# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 79 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #3901–3950 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/79 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/78.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/80.md) ### Across-Design Uncertainty in Short Pricing Panels: Evidence from Simulated Price Trajectories Authors: Pedro Cadahia Delgado Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, econ.EM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21334v1 Short observational pricing panels can contain many observations while offering only a small number of distinct price movements. This paper studies the inferential consequences of that distinction in a synthetic data-generating process calibrated to a sparse pricing regime. We separate uncertainty conditional on a realised price trajectory from variation in estimation error across alternative trajectories generated by the same pricing process. In the baseline simulations, the latter component accounts for 97.6% of the variance of estimation error for the gradient-boosted specification. Within-panel resampling procedures use the information of one realised trajectory and do not identify this across-design component. Three results organise the analysis. First, across-design dispersion is well described by the empirical relation sigma_hat approx 0.182 V^(-0.271), where V equals moves times magnitude squared. Second, adding regions sharing a common price path reduces outcome noise but does not create independent price trajectories; conversely, averaging across units with independent design-specific errors reduces dispersion at the standard square root rate. Third, a Paule-Mandel variance component estimated across independently priced units substantially increases empirical coverage in homogeneous simulations, from 0.469 to 0.931. The broader implication is a shift toward designing data-generating processes that create independent identifying variation rather than relying solely on fixed passive panels. --- ### Anatomy-Informed Neural Networks: Encoding Anatomic Priors in Loss and Architecture, with an SE(3) Formulation of Guidewire-Induced Aortoiliac Deformation Authors: David P. Stonko Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21332v1 Deep-learning models of anatomy can be numerically plausible yet anatomically impossible, and they generalize poorly when data are scarce. We introduce Anatomy-Informed Neural Networks (AINN), in which soft anatomic priors enter as penalty terms in the loss (e.g., a branching penalty that treats a renal transplant artery off the iliac instead of the aorta as unexpected rather than impossible), in direct analogy to a physics-informed neural network, and hard anatomic priors (e.g., continuity of the vessel) are built into the architecture and state representation, making such invalid predictions impossible by construction wherever the prior admits architectural enforcement. We develop it on a clinical test case with limited data: how the aortoiliac tree deforms when a stiff wire is introduced endoluminally. This is important to contemporary aortic surgery and will matter to autonomous endovascular navigation. We lift the vessel centerline and the wire path from R^3 to curves of frames in the Lie group SE(3), and couple a Cosserat-rod wire to a tortuosity-modulated, anatomically anchored vessel through a unilateral lumen-contact inequality. The prediction is a constrained minimizer of the coupled elastic energy, with contact forces as its Lagrange multipliers. Supervision is a Wasserstein-2 optimal-transport loss between the predicted projection through the C-arm geometry and the observed angiogram, so a 2D angiogram can train a 3D prediction. The kinematics, loss and projection are verified against known ground truth; the mechanics solver only against its own optimality conditions, and predicted displacement is not yet mesh-converged. Here, no network is trained. Future work will transfer this in silico model to real CT scans and test whether it improves predictive accuracy and reduces the training data required. --- ### Move by Move: Measuring and Steering How LLMs Conduct Psychotherapy Authors: Afonso Baldo, Hugo Pitorro, Areti Vassilopoulos, Anabela C. Areias, Maya D'Eon, Fabíola Costa, Ricardo Rei, Nuno M. Guerreiro Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21325v1 Users increasingly turn to large language models for emotional support, yet little is known about how these models actually conduct a psychotherapy interaction. We introduce an ontology of ten therapeutic moves: compact, function-based categories grounded in the MULTI-60 inventory, validated through an annotation campaign with five licensed psychologists, and scaled with a judge-based approach that matches expert agreement. Applying it to real counseling transcripts and model-led sessions, we compare the move distributions between human clinicians and a panel of frontier models. Models over-use inquiry at up to three times the human rate, neglect psychoeducation, and are strongly context-anchored: they carry forward strategies initiated by a human clinician but rarely initiate them themselves. Exposing the ontology as a set of tools roughly halves the mean deviation from the human move distribution and improves turn-level alignment with human therapist by 7-9 percentage points, without any fine-tuning. --- ### Time-Aware Tranformer-Based Prediction Model for AECOPD Authors: Weihao Qu, Ling Zheng, Dongyang Wang, Jiacun Wang, Haowen Pan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21324v1 The rapid symptom change of Acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) makes it critical to have time-sensitive prediction models. However, most current machine learning models studying AECOPD use clinical and laboratory data, which will inevitably cause latency. To ensure timely detection of AECOPD and minimize latency, this paper focuses on home monitoring scenarios where only respiratory data from daily-use ventilators is available. We introduce a Time-Aware transformer-based AECOPD prediction model, which generates meaningful patient representations using the Time-Aware transformer to capture the symptoms and their temporal progression in ventilator data. Our experimental results demonstrate that our Time-Aware transformer-based approach outperforms traditional methods in multiple classification tasks, highlighting its potential to enhance AECOPD prediction accuracy. --- ### Unified Branch-and-Bound Search for the Steiner Traveling Salesman Problem on Graphs of Convex Sets Authors: Jingtao Tang, Hang Ma Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21319v1 We formalize the Steiner Traveling Salesman Problem (Steiner-TSP) on Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS), which seeks a minimum-cost closed trajectory through required convex sets while allowing optional transit vertices and revisits. To explore the resulting infinite solution space, we propose a unified branch-and-bound search over rooted walk prefixes. Additive lower-bound-graph costs bound committed prefixes, while a cut-separated connected-flow relaxation lower-bounds the residual cost of visiting every remaining target and returning to the root. Under a uniform positive-cost assumption, best-first traversal terminates after finitely many expansions on every feasible instance without an initial incumbent, whereas depth-first traversal does so once a finite incumbent is available. For a user-specified factor $ε\geq1$, a global lower bound certifies that either strategy's incumbent cost is at most $ε$ times the global optimum. We further demonstrate joint sensing-mode, visitation-order, and continuous-trajectory selection for a mobile-manipulator inspection task, including action precedences expressed in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTL$_f$). Both traversal strategies find feasible solutions on all benchmark instances within 30s with mean certified optimality gaps of 28.1% and 29.7%, respectively, whereas two recent baselines succeed on only about half of the instances --- ### From Regulation to Implementation: A Critical Evaluation of LLM-Assisted Regulatory Compliance in Industry Authors: Adriana Watson, Marco Bücheler, Grant Richards Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21317v1 The European Union (EU) has emerged as a leading regulatory body in the development of sustainability and privacy regulations. While new regulation requirements vary, many include a documentation artifact to ensure compliance. Notably, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) introduces Digital Product Passports (DPPs) for life cycle transparency, while the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) to mitigate privacy risks. Creating these compliance artifacts, however, is challenging. Industrial data, which often exists in heterogeneous formats and is scattered across company and supplier systems, is required for DPPs and can be difficult to extract into compliant DPP formatting. Furthermore, DPIA documents require interdisciplinary expertise and follow no standardized format, making development difficult for novel systems. To address the particular complexity of compliance artifact creation for both regulations, researchers have proposed the use of LLMs in the generation process; however, the impact of the aforementioned problems on the output of these systems is largely unaddressed. This work investigates the existing research gap by exploring how data extraction instructions and regulatory vagueness impact the quality and consistency of LLM-produced compliance artifacts. The resulting artifacts are evaluated by benchmarking different models against manually created ground-truth schemas. The results reveal that less strict guidelines, such as DPIA formatting, require higher context prompts to maintain consistency and completeness. Stricter guidelines, such as formatting for Digital Battery Passports (DBP), result in consistent results regardless of prompt context, but may lead to more hallucinations in the output --- ### Prompt-Model Interaction Reaches the Fixed Points: A deterministic, task-free structural readout -- and the factorizations of it that failed Authors: Nicolás Vera Zúñiga Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21315v1 That a prompt's effect is not a property of the prompt is established: prompts optimised for one model degrade on another, and rankings reorder under neutral reformatting. That evidence is about task accuracy, which cannot say whether the interaction is a fact about