# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 83 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #4101–4150 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/83 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/82.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/84.md) ### M2Depth: Unifying Monocular Depth Foundation Priors with Multi-View Stereo Authors: Byeonggwon Lee, Sanggi Lee, Siwoo Lee, Khang Truong Giang, Soohwan Song Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20788v1 Deep learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS) has advanced significantly but often generalizes poorly to unseen scenes, particularly in occluded areas or regions with limited view overlap. To mitigate this, recent approaches integrate Depth Foundation Models (DFMs) into MVS pipelines to provide monocular depth priors. However, existing methods typically rely on a static, one-way fusion scheme, which fails to fully exploit the complementary strengths of both modalities. We propose a novel framework that overcomes this limitation by tightly coupling a DFM with a cascade MVS pipeline through a bidirectional mutual refinement strategy. Our method leverages MVS depth to resolve the scale ambiguity in monocular predictions, while the monocular depth, in turn, enhances the structural completeness and fine-grained detail of the MVS estimate. Furthermore, we introduce a prior-guided cost volume refinement mechanism that effectively integrates multi-view and monocular information via attention-based fusion and discretized depth bins, thereby promoting local geometric consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art MVS approaches on standard benchmarks, producing more complete and generalizable depth maps with sharp boundaries. Furthermore, although not explicitly designed for sparse-view settings, our framework generalizes remarkably well, competing favorably with even dedicated sparse-view methods while maintaining a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off. --- ### Structure for Reading, Prose for Writing: Asymmetric Structural Conditioning in Multi-Agent Document Authoring Authors: Cheng Yu, Nikhil Mathew, Zhengjie Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20786v1 Multi-agent pipelines that author formal documents must both read a requester's forms and write against them. We report a deployed tender-response system, running an open-weights model under sovereignty constraints, and evaluate it against human-written bids the same organisation actually submitted. On a blind comparison where the system had no worked example available, an LLM judge rated its answers at least as good as the human-submitted answer on $40$ of $55$ ground-truth sections, better on $4$, missing on none, and flagged one unsupported claim in total. Classifying every gap the judge identified shows that $68\%$ were content absent from the system's own sources -- knowledge the human author held and the pipeline was never given -- so only $6$ of the $15$ adverse verdicts involve a deficiency the system could have avoided. A divergence from ground truth is more often an information-availability result than a writing-quality one, and evaluations that do not separate the two understate such systems. Against this backdrop we report a conditioning asymmetry. It is well established that rendering documents as structural markup rather than flat prose improves extraction, and we reproduce that on three reading tasks. The benefit does not transfer to conditioning: converting a bid's \emph{instruction} material from prose to nested XML dropped answer quality from $74\%$ to $48\%$ under a paired comparison. We further find that naming a forbidden construction concentrates rather than removes it -- $96\%$ of surviving defects fall in the two forms the prompt explicitly names -- and that coupling a stochastic annotation to a deterministic windowing function moves the extracted requirement count from $68$ to $51$ on a byte-identical file. Structure belongs where the model reads; prose and self-applied tests belong where it writes. --- ### Rethinking Demonstration Unlearning in Imitation Learning for Robotics Authors: Jiazhuo Li, Yu Zhang, Yiming Fei, Kangkang Dong, Xiaojun Zhu, Houde Liu, Jinze Tao Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20784v1 Imitation learning for robotics depends on human demonstrations, some of which people may later ask to remove. Retraining without them is the natural reference, but its cost grows with policy and dataset scale, motivating cheaper operators that edit a trained policy. Metrics inherited from machine unlearning, such as forgetting loss or a single membership attack, do not establish what an edit removed from a policy acting in closed loop. We therefore introduce a retrain-calibrated audit that reads demonstration unlearning along two axes: behavior, whether the edited policy acts like one retrained without the removed demonstrations, and evidence, whether an auditor can still detect it was trained on them. The behavior axis measures action divergence to that retrain at matched states, calibrated by a floor built from independent retrains, so a policy at the floor is as close to a retrain as retrains are to each other. The evidence axis applies a per-demonstration membership attack against a retrain null, reporting both its rank and its absolute member-loss level, since rank alone accepts operators that inflate member losses past the null. A conformal test then combines both axes into one hypothesis of joint retrain consistency, against a fleet of independent retrains large enough to reject at conventional significance. Across five preregistered conditions on three real-robot policy classes and two simulation suites, the axes dissociate in both directions on one checkpoint, as an edit may repair task behavior while leaving evidence unchanged, or reduce evidence while moving behavior away from retraining. On the ACT arm, a redirect edit restores blind-scored robot success to 18 of 20 trials. --- ### Tree-of-Concerns: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Debate for Unstated-Limitation Extraction in Scientific Critique Authors: Sahil Mishra, Niranjan Rajeev, Tanmoy Chakraborty Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20777v2 As scientific literature grows and papers increasingly under-report limitations, multi-agent LLMs offer a promising approach to systematically uncover these hidden failure modes. Here, we introduce Tree-of-Concerns, a multi-agent framework that deploys specialized skeptic personas, each operating through a category-specific analytical lens, as parallel debate trees to extract unstated limitations from scientific papers. Each persona conducts structured, evidence-grounded argumentation, while a Panel Review mechanism re-evaluates each surviving claim from all five perspectives to correct category drift and severity miscalibration. Through retrieval-free, single-paper experiments on ToC-Bench, our benchmark of 414 research papers with 1,905 unstated limitations, sourced from reviewer-reported weaknesses and follow-up citation critiques, we demonstrate that ToC improves precision by 79% and coverage by 11% relative to the strongest baseline, surfacing specific, evidence-grounded concerns that support reviewers in systematic evaluation. --- ### CAS: Conformalized Agentic Search via Adaptive Retrieval and Policy Weighting Authors: Zixi Zhu, Jiayuan Su, Jian Zhang, Yu Lin, Hongwei Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20771v1 Search Agents face a severe reliability crisis during reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. Heuristic Top-K retrieval often causes critical evidence loss or noise inclusion, while over-confidence induced by progressive RL leads to hallucinated answers and redundant searches. To build highly reliable agents, we introduce Conformal Prediction (CP) and propose Conformalized Agentic Search (CAS). This framework establishes reliability guarantees on both the retrieval and training sides: on the retrieval side, an Adaptive Prediction Set (APS), a specific CP realization, translates statistical coverage into dynamic document truncation to construct prediction sets that are adaptive in size; on the training side, Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI), a dynamic CP algorithm, dynamically constructs prediction sets with controllable coverage to quantify answer confidence, which is then used to penalize low-confidence trajectories within the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective, ensuring the model learns only from reliable ones. Experiments across single-hop and multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves reasoning accuracy while drastically reducing redundant tool invocations, establishing a highly reliable and efficient agent paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/S1llyBird/CAS. --- ### MotionPhys: Detecting AI-Generated Videos via Physical Consistency of Optical-Flow Trajectories Authors: Haojin He, Hao Tan, Zichang Tan, Ajian Liu, Jun Wan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20770v1 Modern AI video generation models can produce videos with high visual fidelity and seemingly smooth temporal transitions. However, visual realism does not necessarily imply physical motion consistency. Existing generative models mainly optimize distribution matching in pixel or latent spaces, without explicitly enforcing real-world constraints such as inertia, continuous forces, and trajectory geometry. Our experiments show that AI-generated videos remain visually plausible over short sequences of consecutive frames, yet fail to preserve physical motion consistency throughout a complete object action, resulting in systematic statistical discrepancies in their motion trajectories. Based on this observation, we introduce MotionPhys, a lightweight and interpretable framework that treats sparse motion trajectories as physical evidence rather than relying on appearance artifacts or generator-specific traces. By modeling the geometric evolution of trajectories across multiple temporal scales, MotionPhys reveals subtle motion inconsistencies that are difficult to capture with conventional visual cues and transforms them into a compact representation for efficient detection. Experiments on multiple datasets show that MotionPhys can effectively detect physical inconsistencies in generated videos and generalizes well across different video generators. --- ### Do SpeechLMs Hear Their Own Opinions? Diagnosing and Mitigating Previous-Belief Contamination in Streaming Emotion Understanding Authors: Haoyue Liu, Zhichao Wang, Ye Chen, Haonan Deng, Xiaoying Tang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20769v1 Streaming emotion