# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 84 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #4151–4200 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/84 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/83.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/85.md) ### Beyond Effectiveness: A Multi-Criteria Framework for Comparing Practical Socio-Technical Interventions Authors: Catherine King, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20649v1 Designers and policymakers in sociotechnical domains like content moderation, privacy interfaces, recommender systems and beyond, must choose among a growing menu of proposed interventions, but typically lack a principled basis for comparing them. Prior work tends to evaluate interventions individually and mostly along the effectiveness criteria, while implementation constraints such as cost, effort and feasibility are often considered separately. We present a multi-criteria framework for evaluating sociotechnical interventions. This framework is instantiated through the case of misinformation, a domain of intense focus for proposed countermeasures. We survey $N=39$ researchers on 40 operationalized interventions across five evaluative criteria: political feasibility, effectiveness, user acceptance, cost, and implementation effort. We find that the interventions that experts judge to be the most effective are not always the most acceptable to the public or the most feasible to implement. We also discuss how this tension has implications for the design of sociotechnical interventions beyond misinformation, and offer a decision framework for practitioners navigating the trade-offs of sociotechnical interventions. --- ### Directional Contextual Representations for Dependency Relations: Why Cross-Direction Pairing Fails Authors: Sai Krishna Arthanari, JaeHyeong Chang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20647v1 Splitting a bidirectional LSTM's contextual representation into a forward-only $F_i$ (strictly a function of tokens $1..i$) and a backward-only $B_i$ (strictly a function of tokens $i..n$) beats either alone and beats a fused self-attention representation for dependency relation-type classification. But a specific, natural extension of this idea -- pairing a token's forward state against a \emph{candidate}'s backward state (``cross-direction'' pairing, $F_i$ vs.\ $B_j$) -- consistently \emph{underperforms} same-direction pairing, and the penalty \emph{grows}, not shrinks, with token distance, both paired-bootstrap significant. We diagnose why using a frozen-trunk methodology: architectural information leakage between directions is impossible by construction (a single-layer BiLSTM, verified by code inspection); 93\% of the same-vs-cross gap survives freezing the trunk and training only fresh heads, ruling out training-co-adaptation as the primary cause; linear regression shows partial representational redundancy between $F_i$ and $B_i$ ($R^2{=}0.324$ vs.\ $0.028$ for a shuffled control) and a linear probe shows partial anticipatory encoding of upcoming tokens in $F_i$ (36.5\% vs.\ 17.2\% majority baseline) -- real effects, but neither alone, nor combined, cleanly explains the full gap. Extended frozen-trunk diagnostics (a positional probe and a distance-decay probe) show directional information is genuinely stored but not exactly positioned, and propagates only a few tokens before decaying to baseline -- consistent with, and mechanistically underneath, the distance-growth finding. --- ### One Hierarchy, Two Systems: Semantic Product IDs for Discovery-Surface Ranking and Search-Page Query Reformulation Authors: Steven Xu, Sanjyot Thete, Saathvik Dirisala, Raghav Saboo, Nimesh Sinha, Leo Shao, Elyse Winer, Sudeep Das, Martin Wang, Kyle MacDonald Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20640v1 Multi-merchant e-commerce catalogs contain equivalent and related products under different merchant-scoped identifiers, fragmenting behavioral evidence across merchants. Expert-defined taxonomies, meanwhile, are often too coarse for fine-grained discovery. We investigate whether a single hierarchical Semantic ID (\sid{}) representation can support personalized ranking and query reformulation. Learned once from product-content embeddings, the hierarchy defines product concepts at multiple granularities that each application combines with its own behavioral and serving context. For ranking, we aggregate consumer affinity and product performance over \sid{} prefixes and derive sequence features for candidate products and consumer histories. Controlled ablations show improved offline relevance, while online evaluation of the full ranking treatment shows stronger top-slot add-to-cart engagement and broader exposure for less-popular products. For query reformulation, we ground queries and session transitions in \sid{} concepts, use the hierarchy for navigation and refinement, and filter suggestions against the merchant's assortment. Offline evaluation shows finer intent preservation than taxonomy and higher-quality suggestions than raw query-string transitions; online evaluation shows reduced search effort and earlier access to purchasable products. These results show that a shared semantic product hierarchy can support both recommendation and search while preserving the task-specific context required by each application. --- ### MV2GF: Multi-view Pedestrian Detection with a Visual Geometric Foundation Model Authors: Taiga Yamane, Satoshi Suzuki, Ryo Masumura, Shota Orihashi, Tomohiro Tanaka, Mana Ihori, Naoki Makishima Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20639v1 Multi-View Pedestrian Detection (MVPD) aims to detect pedestrians in the form of a bird's eye view map from multi-view images. Recent MVPD methods adopt a unified framework that projects 2D image features into a 3D world space and aggregates them into a single feature. Although they are effective, they struggle to generalize to unseen camera configurations during training due to two main issues. First, they are difficult to capture accurate visual geometry across views in unseen camera configurations. Second, they make detection models highly dependent on distortion patterns during training arising from their image feature projection. To address these, we leverage a visual geometric foundation model and propose MV2GF. This foundation model has exhibited strong generalization in capturing visual geometry across views and predicting accurate 3D attributes in diverse camera configurations. MV2GF fuses task-specific features with general-purpose geometric features extracted by the foundation model to effectively capture the visual geometry even in unseen camera configurations. Furthermore, MV2GF projects each pixel in the image features to an appropriate 3D location using 3D pointmaps predicted by the foundation model, preventing the detection model from depending on distortion patterns during training. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging a visual geometric foundation model for MVPD and that MV2GF generalizes better than existing methods. --- ### Provable Edge-of-Stability for Adam on a One-Dimensional Quadratic Authors: Yiman Fong, Heng Yang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20638v1 The edge-of-stability (EoS) phenomenon of Adam has been widely observed, while its underlying dynamical mechanism is not yet fully understood. We study uncorrected Adam on a one-dimensional quadratic, a clean setting where constant curvature isolates the optimizer-induced dynamics behind the EoS. We characterize the resulting dynamics across the parameter space. In broad regimes, we prove that Adam exhibits a restoring tendency toward its frozen stability threshold $2(1+β_1)/(η(1-β_1))$. We also identify settings in which this edge-seeking mechanism breaks down, including strictly subcritical periodic orbits and specially tuned trajectories that converge to the optimum while remaining uniformly supercritical. These results give a concrete dynamical explanation for Adam's EoS in a setting free of evolving loss geometry, while also exposing its limitations. --- ### ARQ: Agentic CodeQL Query Refinement for C/C++ Vulnerability Detection Authors: Chunyi Wang, Yunfei Ke, Junfeng Yang, Yun-Yun Tsai, Penghui Li Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20637v1 Static analyzers have been widely adopted for vulnerability detection in C/C++ programs. Query-based static analyzers (e.g., CodeQL) encode vulnerable code patterns in detection queries and match them against source code. However, existing queries still suffer from false positives (FPs, incorrectly flagging benign code as vulnerable) and false negatives (FNs, missing real vulnerabilities). We present ARQ, an agentic framework that automatically refines C/C++ CodeQL queries using execution-grounded evidence from synthesized C/C++ programs. Our key insight is that a synthesized program exposes a query's weakness whenever its execution disagrees with the query's verdict. If the program is genuinely vulnerable but the query stays silent, the query has an FN weakness; if the program is safe but the query fires anyway, it has an FP weakness. ARQ then runs an LLM-based refinement loop that repairs the query using these disagreements as ground truth. Unlike previous query refining methods, ARQ requires no labeled datasets, no commit history, and no vulnerability-specific templates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ARQ by refining 12 official CodeQL queries using three commercial LLMs (GPT-5.4, Claude-Sonnet-4.6, and Gemini-3.5-flash). We compare both ARQ-refined and original CodeQL queries on the Juliet v1.3 and FormAI v2 datasets and show that ARQ-refined queries detect substantially more true positives, by up to 119.8\%, with a Precision of at least 98.0\% throughout. ARQ successfully fixed three unresolved GitHub issues raised in the official CodeQL query repository that had remained open for as long as \textit{27 months}. The refined queries also exposed two previously undiscovered bugs in the real-world libraries libpng and zlib. --- ### MIL-BERT: Classification of Arbitrarily Large Text with Performance and Explanatory Guarantees Authors: John Cadigan, Dayne Freitag, Eric Yeh Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20636v1 Many text classification decisions are viable based on constituent excerpts alone. Taking inspiration from the field of multiple instance learning, we present an algorithm for training a neural network to