# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 90 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #4451–4500 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/90 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/89.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/91.md) ### GOAG: Generative and Object-Agnostic Grasp Planner for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Authors: Julien Merand, Boris Meden, Mathieu Grossard, Liming Chen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19759v1 Multifingered grasping is a crucial robotic skill, but current deep-learning grasp planners often struggle to generalize to new objects because they are trained on limited, object-specific datasets. We introduce a fundamentally different approach, grounded in the observation that the gripper and the object share identical surface geometry at their mutual contact points. We propose GOAG: Generative and Object-Agnostic Grasp Planner for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation, a novel deep generative model that learns a compact latent representation of a specific gripper's contact surface distribution, enabling the efficient sampling of valid grasp configurations without relying on object-specific training data. We show that by introducing object features only at inference time, our model can effectively retrieve admissible contact areas that are compatible with the gripper's capabilities. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on established grasp protocols in both simulated and real-world scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness with different grippers from the literature. Our method delivers state-of-the-art results on the objects from the MultiDex dataset, achieving an average success rate of 86.93%. It offers significantly faster processing when generating numerous grasps, while matching the performance of leading approaches specifically trained on this dataset. Unlike these methods, our approach does not rely on object-specific training data, highlighting the advantages of object-agnostic learning. It effectively addresses the generalization challenges faced by traditional data-driven grasp planners. Code and videos are available on our project website https://cea-list.github.io/goagweb/ . --- ### FlashPrefill V2: Block-Sparse Prefill Attention for Long-Context LLM Serving Authors: Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19758v1 Long-context modeling is a pivotal capability for Large Language Models, yet the quadratic complexity of attention remains a critical bottleneck, particularly during the compute-intensive prefilling phase. Our previous work, FlashPrefill, mitigates this cost through instantaneous pattern discovery and max-based dynamic thresholding; however, it remains an algorithmic prototype that is still distant from production deployment. In this paper, we present FlashPrefill V2, which evolves FlashPrefill from a prototype toward practical long-context serving along three dimensions. First, we introduce a mean correction term that effectively suppresses the approximation error, keeping performance degradation manageable even at extreme sparsity levels. Second, we redesign the sparse attention operator with PackGQA memory access, warp specialization, and pingpong pipelining, fully aligning with the latest FlashAttention-3/4 implementations and supporting FP8 inference to meet practical quantization requirements. Third, FlashPrefill V2 natively supports paged KV cache and continuous batching, allowing integration as an attention backend in modern inference frameworks such as SGLang. Extensive evaluations on NVIDIA H20 GPUs---among the most widely deployed inference accelerators---demonstrate that FlashPrefill V2 delivers up to 47.26x and 27.19x speedups over FlashAttention-2 at 128K context length under FP8 and BF16 precision, respectively, and, in FP8, still achieves a 30.49x speedup against an FA3/4-aligned dense baseline. --- ### GenMatch: An End-to-End Generative Matching Framework for Micro-View Order-Dispatching in Ride-Hailing Authors: Chuang Liu, Yuxueqing Zhang, Tengfei Lyu, Zirui Yuan, Weiqi Hu, Yanghan Cheng, Ming Wang, Li Ma, Zihao Lu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19751v1 Micro-View Order-Dispatching assigns available drivers to passenger orders within each dispatch batch and is critical to the service quality and operational efficiency of ride-hailing platforms. Mainstream industrial solutions follow a multi-stage paradigm of model prediction, value calculation, and dispatch matching. Although dispatch quality is determined by the final batch-level assignment, these stages optimize different intermediate objectives. This cross-stage objective inconsistency means that improving a single stage does not necessarily improve the overall dispatch result. We therefore formulate Micro-View Order-Dispatching as a generative matching problem and propose GenMatch, an