understanding uses historical state while continuously interpreting current audio, often feeding the model's previous prediction back as context. We show that this history conditioning can distort current perception. On a balanced CREMA-D-Stream counterfactual diagnostic, changing only the injected previous emotion label while holding the audio fixed reduces current-audio accuracy from 72.50% to 30.42% and flips 65.69% of predictions. The effect is strongly label-asymmetric, with prior pull ranging from 4.76% to 98.20%, revealing a failure we call previous-belief contamination (PBC). To address PBC, we introduce EmoUpdate, a training-free framework that separates current-audio perception from historical state revision through three components: (1) a prior-blind acoustic firewall that prevents historical state from entering perception; (2) an evidence-shrunk causal belief filter that introduces history only after observation formation and retains label-asymmetric transition structure only when supported by observed evidence; and (3) a closed-form decontamination operator derived from the same counterfactual measurements for serving stacks where firewalling is unavailable. Across four SpeechLMs and two streaming emotion benchmarks, EmoUpdate achieves the best step accuracy and state-balanced accuracy in all eight model--benchmark settings, improving S-BAcc by up to 69.71 points and step accuracy by up to 38.41 points over the strongest controlled baselines. --- ### Beyond Endpoint Gains: A Weight-Delta Audit of Medical Specialization Authors: Praphul Singh, Shanu Kumar, Akshat Agarwal Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20768v3 Specialist language models are usually understood through endpoint gains: the generalist scores lower, the specialist scores higher, and the difference is treated as evidence of specialization. This leaves the released update itself largely unexamined. We propose a paired weight-delta path audit and apply it to two public, aligned generalist-to-medical-specialist checkpoint pairs: Gemma-3-4B-IT to MedGemma-4B-IT and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct to HuatuoGPT-o1-7B. In both pairs, the full decoder-side update strongly reconstructs measured medical benchmark movement (0.974 and 1.183 endpoint-normalized retention), making each decoder delta an appropriate substrate for the audit. Yet the movement is not cleanly localized. MLP is the strongest broad component family in both pairs, but mixed off-domain movements, 10-seed matched controls, and endpoint-anchored rollbacks prevent a unique coarse-family explanation. The audit therefore separates update-level reconstruction from component-level explanation. Its claims concern text-only multiple-choice benchmark movement, not clinical validation, repair, or circuit-level mechanism. --- ### CARD: Diagnosing Belief to Action Routing Failures in Vision Language Models Authors: Souptik Kumar Majumdar, Fabian Kögel, Andreas Bulling Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20763v1 Linear probes and activation steering have uncovered that vision-language models (VLMs) internally represent mental states such as agents' beliefs, knowledge, and intentions. However, it is unclear whether and how these representations are used by downstream predictions along these axes. To close this gap, we introduce Cross-Axis Routing Diagnostic (CARD), which steers activations along one axis while measuring the response of a different axis's prediction. Applied to open-weight VLMs on Relay Chain -- a new cooperative grid-world benchmark we propose -- we diagnose a critical routing failure: models fail to incorporate belief representations into their next action prediction, effectively leaving valuable information about their partners unused. --- ### Fuzzy-MoE: Interpretable Regime-Conditioned Expert Routing for Non-Stationary Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Authors: Lan Guo, Jie Xiao, Zhao Su, Jun Shen, Haoran Li, Weixia Ma, Qingguo Zhou, Binbin Yong Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20761v1 In non-stationary multivariate time series, different variables and samples often exhibit heterogeneous latent dynamic states, while existing deep forecasting models usually compress them into a unified end-to-end mapping, leading to suboptimal modeling of time-varying dynamics and limited interpretability regarding which forecasting mechanism is activated under different latent states. To overcome these limitations, we reformulate time series forecasting as a unified framework of latent temporal state identification and interpretable expert routing, and propose Fuzzy-MoE, a fuzzy logic-based dynamic Mixture-of-Experts model. Fuzzy-MoE consists of multiple parallel expert mapping networks and a dual-view fuzzy router. By jointly exploiting local convolutional dynamics and global segmented statistics, the router infers latent temporal states and computes expert activation strengths through learnable Gaussian membership functions, enabling explicit IF-THEN rule-based expert selection. This fine-grained routing strategy allows different variables within the same sequence to activate different experts, effectively capturing heterogeneous temporal dynamics while improving model interpretability. Experimental results on multiple public time series benchmark datasets show that Fuzzy-MoE significantly outperforms mainstream forecasting methods in forecasting accuracy. Moreover, fuzzy memberships and rule activations provide interpretable routing diagnostics, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework in both forecasting performance and mechanism transparency. Unlike traditional MoE models that use black-box routing, Fuzzy-MoE`s routing is based on clear, interpretable fuzzy rules. This makes the expert selection transparent and traceable. --- ### DiGS-Avatar: Single-Image Animatable 3D Human Reconstruction via UV-Space Diffusion Authors: Jiakun Li, Li Fang, Hao Zhu, Fei Hu, Long Ye, Yuan Zhang, Jinyao Yan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20759v1 Single-image 3D human reconstruction often suffers from over-smoothed textures and geometric inconsistencies. While diffusion models improve generative quality, their reliance on multi-view synthesis prior to 3D reconstruction is computationally expensive and prone to view inconsistency. We propose DiGS-Avatar, which reformulates this task as an efficient, diffusion-based UV-latent completion task, ensuring 3D consistency by design. To capture accurate spatial structure, we introduce a teacher-student framework where a multi-view teacher provides geometrically aligned pseudo-ground-truth latents to supervise a single-view diffusion student. Treating this inferred latent as a robust structural skeleton, our method injects high-level semantic features to accurately recover fine textural details without disrupting spatial integrity. The refined representation is then decoded into 3D Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGS-Avatar achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive visual fidelity and zero-shot generalization, while reconstructing a fully animatable 3D avatar in just 0.71 seconds. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/DiGS-Avatar. --- ### Hidden Axis of Uncertainty: Latent-Posterior Alignment in Graph Neural Networks with Bayesian Output Layers Authors: Suk Hoon Choi, Damdae Park, Junhyuk Choi, Hyein Jung, Changsoo Kim, Ung Lee, Kyeongsu Kim Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20758v1 Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) with Bayesian output layers provide a principled and tractable framework for quantifying predictive uncertainty, yet the mechanisms shaping that uncertainty remain unclear. While conventional theory attributes uncertainty reduction to posterior contraction, the corresponding assumptions need not hold for deep models. In the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Bayesian output layers studied here, we observe that predictive uncertainty decreases as latent representations shift toward lower-variance posterior directions, even though the posterior variance does not contract. We term this behavior Latent-Posterior Alignment (LPA) and conduct interventional experiments that support its functional role in shaping predictive uncertainty. Building on this insight, we propose Alignment-Guided Learning (AGL), which explicitly promotes this alignment during training. AGL effectively reduces predictive uncertainty while preserving accuracy and improves structural calibration, ensuring that the model confidence faithfully mirrors underlying data density. These findings provide a new perspective on uncertainty dynamics in GNNs with mean-field Bayesian output layers, shifting the focus from the magnitude of the posterior to the geometric interplay between latent and parameter spaces. --- ### PSK at WMT 2026 MIST: Task-Specialized QLoRA Adapters for Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering Authors: Srikar Kashyap Pulipaka Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20757v1 We describe the PSK submission to the WMT 2026 Multilingual Instruction Shared Task. Our system uses the 3.35B-parameter Tiny Aya Global model with three QLoRA adapters, one for each task. The adapters are trained on multilingual document-summary pairs, passage-based question answering, and filtered standalone question answering. The summarization data also includes scientific papers with their author-written abstracts. On our held-out split, the context and summarization adapters perform better than our multitask adapter, which was trained only on data supplied by the organizers. Results for open QA are mixed and vary with answer length and evaluation method. We therefore submit three systems with the same context and summarization adapters but different open-QA adapters. --- ### Vis-Poison: Poisoning Visual Knowledge in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Rujin Liang, Zhongpu Chen, Yuhao Lei, Xin Miao Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20756v2 While multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems increasingly rely on images as external knowledge sources, the introduction of poisoned visual evidence can severely compromise multimodal large language model (MLLM) generation. Unlike prior attacks that rely on altering textual metadata, we introduce Vis-Poison, a novel visual knowledge poisoning attack where the poisoned image itself is the attacker-controlled payload, without manipulating captions, summaries, metadata, or other associated text. Specifically, this attack is instantiated through an automated multi-agent method that constructs visually plausible poisoned images. To assess its impact, we evaluate Vis-Poison across two representative multimodal RAG pipelines, four embedding models, and six generation models. Empirically, Vis-Poison achieves an end-to-end attack success rate of 40.16% to 65.40% against 30k-entry multimodal knowledge bases in \emph{black-box} settings. Moreover, Vis-Poison remains effective against various MLLMs that can answer correctly from parametric knowledge alone, with an average success rate above 60%. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SWUFE-DB-Group/Vis-Poison. --- ### Natural-Language-Guided Generator-Agnostic Shortlisting for Protein Binder Design Authors: Gyubok Lee, Kiwoong Yoo, Jimin Seo, Jiyoun Kim, Kyunghoon Hur, Edward Choi Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20755v2 Modern de novo design workflows generate many candidate protein binders, but wet-lab validation capacity remains limited, making shortlisting a major bottleneck. We study whether LLMs can generate multi-metric ranking policies from precomputed structural-confidence and interface-quality proxy scores. Rather than proposing a new protein binder design pipeline, we focus on post-generation binder shortlisting: selecting the final top-K candidates from already generated binder pools using a shared panel of precomputed proxy scores. On the 10-target held-out split, averaging performance over five sampled global iterative gpt-4o policies reaches 0.589 Recall@10, modestly improving over the strongest single-feature fixed baseline, Protenix binder ipTM, which reaches 0.571 Recall@10. On the 3-target held-out subset comprising Nipah, RBX1, and TREM2, target-conditioned iterative gpt-5.4 policies reach the strongest LLM performance, with 0.519 Recall@10 and 0.583 NDCG@10. These results suggest that LLM-generated ranking policies can act as an interpretable post-generation decision layer for combining heterogeneous proxy metrics to prioritize binders from large candidate pools. --- ### SPARK-SAM: Learning How to Prompt and Respond for Infrared Small Target Segmentation Authors: Aji Mao, Zhenming Peng, Bailin Mu, Tian Pu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20754v2 Promptable segmentation models provide a reusable interface, but direct transfer to automatic infrared small-target segmentation (IRSTD) exposes a mismatch between spatial prompts and target-domain mask responses. In a diagnostic using target-covering loose-box prompts deterministically derived from test reference masks, the best official SAM2.1 results are only 4.69%, 1.64%, and 2.28% IoU on NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K. We introduce SPARK-SAM (Self-Prompt Adaptation with Response Knowledge for SAM), which learns target-domain response knowledge and conditions the decoder through an image-conditioned joint self-prompt state. Training combines benchmark-mask supervision with reliability-aware response guidance. SPARK-SAM achieves 75.78%, 86.49%, and 68.34% IoU with 0.726M additional parameters, ranking first on two benchmarks among 14 retrained SAM variants and adaptations evaluated as automatic image-to-mask methods. The staged IRSTD-1K diagnostic shows that response adaptation reaches most of the final IoU before the predicted points acquire reliable target grounding. Prompt supervision aligns the predicted prompt candidates with target locations, and frozen-weight interventions measure output sensitivity to the joint self-prompt state. Matched ablations show consistent accuracy gains from response guidance and high-resolution prompt refinement across all three datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Sakauma/SPARK-SAM. --- ### Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation via Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair Authors: Jiayi Gao, Changcheng Hua, Jiaqi Tang, Yuxin Peng, Yang Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20749v1 Identity-preserving video generation aims to synthesize videos that follow natural-language instructions while maintaining the visual identity of a given subject. Recent commercial video generation models have achieved strong visual quality and motion realism, but they still suffer from identity drift, incomplete instruction following, and missing visual details under complex prompts. Since these models are usually closed-source black boxes, directly improving them through parameter optimization is often infeasible. We therefore propose Agentic Enhancement and Semantic Repair (AESR), a lightweight enhancement framework for identity-preserving video generation. To improve prompt construction before generation and mitigate the above failures, AESR introduces a global agentic prompt enhancement module. This module learns model-specific prompting formats from official documentation, acquires human-centered video generation priors from human-interaction data, and accumulates test-domain identity-preserving generation experience into a reusable playbook through an agentic loop. To further repair errors in videos generated with enhanced prompts, AESR introduces a sample-level visual semantic repair module, which uses a VLM to locate erroneous video segments and design repair instructions, edits selected frames into explicit visual references, and guides a video editing model to fix local semantic or identity-related errors. We also adopt a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts selection strategy to choose reliable outputs from different generation and refinement paths. Under the official evaluation protocol of the ACM MM 2026 Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge, our system MIPL\_Video ranked first in Track 1, demonstrating the effectiveness of AESR for practical identity-preserving video generation. The code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/AESR. --- ### Generating Multi-view Adversarial Examples for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer Authors: Qi Song, Ziyuan Luo, Haoliang Han, Renjie Wan Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20748v1 The Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) enables unified feed-forward 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. However, deploying such a high-performance model may expose critical security vulnerabilities. Traditional adversarial perturbations require costly per-scene optimization, while Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs) rely on a single static pattern and fail to effectively attack VGGT. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MVAP-G}, a multi-view adversarial perturbation generator that produces imperceptible consistent perturbations across multiple views in a single feed-forward pass. To ensure perturbation consistency across diverse scenes, we design a cross-view adversarial alignment mechanism to process multi-view images. Experiments demonstrate that MVAP-G significantly degrades VGGT performance without iterative optimization during inference. This work pioneers multi-view adversarial attacks on 3D foundation models, uncovering severe vulnerabilities and underscoring the urgent need for robust 3D vision systems. The code is available at https://github.com/qsong2001/mvap-g. --- ### Is Multimodal Speculative Decoding Ready for Diffusion-Based Parallel Drafting? A Survey and Empirical Diagnosis Authors: Yantao Li, Huanlin Gao, Fang Zhao, Chao Tan, Qiang Hui, Shuting Liu, Fuyuan Shi, Ting Lu, Shaoan Zhao, Xueqiang Guo, Xinpei Su, Jianbing Zhang et al. Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20743v2 Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by allowing a lightweight drafter to propose future tokens while a target model verifies them in parallel. Its lossless guarantee has motivated a line of work that pushes the drafter itself toward parallel generation. The most recent paradigm is block-parallel generative drafting, including diffusion-based methods such as DFlash and DSpark, achieving up to 3.6x speedup on common daily chatting tasks. While this transition is well studied in text-only LLMs, its applicability to multimodal models remains an open question. Existing multimodal speculative decoding efforts focus on input compression, adapter alignment, candidate coverage, or modality-specific verification; however, block-parallel generative drafting remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this paper combines a modality-centered survey with a cross-architecture empirical study to ask: Is multimodal speculative decoding ready for diffusion-based parallel drafting? In this survey, we systematically analyze a wide spectrum of multimodal models, spanning Vision-Language, Video-Language, Audio, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures, from the dual perspectives of drafting parallelism and cross-modal information interaction. We introduce a unified taxonomy that isolates drafter-side parallelism from orthogonal design choices such as tree construction and verification strategies. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of existing methods under varying degrees of parallelism across standardized multimodal benchmarks, including OCR, VQA, visual reasoning, and image captioning. Finally, we summarize the limitations of current approaches, discuss open challenges, and outline promising future directions for this rapidly evolving field. --- ### VisTa3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for Thin Object Reconstruction from Vision, Tactile, and 3D Point Clouds Authors: Shania Guo, Yeongsik Seo, Andrew Fu, Mei Hao, Iris Xia, Jiwon Jenny Lee, Xinyi Mary Xie, Hyoungseob Park, Aaron Dollar, Alex Wong Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20740v2 State-of-the-art 3D reconstruction models, whether from visual, range, or both, tend to underperform on thin objects. This is partially due to the small amount of space such objects occupy in RGB images and in 3D point clouds. To test the extent of their errors, we collected the first thin object dataset comprising of synchronized RGB images, depth maps, and tactile response maps, where each frame is associated with inertial measurements, camera pose and calibration, and groundtruth depth and segmentation maps obtained from laser scanning of thin objects. We hypothesize that tactile data can aid in the reconstruction of thin objects as their response maps provide local shape and deformation information. Our dataset, termed VisTa3D, comprises of 387 scenes covering 70 thin objects over 17 environments. We benchmarked current 3D reconstruction models on VisTa3D and found that, indeed, they exhibit low fidelity on thin objects. To test if tactile data can help, we introduce the first visual-range-tactile 3D reconstruction model as a baseline. Code and data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/shaniaguo/VisTa3D. --- ### Continuous-Time Quantum