classify text by selecting such excerpts. We show that our approach is also scalable with demonstrated learning against samples with nearly 1M tokens. We evaluate our methods on 7 datasets with emphasis on long-textual collections that far exceed the encoding limit of our base model. We present state-of-the-art results with this algorithm on 3 datasets: identification of political bias in news outlets, trigger warnings in long stories, and demographic characteristics of authors in tweet collections. Furthermore, the model trained on weakly-labeled collections of text (bags) generalizes to accurately classify constituent, smaller instances. Besides a new state-of-the-art for these problems, this approach is one of the few neural methods to excel in these datasets. --- ### Minimax Optimality of Score-Entropy Discrete Diffusion Authors: Cholyeon Cho, Yuchen Wu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20635v1 Discrete diffusion models have demonstrated strong performance across a range of datasets, including natural language data and graph-structured data. Among many variants, score-entropy discrete diffusion (SEDD) has achieved particularly strong empirical results. In SEDD, new samples are generated by iteratively evaluating a sequence of concrete score functions, which are learned by minimizing a score-entropy loss. While much of the prior theoretical literature on discrete diffusion has focused on the sampling efficiency of SEDD under the assumption of small score estimation error, recent work has begun to investigate the finite-sample properties of score estimation itself. In this work, we take a different route by investigating the fundamental statistical limits of concrete score estimation. We focus on uniform and masking discrete diffusions, two of the most widely adopted discrete diffusion models. We establish a minimax lower bound under the score-entropy loss, and propose an MLE-based thresholding estimator that matches this lower bound up to constant and polylogarithmic factors that depend on neighboring density ratios. We further show that, for any target distribution, this density ratio is naturally controlled under both uniform and masking discrete diffusion models, yielding nearly matching minimax lower and upper bounds for the aggregated score estimation error. Our results imply that, with appropriate initialization and discretization, SEDD can achieve nearly optimal minimax sample complexity, as measured by the KL divergence between the target and generated distributions. --- ### AgentMercury: Your Agent Can Synthesize Verifiable Environments for Business Scenarios at scale Authors: Minbyul Jeong, Chanwoong Yoon Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20634v1 Agents learn to act through interaction with environments, yet the environments used for training are often manually constructed or synthesized around predefined tasks and benchmarks. This task-centric paradigm makes it difficult to scale environments that reflect realistic and evolving workflows where diverse tasks can naturally emerge from the underlying world. We introduce AgentMercury, a scalable framework for synthesizing executable environments from high-level business scenarios. Rather than constructing an environment for a specific task, AgentMercury first instantiates a persistent world with entities, services, tools, state, and executable cross-service invariants, from which diverse tasks and interaction trajectories can subsequently emerge. We construct 4,783 executable environments spanning 14 industries and 50 countries, and use them as training substrates for reinforcement learning. Despite being generated without targeting the evaluation benchmarks, policies trained on these business-oriented environments improve substantially on both enterprise workflows and out-of-domain benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, scientific computing, and tool use. In our experiments, Qwen3.5-4B improves from 12.3 to 15.7 on EnterpriseOps-GYM and from 45.9 to 56.0 on AIME26 after training on AgentMercury environments. We further show that the construction process itself can be learned: fine-tuning Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on construction traces increases executable-world authoring success from 3.3% to 83.3% on held-out business scenarios. These results show that scenario-grounded environments can provide useful and generalizable learning signals beyond benchmark-specific training, while their construction can itself become a learnable capability. --- ### Sparse Token Routing in Efficient Transformers Authors: Sai Krishna Arthanari, JaeHyeong Chang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20632v1 Efficient-transformer research often motivates token pruning and adaptive computation with the claim that not all tokens require equal computational effort. We test this claim end to end using SEWN, a two-stream Transformer that routes tokens through either lightweight or full-capacity processing using a learned gate. Across our experiments, routing introduces negligible accuracy change relative to parameter-matched baselines, while the gate's token-importance signal depends critically on how it is learned. A static lexicon-seeded prior fails a counterfactual faithfulness test on BoolQ, whereas a fully contextual gate achieves highly significant separation ($p<10^{-10}$) on both evaluated tasks without changing task accuracy. --- ### Weighted Memory Tree: Remembering What Matters for Long-Horizon LLM Agents Authors: Quang Dao, Purvi Kathalkar, Kenneth Eaton Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20631v1 Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated the ability to solve multi-step tasks requiring planning, tool use, and external information access, yet growing execution histories increase inference cost and expose reasoning to outdated, irrelevant, or misleading information, potentially degrading reasoning quality. Existing memory approaches organize or compress execution histories but provide limited mechanisms for deciding which memories remain active. We introduce the, a hierarchical memory system that organizes execution into tasks, subtasks, and actions while assigning each memory a dynamic retention score. Event-based updates and selection-based decay revise these scores, allowing WMT to preserve useful information, fold completed trajectories, suppress low-utility content, and retain access to folded context. We evaluate WMT on GAIA-Text using Qwen3-8B, Gemma 4 E4B, and Llama-3.1-8B, with ablations and memory-poisoning experiments. Relative to linear memory, WMT improves accuracy by an average of 9.97 percentage points while reducing prompt-token usage by 32.8%. Memory-poisoning experiments show that WMT limits the persistence and propagation of unreliable information. Our results suggest that effective long-horizon agent memory depends less on storing more information than on deciding which information should remain active. --- ### SAGE: A Unified Algebra and Self-Adaptive Execution for AI Functions in SQL Authors: Xiangqi Wang Published: 2026-08-21 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20630v1 SQL systems increasingly expose AI functions for tasks such as classification, extraction, filtering, ranking, retrieval, joining, and summarization. Despite their diverse APIs, these functions play only three relational roles: transforming individual rows, aggregating groups, or generating relationships between row pairs. We present SAGE (Self-Adaptive Generative Execution), a unified logical and physical framework that captures these roles with three typed primitives, AI_SCALAR, AI_AGG, and AI_JOIN, and composes them naturally with standard relational operators. All primitives share a confidence-gated execution interface while supporting physical strategies tailored to their relational shape. The main challenge is AI_JOIN, where SAGE analyzes the predicate, decomposes compound conditions when possible, and uses a recipe card together with a small label-free probe to select among complete execution strategies. Across a broad audit of public AI operators and evaluations spanning scalar, aggregate, and join workloads, this formulation covers common AI functionality while consistently improving execution quality and efficiency. SAGE achieves the strongest overall SemBench performance and, on a representative factorable join, reduces pairwise model calls by more than two orders of magnitude, yielding a 358-fold measured cost reduction. --- ### Neural Ideals and Neural Codes: An Algebraic Framework for Neural Network Classification and Feature Interpretation Authors: Venkata Subbaiah Yerrapati, Rahul Dixit, Ajay Kumar Shukla Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, math.AC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30279v1 Understanding the features captured by the hidden layers of neural networks is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, despite their widespread success across various classification problems. In this work, we propose an algebraic framework for examining neural networks that model classification problems. Certain results, such as the correspondence between the neural network and neural ideals, algorithms for computing the neural ideals, and a stabilization theorem that enables approximation of the neural ideals, are first established. As an application to the framework, we present algorithms to identify and interpret the features captured by each hidden-layer neuron. Along with these theoretical developments, the practical performance has been demonstrated on the MNIST digit dataset, and the results highlight the pivotal role of neural ideals as a mathematical and computational tool for analyzing the features captured by neural networks. Further, we develop an interactive software that builds on the presented framework to visualize the features captured by each neuron. This tool is available at https://github.com/yvs1967/neural-network-representation-explorer --- ### False-science induction in autonomous scientific discovery Authors: Hanbing Liang, Fujun Liu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27883v1 Closed-loop discovery systems increasingly execute experiments and update decisions autonomously, turning record integrity into part of the experimental apparatus. We show that false-science induction arises when legitimate physical objects and measurements are paired incorrectly, driving neural surrogates to faithfully learn record-induced associations