end-to-end Generative Matching framework and the first such framework deployed in a real-world production environment. Applying generative modeling to this problem introduces three challenges. First, each dispatch batch forms a dynamic sparse bipartite graph, requiring efficient structured batch-level encoding. Second, replacing the hand-crafted value function requires learning unified business utility from heterogeneous feedback. Third, directly generating an assignment requires tracking the evolving matching state because each selected order-driver pair changes the remaining feasible candidates. GenMatch addresses these challenges with a Context-Aware Bipartite Encoder, a Business-Aware Utility Learner, and a State-Aware Pointer Decoder. Extensive offline evaluations and online A/B tests in five cities across DiDi's international ride-hailing markets show consistent improvements over competitive baselines, confirming the effectiveness and practicality of GenMatch for industrial order-dispatching. --- ### Truncate Bad, Upweight Good: BoN-Style Distillation via Rank-Based Classification Authors: Yarin Bar, Yaniv Romano Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19748v1 Inference-time selection methods, such as Best-of-N, improve generation by sampling a pool of candidates and selecting the top-ranked completion according to a reward model. Distillation seeks to amortize this procedure into a single policy by replacing raw rewards with in-pool ranks and learning a policy that upweights higher-ranked completions. However, existing rank-based policies typically use smooth full-support reweighting, so low-ranked completions receive less mass but remain in the target support. Although a sharper reweighting reduces lower-tail mass, it also increases reliance on brittle ranking at the top made by a single reward model. We propose TUP: a Truncate-bad, Upweight-good Policy that removes low-ranked completions from the support and reweights only the retained upper tail with a tunable sharpness. TUP admits a closed-form, prompt-independent normalization and can be trained fully offline via binary cross-entropy, using shifted-truncated win-rates as soft labels and distilled-to-reference log-likelihood ratios as logits. Theoretically, under certain assumptions, we show that for any unknown oracle reward, the best monotone rank-reweighting can be matched by a lower-tail truncation rule, providing formal support for removing the lower tail rather than merely downweighting it. Empirically, we show that TUP is competitive with strong offline alignment baselines. --- ### PersonalBench: Measuring the Authorship Gap in LLM Personalization Authors: Yash Ganpat Sawant Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19746v1 Personalized text generation aims to make LLMs write in a specific individual's style, yet existing benchmarks measure task accuracy or preference alignment rather than whether the model's output actually resembles the target author's writing. We introduce PersonalBench, a benchmark that evaluates inference-time personalization methods through three independent lenses: LUAR (a trained authorship verification model), an LLM-as-judge, and automated stylometrics. Across 50 authors, 1,000 generations, and two model families (Qwen 3, GLM-4), we find that personalization methods do produce author-differentiated output (LUAR discriminates target authors within generated text at AUC=0.918) but this differentiation never crosses the human-LLM boundary. All methods achieve LUAR similarity to real authors in the range 0.484-0.508, below the cross-author human floor of 0.626 (ceiling 0.756). The LLM's own authorship fingerprint dominates: generated text is more distant from any human author than random humans are from each other. Methods are statistically indistinguishable from each other on LUAR (spread 0.024) despite appearing differentiated on the LLM judge, a discrepancy we trace to circularity between trait extraction and profile extraction. We validate that LUAR reliably measures authorship in our corpus (AUC=0.76 single-post, 0.96 multi-post). We release PersonalBench as a calibrated measuring stick: inference-time personalization modulates the LLM's style but does not bridge the gap to human authorship. --- ### Gallileo-4D: Frozen Backbone Ensemble for Dynamic 4D Reconstruction Authors: Nicolò Savioli Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19743v1 We describe our entry to the PhysAI Dynamic 4D Reconstruction Challenge, which placed third of 27 teams at 0.58356 APD on the final leaderboard, without a single gradient update. This was not the plan: of thirteen fine-tuning configurations of a pre-trained 4D backbone, twelve degraded the challenge score, and eleven of those twelve improved local validation at the same time. We trace this inversion to the structure of the benchmark: only 25% of the evaluation set belongs to the data variant released for training, so updates