Walks based Graph Neural Network Authors: Yuliang Zhan, Zefeng Gao, Jian Li, Yang Liu, Hao sun Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20738v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used on graph-structured data, but most suffer from two key weaknesses. First, message passing behaves as a low-pass filter under the homophily assumption, leading to poor performance on heterophilic graphs. Second, stacking layers drives node features toward constants, causing over-smoothing. Existing methods usually address these issues separately, while the few joint solutions rely largely on empirical heuristics, and many over-smoothing remedies sacrifice model expressiveness. We propose \textbf{CTQW-GNN}, a GNN based on Continuous-Time Quantum Walks (CTQW), to address both issues with theoretical justification. Its design exploits two properties of the CTQW propagator $e^{-\mathrm{i}Ht}$. First, it is unitary and has eigenvalues on the unit circle, so no frequency component is damped, counteracting the low-pass bias. Second, unitarity preserves feature norms and prevents the Dirichlet energy from decaying exponentially with depth, thereby mitigating over-smoothing. CTQW-GNN combines three complementary aggregation modules. \textit{CTQW-based Aggregation} evolves node features through the unitary propagator, preserving mid- and high-frequency signals for heterophilic graphs while preventing Dirichlet-energy collapse. \textit{CTQW-Attention Aggregation} constructs a multi-hop neighbor graph from CTQW amplitudes and applies attention over it, enabling access to distant homophilic nodes missed by single-hop aggregation. \textit{LF Aggregation} uses a standard low-pass GAT branch to retain strong performance on homophilic graphs, where pure CTQW aggregation can be suboptimal. We further provide a spectral-gap analysis explaining energy preservation and a Lieb--Robinson-type bound that gives a principled rule for selecting the walk time $t$. --- ### ForeTime-VLA: Causal Future-Token Distillation from a World Action Model for Conveyor-Belt Manipulation Authors: Siyuan Ma, Yutian Zhang, Boshi Zhang, Qinglian Wu, Jiaqi Zhai, Dong Wei, Xiaojin Huang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20735v2 Manipulating moving objects requires a policy to anticipate contact events, yet vision-language-action (VLA) policies are commonly fine-tuned from the current observation alone. World action models (WAMs) learn predictive dynamics, but running a video-scale teacher or explicitly imagining future frames at deployment is costly. We introduce ForeTime-VLA, a dense pi0.5 policy that distills a future-aware, action-equivalent representation from a frozen Fast-WAM-derived teacher while remaining causal at inference. Offline, current and future video latents are compressed into a whitened 64-D target. Online, an eight-frame history encoder predicts this target together with manipulation phase and normalized time-to-transition. Four future tokens and one phase token condition the VLM prefix, while the predicted future and transition horizon condition the action expert. Training retains the original flow-matching action target and adds cosine, relational geometry, phase, time-to-transition, and action-equivalence objectives. On a deduplicated conveyor-belt dataset, we compare 40k-step checkpoints on 768 matched windows per split. Test MAE decreases from 0.134119 to 0.130593 (2.63%; paired-bootstrap 95% CI: 0.82-4.48% improvement), and test L2 decreases by 3.02%, at a 2.46-2.93% latency cost. In quantitative real-robot evaluation, ForeTime-VLA achieves 81.1% stationary and 58.9% slow-moving grasp success, exceeding the next-best reference by 12.2 and 22.2 percentage points, respectively. Across three belt speeds, it completes 44/90 grasps versus 23/90 for pi0.5, including 11/30 versus 2/30 at fast speed. The agreement between offline orientation gains and reduced real-robot contact-pose failures supports causal future-token distillation as an effective way to improve dynamic manipulation without deploying the world-model teacher. --- ### Calibrating Criterion Revision in LLM Agents: Failure Modes and a Trace-Anchored Protocol Authors: Guodong Xu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20729v1 Language-model agents can improve after failure or carry text across episodes without revising what counts as success. We study the narrower attribution problem of criterion revision: when criterion K0 accepts an outcome violating a broader commitment B, what observations justify saying that the system formed and persistently used K1? We require five non-compensatory conditions: criterion-failure detection, a model-emitted proposal, new-episode transfer, intervention sensitivity on the claimed carrier, and preservation. We evaluate CMB-0.1 on twelve cross-domain cases and four arms: stateless inference, append-only history, model-generated but harness-committed state, and evaluator-written oracle state. Seven mechanism fixtures yield 84 deterministic scorer trials; four local quantized artifacts yield 96 calls and 192 model-case-arm trials. No model trial satisfies all five conditions, but this zero does not establish general capability absence. Eleven calls remain invalid after one retry; several commitments disclose the target distinction; the harness performs commits; deletion reuses a stateless call; and conflict changes multiple factors. Qwen2.5-7B answers every transfer and preservation item without revision state, exposing zero-state reconstruction. These failures make CMB-0.1 an instrument-calibration result rather than a model ranking. We derive a prospective, trace-anchored CMB-0.4 protocol requiring concealed transfer, explicit WRITE/NO-WRITE/ESCALATE actions, a separately logged policy-selected commit, matched interventions, repeated hidden items, and a frozen executable oracle. It is a successor design, not a completed confirmatory result. The paper contributes a measurement chain, an empirical diagnosis of its first implementation, and a more discriminating protocol for future tests of criterion revision. --- ### Enabling Memory-efficient Im2win Convolution with Multi-precision Support on GPU CUDA and Tensor Cores Authors: Xiang Fu, Jixiang Ma, Xinpeng Zhang, Peng Zhao, Shuai Lu, Xu Tony Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.DC, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20725v1 Convolution is a principal computational bottleneck in deep neural networks, and its efficiency depends on tight integration between algorithms and GPU hardware. Existing GPU convolution methods suffer from large memory overhead, poor cache utilization, limited effectiveness across kernel sizes, or numerical instability. This work extends the im2win paradigm -- a universal, memory-efficient convolution method with contiguous memory access for all kernel sizes -- to run efficiently in full precision on CUDA cores and half precision on tensor cores. By introducing new kernel designs and optimizations such as zig-zag memory access and asynchronous data movement, im2win efficiently exploits hardware-accelerated half-precision matrix multiply-accumulate operations. Across twelve CNN benchmarks, im2win achieves up to 2.8x higher TFLOPS than its CUDA core implementation, 1.4x higher than cuDNN, and 6.4x higher than GEMM-based convolution with cuBLAS, while using as little as 53% and 35% of their memory, respectively. These results establish im2win as a unified, high-performance convolution framework for modern GPU architectures. --- ### AffordAny: Open-World 3D Affordance Grounding from Monocular RGB Images via Vision-Language-Guided Geometric Reasoning Authors: Junqi Wu, Kaihua Tang, Xuanwen Chen, Hongzhi Li, Jianqiang Huang, Xian-Sheng Hua Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20720v1 Open-world 3D affordance grounding requires localizing functional object parts in 3D given free-form language queries. Existing methods typically assume pre-built object-centric 3D geometry and closed affordance ontologies, limiting deployment from raw RGB observations. We present AffordAny, an end-to-end framework that uses one monocular RGB image to construct large-scale text-conditioned 3D part supervision, ground affordances with a frozen vision-language model (VLM) guided decoder, and improve open-world generalization through pseudo-label self-training. Our automated pipeline produces a benchmark of 5,334 objects and 10,633 part-level samples spanning 473 categories, an order-of-magnitude increase in categorical diversity over prior work. The decoder progressively fuses frozen Cosmos-2B features with 3D geometry through spatial projection, instruction-conditioned semantic compression, and bidirectional geometry-semantics interaction. Minimal-perturbation pseudo-label self-training further adds new objects without human annotation. Under a systematic generalization protocol evaluating unseen objects, unseen categories, and unseen instruction paraphrases, our approach achieves 0.428 IoU on unseen objects and 0.315 IoU on unseen categories after self-training, with unseen-category mIoU improving by 6.3% relative (p<0.01) and an instruction sensitivity gap of only 0.105, demonstrating effectiveness and robustness of our method. --- ### DirEAG: Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation for Calibrating Verbalized Confidence in Mathematical Reasoning Authors: Haorui Xu, Yuzhou Zhu, Liyuan Gao Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20717v1 Reliable confidence estimation is essential for using large language models in mathematical reasoning, but black-box verbalized confidence is difficult to calibrate. When the same problem is queried under multiple confidence-steering prompts, the resulting answer-confidence observations contain useful uncertainty information, yet their scales may shift across steering levels, models, and datasets. Existing black-box uncertainty methods often rely on answer agreement, sample consistency, or entropy, which describe output variation but do not model the numerical meaning of self-reported confidence. Conversely, direct averaging or heuristic aggregation of elicited confidence cannot learn prompt- and task-dependent bias. We propose DirEAG, a Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation method that converts each elicited answer-confidence observation into calibrated soft evidence over generated candidate answers and an additional null state, allowing the model to represent cases where none of the candidates is correct. Experiments on GSM8K, SVAMP, and GSM-Hard with Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma models show that, compared with direct confidence averaging and heuristic confidence-steering aggregation, DirEAG often achieves better calibration while