that do not correspond to the true object-outcome relationship while marginal data distributions remain unchanged. Across green fluorescent protein fitness and materials band-gap prediction loops, coherent paired misbinding systematically redirects experimental budgets toward low-performing basins, whereas same-volume random swaps have negligible effects. These observations identify error coherence, rather than raw error frequency, as the primary variable controlling this budget misallocation in the tested loops. The resulting binding identifiability boundary supports monitored-axis quarantines and feedback-conflict triage, which intercept over-concentrated proposals before execution and isolate the corrupted hypothesis axis. --- ### Noise-Induced Predictability Redistribution Across Forecast Horizons of Extreme Events in Chaotic Dynamics Authors: Andrei Velichko, Viet-Thanh Pham Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: nlin.CD, cs.LG, physics.data-an arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27877v1 Extreme events (EEs) in chaotic dynamics are rare broad excursions whose forecastability can be altered by dynamical noise. We investigate how noise changes EE occurrence and prediction skill across forecast horizons in a third-order autonomous chaotic flow. A single clean-data threshold is frozen for all realizations, broad events are defined by one maximum per excursion, and a future window W=15 is predicted from a 15-time-unit history using HistGradientBoosting with chronological data separation. As the forecast gap G between the observed history and the future event window increases, the clean Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) decreases from 0.641 at G=0 to 0.165 at G=15. Noise dependence is evaluated with ten paired realizations at eight amplitudes. The mean short-horizon score increases from 0.456 in clean data to 0.546 at sigma=0.007; the paired gain is 0.0895 (95% CI 0.0494-0.1295; Holm-adjusted p=0.0234). Noise strongly increases EE occurrence while event amplitude and width remain comparatively stable. Equalizing positive training counts across noise levels substantially attenuates the short-horizon gain, whereas strong noise reduces intermediate-horizon skill. We term this horizon-dependent, nonuniform change in forecast skill noise-induced predictability redistribution (NIPR). --- ### Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses Authors: Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap Bhardwaj Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27871v1 In mainstream agent frameworks, a step ends when the agent's own output says it has finished. Durable-execution platforms bound retries and time, but their checker conventionally lives in the same codebase as the work: a discipline the deployment is trusted to keep, not a property the harness enforces. We state what an agent harness must guarantee, prove it, and build the instrument that measures whether a harness delivers it. A bounded loop is a worker, an independent gate the worker cannot write to, and a declared budget; a bounded-loop graph composes them with a repair relation that lets a downstream failure re-run a finished upstream node. Three guarantees follow. It finishes: termination holds under repair, with the worst-case attempt total in closed form, if the repair budget is global not per node. It does not drift: no node reaches DONE without a gate verdict in an append-only hash-chained ledger, proved from control flow, since repair leaves no topological order to induct along. It does not overspend: the ceiling is enforced inside an attempt, not between attempts. Gates are measured against a two-tier held-out mutant corpus. We characterise two classes that let a sound-looking check pass anything: vacuity, satisfied by the absence of the thing checked, and self-attestation, where the subject supplies the value the check is applied to. On a 69-loop catalogue the instrument found 47 vacuous gates in shipped, reviewed code. Against the repaired gates it reports no false accepts over 209 destroying mutants ($α\le 1.8\%$, Wilson 95%); that figure is saturation, not quality: freezing the gates and applying a fresh operator family recovers a 23.3% false-accept rate where the exhausted corpus reported none. A rate belongs to a specific gate; the apparatus, not our number, is the contribution. Engine, catalogue and corpus are Apache-2.0. --- ### Learning What to Activate: Combinatorial Capability Allocation for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agents Authors: Wenhao Yuan, Chenchen Lin, Jian Chen, Jinfeng Xu, Shuo Yang, Edith Cheuk-Han Ngai Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27869v1 Long-horizon multimodal agents rely on specialized capabilities for perception, retrieval, reasoning, verification, and execution. Existing designs typically activate a fixed capability set or invoke a predefined workflow, incurring substantial computational overhead while failing to accommodate stage-dependent capability demands. In this paper, we study the \textit{combinatorial capability allocation} problem for long-horizon multimodal agent systems, where the system selects a cost-sensitive subset of specialized capabilities at each interaction stage, which is nontrivial since capability values depend on the selected subset, while previous allocations alter the states encountered by subsequent decisions. We introduce \textsc{CoCA}, an on-policy learning framework that recovers a deployable capability-subset policy from sparse conditional comparisons. On states visited by the student policy, the stronger teacher compares the marginal net values of candidate capabilities, conditioned on the currently selected subset. Then, we adopt a conditional utility model to transform such comparisons into an autoregressive capability-subset policy, avoiding explicit enumeration. We further introduce dual-level on-policy distillation to address distribution mismatch both across environment states and within the partial subsets encountered during set construction. Finally, trajectory-level reinforcement learning refines the distilled policy toward task success, activation cost, and allocation stability. At inference time, allocation is performed solely by the lightweight student policy without teacher queries or online updates. Experiments on long-horizon multimodal environments and controlled capability-demand shifts demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. --- ### TopoGS: Topology-Aware Anchor Feature Aggregation for Large-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Wei Zhang, Shiqiang Gong, Shengkai Yu, Zeyu Wang, Clement Mallet, Zhitong Xiong, Qi Wang Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27868v1 Octree-based 3D Gaussian Splatting organizes anchors into multi-level hierarchies for level-of-detail rendering, but features at different levels are typically optimized independently, leaving the octree topology underused during feature learning. We observe that uniform cross-level aggregation produces asymmetric effects: fine-level anchors benefit from coarse context, whereas coarse-level anchors require selective information from their descendants. We therefore propose TopoGS, a topology-aware anchor feature aggregation framework with two lightweight components. Hierarchical Anchor Coupling establishes bidirectional cross-level gradient pathways by fusing per-level context triplets with a residual MLP. Structure-Aware Containment Aggregation uses octree containment and hash-based matching to distinguish anchors with valid parent-child relations from isolated anchors, then applies soft weighting to accommodate varying topological sparsity. Experiments on ten scenes from Mill19, UrbanScene3D, Tanks & Temples, MatrixCity, and WHU show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods. TopoGS achieves average PSNR gains of 2.13, 1.78, and 0.29 dB over the strongest reported baseline on aerial, ground-level, and synthetic-cartographic scenes, respectively, while rendering faster and using less memory. Code is available at https://github.com/WZ-CS/TopoGS. --- ### Evaluation Choices Decide the Forecasting Leaderboard: Evidence from a Production Marketplace Panel Authors: Md Rezwanul Islam, Wael Mohammed Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27867v1 A forecasting benchmark reports which method won. We show that the answer is set by the evaluator's choices before any model is fitted. We benchmark 24 forecasting methods and one textbook reference, including six 2025-era time series foundation models, on a production marketplace panel of 1,887 business customers over 67 months. We hold the data, the horizon and the period fixed, and vary only the evaluation design. Three choices each reverse or dissolve a headline conclusion. Changing the unit of analysis from the market total to the individual customer moves our production baseline from second of nineteen, beaten by nothing, to twenty-third of twenty-five. Nineteen of its twenty-four challengers beat it there. Changing how much error is pooled decides whether a Diebold-Mariano test finds anything at all. Scoring prediction intervals rather than point forecasts reorders the field almost completely, with a rank correlation of 0.02 on intermittent demand. We then measure what the deployed system gets from this. Its selection rule captures 55% of the distance between doing nothing and choosing with hindsight. The reversal is not a quirk of our data. We ran the released protocol, unchanged, on the public M5 retail panel. The same baseline shape places first at the market total and last per series, beaten by everything, and a replayed selection rule closes 64.7% of the same floor-to-ceiling distance there. Adding five zero-shot foundation models to that roster changes who wins at the total, not the shape. The bands' blind spot travels too: conformal bands under-cover most on the spikiest items. Splitting our own panel into ever smaller groups turns the contrast into a curve: the baseline's rank worsens at every level of disaggregation. We release the evaluation protocol and report an error of our own that inverted a result before we caught it. --- ### What Changed? Drift Detection with Real, Virtual, and Incomparable Diagnosis Authors: Kentaro Oda Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27865v1 Sharing a deep encoder does not, by itself, fix the central confound of task-comparison scores. We show that cross-evaluated heads on a frozen shared representation