that fit the available data damage the pre-trained features the remaining 75% relies on. Our system therefore freezes the backbone and spends its budget at inference time, fusing three decoding configurations -- temporal stride-3, horizontal-flip test-time augmentation, and dense stride-1 -- under a convex weighting. The ensemble recovers +0.041 APD over the frozen baseline, more than any training run achieved, at zero training cost. --- ### One Success Isn't Reliability: Thinkingbox, a Sandbox and Benchmark for Agents in Stateful Business Workflows Authors: Zhuochun Li, Youngmin Ko, Ali Keramati, Nicola Ferri, Susana Palmaz Lopez Pelaez, Liang-Chun Tsai, Calvin Wang, Mirco Milletari, Tuhin Kundu, Vadim Smolyakov, Kjartan Olafsson, Tommy Guy Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19741v2 Recent agent benchmarks increasingly ground evaluation in executable environments, from code repair to web navigation, app APIs, and function calling. Yet completing consequential work beyond code requires more than producing a plausible response or valid tool call: agents must gather missing information over multiple turns, follow domain policies, coordinate dependent tools, and realize the correct persistent state transition without collateral effects. In this paper, we introduce Thinkingbox, a sandbox for tool-agent-user interaction that provides isolated MCP-compatible tool sessions, complete execution traces, and outcome evaluation over terminal backend state. Built on this sandbox, Thinkingbox-bench contains 507 policy-conditioned workflows across numerous scenarios, including retail, hospitality, auto insurance, neobank internal IT, and consulting IT/HR support. Each attempt is evaluated by task-specific executable checks that accept valid trajectories while rejecting wrong, missing, or extra effects; designated tasks additionally check required properties of the final response. Across proprietary and open-weight models, the strongest model Claude Opus 5 achieves 66.50% pass@1, but only 47.53% pass^20. Moreover, many failed trials show clean termination and valid state-changing actions, showing that response or tool-call-level signals are not clear proxies for end-to-end task completion. Thinkingbox-bench reveals a large gap between occasionally finding a successful trajectory and reliably completing stateful business tasks. We release both Thinkingbox and Thinkingbox-Bench: https://github.com/microsoft/thinkingbox --- ### Question-Guided Evidence Acquisition for Multimodal Visual Question Answering Authors: Alin-Ionut Popa Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19739v2 Multimodal LLMs can see a document, but they often can't read it reliably. Small text, tables, visual cues, and topological elements still trip them up under direct visual inference, even when the page is already sitting in the model's context. Most document-VQA systems treat perception as fixed: they encode the page once, ask the question, and answer from whatever the model happened to extract in that single fast pass. We think document VQA needs slower, more deliberate perception: rather than answering from one fixed encoding, the model should spend a bit of extra compute at inference time working out what to look at next, and only then answer. We build this into \textbf{Q-Guide}, a small agent that reads a question, works out what evidence it is still missing, and calls targeted tool(s) to recover it---reading text where text is needed, zooming in where detail is needed, or grounding a region where position matters. On DocVQA2026 and Manga109, Q-Guide outperforms both direct prompting and recent multi-agent document systems ($65.0\%$ vs.\ $40.0\%$ on DocVQA2026, $32.4\%$ vs.\ $24.4\%$ on Manga109), and the improvement holds across three Claude backbones (Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Opus 4.5). We find that accuracy scales with the perception budget---most of the gain appears within two to three deliberate rounds---and that the gain comes from directing perception to the right place, not from complex control logic: adding planners, routers, or multiple collaborating agents does not help. --- ### Learning to Beat: Phenotype-Guided Latent Flow with Regional Motion Priors for Biventricular Motion Synthesis Authors: Xuan Yang, Xiaohan Yuan, Hao Li, Lingyu Chen, Yanan Liu, Qingya Li, Lei Li Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19738v2 Full-cycle biventricular geometry is essential for characterizing cardiac function. However, dense and temporally consistent 3D+t biventricular meshes are not routinely available, whereas end-diastolic (ED) anatomy can often be obtained reliably. We therefore investigate full-cycle biventricular motion synthesis from a single ED mesh. This task is challenging because cardiac deformation is spatially heterogeneous and phenotype dependent, while conventional global generative models often obscure localized motion patterns. In this study, we propose