maintaining competitive answer selection. Ablations further reveal that evidence aggregation and final binary calibration address distinct parts of the calibration problem. --- ### AGIDefect-4K: A Richly Annotated Dataset for AI-Generated Image Defect Detection, Localization and Explanation Authors: Xiangfei Sheng, Weidong Zou, Tianjiao Gu, Zhichao Yang, Pengfei Chen, Leida Li Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20713v1 Generative AI can now produce highly realistic images, yet current models still exhibit subtle but critical defects that undermine their reliability. While existing AI-generated image (AGI) evaluation benchmarks have made notable progress, comprehensive AGI defect diagnosis remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce AGIDefect-4K, a richly annotated dataset of 4,000 images from 15 state-of-the-art generative models spanning both open-source and closed-source systems. AGIDefect-4K features hierarchical defect annotations: (1) detection labels identifying whether defects exist, (2) pixel-level segmentation masks localizing defective regions, and (3) detailed textual explanations characterizing defect types and their perceptual impact. Each image is further annotated with an overall quality score. Building on this, we present AGIDA (AGI Defect Assistant), a baseline framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for joint defect detection, localization, explanation, and quality prediction. Comprehensive benchmarking on AGIDefect-4K reveals that AGI defect understanding remains challenging, underscoring the value of this dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/sxfly99/AGIDefect-4K. --- ### Privacy-Preserving Object Detection for Vision Transformer-Based Models Authors: Homare Sueyoshi, Kiyoshi Nishikawa, Hitoshi Kiya Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20712v1 We propose a novel object detection method that enables us to protect sensitive visual information of test images. Previous studies considering visual information protection focus on image classification tasks. This paper proposes an object detection method using perceptual encryption for the first time. The proposed method can achieve almost the same accuracy as that of models without any protection by utilizing the embedding structure of the Vision Transformer (ViT) and a domain adaptation technique with keys. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in terms of accuracy and visual protection under the use of ViTdet, which is a ViT-based object detection model. --- ### AsmEvo: Agentic Assembly-Level Optimization of AMD GPU Kernels with Functional Equivalence Verification Authors: Ji Liu, Puyuan Yang, Rongzhang Zheng, Fan Wang, Jinglin Wang, Muhammad A. Awad, Mortis Huang, Andy Chang, Zekai Li, Zeping Li, Zihao An, Yue Liu et al. Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20711v1 High-performance ML systems increasingly rely on GPU kernels whose editable source is unavailable, generated, or too distant from final machine code to expose remaining optimizations. Existing LLM kernel optimizers and autotuners mainly operate on CUDA, Triton, HIP, or tensor-program source and validate against reference implementations. We study a stricter setting: optimizing an already compiled AMDGPU code object, where the deployed binary is the only behavioral oracle. We present AsmEvo, an agentic assembly-level optimizer for AMD GPU kernels. Given an AMDGPU code object K0, AsmEvo reconstructs a reassemblable representation, proposes low-level edits with a long-horizon agent, rebuilds an ABI-preserving optimized object, and accepts candidates only after differential verification against K0 under identical launches. AsmEvo combines code-object recovery, metadata-aware rebuilding, profiling-guided hot-window editing, correctness-gated timing, and conservative in-place patch fallback. We conduct extensive experiments with AsmEvo on various AMD GPU kernels. On MI308X, AsmEvo improves 29 of 30 selected KernelBench kernels, reaching 1.35x geometric-mean and 3.88x maximum speedup. On MI300X production workloads, it improves all evaluated AITer binaries and vLLM/SGLang Triton assembly kernels, reaching 1.09x/1.31x and 1.18x/1.34x geometric-mean/maximum speedups, respectively, while preserving functional equivalence. --- ### Geometric Regularization for Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning via Gaussian Feature Bridges Authors: Hongyang He, Xinyuan Song, Yan Zhong, Daizong Liu, Yanbin Li, Yang-fan He, Wenqiao Zhang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20710v1 Real-world semi-supervised learning (SSL) often encounters significant challenges with long-tailed label distributions and noisy pseudo-labels, which hinder generalization and amplify confirmation bias. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, Gaussian Bridge Consistency (GBC), to address these challenges by constructing semantic interpolation paths between unlabeled samples and high-quality class anchors. Our method maintains a dynamic Prototype Atlas that stores a diverse and evolving set of labeled and pseudo-labeled exemplars per class. For each unlabeled instance, GBC forms a class-conditional Gaussian Feature Bridge in the latent space, enabling the student model to traverse a smooth trajectory from uncertain predictions to reliable class prototypes. A bridge consistency loss is applied along this path to enforce alignment with a geometrically interpolated target distribution. Furthermore, we propose BridgeMix, a confidence-aware feature mixing strategy that interpolates both sample and anchor pairs to amplify cross-sample generalization. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10-LT and ImageNet-LT (USB benchmarks) validate the robustness and effectiveness of GBC under realistic long-tailed SSL settings, consistently improving long tail-class performance without sacrificing scalability. --- ### ArtiMo: Agent-Driven Articulated Mesh Animation Authors: Chunyu Zou, Peng Dai, Yi-Hua Huang, Ze Yuan, Jingwei Huang, Yeming Yao, Xiaojuan Qi Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20699v1 Animating articulated 3D meshes via text requires satisfying strict kinematic constraints, modeling causal interactions between parts, and achieving instruction fidelity. Due to the absence of task-specific training data and explicit articulation supervision, existing data-driven mesh animation methods are largely inapplicable to this setting. To address this, we propose ArtiMo, a novel agent-driven framework for text-guided articulated mesh animation. Operating in a zero-shot manner, ArtiMo develops an agentic pipeline powered by Large Language and Vision-Language Models (LLMs/VLMs) to orchestrate motion generation. By synergizing the explicit kinematic constraints of URDF with the agent's reasoning and planning capabilities, it effectively produces causally coherent part motions and interactions without requiring model fine-tuning. To ensure motion correctness, the agent additionally utilizes a visual self-improvement mechanism: generated animations are rendered into compact keyframes and motion cues, enabling the VLM to iteratively diagnose and correct errors. Furthermore, we contribute a new benchmark dataset spanning 21 articulated object categories, featuring high-quality motion annotations enriched with causal relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtiMo significantly outperforms baselines, particularly on complex, causally driven motions. The project page is available at https://zou-2004.github.io/ArtiMo/. --- ### Bridging Language and Spherical Space: Object-Centric Control for Text-to-Panorama Generation Authors: Derui Li, Qian Qiao, Yuhao Sun, Wenhao Guo, Peng Lu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20691v1 Panoramic image generation is increasingly important for immersive applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D content creation. Unlike perspective images, panoramic images represent a viewer-centered $360^\circ$ surrounding space, where directional expressions such as left, right, front, and behind play a central role in spatial understanding. However, existing text-to-panorama methods largely rely on implicit spatial reasoning and often fail to faithfully ground object-level directional descriptions in spherical panoramic scenes. A straightforward alternative is to introduce explicit layouts, but requiring manually specified spatial conditions reduces the flexibility of language-based interaction and does not directly resolve the misalignment between egocentric directional language and panoramic image space. To address this issue, we propose PanoCtrl, an object-centric framework for controllable text-to-panorama generation. Our method explicitly bridges natural language and spherical panoramic space by converting textual descriptions into structured object-level spherical conditions and integrating them into the diffusion process. Specifically, we introduce PanoParse, a text-conditioned parser that predicts object semantics and spherical bounding field-of-view (BFoV) parameters, and \textbf{PanoControl}, which injects object-level semantic and spatial guidance into the diffusion transformer through object-aware attention and spatial residual enhancement. To support this task, we construct PanoGround, a dataset with object-level spherical annotations and diverse directional descriptions for controllable panoramic generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoCtrl achieves state-of-the-art performance in both spatial alignment and image quality. --- ### Identity-Aware Human-Object Interaction Motion Captioning Authors: Yiming Wang, Yonghao Dang, Huilai Li, Jiawei Tu, Jianqin Yin Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20690v1 Existing human-object interaction (HOI) motion captioning methods typically describe what happens while referring to the subject using generic terms such as "a person" or "someone", without grounding the caption in subject identity. To address this limitation, we introduce Identity-Aware Human-Object Interaction Motion Captioning task. This task requires each generated caption to specify both the subject identity and the corresponding HOI motion. For example, the model generates "Sub_ID lifts the chair" rather than "A person lifts the chair". For this task, we design identity-aware HOI motion captions based on the BEHAVE and InterCap datasets. We further propose ID-HOINet, which learns from multi-view videos while supporting single-view identity-aware HOI motion caption generation. ID-HOINet contains two core components: Multi-View Identity-Motion Learning Module (MVIML) and Two-Stage Caption Rewriting Strategy (TSCR). MVIML learns from multi-view videos by modeling dependencies across temporal