inherit the extrapolation confound of shallow exchange scores: pure input rotations with fixed labels inflate a deep exchange score from about 0 to 0.80, while representation-novelty scores are blind in the complementary direction (flat under label permutations that change the task completely). Transplanting a conditional two-discriminator discrepancy into the embedding space resolves both blind spots: the functional axis stays within +-0.001 under rotations and tracks label-permutation drift mass monotonically. Built into a mixture-of-heads lifecycle, the two-axis gate attains better decision quality with fewer heads than exchange or novelty triggers at a matched training budget. On generalized category discovery, the same chunk-level functional axis separates semantic novelty from photometric shift with AUROC 0.98-0.99 where per-input OOD scores (MSP, Energy, Mahalanobis, KNN) sit near chance for that distinction. All findings replicate across frozen ImageNet-21k ViT-B/16 and self-supervised DINOv2 backbones on CIFAR-100, and extend to residual adapter pools with recurrence, where a null-calibrated novelty trigger never fires on mechanism changes while the two-axis gate handles them with full recurrence reuse. We state explicitly the common-factoring condition under which embedding-space conclusions transfer to the original mechanism. --- ### A hierarchy of faithfulness criteria for knowledge base completion Authors: Olga Mashkova, Robert Hoehndorf Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27863v1 Knowledge graph completion is evaluated by ranking observed triples above randomly corrupted ones, which treats every unobserved fact as false. When the object being completed is a description logic knowledge base rather than a plain graph, the open world assumption and deductive closure make this inadequate: relative to the knowledge base, a candidate axiom is entailed, contradictory, or undetermined, and a model that cannot separate a logically impossible axiom from a plausible novel one is not merely less accurate but semantically incorrect. We ask what it means for a knowledge base completion model to be logically faithful, and whether current embedding models are. We define a hierarchy of four increasingly strict criteria, discrimination, logical admissibility, monotonic logical faithfulness, and probabilistic logical faithfulness, and prove that they form a strict chain of implications. We ground the strongest criterion in the relative model count $P(α\mid\mathcal{O}) = \#(\mathcal{O}\cup\{α\})/\#(\mathcal{O})$, which recovers the trichotomy at its endpoints and ranks undetermined axioms in between. Evaluating knowledge graph and logic-geometric embedding models on $\mathcal{EL}$ ontologies, with entailed, contradictory, and undetermined test sets generated by a reasoner, we find that ranking accuracy does not imply logical faithfulness and that none of the evaluated models is faithful across the hierarchy. The code is available at https://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/kbc. --- ### Exact Minimax One-Bit Unbiased Compression: Heavy-Tail Necessity and Finite-Randomness Approximation Authors: Tao Jiang, Minbo Gao, Shaowei Cai Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27860v1 A pointwise-unbiased one-bit compressor reconstructs every real input in expectation while transmitting one bit. For a scalar source $P$ with CDF $F$, mean $m$, and $\mathcal J(P)=\int_{\mathbb R}\sqrt{F(r)(1-F(r))}\,dr$, we prove that the infimum of the source-averaged reconstruction second moment over all public-coin one-bit codes unbiased on $\mathbb R$ is $m^2+\mathcal J(P)^2$. For regular full-support sources, a distribution-centered random-threshold code attains this value; a converse over arbitrary randomized binary encoders and an equality analysis characterize every attaining code up to null sets, bit relabeling, and public-seed refinement. For the Gaussian location family $\mathcal N(μ,σ^2)$ with $|μ|\le cσ$, the equal prior on the endpoint means is least favorable and the minimax value is $σ^2Λ_c^2$. Exact Gaussian minimax optimality forces a critical heavy tail: at the endpoint means, absolute moments are finite exactly for $p<3$, and $\Pr(W>t)=Θ(t^{-3}/\sqrt{\log t})$. A Cauchy-mixture robustification inflates the second moment by at most $1/(1-η)$ while making every positive-order absolute moment finite. Finite-support public randomness with finite decoder means cannot achieve exact unbiasedness on $\mathbb R$, but a bounded-output approximation using exactly $R$ shared random bits has explicit bias and second-moment bounds converging to the minimax constant. Finally, coordinate allocation communicates exactly $B$ bits per Gaussian-gradient query. On Kim's continuous quadratic hard family, the expected optimization guarantee matches the lower bound in its dependence on $(σ,d,B,\varepsilon)$, and a finite-variance high-probability bound incurs only a logarithmic confidence factor. --- ### ChronosAttack: Adversarial Tool Scheduling Attacks on LLM Agents Authors: Arash Vashagh Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27857v1 Large language model (LLM) agents often process external tool responses as they arrive, making response timing part of the decision process. We introduce ChronosAttack, a delay-only scheduling attack that changes when authentic tool responses arrive without modifying, adding, removing, or accelerating them. Bounded delays can change the order of the same evidence and alter the final decision. We evaluate ChronosAttack on GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude show strong targeted shifts in vulnerable settings, Gemini shows large shifts in the opposite direction, and DeepSeek is more stable under the tested schedules. We also find that sequential agent state is not always required and that a single scheduling inversion can cause a large decision change. Synchronization and order-consistency defenses reduce attacker control over observation order. These results show that tool-response timing can itself form an attack surface in asynchronous LLM agents. --- ### Reachable Global Optimization in AI Systems: How Global Is Global? Authors: Wesley Shu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27855v1 AI systems increasingly claim to optimize prompts, policies, architectures, plans, tool-use trajectories, reasoning traces, and test-time computation. This paper argues that such claims are underspecified unless they state the region actually reachable by the system that performed the optimization. We introduce Reachability-Induced Optimization (RIO), a model in which a generator, verifier, controller, memory, tools, and budget induce a reachable candidate region. The returned solution is therefore a best visited point, an approximate reachable optimum, or an exact global optimum only when additional certificates relate the reachable region to the full formal space. We prove reachable-optimality, false-globality, gap- decomposition, certificate, escape, pruning, and control-value results. The full benchmark record contains 66,150 executed trials over six known-optimum landscape families, seven control policies, 270 landscapes, and 35 runs per landscape-method. The online appendix includes raw trial records, aggregate tables, figures, benchmark code, validation scripts, and checksums. The results show that control can restrict, expand, or misdirect reachability, and that optimization quality, reachability quality, and control reliability must be reported separately. --- ### Agentic Governance and Adversarial Verification for Policy-Constrained LLM Healthcare Appeal Generation Authors: Harshil Lodhiya, Alex McManus, Reese Walker Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27844v1 Claim denial management costs U.S. healthcare approximately $260 billion annually in administrative overhead. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can produce fluent clinical text, but single-agent architectures fail in high-stakes healthcare: they introduce unsupported clinical details and lose the logical structure of hierarchical payer policy. We propose AGVF (Agentic Governance and Adversarial Verification Framework), a multi-agent architecture for medical-necessity appeal generation under explicit policy and evidence constraints. AGVF models appeal synthesis as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) over five agents: policy formalization, evidence retrieval, gap analysis, adversarial critique, and gated synthesis. We prove that refinement over a fixed policy constraint graph monotonically reduces evidence-deficiency and terminates with either a complete satisfying frontier or a localized evidence gap. A deterministic citation- grounding gate prevents assertions without admissible evidence from entering shared state. We provide a reference implementation and validate it on 1,000 synthetic appeal cases parameterized from de-identified public hospital discharge data. The validation confirms zero citation-grounding violations across all AGVF cases and monotone deficiency reduction in every episode; ablating the gate raises violations to 100%, confirming it is load-bearing. The study uses no real patient records and does not measure clinical efficacy. AGVF thus contributes a theory-backed agentic architecture and verified reference implementation for policy-constrained LLM generation in healthcare. --- ### From Reasoning Strings to Partial Orders: Verifier-Certified Rule Transport through Quotient Policy Optimization Authors: Bang Xie, Hao Liu, Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Chenhao Ying, Yuan Luo, Senjian Zhang, Wei Chen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27833v1 Many computations admit several valid execution orders because independent subgoals or disjoint state updates can commute. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards usually treats each successful trace as a separate token sequence, so serialization choices can be mistaken for logical dependencies. We introduce Verifier-Certified Rule Transport (VCRT), which replays adjacent operation pairs with native verifiers. Pairs whose two orders are accepted and reach the same canonical state provide commutation certificates; rejected or state-changing reversals provide anti-diamonds. VCRT uses anti-diamonds to preserve genuine prerequisites and assigns policy credit to the total probability mass of each certified orbit. It also constrains post-swap consistency, source retention, and policy drift. We evaluate leave-one-environment-out transfer across ProofWriter, CLRS, and Lean through a shared anonymized relation-graph interface. All training and checkpoint decisions are frozen before held-out evaluation, which uses one greedy trajectory per item without search or verifier feedback. VCRT obtains a 77.60% macro pass rate versus 64.53% for the strongest matched baseline, a paired gain of 13.06 points (95% bootstrap CI (12.58, 13.54)). Lean accounts for most of this gain at 33.49 points, while ProofWriter and CLRS improve by 2.85 points on average. Mechanism tests consistently favor anti-diamond supervision, whereas No-Orbit is statistically indistinguishable from full VCRT. The evidence does not establish a general benefit from exact orbit aggregation. --- ### Mode Collapse Is Cheap to Detect: A Ground-Truth-Free Pre-Flight Check for Neural Samplers Authors: Jian Xu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26272v1 Neural samplers are trained against an unnormalised target $\tildeπ=e^{-E}$ with no samples from $π$, which leaves the practitioner with no way to tell whether an expensive training run has silently dropped part of the target. The diagnostics in common use are computed from the model's own draws and are therefore confined to the model's support: we exhibit a sampler whose self-normalised effective sample size is $0.99$ while it misses $87\%$ of the target mass. We argue that \emph{detecting} missing mass is a strictly easier problem than sampling it: detection needs one point per missed basin plus a local curvature estimate, whereas correction needs the sampler retrained. We turn this into a pre-flight check that consumes a few percent of the sampler's own training budget and uses only $E$, $\nabla E$ and $\nabla^2 E$. On Gaussian-mixture, Many-Well and rotated anisotropic Many-Well targets with exactly computable ground truth, the check estimates the missing mass to within $10^{-3}$ at $2.7\%$ of training cost, where a tuned annealed SMC reference needs $70$--$280\%$ of training cost to do worse. It also applies unchanged to a controlled-SDE sampler that has no tractable density, where ESS and the ELBO cannot be formed at all. The estimator carries a \emph{self-diagnostic} that, without ground truth, is conservative in the safe direction: across $60$ configurations it clears $16$, of which $15$ are accurate to $10^{-2}$ or better. We are explicit about what this does and does not license: the check cheaply produces evidence of missing mass, and sometimes evidence that the search has stabilised, but it cannot certify a run, and its thresholds are heuristic. We then map the boundary of the method on a real physical landscape, LJ-13, and report where it fails and why. --- ### Margin-Drop Coordinates for Cross-Budget Robustness Evaluation Authors: Yanliang Huang, Zhen Zhang, Peng Xie, Wenyuan Wu, Sitong Zhu, Zhuoqi Zeng, Amr Alanwar Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26081v1 Fixed-budget robustness evaluation can select the wrong frozen vision encoder. An encoder that survives a shallow attack may lose most of that robustness when the same evaluation is strengthened. We ask whether the shallow evaluation contains enough information to identify this budget fragility. For each clean-correct sample, the evaluation records the clean pairwise margin, the first-order linearized margin-drop scale, the margin drop from a clean-start one-step attack, and the drop reached by an iterative attack. Normalizing by that scale gives three margin-drop coordinates capturing clean margin slack, one-step shortfall, and drift, where drift is the additional normalized margin drop the iterative attack reaches beyond the one-step perturbation. Together, they reconstruct the normalized post-attack margin and therefore the pass-or-fail outcome. Across 42 pretrained frozen vision encoders, the shallow survival rate carries essentially no rank information about subsequent PGD-10 to PGD-200 collapse, at Spearman -0.006, while the median shallow drift coordinate ranks the same collapse at +0.811. The result persists in a held-out encoder pool and under an $\ell_\infty$ evaluation. With deep evaluation limited to 11 encoders, ranking by shallow drift recovers 11 of the 17 high-collapse encoders, compared with 5 under survival-rate ranking. The full coordinate decomposition further distinguishes cases that share the same fixed-budget residual but diverge at deeper budgets, and separates margin repair from drift repair under interventions, revealing distinct repair paths that endpoint robustness alone does not identify. --- ### Balancing Reasoning and Hardware Constraints in RAG Pipelines for Ukrainian Multi-Domain Document Understanding Authors: Illya Havrylov Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22124v1 This paper describes the system submitted to the UNLP 2026 Shared Task on Multi-Domain Document Understanding. The challenge required extracting precise answers, document IDs, and page numbers from a diverse corpus of Ukrainian PDF documents within a strict 9-hour offline Kaggle execution limit. During evaluation on the hidden private test set, optical character recognition (OCR) of scanned documents emerged as a severe bottleneck, consuming 5-7 hours of the total time budget due to sequential single-threaded execution. This overhead strictly limited the remaining time for Large Language Model (LLM) inference to approximately two hours for 500 questions. To guarantee pipeline completion without timeouts, we developed a resource-efficient Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline utilizing BM25, BGE-M3, and Cross-Encoder reranking. Rather than deploying parameter-heavy reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) which consistently timed out, we utilized a 4-bit quantized LapaLLM 12B model via llama.cpp on dual NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Prioritizing pipeline stability over multi-step reasoning, our system achieved a Private Score of 0.8095, placing 10th out of 15 active teams. --- ### StationPDE: Station-Oriented Surface PDE Learning for Multi-Station Multivariate Weather Forecasting Authors: Xiao Wang, Changjian Chen, Rongwen Li, Hongwu Liu, Kun Fang, Zhuo Tang Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22123v2 Multi-station multivariate weather forecasting aims to forecast future weather variables at multiple weather stations from historical surface observations. Existing station forecasting models learn statistical dependencies among discrete stations, but lack explicit physical evolution. Meanwhile, PDE-based weather models provide interpretable physical dynamics, yet require continuous fields and upper-air variables unavailable in surface station data. To bridge this gap, we propose StationPDE, a station-oriented surface PDE learning model. StationPDE constructs a terrain-aware continuous surface field from discrete station observations and decomposes its physical evolution into surface wind transport and upper-air inference. Surface wind transport explicitly evolves observable weather variables, while upper-air inference uses learnable horizontal diffusion to approximate the missing influence of unavailable upper-air variables. A parallel data-driven diffusion branch captures complementary motion patterns, and an adaptive router integrates the two forecasts for station-level multivariate forecasting. Experiments on Weather2K and MeteoNet show that StationPDE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing MSE by about $9.6\%$ on average compared with the strongest baseline. --- ### Rank Portability Does Not Imply Feasibility Portability: Target-Specific Evaluation of Joint Hardware Constraints Authors: Wesley Shu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22122v1 Cross-device hardware evaluation often assumes that if architecture rankings transfer across devices, a proxy device can support target-side model selection. We stress-test this assumption for joint latency-energy feasibility across two public architecture families. On NAS-Bench-201, cross-device rank correlations are moderate, while target-comparable feasible-set overlap remains incomplete. A faithful AdaProxy diagnostic substantially improves latency ranking, showing that the observed boundary failures are not simply due to weak adaptation. Exact finite-sample split-conformal analysis also exposes an evidence bottleneck: a finite one-sided 90% threshold requires at least nine calibration observations. We then replicate the phenomenon on 10,000 GPT architectures across 13 HW-GPT-Bench devices. Relative to an RTX3080 proxy, target latency SRCC ranges from 0.951 to 0.996, yet proxy-reuse violation risk ranges from 33.3% to 100% under matched joint constraints. These results show that rank portability, feasibility portability, and target-specific decision support are distinct evaluation objects. Cross-device evaluations should therefore report which target environments actually support the operating point being claimed. --- ### Modelling daily activity patterns from mobile phone location data via deep representation learning Authors: Xinglei Wang, Junyuan Liu, Guangsheng Dong, Zichao Zeng, Stephen Law, James Haworth, Tao Cheng Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22121v1 Passively collected mobile phone location data provide large-scale, longitudinal observations of human mobility but do not directly reveal activity purposes. The functional characteristics of visited locations offer useful contextual information, yet their relationship with activity purpose remains uncertain, particularly in mixed-use urban environments. We conceptualise activity pattern mining as an integrated process of representation, clustering, and interpretation, and propose the Activity Chain Encoder (ACE) for the representation stage. ACE is a self-supervised model that combines pre-trained urban embeddings with visit timing and duration and uses a Transformer to model the sequential organisation of stays. It is trained using masked activity modelling and identity-guided contrastive learning without requiring deterministic activity purpose labels. Learned daily representations are aggregated into user-level profiles, clustered, and interpreted through temporal-functional patterns and Census-derived demographic context. Applied to mobile phone app location data from London and compared with three representative methods, ACE supports the identification of six differentiated weekday activity-pattern groups characterised by distinct daily