an extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our framework achieves high concept alignment and downstream visual reasoning accuracy using minimal label budgets, matching or outperforming end-to-end paradigms. --- ### Clinical Graph-JEPA: Predictive Patient-State Knowledge Graphs for Cognitive Decision Support Authors: Kushagra Yadav, Nalin Prabhath, Amit Lamba, James E. Schrager, Goeun Han, Yining Mao Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22583v2 Clinical records contain rich evidence about patient state, but converting that evidence into reliable, structured knowledge graphs remains difficult because extraction errors, ontology mismatch, missing relations, and temporal ambiguity can propagate into downstream systems. We propose a clinical knowledge graph construction and refinement framework that combines multi-agent relation proposal, ontology-aware normalization, deterministic evidence scoring, and JEPA-based latent refinement. Rather than treating a clinical knowledge graph as a static extraction artifact, we treat it as a predictive patient-state representation. For each admission, the system constructs an evidence-scored graph from structured MIMIC-IV records and inferred clinical cross-links, then learns to recover held-out clinical relations from the observed graph context. We evaluate the refiner with leakage-free leave-one-out edge recovery (MRR and Hits@k) and held-out batch-mask evaluation (AUC and MRR). To isolate the contribution of discharge-note context, we compare a note-embedding-free configuration with a note-augmented configuration that injects real discharge-note representations only into note-grounded entities. Under the same cohort and evaluation protocol, entity-grounded note injection improves overall leave-one-out MRR by 31% relative improvement. --- ### Hybrid Panels: Toward Human-AI Collaboration in Survey Research Authors: Julia Romberg, Tobias Gummer, Gabriella Lapesa, Tanja Kunz, Claudia Wagner Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22582v1 Large-scale population surveys are essential for generating robust social and scientific insights, yet they face significant challenges, including declining response rates, increasing data collection costs, long delays between data collection and data provision, and the risk of nonresponse bias. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have opened up new opportunities for AI-supported survey infrastructures where the goal is to overcome these challenges without limiting the data quality. A promising AI-enabled survey infrastructure for which we build a first pilot is a hybrid panel. A hybrid panel is a longitudinal AI-enabled survey which allows to iteratively improve the alignment between large language models (LLMs) and the population they aim to simulate and use the errors to inform the design and implementation of the next survey wave (e.g., inform the participant recruitment, assignment of questions to participants). It incorporates both human participants and LLMs as fundamental elements of its design. In this research note, we introduce the concept of a hybrid panel by providing a definition and outlining an overarching framework, spanning data collection to data validation. We detail results from a first pilot study to illustrate (open) challenges that we identify for hybrid panels. --- ### CausalCache: Conditional High-Fidelity Restoration for Long-Horizon GUI Agents Authors: Jiaxuan Luo, Zhanfeng Liao, Jiayao Teng, Yuan Wang Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22577v2 Long-horizon GUI agents can retain complete action histories as compact text, but only a few historical screenshots fit in active context. We formulate this as budgeted fidelity restoration: every event remains summarized, while a fixed budget $B$ determines which events regain their archived screenshots. Recent-$B$ assigns all visual slots to the latest events. CausalCache instead scores the complete history and swaps in an older event only when its predicted utility exceeds that of a recent event. A history-gated key/value adapter modifies only restored history-image tokens and is exactly bypassed when no history image is active, preserving current-screen processing. The adapter and selector are trained with matched-budget interventions on desktop trajectories and evaluated zero-shot on mobile. On OSWorld-Verified, activating historical screenshots improves success by about $13$ percentage points over summary-only memory. Under the official $15$-step limit, CausalCache and Recent-$4$ are statistically indistinguishable; in a $30$-step diagnostic, CausalCache achieves $46.7\%$ success versus $42.4\%$ ($+4.3$ points). Zero-shot on $117$ MobileWorld tasks, CausalCache improves over Recent-$4$ from $30.2\%$ to $36.8\%$. The gain is concentrated on a pre-defined cross-app memory-candidate split ($30.6\%$ vs. $19.4\%$, $+11.2$ points), while single-app controls show no detectable difference ($43.6\%$ vs. $42.4\%$). These results show that selecting which past events regain pixels is more effective than spending a fixed visual budget entirely on recency. --- ### Two-level domain-decomposition AdaGrad method for scalable training of graph neural networks Authors: Laurynas Varnas, Julien Herrmann, Alexander Heinlein, Serge Gratton, Alena Kopaničáková Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22575v1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for learning from graph-structured data. However, their efficient training remains challenging, particularly in distributed computing environments. This challenge arises from the use of message passing, which couples all graph nodes, leading to expensive optimization steps, high memory requirements, and substantial communication overhead. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a novel domain-decomposition (DD) variant of AG2m, an AdaGrad method enhanced with second-order curvature information and momentum, denoted by DD-AG2m. The proposed DD-AG2m alternates between AG2m optimization on the original (global) graph and AG2m optimization on the partitioned graphs. To incorporate global information at reduced cost, we further introduce a two-level variant (2DD-AG2m) that performs global optimization steps on a coarse graph obtained by randomly subsampling nodes within each subdomain. Numerical experiments spanning graph classification, node-level regression, and spatiotemporal forecasting tasks demonstrate that the proposed DD methods reduce the computational cost required to achieve the same predictive performance by a factor of 4-8. Moreover, for the fixed computational cost, they improve the predictive performance of GNNs by up to 22% compared with the baseline AG2m. --- ### From Diagnosis to Redesign: Using Quantitative Ethnography to Improve Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning Authors: Vedant Khatri, Anthony Cusimano, Zachari Swiecki, Zhen Xu, Xiner Liu, Renzhe Yu Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22566v1 Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are designed to improve reasoning by decomposing tasks across multiple agents with specialized functions, but the presence of multiple agents does not inherently guarantee coherent reasoning or outputs that align with task objectives. This paper introduces a quantitative ethnographic (QE) approach for diagnosing and redesigning multi-agent LLM systems based on the discourse produced through agent interactions. We test this approach using automated essay scoring as an example context, applying Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to model a five-agent multi-agent debate system and examine differences between debates that produced correct versus incorrect scoring decisions. Results show that, in the initial system, correct scoring decisions were characterized by rubric-grounded justification, agreement, and elaboration. Incorrect scoring decisions, in contrast, were characterized by extended proposition-challenge-response exchanges that were less consistently tied to rubric criteria. We then used the findings to revise the agents' prompts. The revised system improved exact scoring accuracy from 27.78% to 40.28% and shifted the discourse of incorrect debates toward the rubric-grounded pattern of correct ones, making the two nearly indistinguishable. Based on these results, we argue that QE can support a diagnostic-to-redesign loop for AI reasoning by tracing how patterns of agent interaction relate to system performance, informing prompt redesign, and evaluating whether those redesigns change both outcomes and interaction patterns. --- ### ExecRubrics: Executable Tool-Augmented Rubrics for Verifiable and Efficient Long-Form Evaluation Authors: Kaustubh D. Dhole, Charles L. A. Clarke, Eugene Y. Agichtein Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22559v3 Rubrics aim to make language-model evaluation transparent by decomposing response quality into interpretable criteria. However, natural-language rubrics are often ambiguous, require LLM judges, and typically assume criteria aggregated through linear weighted sums, limiting their ability to capture dependencies, alternatives, penalties, and override conditions. We propose ExecRubrics, a framework for representing rubrics as compact executable programs. ExecRubrics encodes evaluation logic as verifiable Python scoring functions, giving natural-language rubric intent an operational semantics: a fixed decision procedure that can be inspected, executed, and edited. On three long-form response benchmarks -- HealthBench, HelpSteer, and ArgQuality -- we show that ExecRubrics can recover substantial preference signal without an LLM judge at evaluation time. On ArgQuality and HelpSteer, the strongest executable variants are within 1.1 and 4 percentage points, respectively, of the direct GPT-5.5 agentic baseline. Executable rubrics are also considerably faster, achieving a 192x average speedup. We show that incorporating external logic and resources from text processing libraries such as NLTK and spaCy can further improve preference accuracy. Our results suggest a novel way of approaching automated evaluation, by offering a faster, more explainable, and less ambiguous alternative to black-box rubric evals, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and banking where precision and auditability are critical. --- ### BLADE: Bilevel Low-rank Augmented-Lagrangian Erasure for LLM Unlearning Authors: Md Toufikuzzaman, Ahmad Mousavi, Dongwon Lee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22557v1 Existing LLM unlearning methods struggle with robustness: unbounded forget losses degrade model coherence, fixed-weight balancing cannot adapt as retain difficulty shifts mid-training, and methods that work on one benchmark falter under scaling or repeated application. We propose BLADE, a constrained bilevel framework whose three mechanisms give smooth, predictable control over the optimization landscape: a clamped-entropy forget loss whose gradient is exactly zero once a token reaches sufficient uncertainty; an asymmetric augmented Lagrangian that permanently ratchets retain protection after any violation; and a bilevel structure confined to LoRA adapters that repairs retain damage before each forgetting step. BLADE dominates across three benchmark families, improving average composite scores over the strongest baselines by $6$% on TOFU, $9$% on MUSE Books, and $7$% on KnowUndo, and it remains stable under $4\times$ scaling and $4$ sequential unlearning steps on MUSE News where the best competing method collapses entirely. --- ### Neighbor-embedded Graph Neural Network-based Crowd Delivery Traffic Management in Smart City Authors: Kishu Gupta, Deepika Saxena, Ashutosh Kumar Singh, Chung-Nan Lee Published: 2026-08-23 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22555v1 The significant upsurge in vehicle traffic presents a considerable challenge in the pursuit of smart mobilization and transportation (SMT) worldwide. Current approaches primarily focus on vehicular traffic management through congestion prediction but fall short in addressing essential objectives such as traffic reduction and appropriate vehicle selection to alleviate congestion in smart cities ($SmCt$). To address these concerns, this work introduces a novel \textit{Neighbor-Embedded Graph Neural Network-based Crowd Delivery Traffic Management} (NeCDM) Model, comprising two key components: the Traffic Congestion Prediction Unit (TCPu) and the Traffic Observation and Management Unit (TOMu). The TCPu utilizes Graph Neural Network (GNN) optimization to accurately predict traffic flow levels at various delivery stations within $SmCt$ ecosystems. Additionally, the TOMu facilitates the intelligent selection of the most suitable delivery vehicles for fulfilling crowd delivery requests ($CDR$). This work emphasizes the potential of crowd delivery as a feasible solution for achieving SMT goals while adhering to smart city parameters ($\mathcal{SCP}$s), such as reduced carbon emissions, shorter travel times, and minimized travel distances. The proposed model achieves notable improvements in computational efficiency, including reductions of up to 4.03\% in L1 loss ($£$), 16.66\% in L2 loss ($£_{rmse}$), and 7.64\% in computation time. ---