task machinery or about the conditional distribution itself. We ask on a readout with no task in it: the fixed-point structure of the short-window argmax map x_{t+1} = argmax_x p(x | x_{t-1}, x_t), censused from 96 starts. It is deterministic, so nothing can be helped or hurt, and it exists only at short windows -- four of six models lose it entirely by window 16 -- so everything here concerns how a model reads a fragment. Two results. First, the interaction reaches this readout at full magnitude: nine tokens of conditioning move the fixed-point fraction across most of its range, change a four-way structural class, and reorder models, while instruction tuning worth 60.5 IFEval points moves the class by zero. Second, nothing we proposed carries it. Prefix length fails: the effect is not monotone. Four phenomenological factors -- prose-versus-markup, a universal direction, bidirectionality, instruct-resistance -- were each withdrawn within one run of being proposed, dissolved by widening the sample. And the nearest mechanistic account, attention-sink dominance of early tokens, predicts the sign of the shift on 2 of 5 models -- chance -- while a length-by-content cross shows it holds on real text and fails on our probe's uniformly random input, so we are outside its regime, not against it. One fixed nine-token prefix drives four models toward 0 and two toward 1; the bidirectionality survives in-distribution starts. On this readout the unit of explanation is the prompt-model pair. The recurring error it caught in us has a name: a criterion with a shape applied to a quantity with no room to vary. --- ### Rethinking Expressivity and Efficiency in Test-Time Training Authors: Zeyun Zhong, Joya Chen, Manuel Martin, Frederik Diederichs, Juergen Gall, Juergen Beyerer Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21308v2 Test-Time Training (TTT) enables long-context processing via continuous weight updates during inference, but current methods struggle to balance the expressivity of per-token update dynamics with the hardware efficiency of chunk-wise approximations. We propose E$^2$-TTT (Expressive and Efficient TTT) to bridge this gap. Under the standard approximation of taking gradients at the chunk-start weights, we derive a closed-form state transition that exactly reproduces the chunk-end fast-weight and momentum states of the per-token recurrence. This enables fully parallelized chunk-level training while preserving the temporal structure of the update rule that prior chunk-wise methods discard. We validate E$^2$-TTT by training models up to 1.3B parameters from scratch. It performs on par with previous TTT and hybrid attention baselines in language modeling while outperforming them on in-context retrieval. Its advantage is most pronounced in length extrapolation: on the standard ``Needle in a Haystack'' passkey test, it retains over 90% accuracy at $8\times$ the training context length. Meanwhile, E$^2$-TTT can match the training throughput of efficient chunk-wise methods, demonstrating that it effectively reconciles expressivity with efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zeyun-zhong/E2-TTT. --- ### Rethinking Expressivity and Efficiency in Test-Time Training Authors: Zeyun Zhong, Joya Chen, Manuel Martin, Frederik Diederichs, Juergen Gall, Juergen Beyerer Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21308v1 Test-Time Training (TTT) enables long-context processing via continuous weight updates during inference, but current methods struggle to balance the expressivity of per-token update dynamics with the hardware efficiency of chunk-wise approximations. We propose E$^2$-TTT (Expressive and Efficient TTT) to bridge this gap. Under the standard approximation of taking gradients at the chunk-start weights, we derive a closed-form state transition that exactly reproduces the chunk-end fast-weight and momentum states of the per-token recurrence. This enables fully parallelized chunk-level training while preserving the temporal structure of the update rule that prior chunk-wise methods discard. We validate E$^2$-TTT by training models up to 1.3B parameters from scratch. It performs on par with previous TTT and hybrid attention baselines in language modeling while outperforming them on in-context retrieval. Its advantage is most pronounced in length extrapolation: on the standard ``Needle in a Haystack'' passkey test, it retains over 90% accuracy at $8\times$ the training context length. Meanwhile, E$^2$-TTT can match the training throughput of efficient chunk-wise methods, demonstrating that it effectively reconciles expressivity with efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zeyun-zhong/E2-TTT. --- ### SPARCL: Spectral Partitioned Analytic Continual Learning Authors: James Hartley, Zeropy Surio, Daniel Whitmore, Hannah Clarke, Thomas Reed Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21307v1 Analytic continual learning has emerged as a strong exemplar-free alternative to gradient-based class-incremental learning because it replaces iterative optimization with closed-form ridge updates. Yet the usual forgetting narrative, centered on stochastic gradient overwriting, does not explain why analytic methods still drift on old classes despite exact recursive solvers. We identify the culprit as spectral interference: the joint ridge classifier for all tasks shares the inverse autocorrelation operator $(R+λI)^{-1}$, so incoming task samples that load onto old dominant eigendirections dilute the spectrum and perturb old-class logits even when old labels are never revisited. Based on this view, we propose SPARCL, a spectral partitioned analytic continual learner that decomposes the running autocorrelation into a high-energy core and a residual complement, freezes old-class classifier components in the core subspace, and updates only the residual block through recursive least squares with an optional residual random-projection expansion. This yields a simple closed-form update with a provable invariance guarantee for the core contribution of old logits. Across CIFAR-100, CUB-200, ImageNet-R, and ImageNet-A under a frozen ViT-B/16 protocol, SPARCL closes most of the gap from classical analytic learners to strong representation matchers, while remaining complementary to sparse feature-decorrelation approaches such as Fly-CL. --- ### Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Haonan Jia, Shichao Dong, Zenghui Sun, Jiawen Zheng, Ziqi Miao, Gege Shi, Qiuyu Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21305v1 Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant gains in image captioning, yet it is still limited in encouraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to explore novel reasoning strategies. This limitation leads to a performance gap between RL and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this paper, we argue that multi-modal retrieval can serve as an effective reasoning signal for caption refinement. Based on this insight, we present the Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning (Re$^3$Cap), a retrieval-guided reasoning strategy that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Instantiated by Caption Refinement Suggester (CRS) and Caption Quality Assessor (CQA), this strategy identifies hallucinations and omissions in image captions, leading to more accurate and detailed descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in image captioning, even compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Especially, Re$^3$Cap outperforms GRPO with an average improvement of 8.64% in relation reasoning on the COCO-LN500 benchmark. --- ### Basin-Preserving Discretizations of Modern Hopfield Retrieval Dynamics: Energy Cells, Dissipation, and the Attention Limit Authors: Francisco R. Villatoro Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: math.NA, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21304v1 The retrieval dynamics of a modern Hopfield network is the gradient flow of a log-sum-exp energy, while the attention update is its exact difference-of-convex minimization step. We study which time discretizations preserve not only energy decay and equilibria but also basins of attraction. We introduce energy cells, connected components of sublevel sets containing one attractor and no other critical point. Our main theorem shows that every finite energy cell below the escape energy is contained simultaneously in the basin of the continuous flow, every relaxed attention map $Ψ_θ=(1-θ)\,\mathrm{id}+θ\,\mathrm{attention}$ for $0<θ<2$, and implicit Euler throughout its uniqueness regime. A parameter-uniform unit-curvature majorant yields unconditional dissipation and a monotone interpolation of each discrete step. We also derive explicit local contraction bounds near well-separated patterns, with a certified optimal slight overrelaxation; characterize proximal tunneling and overshoot beyond the preservation regimes; compare first-order error constants; establish an order barrier for scalar reparametrizations of the relaxed family; construct a second-order scalar-auxiliary-variable scheme; and extend cell preservation to damped difference-of-convex iterations in Bregman geometry, including a certified overrelaxed window under bounded asymmetry. Nine numerical campaigns test the bounds and failure mechanisms. In two-dimensional basin experiments, all observed disagreements between continuous and discrete retrieval occur above the attractor-specific numerically inferred escape level. --- ### When Adaptation Hurts: Connecting Representational Drift to OOD Failures in MedSAM Fine-Tuning Authors: Marko Haralović, Sounic Akkaraju, Carlo Baretta, Vasil Zapryanov, Alexia Briassouli Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21300v2 Foundation models for medical image segmentation, like prompt-based MedSAM, generalize well across domains and modalities, often in zero or few-shot setups. However, their performance depends on the quality of prompts and the adaptation of the models to custom datasets. This work systematically examines how MedSAM generalizes across diverse medical imaging benchmarks, with six adaptation strategies: full-model and encoder-only LoRA, shallow and deep visual prompt tuning (VPT), and decoder-only and full fine-tuning. Models are trained on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration Challenge (ISIC 2018) dataset and evaluated under clean and increasingly noisy prompts on IN and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets: close-OOD PH2 (dermoscopy), far-OOD BUSI (Breast Ultrasound Images Dataset) and CBIS-DDSM (Curated Breast Imaging