stages and camera viewpoints, capturing identity and interaction motion features. At inference, the TSCR first retrieves the subject identity and generates identity-agnostic HOI motion captions. TSCR then rewrites these captions with the predicted identity to produce the final identity-aware HOI motion captions. Experiments demonstrate that ID-HOINet achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### VortexChat: An agentic framework for autonomous multi-objective integrated photonic design Authors: Faqian Chong, Yulun Wu, Shilong Li, Andrew Forbes, Hongsheng Chen, Song Han Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, physics.optics arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20688v1 The advancement of modern integrated photonics is frequently bottlenecked by device design workflows that rely heavily on manual simulation and expert intuition. While inverse design offers an alternative, it remains constrained by expert supervision and a lack of end-to-end automation. To address these issues, we present VortexChat, an agentic framework for the autonomous, end-to-end inverse design of integrated photonic devices directly from natural language specifications. VortexChat couples a large language model (LLM) decision agent with topology generation, gradient-based refinement, and full-wave electromagnetic simulation. This closed-loop architecture enables the system to iteratively decompose design objectives, orchestrate computational tools, and update strategies based on feedback with minimal human intervention. Constrained by the absolute metrics of the Vortex100 Benchmark, VortexChat autonomously generates devices that strictly meet all predefined performance thresholds without any human-in-the-loop. As an experimental demonstration, we fabricated a broadband terahertz perfect vortex beam multiplexer, autonomously designed by VortexChat, with measurements confirming high-efficiency operation, high mode purity and low inter-channel crosstalk in agreement with full-wave simulations. These results demonstrate that an LLM agent can assume key aspects of expert decision-making in photonic inverse design while maintaining physical fidelity and fabrication feasibility, providing a scalable route towards autonomous design of complex integrated photonic systems. --- ### TopoSurfel: Closing the Loop between Gaussian Surfels and Meshes for Surface Reconstruction Authors: Chuanjin Fan, Wenjie Chang, Bohao Liao, Yujia Chen, Wenfei Yang, Tianzhu Zhang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20687v2 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in novel view synthesis. However, extracting high-fidelity surfaces directly from 3DGS remains challenging due to its discrete and unstructured nature. Existing 3DGS-based reconstruction methods typically rely on multi-view geometric consistency or local constraints. Without an explicit structured geometric prior during optimization, these methods often struggle to resolve structural ambiguities, leading to artifacts and floaters, particularly in textureless or occluded regions. To address this limitation, we propose TopoSurfel, a novel framework that closes the loop between Gaussian surfels and continuous meshes. Unlike recent methods that incorporate mesh extraction into the differentiable pipeline by introducing auxiliary neural networks or extra per-Gaussian parameters, we dynamically extract a continuous proxy mesh via a non-trainable differentiable iso-surfacing process. Leveraging this differentiable connection, we introduce a mesh-guided surfel evolution strategy, including normal alignment and geometry-aware density control, to effectively suppress floaters and fill surface holes. Furthermore, to address the initialization challenges in large-scale environments, we propose a spatially aware hybrid re-initialization strategy that ensures robust reconstruction across complex scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopoSurfel achieves competitive geometric reconstruction accuracy while maintaining high-quality mesh-based novel view synthesis. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/Fan-Treasure/TopoSurfel. --- ### CDRL: Certification-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Neutrino Flavor Model Discovery Authors: Piyush Jha, Jake Rudolph, Victoria Knapp-Pérez, Max Fieg, Aishik Ghosh, Vijay Ganesh Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.LO, hep-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20686v1 Many scientific discovery problems require searching combinatorial hypothesis spaces under complex domain constraints. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach, but existing methods rely on scalar rewards that provide limited information about why candidate solutions fail, leading agents to repeatedly explore invalid regions. We introduce Certification-Driven Reinforcement Learning (CDRL), a framework that leverages structured feedback from symbolic reasoning tools. When a candidate violates domain constraints, these tools produce certificates identifying the actions responsible for failure. CDRL converts these certificates into reusable constraints that eliminate classes of invalid solutions and guide exploration toward valid regions. We evaluate CDRL on neutrino flavor model discovery in theoretical particle physics, where the hypothesis space exceeds $10^{26}$ possible models, and compare it with the state-of-the-art RL approach previously used for this task. Across three theory spaces, CDRL achieves up to 1.95$\times$ higher valid model rates and up to 6.33$\times$ higher neutrino model rates while evaluating up to 4$\times$ fewer candidates. We further extract 40 interpretable rules from search trajectories using a post-hoc decision-tree framework and show that reusing them as soft constraints yields gains of up to 2$\times$ in valid model rates and 3$\times$ in neutrino model discovery across all three theory spaces. These results suggest that CDRL uncovers reusable structure in combinatorial search spaces and provides a general framework for scientific model discovery. --- ### Temporal Validity on Real Software Histories: Eliminating Stale-Fact Errors in Code-Assistant Memory over GitHub Fixes Authors: Neeraj Yadav Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20685v1 Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has no model of time: when a fact changes across a coding session - a function is renamed, an endpoint moves, a dependency is bumped - RAG retrieves both the old and new value with near-identical similarity and cannot tell which is current, so it serves the superseded value. Paper 1 showed, on synthetic single-value benchmarks, that a deterministic (subject, relation, object) supersession memory eliminates this failure. Here we validate it end-to-end on real software history. From 707 real GitHub issues (SWE-bench Lite + Verified) we extract 130 clean atomic state transitions, a fix that changes one identifiable value from a pre-fix to a post-fix form, and render each marker-free (the stale and current statements differ only in the value). On this set, MemStrata reaches 0.91 answer accuracy versus RAG's 0.57-0.59; and, the structural result, when forced to answer RAG serves the superseded value 36-38% of the time (an LLM reranker does not help) while MemStrata drives this to ~0, at RAG retrieval latency (~2.1 s vs ~18 s for the reranker). We are explicit about scope: only ~18% of real fixes are clean atomic transitions; Paper 2 isolates the memory mechanism on that class, and extraction coverage of the remaining fixes is the orthogonal problem we defer to follow-on work. A real product bug surfaced and was fixed during the study (a case/punctuation-insensitive value comparison), with the moat property (deterministic-supersession accuracy on clean code mutations) preserved and verified. --- ### Aristotelian Manifolds: Leveraging Platonic Perceptual Features for Backpropagation Free Rapid Concept Learning Authors: Michael Karnes, Alper Yilmaz Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20682v1 This paper formalizes and systematically characterizes Aristotelian Manifolds, a generalized structural framework built upon the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. We position high-capacity foundation models as universal perceptual filters and conduct a comprehensive layer-wise investigation to map how knowledge is functionally synthesized within these latent subspaces. Across diverse architectural paradigms and multi-domain datasets, we rigorously chart the interplay between network depth, dimensionality reduction, and distance metrics. Our characterization reveals that semantic maturation does not follow a singular, monotonic path; instead, different data domains exhibit highly distinct geometric response profiles, characterized by intermediate mound-like peaks for specialized clinical modalities and sigmoidal plateaus for natural visual tasks. By profiling the exact coordinates where these manifolds achieve peak representational efficiency, we establish a predictable taxonomy for layer selection and feature compression. Ultimately, this systematic characterization demonstrates that mapping the internal geometry of frozen representations provides a robust, backpropagation-free, and interpretable framework for understanding and exploiting foundation model latent spaces. --- ### Reinforcement Learning for Continuous-Time Jump Markov Decision Processes with Applications to Network Dynamic Pricing Authors: Huiling Meng, Ningyuan Chen, Xuefeng Gao Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20680v1 We study reinforcement learning (RL) in Continuous-Time Jump Markov Decision Processes (CTJMDPs) featuring general discrete state spaces (which need not possess a vector space structure) and continuous/discrete action spaces. The setup covers many well-known applications in operations such as multi-product dynamic pricing with capacitated resources (Gallego and van Ryzin 1997). To model the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, we formulate an entropy-regularized continuous-time control problem with stochastic policies. Recent continuous-time RL techniques such as $q$-learning for controlled diffusions in (Jia and Zhou 2023) focus on continuous state spaces $\mathbb{R}^d$ and rely heavily on semimartingale theory in $\mathbb{R}^d$ for their theoretical analysis. Consequently, their methods cannot be directly applied to CTJMDPs with general discrete state spaces, which may lack the algebraic addition and subtraction structures inherent to Euclidean spaces. To bridge this gap, we establish the theoretical foundations of $q$-learning for CTJMDPs and develop model-free $q$-learning algorithms. Compared to naïve time discretization and approximating