rhythms, urban functional contexts, and demographic associations. These complementary forms of evidence further support the development of empirically grounded activity-pattern personas, establishing a holistic route for deriving behaviourally meaningful population patterns from unlabelled mobile phone location data. The source code for the entire analytical pipeline developed in this study is publicly available at https://github.com/xlwang233/ACE. --- ### Success Leaves Detours: Learning Executable Walkthroughs for Long-Horizon Agents Authors: Kaijie Chen, Chenyu Fang, Liang Yan, Bo Li, Bo Zhang, Peng Ye Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22120v1 Test-time self-evolving agents improve by reusing past experience, yet sparse-reward trajectories contain failures, loops, and detours, while summaries often omit the state conditions and action dependencies needed for execution. We study executable Walkthrough induction from sparse-reward trajectories: extracting compact, state-conditioned, and verifiable procedures. Our key observation is that delayed credit identifies actions associated with progress but cannot determine whether they produce facts required by later actions. We propose Trace, a credit-guided, dependency-grounded framework that compiles noisy trajectories into executable Walkthrough Memory. It detects progress anchors from rewards and persistent state changes, propagates credit to identify valuable transitions, and estimates action prerequisites from cross-episode success and failure evidence. Backward dependency slicing then traces required facts to their producers, extracting dependency-consistent action chains while removing irrelevant loops and detours. The resulting Walkthroughs encode entry conditions, ordered state--action--effect steps, and completion and failure predicates, supporting reuse, intermediate-state resumption, and programmatic verification. Experiments on J-TTL, WebShop, and ScienceWorld with three open-source LLMs show that Trace consistently outperforms eight test-time learning and memory baselines. Compared with the strongest baseline, it improves average AUC and Final-$3$ by $30.0%$ and $40.5%$, respectively, while using fewer inference tokens. These results show that long-horizon interaction benefits more from state-conditioned executable procedures than from complete trajectories or abstract summaries. --- ### Evaluation Awareness Shifts from Format to Context with Model Scale Authors: Navraj Singh, Maheep Chaudhary Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22119v1 Evaluation awareness poses an unprecedented threat to model evaluation, but the mechanisms by which models detect it remain unknown. This study focuses on determining this and identifying contrasting mechanisms between smaller and larger models. While smaller models use the prompt's format sensitivity to detect evaluation, larger models often rely on higher-order reasoning to detect it. We evaluated Gemma 3 (1B, 4B, and 12B), Phi-3 (Mini and Medium), and Llama-3 8B using Chain-of-Thought analysis, representation probing, and Integrated Gradients attribution. Motivated by these findings, we propose a dual-pathway intervention that combines prompt sanitization with activation counter-steering to suppress both external evaluation triggers and their internal representations. Across 200 highly evaluation-aware prompts, our method achieves an average behavioral flip rate of 70.58\%, consistently outperforming either intervention alone. These results provide new insights into how evaluation awareness develops in compact language models and suggest that effective mitigation requires jointly addressing both prompt-level and representation-level signals.Datasets and codebase can be found in this \href{https://github.com/chahal-navi/Evaluation-Awareness-Compact-LLMs/tree/main}{Github Repository.} --- ### Evaluating GNNs for Success Prediction in Artist Collaboration Networks Authors: Wiktor Dowgiałło Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.SI, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02920v1 As the music industry becomes an increasingly collaborative effort, understanding the underlying structures of the artist network has become a focal point in cultural data analytics. This study expands on the previous analyses of the Italian and Danish networks by introducing a novel dataset of the Polish music scene. By utilizing methodologies used in the prior studies, this work enables a direct comparison between three distinct European music landscapes and allows to merged the created networks into one. Furthermore, this research introduces a framework to test the efficacy of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for artist popularity predictions based on the metadata and the position in the network. The statistical analysis revealed that the Polish and tri-national network exhibit similar properties and clustering behaviours, consistent with prior models. An evaluation of the predictive architectures reveals that while GNN models achieve a comparable F1-macro scores to the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) in specific cases however the MLP remains a superior model regarding the success metric. The results suggest that internal node features - such as genre and label affiliation might carry more predictive capabilities than the topology of the network. The higher performance of the GNN models in the tri-national network might also suggests that the relational features become more informative when the network spans multiple linguistic and geographic boundaries, with the GNNs potentially capturing complex 'bridge' structures between the merged networks. --- ### SCAFFOLD: A Large-Scale Structured Dataset of Computer Science Research Figures with Diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Traces Authors: Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Sudan Jha Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00018v1 Computer science papers rely heavily on diagrams: architecture drawings, system flowcharts, and pipeline schematics that often carry more information than the text around them. There is currently no public dataset that pairs this specific kind of figure with captions, context, questions, answers, and step-by-step reasoning, which is exactly what is needed to train a vision-language model to understand them. We present \textbf{SCAFFOLD}\footnote{https://github.com/theranjitraut/scaffold}, a large-scale structured dataset of computer science research figures with diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. This dataset consists of (image, caption, context, question-answer, chain-of-thought) tuples from arXiv computer science papers prepared using layout detection and PDF parsing, with an AI-assisted question-generation step. The resulting large-sized SCAFFOLD-157K dataset spans 3,058 papers with 29,887 figures (157,387 pairs), a medium-sized SCAFFOLD-37K dataset (36,797 pairs), and a small-sized SCAFFOLD-12K dataset (12,000 pairs). We used SCAFFOLD-12K for baseline experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct. --- ### Class-Based Heuristic Selection for Solving the Flying Block Puzzle Authors: Sanyar Ahmadi, Pedram Asadzadeh, Amanj Khorramian Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27476v1 Heuristic search underlies planning in autonomous systems ranging from warehouse logistics to robotic navigation, yet generic heuristics fail to exploit the structural constraints that govern constrained spatial domains, causing search performance to degrade catastrophically on harder instances. We study this problem through the two-column Flying Block Puzzle, a rigorously NP-complete spatial planning microworld whose bottleneck geometry mirrors clearance-to-size constraints encountered in multi-agent path finding, autonomous vehicle navigation, and block relocation systems. We introduce the Class-Based Heuristic A* (CBHA*) algorithm, which integrates a General Move Constraint to capture minimum displacement costs when vacant units are scarce, a formal kinematic taxonomy partitioning the state space into seven mutually exclusive classes with provably admissible heuristics based on vacancy ratio and goal-piece geometry, and a class-conditional tie-breaking mechanism that dynamically switches between depth-priority and vertical-distance ordering to overcome f-value plateaus. Over 146 benchmark instances, CBHA* achieves a 93.4% success rate against 64% for Depth-Prioritized A*, 39% for Standard A*, and 17% for BFS, while reducing node expansions by 87.98% relative to Standard A* and sustaining an average effective branching factor of approximately 3, demonstrating that class-triggered adaptive heuristics constitute a principled mechanism for efficient spatial planning that generalizes structurally to physical constraint systems. --- ### PACEShop: Evaluating Personalized, Actionable, Compositional, and Evidence-grounded Shopping Assistants Authors: Weimin Lyu, Chen Luo, Guangrui Li, Yaochen Xie, Dhineshkumar Ramasubbu, Arief Koesdwiady, Wanqiu Long, Hansu Gu, Yutong Chen, Zheshen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yi Liu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26180v1 Shopping assistants are shifting from ranked product lists toward structured decision support, where systems must synthesize shopper context, product evidence, and next-step guidance into a coherent recommendation experience. This changes the unit of evaluation: a fluent response can still fail by ignoring shopper context, contradicting itself across components, or leaving defects too vague to localize. Existing personalization, grounding, and LLM-as-a-judge benchmarks cover pieces of this problem, but they do not define a joint evaluation target for structured shopping-assistant responses. We formulate this missing evaluation target as PACE: Personalized, Actionable, Compositional, and Evidence-grounded evaluation. We instantiate PACE with two artifacts: PACEShop, a benchmark dataset that makes the target measurable through 22,625 controlled records with structured personas, auditable evidence pools, GOOD/BAD labels, and gold defect family and location annotations; and PACEJudge, a training-free judging protocol that makes the target reportable through a structured output contract. Our experiments show that generic judges can recognize broad quality but fail to recover the diagnostic fields required for PACE; PACEShop makes these failures verifiable, and PACEJudge improves