Subset of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography). We show that adaptation improves performance on IN and close-OOD data but often reduces performance on far-OOD data. Full fine-tuning provides the best tradeoff, while encoder-only LoRA is the strongest parameter-efficient alternative, outperforming standard LoRA and VPT under far-OOD shifts. Using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), we show that far-OOD degradation is strongly associated with drift in decoder representations, whereas encoder similarity alone does not explain robustness. This suggests encoder-only LoRA provides stronger robustness than standard LoRA by adapting the encoder to distribution shift in visual features, while preserving the decoder pathway. We further show that random 0-100 pixel jitter on prompts produces more robust and better performing models. We thus conclude that robust MedSAM adaptation requires the combined consideration of prompt noise exposure, domain shift, and representation preservation. We release our code: https://github.com/ImSounic/medsam-vpt --- ### When Adaptation Hurts: Connecting Representational Drift to OOD Failures in MedSAM Fine-Tuning Authors: Marko Haralović, Sounic Akkaraju, Carlo Baretta, Vasil Zapryanov, Alexia Briassouli Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21300v1 Foundation models for medical image segmentation, like prompt-based MedSAM, generalize well across domains and modalities, often in zero or few-shot setups. However, their performance depends on the quality of prompts and the adaptation of the models to custom datasets. This work systematically examines how MedSAM generalizes across diverse medical imaging benchmarks, with six adaptation strategies: full-model and encoder-only LoRA, shallow and deep visual prompt tuning (VPT), and decoder-only and full fine-tuning. Models are trained on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration Challenge (ISIC 2018) dataset and evaluated under clean and increasingly noisy prompts on IN and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets: close-OOD PH2 (dermoscopy), far-OOD BUSI (Breast Ultrasound Images Dataset) and CBIS-DDSM (Curated Breast Imaging Subset of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography). We show that adaptation improves performance on IN and close-OOD data but often reduces performance on far-OOD data. Full fine-tuning provides the best tradeoff, while encoder-only LoRA is the strongest parameter-efficient alternative, outperforming standard LoRA and VPT under far-OOD shifts. Using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), we show that far-OOD degradation is strongly associated with drift in decoder representations, whereas encoder similarity alone does not explain robustness. This suggests encoder-only LoRA provides stronger robustness than standard LoRA by adapting the encoder to distribution shift in visual features, while preserving the decoder pathway. We further show that random 0-100 pixel jitter on prompts produces more robust and better performing models. We thus conclude that robust MedSAM adaptation requires the combined consideration of prompt noise exposure, domain shift, and representation preservation. We release our code: https://github.com/ImSounic/medsam-vpt --- ### AUSO: Action-Level Unified Skill Optimization from Internalization to Utilization Authors: Huizu Lin, Chengkai Huang, Tianqi Gao, Tao Huang, Daijiao Liu, Tongxin Li, Xiaoyan Sun, Lina Yao Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21292v1 Skills play different roles as an agent's policy evolves: they should first provide learnable knowledge, then support capability formation, and finally be invoked only when they improve individual decisions. Existing methods rarely model this lifecycle. They either keep skills outside the model, fully internalize them, or select among internalization and utilization objectives through noisy task-level success rates. Such designs fragment training and assign uniform importance to actions within the same trajectory, even though skill guidance may help some decisions while distracting others. To solve these problems, we introduce AUSO (Action-level Unified Skill Optimization), which unifies skill learning and skill use through a progressive, action-aware optimization process. At the beginning of training, AUSO jointly learns from teacher guidance and environmental outcomes, enabling the policy to acquire foundational skills without losing task-oriented feedback. It subsequently emphasizes outcome-based policy optimization to consolidate autonomous problem-solving ability. As the policy matures, AUSO evaluates each sampled action under both skill-conditioned and skill-free contexts. The resulting action-level information signal is coupled with the trajectory outcome advantage, allowing beneficial skill-sensitive actions to receive stronger updates and harmful ones to be suppressed. Therefore, skills gradually transition from an external source of supervision into decision knowledge whose utilization is adapted to its action-level benefit, while reinforcement learning remains the shared backbone across all stages. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA show that AUSO consistently improves agent performance and out-of-distribution generalization over competitive baselines. --- ### VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation Authors: Congsheng Xu, Qiaochu Yang, Fangyuan Shi, Yifan Han, Baijun Chen, Yiming Wang, Haonan Zhao, Zhe Liu, Yao Mu, Daolin Ma, Xiaokang Yang, Hesheng Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21290v2 We propose VT-MUSE, a Multimodal Unified SEquential representation learning framework for visuotactilemanipulation. Existing approaches often encode visual and tactile observations independently before fusion, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Moreover, most methods focus on observations at the current time step and overlook the temporal evolution of contact. VT-MUSE addresses both limitations through a two-stage representation learning framework. In Stage I, modality specific encoders are jointly adapted via cross-modal temporal alignment and masked-view consistency. In Stage II, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences together with full tactile histories. Auxiliary decoders reconstruct the masked recent visual observations and predict tactile depth changes, encouraging the latent representation to retain both global visual context and local contact dynamics. The learned representation is subsequently integrated into a lightweight Transformer policy through gated cross-attention. On the simulation benchmark, VT-MUSE outperforms the strongest baseline evaluated on all tasks by 11 percentage points and also achieves substantial improvements in real-world experiments. --- ### VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation Authors: Congsheng Xu, Qiaochu Yang, Fangyuan Shi, Yifan Han, Baijun Chen, Yiming Wang, Haonan Zhao, Daolin Ma, Xiaokang Yang, Hesheng Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21290v1 We propose VT-MUSE, a Multimodal Unified SEquential representation learning framework for visuotactilemanipulation. Existing approaches often encode visual and tactile observations independently before fusion, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Moreover, most methods focus on observations at the current time step and overlook the temporal evolution of contact. VT-MUSE addresses both limitations through a two-stage representation learning framework. In Stage I, modality specific encoders are jointly adapted via cross-modal temporal alignment and masked-view consistency. In Stage II, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences together with full tactile histories. Auxiliary decoders reconstruct the masked recent visual observations and predict tactile depth changes, encouraging the latent representation to retain both global visual context and local contact dynamics. The learned representation is subsequently integrated into a lightweight Transformer policy through gated cross-attention. On the simulation benchmark, VT-MUSE outperforms the strongest baseline evaluated on all tasks by 11 percentage points and also achieves substantial improvements in real-world experiments. --- ### Difficulty-Calibrated Interpolation Paths for Conditional Flow Matching Authors: Airin Akter Tania, Md Raihan Khan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21286v1 Conditional Flow Matching trains generative models by regressing a network onto the velocity of a prescribed noise-to-data interpolation path. The interpolation schedule that shapes this path is known to affect convergence and sample quality, yet it is invariably fixed in advance, independent of both the data and the model. We show that the regression difficulty of Conditional Flow Matching varies systematically along the path, and we propose Difficulty-Calibrated Flow Matching, which derives the schedule from the model itself: a short pilot run with the linear path records the per-time loss, and the schedule is set to the quantile function of this difficulty profile, so the trajectory lingers where the velocity is hardest to learn. The method has a single hyperparameter, leaves the training objective and its gradient equivalence intact, composes with classifier-free guidance, and adds about two percent training overhead. In controlled experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST with an identical compact U-Net, the calibrated path attains the best FID on CIFAR-10 at full sampling budget and clearly outperforms all fixed schedules in the large-batch, few-update regime, precisely the setting where compute is scarcest. --- ### WildFin: An In-the-Wild Dataset for Fish Behavioral Recognition Authors: Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin, Ziang Liu, Max Whitton, Madelyn Hair, Liam Gutierrez, Haozheng Yu, Kristin Branson, Vivek Jayaraman, Michael A. Gil, Andrew M. Hein et al. Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21281v2 Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging this data is the high cost of expert annotation. While computer vision offers a potential solution, current models frequently fail when deployed in complex marine environments. To characterize these failures, we introduce WildFin, a novel benchmark for fish behavior recognition collected and annotated by ecologists. WildFin spans two critical real-world paradigms: stationary cameras monitoring groups of fish and dynamic divers following individual subjects. The dataset represents a massive curation effort, involving 1,350 hours of fieldwork and 600 hours of expert annotation to produce 9 hours of behavioral data with over 2 million frame-by-frame labels. We benchmark modern vision foundation models and quantify tradeoffs between static and spatiotemporal architectures, revealing the substantial gap that remains between current model capabilities and the demands of real-world underwater behavioral analysis. Project website: https://team-wildfin.github.io/. --- ### WildFin: An In-the-Wild Dataset for Fish Behavioral Recognition Authors: Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin, Ziang Liu, Max Whitton, Madelyn Hair, Liam Gutierrez, Haozheng Yu, Kristin Branson, Vivek Jayaraman, Michael A. Gil, Andrew M. Hein et al. Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21281v1 Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging this data is the high cost of expert annotation. While computer vision offers a potential solution, current models frequently fail when deployed in complex marine environments. To characterize these failures, we introduce WildFin, a novel benchmark for fish behavior recognition collected and annotated by ecologists.WildFin spans two critical real-world paradigms: stationary cameras monitoring groups of fish and dynamic divers following individual subjects. The dataset represents a massive curation effort, involving 1,350 hours of fieldwork and 600 hours of expert annotation to produce 9 hours of behavioral data with over 2 million frame-by-frame labels. We benchmark modern vision foundation models and quantify tradeoffs between static and spatiotemporal architectures, revealing the substantial gap that remains between current model capabilities and the demands of real-world underwater behavioral analysis. Project website: https://team-wildfin.github.io/. --- ### CLEAR: Continuous Latent Adapter Routing for Utility-Preserving LLM Safety Alignment Authors: Chengxiao Wang, Enyi Jiang, Xiaojing Liao, Sanmi Koyejo Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21278v1 Improving the safety of large language models (LLMs) often comes at the expense of utility, as globally applied safety tuning may affect model responses to both harmful and benign inputs. We propose \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{L}at\textbf{E}nt \textbf{A}dapter \textbf{R}outing (CLEAR), a conditional safety adaptation framework that uses a lightweight hidden-state gate to continuously control the activation strength of a safety low-rank adapter. CLEAR aims to reduce harmful completions while avoiding unnecessary changes to the frozen backbone that could degrade performance on benign prompts. Experiments on widely used safety and utility benchmarks show that CLEAR improves robustness on HarmBench while reducing the utility degradation observed with globally applied safety tuning such as SFT or standard low-rank adaptation (LoRA). On Llama-3-8B-Instruct, CLEAR reduces HarmBench ASR from 32.3\% to 0.5\%, while retaining most of the base model's utility and achieving up to 7.1 percentage points higher GSM8K accuracy than globally applied SFT or LoRA. These results suggest that CLEAR is a promising mechanism for improving the safety--utility trade-off in LLM alignment. --- ### ConceptTS: LLM-Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting Authors: Yichen Jiang, Yueqiao Chen, Dongyu Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21277v1 State-of-the-art multivariate time-series forecasters can model complex temporal and cross-variable dependencies, yet their opaque representations provide limited insight into why a particular forecast is produced. This lack of transparency restricts their use in settings where practitioners must understand and assess the factors underlying a prediction. We introduce ConceptTS, an interpretable forecasting framework that organizes its predictions around named, human-readable concepts. ConceptTS uses a large language model to propose task-relevant concepts and generate executable labeling rules, translating the language model's domain knowledge into direct supervision without costly manual concept annotation. The proposed concepts are organized into three complementary bottlenecks that describe the historical context, local forecast intervals, and the full forecast horizon. A shared decoder combines representations derived from their predicted activations to construct the forecast, making the model's decision process explicit and supporting direct concept-level interventions. Experiments on the Beijing Multi-Site Air Quality dataset show that ConceptTS achieves accuracy competitive with strong black-box baselines while producing semantically meaningful concept activations. --- ### The Coastline as a Structural Constraint: Harnessing Scene Geometry for Autonomous Surface Vessel Localization Authors: Derek R. Benham, Joshua G. Mangelson Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21276v1 Coastal environments contain rich, largely unexploited geometric structure capable of providing globally referenced localization cues. In this work, we present two complementary localization frameworks that exploit shoreline and water-surface geometry for GPS-denied autonomous surface vessel localization. The first framework leverages LiDAR observations of the water surface to estimate roll, pitch, and heave (vertical motion), while recovering global position and heading through direct registration of shoreline observations against a satellite-derived coastline map. The second framework relies solely on passive imagery to detect the shoreline and horizon through semantic segmentation. Using the proposed coastal scene geometry, shoreline distance is inferred from monocular imagery. Shoreline observations are accumulated into short-duration local submaps, registered against the same satellite-derived coastline map, and fused within a hierarchical factor graph. Evaluated across three real-world coastal datasets, the LiDAR pipeline consistently improves trajectory accuracy over standard baselines, while the monocular architecture maintains bounded long-term drift. In addition, we establish that modern zero-shot foundation models can reliably extract shoreline observations across diverse coastal environments. Together, these results demonstrate that coastal geometry provides a powerful and dependable source of globally referenced information for GPS-denied maritime localization. --- ### Memory Augmentation Unlocks Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Authors: Simeng Zhang, Yilong Chen, Wenyuan Zhang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yao Chen, Junyuan Shang, Tingwen Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21265v2 Large language models often rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks, but verbose reasoning traces introduce substantial inference overhead. CoT compression shortens generation, yet aggressive compression may disrupt logical coherence and degrade performance. We formalize this trade-off as the Context-Generation Substitution Law, where explicit reasoning context substitutes for part of decode-time generation. Based on this principle, we propose Memory-Augmented Compression, a training-free framework that constructs reusable reasoning memories from historical traces and retrieves them as prefill-side scaffolds. Rather than using raw demonstrations, these memories summarize reusable reasoning patterns, key constraints, and critical operations to compensate for information lost during compression. Experiments show that Memory consistently improves prompt-based Chain-of-Draft (CoD) compression across mathematical reasoning, complex reasoning, and science question answering tasks, yielding accuracy gains of 21.4, 28.0, 29.5, and 6.61 points over CoD on GSM8K, MATH, BBH, and MMLU-Sci, while achieving a 1.14-1.49x latency speedup latency speedup over standard CoT. Memory is also compatible with token-level, reasoning-trace-level, and inference-state compression mechanisms. --- ### Memory Augmentation Unlocks Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Authors: Simeng Zhang, Yilong Chen, Wenyuan Zhang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yao Chen, Junyuan Shang, Tingwen Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21265v1 Large language models often rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks, but verbose reasoning traces introduce substantial inference overhead. CoT compression shortens generation, yet aggressive compression may disrupt logical coherence and degrade performance. We formalize this trade-off as the \textit{Context-Generation Substitution Law}, where explicit reasoning context substitutes for part of decode-time generation. Based on this principle, we propose \textit{Memory-Augmented Compression}, a training-free framework that constructs reusable reasoning memories from historical traces and retrieves them as prefill-side scaffolds. Rather than using raw demonstrations, these memories summarize reusable reasoning patterns, key constraints, and critical operations to compensate for information lost during compression. Experiments show that Memory consistently improves prompt-based Chain-of-Draft (CoD) compression across mathematical reasoning, complex reasoning, and science question answering tasks, yielding accuracy gains of 21.4, 28.0, 29.5, and 6.61 points over CoD on GSM8K, MATH, BBH, and MMLU-Sci, while achieving a 1.14--1.49$\times$ latency speedup over standard CoT. Memory is also compatible with token-level, reasoning-trace-level, and inference-state compression mechanisms. Further analyzes show that the gains come from relevant reasoning memories rather than simply increasing context length. --- ### The Exceedance Design Effect: Effective Sample Size for Thresholds under Clustering Authors: Adam Noonan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21262v1 Many machine-learning systems set a threshold at a quantile of a calibration set: conformal predictors that promise 90% coverage by drawing their cutoff at the calibration set's 90th percentile, abstention gates that decline to answer when a model's score falls below the calibration set's tenth percentile, safety filters that block any output scoring above the 99th percentile of a reference set. All of them promise that the threshold will hold at the stated rate on new data. The promise assumes the calibration examples are independent, and in modern pipelines they usually are not: they share a prompt, a document, a reasoning trace. Survey statistics has known how to discount correlated data since 1965, by counting how many independent