CTJMDPs using discrete-time MDPs, our approach has several conceptual and empirical benefits. Numerical experiments in network dynamic pricing (Gallego and van Ryzin 1997) show that our proposed RL algorithm reliably learns near-optimal policies and consistently outperforms standard benchmark methods, demonstrating superior solution quality and effective scalability to large-scale network instances. --- ### Why2Speak: Faithful Reasoning for Abstaining Action Policies Authors: Shreya Mendi, Brinnae Bent Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20670v1 Many agentic systems must repeatedly choose between acting and abstaining, making faithful reasoning important for oversight: an explanation is useful only if it reflects the computation that produced the action. We study this problem through intervention timing in multi-party conversation, where an assistant must decide whether to speak or remain silent. This setting exposes class imbalance, asymmetric action costs, and the possibility that exposing reasoning changes the policy being audited. Using Qwen3-8B, decoded with or without chain-of-thought reasoning, we compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. We find a capability-auditability tradeoff: the strongest direct policy achieves higher quality but exposes no reasoning to inspect, while the reasoning policy provides a trace at the cost of lower performance, particularly recall of true intervention opportunities. Supervised fine-tuning either suppresses reasoning or preserves it without improving decision quality, while reinforcement learning also fails to improve the reasoning policy. We identify one mechanism underlying this failure: group relative objectives provide no learning signal on confidently wrong prompts when sampled rollouts all select the same action. Controlled activation probes and behavioral ablations show that standard faithfulness methods can overstate evidence that exposed reasoning reflects the underlying decision process. Probability-based metrics saturate under confident decisions, probes are vulnerable to class imbalance and textual leakage, and reasoning ablations can confound reasoning content with changes in inference mode. Together, these results show that exposing reasoning can change an agent's action policy rather than simply make it observable. We provide controls for evaluating reasoning-based oversight of agents that can act or abstain. --- ### Lightweight Adaptive ReduNet via Hyperspherical Manifold Learning Authors: Zhenglin Huang, Qifa Yan, Bin Dai, Xiaohu Tang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20668v1 In recent years, a white-box neural network called ReduNet has been proposed, which employs the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR$^2$) principle to transform raw data into low-dimensional discriminative features via a forward layer-wise construction process. Unlike traditional deep networks that rely on backpropagation, ReduNet explicitly derives the parameters of each layer from the features of its preceding layer, offering a mathematically interpretable paradigm. However, this layer-wise construction often requires a large number of layers for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value, which increases the parameter storage of the unfolded module. To address this issue, we propose LA-ReduNet, a lightweight adaptive architecture that refines the layer-wise update rule and enables discriminative feature representations to be obtained with substantially fewer unfolded layers. Specifically, LA-ReduNet employs hyperspherical manifold learning and adaptive step sizes, thereby reducing by an order of magnitude the number of layers required for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value. Simulation results demonstrate that, while maintaining comparable classification accuracy, LA-ReduNet requires significantly fewer layers for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value. Remarkably, under the considered experimental settings, LA-ReduNet requires only approximately $1/29$ of the parameter storage of the unfolded ReduNet module for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value. --- ### C-Score: Beyond Accuracy for Robustness Assessment in Semi-Supervised Learning under Open-World Unlabeled Contamination Authors: Tsao-Lun Chen, Chi-Cheng Fu, Han-Yi E. Chou, Shun-Feng Su Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20667v1 Pseudo-label-based semi-supervised learning has achieved strong performance due to its simplicity and scalability. However, it is typically developed under a closed-world assumption that unlabeled data are drawn from the same distribution as labeled data. In practical deployment, unlabeled data are often collected from open environments and may contain OOD samples. Under such contamination, OOD samples may still receive high-confidence predictions and be incorporated into training as if they were valid target examples. This creates an important evaluation problem: clean in-distribution test accuracy may appear stable even when the internal learning dynamics of SSL have already deteriorated. To address this issue, we study hidden collapse in pseudo-label-based SSL under open-world unlabeled contamination from a diagnostic evaluation perspective. We present C-Score, a compact framework that evaluates training behavior in three complementary spaces: prediction, feature representation, and optimization. C-Score includes PLE and CCI for unlabeled prediction behavior, Sem-Drift for deviation from labeled semantic anchors, and Grad-Align for the compatibility between labeled and unlabeled optimization. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with multiple OOD sources, varying contamination ratios, and four pseudo-label-based SSL algorithms show that C-Score metrics reveal hidden degradation that clean accuracy alone fails to detect: under SVHN contamination, CCI rises over 280% while best-accuracy remains within 3% of the uncontaminated baseline; near-OOD sources (CIFAR-100, STL-10) cause up to 14.9% accuracy collapse (FlexMatch, r=0.5). The results suggest that clean accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating SSL robustness in open-world environments, and that internal diagnostic signals are necessary for more reliable robustness assessment under unlabeled contamination. --- ### Amplifying the imaging power of digital sky surveys with space telescopes data and generative AI Authors: Sai Teja Erukude, Lior Shamir Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.GA, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20666v1 While Digital sky surveys provide excellent throughput of image data and can cover a large footprint, their imaging power is normally inferior to that of space-based telescopes. Space-based telescopes, on the other hand, provide excellent imaging power and can image the deep Universe, but cannot provide the same throughput as advanced ground-based sky surveys. Here, we utilize generative AI to elevate the quality of galaxy images taken by ground-based telescopes to the level of details enabled by space telescopes. The solution is based on the nature of galaxy shapes, allowing generative AI trained on space-based images to convert weak signal into detailed and clear galaxy images. The method allows for combining the high throughput of ground-based sky surveys with the image quality of space-based telescopes. The source code for the method is available, as well as paired training data and a catalog of 63,202 galaxy images enhanced by the proposed method. We also provide a software tool that encapsulates the entire pipeline and the custom generative AI model to generate galaxy images with enhanced quality. --- ### DreamBench-SWE: A Multi-Session Memory-Hygiene Benchmark for Software Agents Authors: Sarthak Singh Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20664v1 DreamBench-SWE is a multi-session benchmark for software-agent memory hygiene in which later software tasks depend on non-inferable evidence from earlier sessions and are scored by executable hidden oracles. We report the original scaled v2 fold and a separately preregistered v2.1 successor audit designed after that study but frozen before successor outcome inspection. The successor run completed 360/360 work units and 720/720 S3 cells across four conditions. In the original fold, the primary DF-hybrid--B5 contrast was null (95/180 versus 89/180; clustered p=.518, Holm p=1), not evidence of equivalence, and C9/C10 retained B0-headroom limitations. In the successor, no external memory achieved 21/180 passes (rate 0.1167), deterministic verbatim event memory 82/180 (rate 0.4556), the typed-plus-raw reference probe 83/180 (rate 0.4611), and one pinned hosted Mem0 literal-storage configuration 97/180 (rate 0.5389). The registered six-slot Family A retained unavailable slots at p=1; all three available comparisons against no memory rejected after Holm correction. Both preregistered mechanism contrasts were unavailable after pre-evaluation conformance rejection. The secondary literal-storage-versus-verbatim comparison was nonconfirmatory and sensitivity-dependent, while the comparison with the reference probe did not reject. The audit therefore supports DreamBench-SWE as a discriminating executable profile benchmark and characterizes one exact hosted-memory configuration, but it does not establish an external-system mechanism, superiority among memory-bearing conditions, equivalence, or broad product generality. The original v2.0.5 findings and artifacts remain unchanged. --- ### Shortcut Learning in a Public Grape Disease Dataset: Annotation Granularity as a Modulator, Not a Cause Authors: Pushuo Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20663v1 Public datasets for agricultural disease detection are usually judged fit for use from reported metrics, which say nothing about whether the annotation scheme is internally consistent. On one public grape disease dataset (3288 images, 11995 boxes, 6 classes), varying model capacity, input resolution and detection paradigm yields a test-set mAP50 range comparable to seed-to-seed noise, with the bottleneck at small objects across all five architectures. The finding lies on the data side: one class is annotated at whole-leaf level (median box area 43.16% of the image) while the other five are annotated at lesion level. On 5156 cross-species images containing no grape, 65.7% of the false-positive boxes fall into that one class, an over-representation of 13.41x relative to its share of the training annotations. Counterfactual retraining establishes a causal effect of granularity on the magnitude of the shortcut: shrinking only that class's boxes cuts its cross-species false positives by 66%, and a placebo control