a region-specific and phenotype-adaptive framework that integrates motion-informed functional parcellation with conditional latent flow. A functional partition learned from reconstructed motion organizes the ventricular surface into regions with coherent dynamics and enables topology-aware regional feature exchange. A phenotype-conditioned rectified-flow model subsequently maps the ED anatomy to full-cycle motion latents through fine-grained conditioning and prototype-routed motion adapters. An optional control branch further incorporates available motion descriptors for controllable synthesis. Experiments on ACDC, M\&Ms, and M\&Ms-2 demonstrate consistent improvements in geometric accuracy and functional fidelity. Under ED-only synthesis, our method achieves biventricular ASSD, HD95, and vRMSE of \(1.49\pm0.34\)~mm, \(3.77\pm1.06\)~mm, and \(3.31\pm1.03\)~mm, respectively, outperforming all competing methods. Complementary functional and robustness evaluations further demonstrate that the synthesized sequences preserve physiologically plausible ventricular dynamics and generalize across cohorts and disease phenotypes. The code will be released publicly upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication. --- ### TempJail: Temporal Jailbreak Attack against Large Vision-Language Models via Subtitle Scheduling Authors: Ling Zhou, Yihao Huang, Jingling Sun, Zhiwen Tian, Yi Zeng, Qihe Liu, Shijie Zhou Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19737v1 Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding and reasoning. Despite extensive studies on text- and image-based jailbreaks, video jailbreaks against LVLMs remain largely unexplored. Existing video jailbreak methods mainly manipulate textual content embedded in videos, while overlooking how such information is organized over time. Our analysis reveals that jailbreak effectiveness depends not only on the semantics of textual information but also on its temporal presentation, including duration and timing-slot allocation. Motivated by this finding, we use subtitles, which are common in real-world videos and allow semantic content to be presented under precise temporal control without appearing visually intrusive, as a natural attack medium. Based on this insight, we propose TempJail, a black-box video-based jailbreak framework that constructs query-aligned dialogue-style subtitle sequences and optimizes their temporal scheduling to exploit temporal vulnerabilities in LVLMs and elicit responses that satisfy the harmful intent of the source query. Extensive experiments on four representative LVLMs and two datasets demonstrate that TempJail achieves the highest attack success rate across all evaluated model--dataset settings, outperforming the strongest baseline by 53 and 18 percentage points in dataset-averaged ASR on GPT-5 and Gemini 3.5-Flash, respectively. --- ### RecPFN: Prior-Fitted Networks for In-Context-Based Recommendations Authors: En Zhi Tan, Jia Xiang Lim, Bryan Lijie Chew, Tze Minh Ng, Benjamin Yan Han Yap Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19735v1 We introduce RecPFN, a prior-fitted network that brings in-context learning to sequential recommendation. RecPFN is pretrained entirely on synthetic clickstream environments sampled from a broad structural causal prior, enabling it to amortize Bayesian-style inference from a small support set. At inference, a lightweight decoder-only transformer conditions on a handful of domain sequences and produces next-item predictions for queries in a single forward pass, without any weight updates. Across eight public benchmarks, RecPFN achives state-of-the-art zero-shot performance while remaining strongly competitive with supervised methods in low-compute and low-data regimes. It is deployment-efficient and robust to domain shift, outperforming strong zero-shot baselines that rely on large real-interaction corpora. RecPFN provides a practical path toward generalizable, data-efficient recommenders and opens avenues for richer priors, longer-context ICL, and multimodal extensions. Code for training and evaluation is publicly available at https://github.com/SAP-samples/tabular-ai-recpfn/. --- ### SafeBranch: Branch-Pair Safety Alignment for Embodied Agents Authors: Hyunse Lee, Jiwoo Jeong, Haneul Lee, Kyochul Jang, Youngjae Yu, Woojin Lee Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19729v1 Vision-language-model-based embodied agents can complete instructed tasks but often violate safety constraints in the process, a problem recently framed as interactive safety. Training such agents to act safely is difficult, since safety and task success are distinct objectives, and safety arises only at a small number of safety-critical steps within a trajectory. Standard supervision is insufficient: imitating safe trajectories teaches behavior without explaining why it is safe, and contrasting arbitrary safe and unsafe trajectories mixes the safety signal with