persona-source, cross-component, grounding, and family/location closure without retraining, showing that realistic shopping-assistant evaluation requires a task-matched output contract rather than only a stronger backbone or scalar prompt. --- ### Enhanced Artificial Neural Networks Using QHAdamW in Air Quality Forecasting Authors: Mary Joy Daniel Vinas Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.ET, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21463v1 The study employed an Artificial Neural Network in combination with the optimized Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) algorithm, currently the only AQI forecasting model available in the Philippines. The modified QHAdamW - Quasi-Hyperbolic Momentum (QHAdam) and Adam with decoupled weight decay (AdamW) were both extensions of the Adam optimizer, and both offer unique advantages for training ANN. The proposed QHAdamW optimizer addresses the issues on convergence, generalization, and forecasting performance of Adam. Hyperparameter tuning results revealed that 0.01 and 0.001 were the most effective optimal values for the generalization performance of QHAdamW. The comparative analysis results using seven evaluation metrics revealed that the error value range is lower, and the regression coefficient, having a value approximately equal to 1, improved the model accuracy performance. Likewise, the model converges to a satisfactory level of performance with the convergence performance results of lower loss values as obtained from training and validation losses. Based on data from a real-time air quality tracking station in Manila, a feed-forward neural network is used to predict the AQI of PM2.5 and PM10 separately. This model can be used to forecast Particulate Matter (PM), to help the Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Environmental Monitoring Bureau (DENR-EMB) implement a comprehensive air quality management. --- ### CyrillicQA: The Influence of Phonetically Encoded Secret Language on LLM Performance Authors: Erik Thureck Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21462v1 Due to the selection of their training data, large language models (LLMs) perform best on standard-language inputs from languages using the Latin alphabet with large speaker populations, while disadvantaging other language varieties. Nevertheless, they can also be a versatile tool for preserving precisely such endangered languages. But do they also possess the necessary creativity and capacity for abstraction to decode phonetically encoded language the same way humans do? --- ### FigmaTrace: Capturing Creative Nuances in Human Figma Design Workflows Authors: Darshan Deshpande, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Martyna Markiewicz, Devanshu Bansal, Shivani Jain, Nicholas Saban, Chirag Maheshwari, Anand Kannappan Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21460v1 Vision Language Models have recently shown improvements in several objective and verifiable domains such as object detection but continue to underperform on subjective and creative design tasks. A major contributor to this performance gap is the lack of high quality human workflow data that captures a diverse set of preferences and decisions that make human experts good at design tasks. In this work, we first define a unique, expert curated taxonomy of design skills and best practices which we further expand into a set of 126 open ended, subjective, long horizon tasks. Built on top of this and expert solutions, our dataset FigmaTrace contains over 200 hours of human captured video data converted into 3469 design trajectories using a novel design phase-based method. We use our dataset to train four models and show that training on FigmaTrace leads to a performance improvement comparable to frontier closed models such as \textsc{Claude-Opus-5} and \textsc{GPT-5.6-Sol} on four out of distribution agentic GUI environments. We further perform a useful ablation to attribute these performance improvements to a design phase-based video to trajectory conversion which outperforms prior length-based conversion approaches. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis on the best performing \textsc{Qwen3.8-27B} outputs to better correlate performance improvements to FigmaTrace's trends. We open source our dataset and the best model for the community. --- ### CLSC DETR: Reliable Candidate Ranking via Cross Layer Geometric Support for UAV Small Object Detection Authors: Junyan Lin Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21457v1 Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection is critical for applications such as target search, where accurate detection of small objects in complex aerial scenes remains challenging. The limited spatial extent, dense distribution, and frequent occlusion of small objects make reliable candidate ranking particularly difficult. Existing Detection Transformer (DETR) based methods improve ranking by estimating localization quality from individual queries and incorporating it into classification scores. However, a single query often lacks sufficient geometric evidence for small objects with weak boundary cues, resulting in unreliable quality estimation and unstable ranking. To address this limitation, we propose Cross Layer Local Support and Consistency Calibration for DETR, termed CLSC DETR. Specifically, the Cross Layer Local Support module establishes correspondences between final layer queries and intermediate layer candidates to aggregate complementary geometric evidence for more reliable localization quality estimation, while the Classification and Localization Consistency Calibration module adaptively adjusts classification scores according to localization quality and classification reliability to improve candidate ranking. Experiments show that CLSC DETR improves AP and AP$_{75}$ over the baseline by 1.5\% and 2.0\% on VisDrone, respectively, while achieving consistent improvements on UAVDT. --- ### Tomatoes, Potatoes, and Onions: Questioning the Need for Faces in Face Presentation Attack Detection Authors: Guray Ozgur, Fadi Boutros, Naser Damer Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21455v2 Face presentation attack detection (PAD) is traditionally formulated as a face-specific problem, although many of the visual artifacts introduced by print, replay, and recapture processes are not inherently tied to facial appearance. In this work, we investigate whether transferable PAD representations can be learned without using faces during downstream PAD training. To this end, we introduce TPO, a controlled face-free presentation attack dataset consisting of bona fide, print, and replay recordings of, almost randomly chosen, tomatoes, potatoes, and onions acquired under protocols that closely mirror conventional face PAD datasets. Using a foundation-model-based PAD architecture, we demonstrate that a detector trained on TPO achieves an average AUC of 92.70% across four standard cross-dataset face PAD benchmarks, outperforming training on synthetic faces and remaining competitive with models trained on real face datasets. Conversely, models trained on face PAD datasets transfer consistently above chance to TPO, suggesting that the learned representations capture characteristics of the presentation process rather than object semantics. Furthermore, incorporating TPO into conventional face PAD training consistently improves cross-dataset performance under fixed optimization budgets, indicating that face-free data provides complementary information rather than simply additional training samples. Finally, representation and frequency analyses provide further evidence that transferable PAD representations cannot be explained by a single spectral artifact but instead encode richer presentation cues shared across object categories. Together, these results provide empirical evidence that transferable presentation attack representations can be learned independently of facial content, opening new opportunities for privacy-preserving and identity-independent PAD development. --- ### Multi-Scale Fruit Capsules: Dilated Convolutions and Dynamic Routing for In-the-Wild Explainable Fruit Recognition Authors: Subhankar Chattoraj, Sawon Pratiher, Samiran Das, Hubert Konik Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21454v2 The same fruit appears in a bunch, unpicked, peeled, bagged in plastic, or sliced on a dish, so automated fruit classification in the wild (AFCW) must absorb wide intra- class and narrow inter-class variability in shape, size, colour and texture. Convolutional networks route information through pooling, which discards the pose and location of the region of interest and therefore generalises poorly across these presentations. We propose FruitCapsNet, a capsule network whose Fruit Capsules replace the standard convolutional front end with dilated convolutions: the receptive field grows exponentially at constant parameter cost, so each capsule encodes multi-scale context before dynamic routing resolves part whole spatial agreement. Hyper-parameters, including the dilation factor, are selected by Bayesian optimisation rather than grid search. On three public datasets (SMP, FruitsGB, Fruits-360) and a new 19-class, 10,639-image in-the-wild dataset (PD-19), FruitCapsNet exceeds ten fine-tuned transfer-learning backbones at one-third the depth, with the largest margin (+2.7% over the nearest competitor) on the hardest set. Grad-CAM saliency propagated from the DigitCaps layer shows that the improvement comes from attributing decisions to whole-fruit regions rather than to object edges, giving post-hoc evidence that the gain is not a dataset artefact. --- ### When Failures Propagate: Causal Failure Attribution in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Lauren Pothuru Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20627v1 Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) interleaves retrieval, reasoning, and answer generation across multiple hops. A retrieval error at hop 1 can surface only as a wrong answer at hop 3, while later retrieval can also repair the trajectory. This paper introduces AgenticRAG-FP, an interventional benchmark for causal failure attribution in agentic RAG. The benchmark injects a certified fault at a specified hop, re-executes the downstream trajectory, and evaluates diagnosers against the known intervention. Its central question is whether a post-hoc trace still identifies the injected hop after the suffix changes. In the completed strict dense Claude