observations a sample is worth, but only for averages. We show that a threshold needs a different count. The count depends on how often clustered scores land on the same side of the threshold, and that changes with where the threshold is set. How similar the scores are as numbers does not enter. We prove a closed-form law for the resulting effective sample size and for the spread of the coverage a deployed system actually sees. Three consequences follow. The correction now used in the conformal literature is the wrong quantity, and can miss in either direction. A dataset has no single effective sample size. It has one for each level the threshold is set at. And the damage is invisible in coverage averaged over many runs, and fully felt by whoever deploys once. On a released calibration set of 25,028 examples, we measure the reliability of about 1,300. --- ### On the Transferability of Agricultural Weed Detection Under Cross-Field Distribution Shift Authors: Nikhilesh Prabhakar, Pranuthi Tenali, Wilfredo Abudeye Fernandez, Shekhar Borah, Athresh Karanam, Erik Blasch, Prabha Sundaravadivel, Sriraam Natarajan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21254v1 Accurate agricultural weed detection in real-world field conditions is essential for precision agriculture, enabling targeted intervention and reducing yield loss. Recent work has reported strong detection performance from UAV-based imagery across a range of crops, yet existing approaches evaluate within a single crop and field, leaving practitioners with little evidence that a model trained on one crop will generalize to a new field or crop type. In this work, we characterize where cross-dataset weed-localization performance degrades and which modeling choices recover it, reducing the need to relabel every new deployment field. We introduce a newly collected and annotated UAV image dataset for agricultural weed detection in cotton fields and use it alongside an existing soybean dataset collected under a similar protocol. Using these datasets, we evaluate the performance of several strategies for transferring a detector trained on one crop to another, comparing unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) against pretraining on a domain-adjacent source dataset followed by few-shot fine-tuning on the target dataset. Our analysis spans target-domain label budgets from zero to the full target dataset, characterizing the trade-off between adaptation strategy and annotation effort. We find that few-shot fine-tuning with as few as 25 labeled target examples outperforms unsupervised DAOD in our cross-crop comparison, suggesting that source domain selection combined with modest target supervision is more productive than algorithmic sophistication in adaptation. --- ### EnSI-RAG: Entity-Structure-Indexed Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-Document Question Answering Authors: Xuanyu Meng, Jiashuo Sun, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Jiawei Han Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.DB, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21252v1 Question answering (QA) over long, connected documents remains challenging because relevant evidence may span multiple entities and their relationships. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods typically index documents as raw chunks and retrieve them through embedding similarity. Their performance degrades when chunk boundaries separate entities from supporting evidence or when a question requires multi-hop reasoning across the corpus. We propose EnSI-RAG (Entity-Structure-Indexed Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a framework that constructs a query-independent, entity-centered index. Each record (e, t, k, v) represents an entity e, its type t, a semantic category k in {property, relation, aspect}, and a value v, while retaining links to the original source passages. At query time, these records serve as retrieval handles, and an LLM synthesizes the retrieved passages into the final answer. This design separates evidence localization from answer synthesis while preserving traceable source evidence. Across Loong and Oolong, EnSI-RAG achieves an average accuracy of 78.24. Relative to the published baseline scores used as references, this is 6.62 points higher, suggesting its effectiveness across these settings. The code is available at https://github.com/RamonMeng/EnSI-RAG. --- ### TRACE-C: Rank-Calibrated Relational Anomaly Detection for Multi-Stream Operational Telemetry Authors: Matthew Faucher Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21251v1 Operational telemetry can be jointly anomalous while every individual stream stays inside its familiar range. TRACE-C is an auditable strictly-prior rank-calibrated detector for aligned multi-stream telemetry: same-regime rolling median/MAD residuals feed three window channels -- a maximum normalized local sum, a Gaussian copula-form dependence contrast on robust-z residuals, and a worst standardized AR(1) innovation -- whose channel ranks are Fisher-aggregated and ranked against earlier aggregates. We evaluate six Great Britain grid streams with a January-April 2019 fit, July-December 2019 development evidence, and a 2020 hold-out frozen before inspection. TRACE-C ranks Storm Atiyah first among 2019 test windows, but a disclosed channel ablation attributes that rank to the local channel, not the copula-form channel: copula-only ranks Atiyah 59th. The short 9 August frequency event is ranked far lower by the fused detector (143) than by the temporal channel alone (40), and reconstruction baselines rank it first. In 2020 no window is selected, which is consistent with record-rule saturation rather than an uneventful year; the highest-ranked frozen window was later interpreted as Storm Ellen. Three interpretive limits carry throughout. The resulting p-values are selection quantities, not event probabilities. The copula-form channel is not a literal copula density: the method applies no probability-integral or normal-score transform. Empirical rank counts are diagnostics, not coverage or false-discovery proofs. Every table and figure in this paper is generated from committed machine-readable reports. --- ### Benchmarking Patent Drafting from Inventor-Style Disclosures Authors: Lekang Jiang, Wenjun Sun, Stephan Goetz Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21249v1 While recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results on individual patent drafting tasks, they fundamentally fail to investigate the core challenge of real-world patent drafting: generating a complete and legally coherent patent application directly from early-stage invention materials. Prior work predominantly assumes later-stage, highly structured, or already legalistic inputs. However, real patenting workflows begin with informal, de-legalized disclosures authored by inventors. To bridge the gap, we introduce Dis2Pat, a disclosure-to-patent dataset that reflects realistic patenting workflows by requiring the generation of complete patent applications directly from inventor-style, de-legalized disclosures. Given the inherent difficulty of long-form, legally constrained patent drafting and the strong privacy requirements, we further propose a strong baseline named Patent-MAF. It is a multi-agent framework for locally deployable patent drafting. Benchmark results reveal that current LLMs exhibit limitations in patent drafting, while Patent-MAF provides a strong baseline that consistently outperforms evaluated open-source models and remains competitive with large closed-source models. --- ### Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Token Compression in Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Zhuoyuan Li, Rui Zhao, Jin Wang, Hanwei Zhu, Cong Zhang, Giuseppe Valenzise, Weisi Lin, Kin-Man Lam Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21247v2 Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-cache reuse widely adopted in vision-language models and recently explored for embodied agents. In embodied agents, tokens not only support perception and semantic understanding but also directly affect latency-sensitive closed-loop robot action prediction. Existing schemes typically guide compression using redundancy or importance cues, such as visual similarity, attention scores, and saliency. However, these cues only indirectly measure the key factor for safe compression: how much a token can change before causing an unacceptable deviation in downstream actions. This receiver-dependent tolerance is closely related to the principle of just noticeable difference (JND). Classical JND characterizes signal tolerance in the human visual system, while machine-oriented JND extends this concept to downstream machine responses. Building on this progression, we introduce Action-JND, which extends JND modeling to embodied perception by defining noticeability through the language-conditioned action response of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy in closed-loop control. A token change is considered admissible only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin. To realize this concept, we develop a lightweight token-wise JND estimator in deep visual-feature space to predict the maximum tolerable perturbation while preserving policy responses. The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms, including stale-KV reuse and token pruning, prioritizing action-tolerant tokens for compression. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark with OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT demonstrate that Action-JND consistently improves compression reliability, especially under aggressive compression ratios. --- ### Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Token Compression in Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Zhuoyuan Li, Rui Zhao, Jin Wang, Hanwei Zhu, Cong Zhang, Giuseppe Valenzise, Weisi Lin, Kin-Man Lam Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21247v1 Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-cache reuse widely adopted in vision-language models and recently explored for embodied agents. In embodied agents, tokens not only support perception and semantic understanding but also directly affect latency-sensitive closed-loop robot action prediction. Existing schemes typically guide compression using redundancy or importance cues, such as visual similarity, attention scores, and saliency. However, these cues only indirectly measure the key factor for safe compression: how much a token can change before causing an unacceptable deviation in downstream actions. This receiver-dependent tolerance is closely related to the principle of just noticeable difference (JND). Classical JND characterizes signal tolerance in the human visual system, while machine-oriented JND extends this concept to downstream machine responses. Building on this progression, we introduce Action-JND, which extends JND modeling to embodied perception by defining noticeability through the language-conditioned action response of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy in closed-loop control. A token change is considered admissible only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin. To realize this concept, we develop a lightweight token-wise JND estimator in deep visual-feature space to predict the maximum tolerable perturbation while preserving policy responses. The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms, including stale-KV reuse and token pruning, prioritizing action-tolerant tokens for compression. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark with OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT demonstrate that Action-JND consistently improves compression reliability, especially under aggressive compression ratios. --- ### A VLM Answer Is Not an Anomaly Score: Rank Compression Across Image and Video Anomaly Detection Authors: Inpyo Song, Jangwon Lee Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21244v3 Anomaly detection aims to identify observations that deviate from normal patterns. Recent work has increasingly used pretrained vision--language models (VLMs) for training-free image and video anomaly detection without task-specific retraining. Anomaly detection is commonly evaluated by how well anomaly scores rank anomalous images or video frames above normal ones. Generative VLMs, however, assign probabilities to possible answers and then decode a single answer. This decoding step may discard ordering information. We call this loss decoded-answer rank compression. To isolate this effect, we compare two ways of scoring the same VLM output: one uses only the decoded answer, while the other computes a probability-weighted score over all possible answers. Probability-weighted scoring consistently outperforms decoded-answer scoring across image and video anomaly detection benchmarks, using different VLMs and answer scales. The mean gains range from 7.66 to 19.95 points on the primary metrics. Most of this gap comes from decoded-answer ties. Breaking decoded-answer ties with answer probabilities recovers at least 95% of the average performance gap on every benchmark. We further investigate how these ties affect evaluation. We find that evaluating tied scores one input at a time makes the reported AUROC depend on input order, and that linear PR interpolation can inflate reported performance. These results reveal that both how VLM outputs are scored and how discrete anomaly scores are evaluated affect reported anomaly-detection performance. --- ### A VLM Answer Is Not an Anomaly Score: Rank Compression in Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection Authors: Inpyo Song, Jangwon Lee Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21244v1 Vision-language models enable training-free video anomaly detection by answering questions about video segments. VAD benchmarks, however, require a scalar anomaly score for each segment and evaluate the resulting ranking using the AUROC or AP. A VLM-based detector should therefore define an answer interface: the answer scale specifies the admissible answers, and the readout rule maps the model's output distribution to a score. Because this interface can change the evaluated ranking, it is part of the detector rather than a formatting detail. The generated readout uses only the most likely answer, whereas the probability readout uses the full distribution over admissible answers. Across four 7-8B VLMs, the probability readout outperforms the generated readout for every tested combination of answer scale, benchmark, and metric, with average gains ranging from 5 to 13 points across the four benchmark-metric pairs. The gap arises because the generated readout keeps only one answer value per segment, so segment with different answer distributions can receive the same score and lose their relative order. We call this loss of relative order generated-answer rank compression. Even when the answer scale allows 91 answers, the generated readout produces only 4-18 distinct scores, whereas the probability readout retains substantially finer score resolution. The advantage persists under every decoding strategy, prompt wording, and joint scoring-explanation prompt we test. The answer interface is therefore a consequential component of VLM-based VAD and should be explicitly specified and evaluated. --- ### Adapting Knowledge Graphs for Behavior Denoising in Sequential Recommendation Authors: Zichun Jin, Zihan Zhou, Yinan Liu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21243v1 Sequential recommendation predicts the next item from a user's interaction history, but not every interaction is equally informative. Real logs combine persistent preferences with temporary needs, exploration, and incidental behavior, so some interactions can distort history representations or provide unreliable supervision. Existing denoising methods judge such interactions mainly from co-occurrence, order, or model predictions, without explicit evidence from relations between items. Knowledge graphs (KGs) offer this evidence, but item popularity, graph degree, uneven coverage, and widely shared entities can inflate connectivity and bias reliability estimates. Here we present AdaptedKG, which derives calibrated KG evidence for each training example without adding graph representations to the recommendation model. It first compares the observed context with structurally matched alternatives to identify relational paths that are unusually prominent and uses them to build a local KG view. It then compares each interaction with structurally matched reference items to calibrate its support within that view. The resulting retention coefficients gate historical representations and reweight target losses. All sample-specific scores are computed offline using training interactions and a fixed KG, so the backbone remains unchanged and no KG access is required at inference. Experiments show gains with a standard sequential recommender and multiple behavior-denoising sequential recommenders. --- ### Affective Context Amplifies Sycophancy in LLM Responses Authors: Jiayi Li, Sanjana Menon, Brett Frischmann, Shomir Wilson, Sarah Rajtmajer Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21242v1 As conversational companions, large language models (LLMs) often have access to users' emotional states. We study how this affective context modulates LLM sycophancy in subjective, evaluative interactions, where users share actions or opinions that invite feedback. Drawing on ingratiation theory, we measure sycophancy as the divergence between a model's independent evaluation and its user-facing response, elicited by presenting the same content as either a third-party account or the user's own disclosure. Across seven LLMs and two Reddit datasets (r/AmItheAsshole and r/TrueUnpopularOpinion), we find that this divergence is systematic and strongly one-directional. User-facing responses consistently soften or withhold negative or oppositional judgments. Affective context further amplifies this divergence with negative states, particularly loneliness and distress, producing the largest effects. These findings suggest that affective context functions as a vulnerability signal that suppresses critical feedback when users may need it most, often through evasive sycophancy, in which models retreat toward non-committal responses rather than outright agreement. --- ### RARE: Decoupling Representation Steering from Expert Routing in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models Authors: Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21236v1 Representation engineering offers a lightweight means of controlling language-model behavior by modifying intermediate hidden states, but its direct application to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models introduces a structural mismatch. We first verify this failure mode through a series of empirical studies and find that preserving clean routing substantially recovers steering performance and that routing is more sensitive to semantic content than to behavioral changes under controlled content. Motivated by these findings, we introduce RARE, a router-agnostic representation engineering framework for MoE language models. RARE projects arbitrary behavioral perturbations onto the null space of the router matrix, thereby removing router-visible components, and further corrects routing drift propagated to selected downstream layers. To decide the best perturbation estimator in this framework, we evaluate five estimators on six heterogeneous open-weight MoE models across three steering scenarios: harmfulness, truthfulness, and factual editing. On harmfulness steering, RARE reaches an average attack success rate of 53.3% while retaining 67.8% MMLU accuracy, yielding a stronger aggregate effectiveness--utility trade-off than baselines. It further improves average TruthfulQA MC1 accuracy from 41.0% to 58.6% and CounterFact efficacy from 16.8% to 96.3%. These results support routing consistency as an important architectural consideration for adapting representation engineering to MoE models. --- ### Advanced Linear Algebra with Applications - Part I (Numerical linear algebra for PDEs, machine learning, and data assimilation) Authors: Victorita Dolean, Jemima Tabeart Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21234v1 These lecture notes form the first part of a master's-level course on advanced numerical linear algebra. Their aim is not only to present the classical algorithms, but to show why the subject has become considerably more central than it was a generation ago. Numerical linear algebra grew up alongside the numerical solution of partial differential equations, and for a long time that is where its large sparse systems came from. Ranking the nodes of a network, assimilating observations into a weather forecast, and fitting a model to a large noisy data set now lead to problems of the same kind: too large to factorise, structured, and accessible only through matrix-vector products. Strikingly few ideas are needed for all of them. Each chapter therefore develops a standard topic and then puts it to work outside its original setting. We treat norms, factorisations, conditioning and floating-point arithmetic; sparse matrices arising from finite differences, from graphs and from machine learning; stationary iterations and the smoothing property; the conjugate gradient and Lanczos methods, with spectral clustering and regularisation by early stopping; Arnoldi and GMRES, with PageRank and large least squares; and finally preconditioning, Schwarz domain decomposition and multigrid. We assume a first course in linear algebra. Every section closes with a summary of what should be retained and every chapter with exercises, several drawn from past examinations. Accompanying Python code reproduces the numerical illustrations. --- ### Fine-Grain GPU Parallelization of the Generalized Partition Crossover for Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problems Authors: Swetha Varadarajan, Darrell Whitley Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21233v1 The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most extensively studied NP-hard optimization problems. Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based solvers, such as the Edge Assembly Crossover (EAX), achieve state-of-the-art performance on many benchmark instances. However, the scalability of these approaches in massively parallel architectures remains limited because crossover operations involve irregular memory access patterns, graph traversals, and sequential dependencies. Existing GPU-based TSP solvers primarily exploit population-level parallelism and are limited to relatively small problem sizes. This work presents a fine-grain GPU implementation of the partition phase of the Generalized Partition Crossover (GPX) operator for large-scale TSP instances. The proposed approach reformulates GPX partitioning as a graph-parallel problem using coalesced memory layouts, ghost-node transformations, and connected-component analysis. The im- plementation parallelizes the union of parent tours, the splitting of degree- four vertices, the deletion of common edges, and the identification of recombining components using CUDA. Experimental results on instances ranging from 10,000 to 2 million cities demonstrate substantial acceleration over a naive sequential CPU imple- mentation. The proposed GPU partitioning achieves speedups between 48x and 625x while significantly reducing memory overhead. The re- sults demonstrate that operator-level parallelism can substantially im- prove the scalability of GA-based TSP solvers on modern many-core architectures. --- ### Utility Under Attack: Agent Memory Poisoning and the Limits of Content Screening and Provenance Ranking Authors: Arulnidhi Karunanidhi Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21230v1 Persistent memory makes false information durable: once a false statement is stored, it can be retrieved into future sessions that match it. We measure the cost of this failure mode using plainly worded false assertions generated in a single pass, with no instruction, trigger, or retriever optimization. Poisoning 1.2% of a LongMemEval corpus reduces accuracy from 0.850 to 0.300. A four-stage write-time screening pipeline that reaches 0.832 recall on indirect prompt injection while flagging 1.5% of trigger-word-laden benign text rejects 0 of 360 poisoned memories. We argue this exposes a boundary of content-only screening: distinguishing a false assertion from a true one generally requires external grounding beyond the text itself. We then evaluate provenance-weighted retrieval. The shipped weight is statistically indistinguishable from no defense (p=0.80), while a stronger weight recovers utility only by excluding untrusted content. In a mixed-provenance corpus where untrusted content is mostly benign, accuracy rises from 0.3167 to 0.7000; when the answer-bearing evidence itself arrives untrusted, evidence recall falls to zero and accuracy to 0.0417. Under the measured similarity regime, the additive provenance term has no usable setting: a weight strong enough to resist query-shaped poison is also strong enough to suppress legitimate untrusted evidence. We therefore argue for bounded occupancy constraints at retrieval rather than additive provenance penalties, and release the harnesses, corpora, and aggregate run reports. --- ### Beyond Attention Masks: Instruction Anchoring for Efficient In-Context Diffusion Generation Authors: Yangshuai Liu, Zheming Li, Jiaao Li, Kang He, Ziliang Lai, Zhitai Liu, Chengru Song Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21229v3 In-context diffusion transformers concatenate instruction, target, and reference tokens into a single sequence for joint attention. Reference-side computation must therefore be repeated at every denoising step, with the cost growing rapidly as more references are added. Decoupling reference tokens from the target enables exact key-value reuse across denoising steps, but prevents the references from attending to the instruction, degrading instruction following and reference fidelity. This trade-off cannot be resolved through attention-mask design alone. We introduce AnchorCache, a parameter-free token-layout and attention-mask co-design that inserts static text anchors. These anchors condition the reference representations on the instruction during cache construction, after which the resulting reference keys and values can be reused exactly across denoising steps. To recover the quality initially lost through this structural conversion, we apply teacher-forced velocity distillation followed by a short on-policy stage that queries the teacher at student-visited states. To our knowledge, this is the first use of on-policy distillation for architectural recovery in diffusion models. Across benchmarks spanning image, speech, and video generation, AnchorCache matches full-attention quality. Its efficiency gains increase with the reference-context size, reaching a 6.40x speedup in diffusion transformer inference. --- ### Anchoring Instruction Outside Mask: Exact Reference Caching for Efficient In-Context Diffusion Transformers Authors: Yangshuai Liu, Zheming Li, Jiaao Li, Kang He, Ziliang Lai, Zhitai Liu, Chengru Song Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21229v1 Omnimodal generation is central to a wide range of content creation and editing applications. In-context conditioning is essential to this paradigm. It allows diffusion transformers to process text instructions and visual references in a shared attention sequence. However, each reference image introduces thousands of tokens. Computation therefore grows rapidly with the number of references. Existing methods reduce computation through structured sparse attention, which limits interactions between reference and target tokens. This structure also makes the reference K and V independent of the denoising target, allowing them to be computed once and reused across steps. However, it blocks visual references from attending to the text instruction. This substantially degrades instruction following and reference fidelity in multi-reference editing. To resolve this conflict, we jointly redesign the token sequence and attention mask. Our beyond-mask design uses static text anchors to connect the instruction to the reference branch. It preserves exact K and V reuse without adding parameters. However, this direct architectural conversion degrades generation quality. We recover the lost performance through teacher-forced velocity distillation, followed by a short on-policy stage in which the teacher supervises student-visited states. To our knowledge, this is the first use of on-policy distillation for architectural recovery in diffusion models. Across three image-editing benchmarks, our method matches full-attention generation quality. With five reference images, it accelerates the complete 40-step denoising process by 3.92x, while static text anchors introduce negligible runtime overhead; the speedup reaches 5.47x at ten references in our scaling study. --- ### Ontology-supported AI Model and Dataset Management Authors: Jan Novacek, Ali Ahari, Tobias Müller, Sebastian Reiter, Alexander Viehl, Oliver Bringmann Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21224v1 Recently, there has been a great deal of research into improving AI methods and their application. The main focus is on tracking progress, enabling transparent comparisons, and fostering a more profound understanding of AI. In that process, different organizations generate and use plenty of assets that need to be tracked, traced and managed. Moreover, it is important to discover assets relevant for the task at hand. This paper presents research aiming to contribute to answering the question of what is required to exchange and manage AI models and related assets effectively without semantic gaps in an industrial context. We introduce a platform for AI model exchange, which facilitates the usage, exchange, and analysis of AI models and datasets. The platform incorporates an ontology that can foster a more profound common understanding of what is required in these tasks and help tackle the issues mentioned above. Finally, we elucidate the utility of the platform through the illustration of a use case in the context of real-time critical systems. --- ### Event-triggered Implicit Perturbation for Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of Spiking Transformers Authors: Tengteng Lei, Prabodh Katti, Rashi Dutt, Houssem Sifaou, Tan Peng, Osvaldo Simeone, Kai Xu, Bipin Rajendran Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AR, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21223v1 Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization estimates gradients using only forward-pass evaluations, making it suitable for fine-tuning non-differentiable, event-driven spiking neural networks (SNNs). However, its deployment on in-memory computing (IMC) accelerators is constrained by the repeated read-modify-write (RMW) operations arising from explicit weight perturbation and the prohibitive hardware footprint of random number generators (RNGs) for statistically independent per-weight perturbations. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit-perturbation ZO (IPZO) architecture in which perturbation sums computed by an event-triggered perturbation generation unit (PGU) are combined with the weighted sums produced by the IMC array, eliminating perturbation-induced RMW operations while preserving weight-stationary execution of IMC. By exploiting spike sparsity, the PGU generates and accumulates perturbation contributions only for spike-activated weight rows, reducing the required row dimension of the RNG array. An address-driven XOR recombination scheme (PGU-XOR) is further introduced to mitigate the spatial correlations caused by direct RNG reuse (PGU-Reuse). The results show that (1) PGU-XOR matches software RNGs in accuracy on Spikingformer/CIFAR-10 (76.41% vs. 76.53%) and perplexity (PPL) on SpikeGPT/WikiText-2 (54.20 vs. 53.23), whereas PGU-Reuse degrades accuracy by 9.56 percentage points and increases PPL by 11.8; (2) implemented in a TSMC 16-nm CMOS technology, PGU-XOR incurs 40.3%-46.0% area and 15.2%-48.9% energy overhead per matrix-vector multiplication relative to PGU-Reuse, yet its faster convergence reduces the total perturbation energy to 0.51x that of PGU-Reuse at iso-accuracy; (3) IPZO reduces the perturbation energy to 0.46x-0.83x that of conventional explicit weight perturbation for a batch size of B=64 and T=4 time steps, with the advantage growing as BT decreases. --- ### Enhancing LLMs in Predictive Political QA with Semi-Structured Data Authors: Yinan Liu, Zihan Zhou, Zichun Jin, Xinyu Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21218v1 Predictive political question answering (QA), such as predicting how a political actor will vote, goes beyond factual lookup. External political resources offer rich historical evidence, but rarely contain the answer itself. Existing LLM augmentation methods, including actor-profile-based simulation and knowledge graph evidence injection, improve political reasoning but largely treat external resources as knowledge-based evidence, leaving prediction-relevant signals under-modeled. We identify two complementary signals for predictive political QA: actor stances that capture issue-specific preferences, and high-order structure signals that capture indirect dependencies among political actors. We propose PSL, a dual-view framework that converts semi-structured political records into inference-oriented evidence for LLMs. PSL extracts stance signals from question-relevant actor records in a semantic view, and learns structure-aware actor representations from an actor interaction graph in a vector view. Across three real-world datasets and multiple LLMs, PSL consistently outperforms baselines, with ablations confirming the complementary gains of stance and structure signals. --- ### Personalized Privacy Control in LLMs via Attention Head Intervention Authors: Junseok Kim, Nakyeong Yang, Kyomin Jung Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21209v1 The rise of agentic AI enables LLMs to access diverse user data, raising critical privacy concerns. Prior work on contextual privacy studies whether LLMs regulate information disclosure according to context-dependent norms. However, acceptable disclosure boundaries may vary across users even within the same context. To address this limitation, we introduce \textit{personalized privacy}, which incorporates user-specific disclosure preferences into privacy control. We further present P3Bench~(\textbf{P}ersonalized \textbf{P}rivacy \textbf{P}reservation \textbf{Bench}mark), a novel benchmark extending contextual privacy policies with personalized disclosure policies. Experiments show that prompt-based policies fail to reliably enforce personalized privacy policies, with Qwen2.5-7B and Gemma3-4B showing average policy ignorance ratios of 51.25\% and 74.28\%, respectively. Finally, to address this problem, we propose \textsc{Repair}, a robust inference-time attention head intervention method that adjusts disclosure behavior toward policy-consistent responses. Our method significantly improves adherence to user-specific privacy preferences by reducing cases where the model fails to follow the given policy. --- ### Specification Portability Across LLM Development Agents: Cross-Agent Compatibility in Specification-Driven Software Migration Authors: Oleg Grynets, Oleksii Ilchuk, Dariia Zatulna, Vasyl Lyashkevych Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21208v1 This paper investigates cross-agent specification portability using Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration as a controlled software transformation task. The study combines two experimental stages. First, a specification-first migration pipeline was evaluated on 1,006 PL/SQL files, of which 623 were successfully regenerated and 380 generated scripts executed successfully in PostgreSQL 16. Second, cross-agent experiments were conducted on a dataset of 1,802 Oracle scripts with corresponding PostgreSQL implementations using Amazon Kiro, Google Gemini, and GitHub Copilot, with Claude Code and Cursor included in the initial single-agent evaluation. Native and foreign specifications were assessed using Token F1, exact match, SQL syntax validity, AST exact match, AST mean similarity, and immediate runnability. The results show that specification size alone does not predict implementation quality and that cross-agent transfer can produce substantial agent-dependent degradation. The strongest replicated case occurred when Gemini directly consumed a Kiro-origin specification, producing a Token F1 of 0.035, SQL syntax validity of 2.33%, and AST mean similarity of 0.015. Rewriting substantially improved Gemini in the tested configuration, compression did not provide a universal benefit, and retrieval-augmented ingestion was the only common strategy represented on the per-agent Pareto frontiers of both Gemini and Copilot. The findings suggest that specifications in heterogeneous SDD workflows should not automatically be treated as agent-neutral artifacts and motivate explicit consideration of specification portability, agent-specific interpretation, and retrieval-based access in multi-agent software engineering. --- ### Curriculum-Aware Interpolate-then-Refine: Learned Physiological Time-Series Imputation under Realistic Missingness Authors: Yu-Chao Huang, Haochen Zhang, Nicholas Konz, Tianlong Chen Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21207v1 Imputing physiological time series (arterial blood pressure, blood glucose, etc.) is essential for addressing the missingness that pervades clinical data. Yet modern imputation methods perform poorly in this domain: a recent benchmark found that simple linear interpolation outperformed every learned imputer on real-world clinical signals with realistic gaps. We show that this reflects two properties of physiological missingness that generic imputers ignore: gaps may occur when the signal is clinically extreme rather than typical, and gap lengths can easily span orders of magnitude. To this end, we introduce Curriculum-Aware Interpolate-then-Refine (CAIR), a two-stage framework for physiological time-series imputation. Our key motivation is to learn a coarse base curve and then repeatedly correct it toward physiological realism, rather than predict a gap in a single pass. Consequently, CAIR couples a bidirectional-GRU interpolator with a Transformer refiner that corrects its own estimate over three successive passes, trained jointly under a broad, signal-agnostic random-gap curriculum. We evaluate imputers stratified by gap length and missingness mechanism (MCAR, MAR, NMAR) rather than by a single average, and CAIR is the most accurate under every mechanism on continuous glucose monitoring (AI-READI) and arterial pressure in intensive care (MIMIC-III). Its margin over the strongest baseline grows with difficulty, from 9% under MCAR to 19% under value-dependent dropout, where generic learned imputers are weakest. We further show low reconstruction error alone does not recover the burden metrics clinicians act on: interpolants matching CAIR's error fail to preserve those metrics, imputers that recover them are far less accurate, and CAIR alone ranks among the best on both axes. --- ### No PUN Intended: Plausible Unknown Names for Person-Centred LLM Evaluation Authors: Dimitri Staufer, David Hartmann, Ibrahim Baroud Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21206v1 Person names are widely used as prompt variables in LLM evaluations of factuality, privacy leakage, bias and abstention, but when a name's evidential status is uncontrolled, measurements may conflate memorisation, retrieval, name priors and wrong-person attribution. We operationalise an unknown name as one with plausible First-Last form, no indexed full-name evidence, and no ambiguity signals under a documented validation run, and introduce PUN (Plausible Unknown Names), a protocol for constructing and validating such names, combining Wikidata-derived components, web-enabled LLM screening, and controlled search revalidation. We report acceptance rate, reproducibility, ablations, and a 204-participant human study, finding accepted names are more name-like than controls while participants recover person evidence in only 3% of cases. We release 300 names with comparison controls. --- ### Beyond Imitation: Self-Improving Robot Policies via Off-Policy Q-Planning Authors: Varun Giridhar, Anant Khandelwal, Jeremy A. Collins, Ignat Georgiev, Animesh Garg Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21204v1 Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a policy that fails cannot learn from that failure without additional human demonstrations. Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning offers a path to self-improvement but has proven difficult to scale to the multi-billion-parameter models underpinning modern robot policies. We propose Q-Planning, which equips a large visuomotor BC policy with a small off-policy Q-function. Because a Q-function estimates value rather than imitates actions, it can be trained on the same successful demonstrations as the BC policy and later absorb both successful and failed deployment rollouts, an asymmetry BC does not have. We exploit this asymmetry to enable value-guided action selection at inference (a single-step Q-weighted average over BC draws) and online self-improvement that fine-tunes only the Q-function, leaving the BC weights untouched. On LIBERO and bimanual RoboTwin, ten iterations of self-improvement lift every benchmark score we tested (LIBERO-10 93% to 99%, RoboTwin 83.8% to 91.4%) and shorten successful episodes on the near-ceiling suites (LIBERO-Object, LIBERO-Goal). On two contact-rich bimanual real-robot tasks, the same loop (BC frozen, no human intervention) improves purely from its own deployment rollouts: stack-cups 40% to 90% and insert-wallet 25% to 80% in five iterations, whereas SFT on successful rollouts alone stalls at 55% and 30%. Under an identical online budget Q-Planning is the only method, among Best-of-N, filtered SFT, IBRL, DSRL, and DAWR, that improves stably from failures without training an auxiliary actor. ---