unrelated differences. We propose SafeBranch, a framework that aligns an embodied actor on safety through branch pairs constructed from the actor's own unsafe rollouts via environment rollback. SafeBranch rolls each unsafe rollout back to the safety-critical step that caused the violation, queries the actor for a safe alternative, and pairs the original action with the alternative so that the two branches differ only at that step. The trained actor acts safely at deployment with no critic in the loop. On IS-Bench, SafetyALFRED, and out-of-distribution variants with unseen tasks and objects, it handles safety reliably without sacrificing task success, achieving roughly ten times more safe successes than the untrained baseline on the unseen-object variant. --- ### A Locally Tokenized Generative Model for Robust Time-Series Watermarking Authors: Dongbin Kim, Geonwoo Shin, Yujin Choi, Soyeon Park, Jaewook Lee Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19727v1 Watermarking is a central tool for provenance in generative models, yet its application to multivariate time series remains hindered by reliability failures under post-editing attacks. We show that existing detectors, which rely on globally coupled re-encoding, suffer from bidirectional drift of the null distribution: post-editing attacks can shift the z-score of non-watermarked samples in either direction, invalidating clean-calibrated thresholds. We argue that this instability is a property of the re-encoding, and that reliable detection requires each recovered unit to depend only on a bounded temporal neighborhood. Guided by this principle, we propose L-VQVAE, a generative model in which each discrete token is produced from a short contiguous window, and LVQMark, a watermarking method over this token space that combines logit-bias injection with robust re-encoding for attack-time detection. Experiments on four benchmarks spanning finance, energy, and neuroimaging show that our approach preserves generation quality while stabilizing both detection power and false-positive behavior under post-editing attacks. --- ### Projector Is All You Train Authors: Nyx Iskandar, Saathvik Selvan, Slater Victoroff Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19726v1 The typical training process of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) involves adapting both the language model backbone and the projector between the backbone and a modality-specific encoder. We ask whether fine-tuning the backbone of an MLLM is necessary to adapt it to a new modality. Through experiments on 3D MLLMs, we find that training only the projector is sufficient to achieve strong multimodal performance relative to existing baseline models and our jointly trained MLLMs with the same encoder and backbone. We also show that joint training leads to undesirable drift in existing capabilities of the language model, which projector-only training avoids by definition. Furthermore, projector-only training has approximately twice the training sample throughput of joint training. We validate our findings across different language model backbones via 3D classification and captioning benchmarks as well as standard benchmarks evaluating language, vision, and spatial reasoning capabilities. --- ### StreamSoccer: Event-Driven Memory for Streaming Soccer Commentary Authors: Chenxi Shao, Bozhong Wang, Jiaxin Huang, Zhao Liu, Sunwei Zhu, Tianxin Hang, Gaoqi He, Yang Li, Changbo Wang Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19723v1 Streaming video understanding requires models to causally update state as video arrives and organize growing history into semantic units that can evolve, persist, and be recalled under bounded computation and memory. This challenge is pronounced in live soccer commentary, where a system must describe completed events, summarize recent play, recall earlier events, or remain silent using only information available before each utterance. We present StreamSoccer, an event-driven system that uses event memory as its intermediate representation. A fixed-budget active memory integrates the stream; completed event states are retained locally and consolidated into retrievable historical records. A unified generator uses current, recent, and historical context to produce three commentary modes, while a rule-assisted scheduler selects a mode or silence. Unlike streaming video-language models organized around frames, visual tokens, or caches, and soccer-commentary methods based on predefined clips or output timestamps, StreamSoccer explicitly models event lifecycles. We construct a three-track streaming soccer commentary dataset and a layered evaluation protocol. At common reference anchors, StreamSoccer obtains CIDEr scores of 38.62, 23.96, and 17.39 for current-event, recent-window, and historical-memory commentary, ranking first on the current-event and historical-memory tracks and second on recent-window. Controlled ablations show that