confirms the effect is specific to the manipulated class. A manipulation in the opposite direction, with criteria registered in advance, returns a negative result: coarsening the finest class to whole-leaf level (0.57% to 40.37%), matched in box count and share of annotations and with higher in-distribution AP, still leaves its cross-species false positives at zero boxes, while the unmanipulated original class holds 50.0% of them. Annotation granularity is therefore a modulator of this shortcut, not its cause: it can amplify or attenuate a sink that already exists, but cannot create one, and what fixes the destination remains open. We also give a granularity screening statistic requiring neither images nor training, and show airborne lesion-level detection to be optically out of reach. The failure mode is invisible to in-distribution evaluation. --- ### Auditable by Construction: An Ontology-Driven Framework for Trustworthy LLM Analytics in Enterprise Finance Authors: Sergiy Lunyakin Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20661v1 Enterprise adoption of large language models in finance is constrained less by fluency than by trust: in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and other regulated workflows, an answer is usable only if it is traceable to authoritative sources and auditable after the fact. This paper argues that retrieval-augmented generation for enterprise finance should be evaluated on auditability alongside accuracy, and presents the Knowledge-Driven Analytics Framework (KDAF), which builds ontology-driven knowledge systems through six iterative stages and retrieves evidence via Context-Aware Relevance Propagation (CARP), so that every retrieved fact carries its relationship type, confidence, and source lineage. An evaluation on FinanceBench (145 questions) compares KDAF against zero-context inference, BM25, concept-weighted lexical retrieval, and ungrounded graph traversal. First, retrieval is necessary: zero-context inference reaches 4.1% correctness against 10-12% for retrieval-augmented conditions. Second, on answer correctness the retrieval conditions are statistically indistinguishable (KDAF vs BM25: -0.007, 95% CI (-0.021, 0.000)), so accuracy alone does not justify structured retrieval here -- a negative result we report explicitly. Third, on auditability the ordering reverses: KDAF attains the highest citation traceability F1 (0.515), exceeding ungrounded traversal by +0.027 (CI (0.006, 0.050)) and BM25 by +0.052 (CI (0.024, 0.083)), intervals excluding zero. Graph-structured retrieval also admits no evidence from outside the question subject entity (0 of 426 items, against 16.8% and 20.2% for lexical baselines), and every selected item resolves to a complete provenance chain. We argue that auditability, not accuracy, is the axis on which ontology-grounded retrieval earns its cost. --- ### Predicting Resource Efficient Hamiltonian Decomposition for Continuous-Time Quantum Walk Simulations Authors: Mostafa Atallah, Rebekah Herrman, Zain H. Saleem Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20660v1 Simulating a continuous-time quantum walk (CTQW) on a graph in the circuit model of quantum computing requires decomposing its Hamiltonian into terms that can be Trotterized into hardware-native gates. We consider two such decompositions: the standard Pauli decomposition and the recently introduced matching decomposition. Prior work suggests that the matching decomposition uses fewer CX gates on sparse graphs, while the Pauli decomposition uses fewer on denser graphs. Since CX gates dominate error and runtime on current hardware, we train machine learning models to predict, for a given graph, which of the two decompositions produces the smaller CX gate count. We train and evaluate on the complete population of all 11,117 connected eight-vertex graphs from Brendan McKay's database, so the class balance and overlap are measured directly rather than estimated. We use twelve features: ten topological properties of the graph and two that count the terms the Pauli and matching decompositions produce (n_Pauli and n_match), both computable without transpiling the simulation circuit. Standard topological properties alone provide little predictive power. Instead, the dominant signal comes from n_Pauli, a property of the Hamiltonian decomposition rather than an intrinsic property of the graph; degree variance is the only other feature that carries signal. Across a range of models the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) falls in a narrow band, from 0.569 untuned to 0.593 after tuning, so no single architecture stands out. We adopt a single-hidden-layer neural network at MCC 0.593. Applied frozen to a held-out, class-balanced test set of larger graphs (up to 256 vertices) from structured and Erdos-Renyi families, the model transfers, with MCC rising from 0.785 at N=8 to 1 at N>=64. --- ### Lift, Associate, and Fuse: A Decision-Centric Framework for 2D-to-3D Foundation Model Transfer Authors: Wentao Sun, Yiping Chen, John S. Zelek, Jonathan Li Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20659v1 Methods that transfer predictions from two-dimensional foundation models into three-dimensional segmentation are commonly grouped by task or representation. Those groupings obscure the decisions that determine whether a system remains coherent across views: where image evidence is grounded, when observations become one identity, how semantic and granularity conflicts are handled, which information is fused, and what state survives for later queries. We introduce \textbf{Lift, Associate, and Fuse (LAF)}, a decision-centric framework that represents a transfer system as five operators: \textbf{Generate, Associate, Reconcile, Fuse, and Persist/Query}. LAF defines an explicit contract for the persistent carrier---its spatial support, semantic state, identity state, uncertainty, provenance, and supported operations---and identifies the first stage at which discarded evidence becomes unrecoverable. We operationalize the framework as a structured audit protocol and apply it to 161 systems available through 7 August 2026, spanning point-, field-, Gaussian-, object-, graph-, and memory-based carriers. Representation, temporal, relational, and feed-forward stress tests required no additional analytical stage after the final confirmation pass. The resulting decision traces expose four recurring properties: association does not establish identity; carrier design fixes both the query interface and correction boundary; rendered-view, native-3D, and proposal-level evaluations are not interchangeable; and qualifiers such as \emph{training-free}, \emph{real-time}, \emph{open-vocabulary}, and \emph{generalizable} are meaningful only when attached to a stage and a complete cost ledger. LAF therefore supplies a representation-neutral method for comparing existing systems, diagnosing irreversible failures, and specifying revisable 3D perception for future agents. --- ### RiskTraf: Risk-Extrapolated Residual Learning for Multi-Variate Traffic Flow Prediction Authors: Guangyu Wang, Zhidan Liu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20656v1 Traffic sensors commonly record flow, speed, and occupancy, but standard traffic flow forecasting benchmarks and models rarely exploit all three raw measurements reliably. Although speed and occupancy provide sensor-native traffic-state information beyond flow alone, existing releases often omit these variables, replace them with proxies, or contain logically inconsistent records. Moreover, direct empirical risk minimization over three-variable inputs may exploit regime-dependent shortcuts, as the relationships among flow, speed, and occupancy vary substantially between free-flow and congested states. We introduce \textbf{PEMSB-3V}, a public benchmark suite that preserves raw flow, speed, and occupancy measurements from PeMS detectors for flow prediction. We also propose \textbf{RiskTraf}, a model-agnostic risk-extrapolated residual plug-in. For each trained spatio-temporal backbone, RiskTraf freezes the selected checkpoint and learns a lightweight zero-start residual head from historical speed and occupancy. The residual head constructs ordered traffic-risk environments and optimizes horizon-wise flow corrections with a risk extrapolation objective, thereby mitigating regime-specific shortcut correlations without modifying the backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiskTraf consistently improves diverse forecasting backbones and outperforms debiasing and distribution-shift adaptation methods. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Guangyu4/RiskTraf. --- ### Meta-clustering of milk mid-infrared spectra identifies dairy cow groups associated with negative energy balance in early lactation Authors: T. Touil, E. R. Paquet Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20653v1 Clustering methods have been used to identify distinct groups of milk samples, cows, or herds. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, particularly mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy, has been applied to individual cow milk samples to predict various milk traits. Applying clustering directly to MIR spectral data may reveal latent groups of cows associated with milk traits or health disorders and can help prevent these conditions or monitor at-risk animals. This study aimed to identify groups of individual dairy cows in early lactation directly from milk MIR spectra and to analyze their associations with milk traits. Using a dataset of 407,632 individual milk MIR records from 3,408 commercial farms, we combined (i) spectral filtering that selects informative wavenumbers, (ii) two dimensionality-reduction methods: principal component analysis (PCA) and an autoencoder, and (iii) two clustering algorithms: k-means and spectral clustering to yield eight different clustering approaches. We regrouped the assigned clusters into meta-clusters that encompassed the most similar ones identified by the eight approaches. Our results revealed five distinct meta-clusters of early-lactation individual dairy cows significantly associated with milk traits. Despite substantial differences, the eight approaches converged on the same five meta-clusters, and the classic, computationally efficient PCA-based k-means approach using the full spectrum recaptured clusters identified by more sophisticated, computationally intensive approaches. The five meta-clusters were strongly associated with DIM and appeared to reflect a gradient of negative energy balance (NEB) severity: severe, moderate, and possibly mild, while the remaining two likely represented cows recovering from NEB, one with rapid restoration of energy balance and one in early recovery. ---