Haiku 4.5 sweep on 80 three-hop MuSiQue questions, coverage-based diagnosis is 0.91 at hop 1 and 0.00 at hops 2 and 3 (n=43,36,21 failed trajectories). A smaller content-corruption study changes an answer-bearing or bridge fact in topically intact evidence. At depth 2, where 18 failed cases remain after filtering, coverage-based diagnosis is 0.00 and a frozen-hop counterfactual probe is 0.67 in an exploratory pooled comparison. Depth-3 content estimates are descriptive only because they contain three failed cases. These results make propagation depth an explicit evaluation axis for diagnosing agentic RAG failures while distinguishing broad evidence of post-hoc signal loss from small-sample method comparisons. --- ### Applying Anthropic Primitives at Large Enterprises: Harness Paradigm for Knowledge Work Authors: George Juraj Salapa Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20622v1 Frontier models have collapsed the cost of writing custom code: a niche problem a specialist sees in their own domain now costs an afternoon. The cost of reviewing and maintaining that code hasn't collapsed. Each solution drifts from the next; understanding one means reading its codebase from scratch. Large enterprises build something centrally governed instead: at worst an off-the-shelf product, at best a graph-orchestration framework wired bespoke per use case, or a low-code platform used as the orchestrator. These are custom every time and limited in scope. Enterprises don't weigh a third option that escapes both constraints: the harness paradigm. Recent work treats the coding-agent harness as enterprise infrastructure rather than a coding tool, converging on three findings: harnesses suffice at the task level and outperform more elaborate architectures on enterprise work (arXiv:2604.00073, arXiv:2604.13107); harness choice accounts for most of the variance in agent benchmark results, more than model choice does (arXiv:2605.23950); and the gap between that finding and enterprise adoption is governance (arXiv:2605.10223, arXiv:2605.18747). We propose an architecture that closes that gap. One harness runs unmodified as the backbone; the code stays identical across every deployment, so reviewing what gets built collapses to reading its instructions file. Section 4 gives four mechanisms: credential-scoped tooling, where each backend gets one generic request tool and a scoped credential instead of a hand-built method; authorization logic outside the harness, so one artifact runs as a cron backbone, a chat-surface engine, and a terminal tool; registration is a side effect of pushing code, collapsing an audit a review of a text file. Built on microcc (<https://pypi.org/project/micro-cc/>), our reference harness. --- ### RECOUNT: Reference-guided Counting with Synthetic Visual Exemplars Authors: Adriano D'Alessandro, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri, Ghassan Hamarneh Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20621v1 Text-guided zero-shot object counters excel at spatial localization but categorize poorly on novel or fine-grained classes: natural language is too coarse to fully specify visual identity, so they fail to separate visually similar distractors. Few-shot counters sidestep this with visual exemplars, but require manual annotations on every image. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce RECOUNT, a plug-and-play framework for image-guided zero-shot counting. Rather than specify a category with a text prompt, our key insight is to specify it visually, from a single off-scene reference image. However, we find that a lone reference image provides narrow coverage of a category's appearance and is unreliable across diverse scenes. We therefore repurpose a diffusion model as an automated contrastive data engine that expands the reference into a diverse exemplar gallery, supplying the discriminative detail that text cannot. RECOUNT preserves the class-agnostic proposals of any frozen counter and offloads categorization to a separate visual module (a frozen backbone with a lightweight head trained on this synthetic data) that matches each proposal against the target and distractor galleries. Applied to a frozen counter, RECOUNT attains the best zero-shot accuracy on both benchmarks, cutting counting error (MAE) by 55% on LookAlikes and 21% on PairTally relative to the strongest prior zero-shot counter. --- ### Dual-Cache Latent Space Communication between Heterogeneous Language Models Authors: Jiyao Liu, Qi Zhang, Yaoyi Jia, Ziwen Kan, Song Wang Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20617v1 Multi-agent LLM systems split work across models, so answering often requires knowledge that sits in another agent's context: a Sharer has encoded information that a Receiver needs to complete its task. They usually communicate by exchanging text, which puts autoregressive decoding on the critical path and reduces the exchange to a discrete message written without sight of the receiver's state. Recent latent protocols instead translate the sharer's key-value (KV) cache into the receiver's: C2C supports heterogeneous models but requires both to read the same input, while LCF-X removes this shared-context requirement through position-free sharer-cache pooling. Three restrictions remain: LCF-X compresses the sharer alone, supplies the same layer-local summary to every receiver position with no joint cross-layer memory to retrieve from, and assumes matched layer count and KV geometry. We introduce XKV, which lifts all three: learned-query attention pools both caches; self-attention over receiver-aligned layer tokens, with a learned layer map reconciling different depths, mixes the pooled summaries into a compact joint memory; and a shared position decoder lets every raw receiver cache position retrieve its own per-head-gated residual in the receiver's native KV geometry. Both models stay frozen and may differ in family, depth, KV-head count, head dimension, and tokenizer; only the translator is trained. Across 45 dataset-model-pair settings (six heterogeneous and three same-model ordered pairings, five datasets), XKV attains the highest macro score and best average rank, improving on LCF-X on every dataset (by 4.6 exact-match and 4.2 F1 points on ROPES) and surpassing text communication on four of the five, while training 76% fewer parameters and translating a cache pair 10.3x faster (5.8 vs. 59.9 ms); end to end, XKV is 26% faster than LCF-X and 6.8x faster than text communication. --- ### Evaluating Skills, Not Just Agents: Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills Authors: Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, Jean-Francois Puget, Roshni Malani, Meghana Puvvadi, Moshe Abramovitch, Mohit Gupta, Rama Akkiraju, Subodh Prabhu, Yogesh Dangi, Wei Luo, Seong Hee Lee Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20614v1 Enterprise agent programs are moving from prototypes into production, where reusable skills, tools, and workflow packages must be reviewed with evidence rather than prose. Current gates often scan these artifacts for structure, style, and security, but they do not answer the deployment question: does the capability package help a live agent complete enterprise tasks under the same model, sandbox, and grading policy? We present ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a repository-native framework for evaluating skills and product capability packages as executable agent artifacts. ACES runs paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizes trajectories into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), grades six default runtime metrics, and reports Skill Lift: the target skill's added value for a fixed task, harness, workspace, and scorer. The same protocol supports product-owned task suites that compare baseline, skill, bundle, team-skill, and plugin targets. On 145 real skills from internal enterprise repositories and public catalogs, scan-only gates surface useful authoring issues but measure complementary facets (structural versus LLM-judge Spearman $ρ= 0.14$). Across 947 scored paired cases from 58 of 64 production skills and four primary harnesses, mean composite Skill Lift is 0.2134 (95\% paired-case CI (0.1967, 0.2301)); mean outcome-only lift, the average of accuracy and goal accuracy, is 0.1799. Composite lift is positive in 72.8\% of paired cases. The largest process-metric gains appear in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency---signals about discovery, routing, workflow following, and tool use that document scans cannot observe. An open-source implementation of the methodology is available in NVIDIA SkillEvaluator. --- ### Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization for Generative Recommendation Authors: Xin Yu, Stephen Li, Sina Aghaei, Zifan Zhu, Jiamu Bai, Guanjie Huang, Bo Peng, Yiyao Liu, Lingzhou Xue Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20611v1 Semantic-ID-based generative recommendation casts retrieval and ranking as autoregressive generation over hierarchical item identifiers. A common recipe is SFT followed by GRPO, yet vanilla GRPO is poorly matched to this tree-structured task. Under the frozen SFT checkpoint, the exact target is absent from the first 16 candidates of the 50-beam constrained ranking for many prompts, and in harder cases none of these candidates enters the target SID branch. This prompt-level diagnostic motivates a training concern: when on-policy GRPO groups are similarly target-missing, item-level rewards may produce weak or degenerate reward variation even if some candidates follow part of the target path. We propose Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization (DASO), a tree-aware post-training method that addresses this failure mode as an online rollout-allocation problem. Instead of using fixed difficulty buckets or uniformly injecting ground-truth completions, DASO profiles each current rollout group by prefix-match depth, locates the bottleneck SID levels where candidates leave the target path, and reallocates a bounded portion of the group to prefix-guided completions while retaining raw rollouts for contrast. A SID-prefix reward provides graded credit, while an auxiliary SFT anchor mitigates regression on examples already solved by the SFT checkpoint. On the public benchmarks, DASO improves over MiniOneRec-style GRPO on 11 of 12 metrics and achieves the best result on 9 of 12 metrics; it also improves most level-wise recall metrics on the internal recommendation task. ---