local completed events improve all tracks and that the full system performs best on all three. Across 174 raw-video runs on 58 matches, per-minute RTF p95 ranges from 0.10 to 0.22 without sustained growth with match history. These results indicate that event memory supports streaming soccer commentary across temporal scopes while controlling long-history computation. --- ### Scale-Separated Conditioning for Style-Encoder-Free Diffusion Stylization Authors: Jingtao Zhang, Haorui Gao, Youqing Liang, Zeming Liu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19719v1 Reference-based diffusion stylization requires separating target geometry from transferable appearance. Existing tuning-based methods often rely on aligned content-style-target triplets or auxiliary visual encoders, which increases data cost and can transfer unintended scene structure from the style reference. We propose SEFS (Style-Encoder-Free Stylization), a style-encoder-free conditioning framework for diffusion transformers. SEFS forms style tokens from stochastic low-resolution crops of single training images. This crop bottleneck preserves local appearance statistics such as palette, stroke, texture, and material, while reducing access to global layout cues. Target content is encoded by edge and segmentation cues and fused with the noisy latent through parameter-efficient trainable projections. We add style-to-denoising re-normalization for token-statistic alignment and cross-block skip fusion for spatial detail. SEFS trains on unpaired single images; the frozen diffusion VAE is used only to place image conditions in the latent space. On artistic stylization benchmarks, SEFS improves content consistency and leakage diagnostics while retaining reference-style affinity, and ablations support the crop-resolution, re-normalization, and skip-fusion choices. The code of SEFS will be made publicly available. --- ### Robust Cross-Modal Foundation Model Perception for Underwater Robots under Degraded Visual Conditions Authors: Mohammad Arif Ul Alam Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19710v1 Reliable underwater robotic perception remains difficult because optical imagery degrades under turbidity, wavelength-dependent attenuation, low illumination, scattering, and blur. Although sonar provides complementary information that is less affected by optical visibility, prior visual-sonar research has largely focused on feature alignment and nominal detection performance. We investigate cross-modal robustness as visual reliability deteriorates and assess whether pretrained visual foundation-model representations can be complemented by sonar under severe degradation. We use frozen DINOv2 as the visual encoder and construct a controlled five-level benchmark ranging from clean to extreme visual conditions. We compare conventional visual detection, frozen foundation-model representations, sonar context, fixed multimodal fusion, clean-trained adaptive gating, and degradation-aware gated fusion. Our method trains the fusion mechanism across the full range of degradation while keeping the visual and sonar encoders frozen, allowing modality contributions to adapt without fine-tuning the pretrained backbone. Under extreme combined degradation, the DINOv2 baseline achieves 0.4610 balanced accuracy, while degradation-aware visual-sonar fusion reaches 0.6152, a 33.5% relative improvement. The learned sonar contribution increases from 14.2% under clean conditions to 41.3% under extreme degradation, demonstrating adaptive redistribution of cross-modal reliance. Fusion provides the largest gains under severe turbidity and blur, whereas color attenuation alone yields little additional benefit. These results show that foundation-model representations remain valuable but insufficient under severe information loss, and that explicitly adapting fusion to modality reliability can improve robust underwater multimodal perception. --- ### Loreley: Repository-Scale Program Evolution with Quality-Diversity Search Authors: Mohan Chen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19703v1 Sequential agent search accumulates changes from its current champion but discards alternative branches; independent proposals preserve breadth but restart from the root. Loreley instead retains complete repository states in a Quality-Diversity (QD) archive and samples them as parents or supplies them as context for later edits. Candidates are Git commits produced in isolated worktrees and judged by a project-supplied evaluator. We compare configured Loreley QD, sequential champion editing, and independent root proposals in a matched Zstandard experiment: seven paired blocks and 48 physical candidate jobs per policy and block (1,008 total), with root-only initialization and each policy's native concurrency. Validation selected a winner at each budget checkpoint; an agent-hidden holdout measured the fixed candidate. At 48 jobs, QD was 0.135% below Sequential Champion (95% BCa interval for the paired effect: -0.556% to +0.161%) and 0.320% above Independent Root (-0.082% to +0.686%). Neither contrast established a QD advantage; Sequential had the highest observed 48-job mean and median. Archive retention and later sampling did occur. Four of seven final QD winners had a non-incumbent state in their primary-parent ancestry under a retrospective one-incumbent rule applied only to the observed QD stream. Including inspiration edges raised the count to six, without showing that supplied context caused an edit. Three earlier capability campaigns produced generation-4, multi-file improvements in two Python libraries and a separate Zstandard revision. Loreley engaged the intended stepping-stone mechanism, but the controlled experiment did not show an endpoint benefit at 48 jobs. --- ### Beyond Memory Majority: Latent-Source Reasoning for Multi-Agent Memory Arbitration Authors: Chenchen Lin, Wenhao Yuan, Xuehe Wang, Edith Cheuk Han Ngai Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19701v1 Long-term multi-agent systems continuously accumulate the memories produced by different agents. Existing memory methods typically treat retrieved memories as independent evidence and combine them through voting or weighting. However, this independence assumption often fails in multi-agent settings: memories written by different agents may inherit the same upstream source or shared bias, causing correlated evidence to be repeatedly counted and creating a false majority. We term this failure mode \textit{Memory Correlation Bias}. To address the issue, we propose the \textbf{C}orrelation-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}emory \textbf{A}rbitration (CAMA) framework that jointly decouples retrieved memories and recovers missing independent evidence. We model the retrieved memories as query-conditioned evidence groups and combine neural dependency inference with provenance-based symbolic priors to estimate the effective number of independent evidence sources, thereby preventing correlated memories from forming a false majority. Since critical independent evidence may be absent from the initial retrieval set, \textsc{CAMA} further learns a sequential recovery policy that actively retrieves alternative evidence or traces upstream sources before making the final decision, aiming to recover sufficient independent evidence for reliable arbitration while minimizing retrieval cost. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art baseline methods, suppressing false majorities induced by correlated memories. --- ### RIPE++: Reinforced Keypoint Learning from Positive Pairs Only Authors: Johannes Künzel, Peter Eisert, Anna Hilsmann Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19693v1 Sparse keypoint extraction and matching underpin core tasks in geometric computer vision, including structure-from-motion, visual SLAM, augmented reality, and medical image registration. Learning robust local feature representations, however, typically requires accurate camera poses or depth supervision, which are often unavailable in real-world settings. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising alternative, requiring only the information if two images show the same scene or not. However, existing RL formulations such as RIPE rely on coarse binary rewards and carefully constructed negative training pairs, limiting training stability and descriptor discriminability. In this paper, we revisit RL-based keypoint learning and propose a reward that fully exploits the geometric consistency signal, deriving both reward and penalty from a single positive pair without contrasting against negatives. This richer signal provides sufficient supervisory contrast to learn discriminative detectors and descriptors from positive image pairs alone, enabling representation learning under extremely limited supervision. Furthermore, we show that the same RL objective can be extended to the matching stage by adapting LightGlue, raising AUC@5 on MegaDepth1500 from 56.58 to 59.65 and enabling weakly-supervised training of the full sparse matching pipeline from image pairs with partial visual overlap. We validate our approach on established benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully-supervised methods. We further show that the method can be even trained on low texture medical video sequences, where camera poses are usually unavailable and standard SfM pipelines often fail. Code and data are available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/RIPEpp . --- ### Rethinking the Evaluation and Optimization of LLM-Based Social Simulation Authors: Pei Wang, Xu Chen, Ji-Rong Wen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19689v1 LLM-based social simulation is a promising complement to traditional methods such as surveys and behavioral experiments. A core question is how to evaluate the fidelity of LLM-simulated human behavior and optimize LLMs toward it. Prevailing practice evaluates by accuracy, checking whether the model selects the single response observed from a human, and trains the LLM to reproduce this hard label. However, human behavior is inherently subjective: the same person in the same situation may reasonably act differently, so an observed response is only one draw from an underlying response distribution, rendering accuracy-based evaluation unreliable and hard-label training misleading. To address these problems, we first introduce the subjectivity coefficient, an entropy-based quantity distinguishing objective tasks such as coding from subjective ones such as social simulation, and use it to systematically analyze how accuracy-based evaluation and hard-label training fail as subjectivity grows. Based on the subjectivity coefficient, we propose Subjectivity-Adaptive soft-Label Training (SALT): it pools observed outputs from semantically nearby inputs into soft distributional labels, with an aggregation radius adapted to the estimated subjectivity of each input; in the near-objective limit the neighborhood shrinks, so SALT naturally falls back to standard single-label training. Moreover, since existing datasets record only single observed responses and cannot support distributional evaluation, we construct SUBJSIM, a benchmark of 19,300 contexts covering 193 annotators and 100 subjective questions. Since real-world data typically provide only a single observation per input, our experiments train models from single observed outputs while evaluating them against the full response distributions, verifying feasibility in realistic settings. Results on SUBJSIM demonstrate the advantages of our method. --- ### Learning Deterministic and Stochastic Forced Hamiltonian Systems Authors: Benedikt Brantner, Tomasz Tyranowski Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG, math.SG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19688v1 We develop a geometric framework for learning deterministic and stochastic forced Hamiltonian systems with neural networks. Motivated by the Lagrange-d'Alembert principle and the theory of variational integrators, we introduce the notion of a Lagrange-d'Alembert map and establish a $C^r$ convergence theorem for first-order one-step methods. Building on these results, we propose Generalized Forced Hamiltonian Neural Networks (GFHNNs), a class of structure-preserving neural networks obtained by concatenating Lagrange-d'Alembert-Euler maps, and prove a universal approximation theorem for this architecture. We further extend the framework to parameter-dependent systems, leading to Parametric Generalized Forced Hamiltonian Neural Networks (PGFHNNs). By interpreting the multiple Stratonovich integrals appearing in the Stratonovich-Taylor expansion as parameters, the same framework can be applied to stochastic forced Hamiltonian systems whenever information about the underlying Wiener process is available. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed geometric architectures provide significantly improved long-time stability and accuracy compared to non-geometric residual neural networks, while requiring substantially less training data to achieve a comparable level of performance. --- ### Learning Hierarchical Skill Policies with Offline Quality-Diversity Reinforcement Learning Authors: Tanachai Anakewat, Takayuki Osa, Tatsuya Harada Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19684v1 Recent studies investigate how to leverage pre-collected datasets to improve the policy performance and sample efficiency of RL. One promising approach to achieve this goal is to employ a two-stage strategy: In the first stage, diverse skills are extracted as a low-level policy from a given dataset, and a high-level policy is trained to solve a specific task in the second stage. Typically, extraction of the low-level policy is performed based on unsupervised learning such as trajectory VAE. However, a limitation of this approach is that the quality of the low-level policy highly depends on the quality of the dataset. To address this issue, we introduce QDOS (Quality-Diversity Offline Skill learning), a unified pipeline for robust offline-to-online learning. Our approach incorporates an Advantage-Weighted Quality-Diversity pretraining objective, which weights the skill extraction and diversity objectives by the estimated advantage of each trajectory segment. This approach allows the model to extract diverse and high-value skills. By providing robust and task-relevant skill representations, QDOS significantly improves the quality of the embedded skill space used by the low-level policy. We further integrate this with a dual dataset reuse strategy, where offline data is used both for skill pretraining and for populating the online replay buffer via pseudo-labeling. Experiments demonstrate that QDOS significantly outperforms strong baselines in structured manipulation tasks and unstructured locomotion tasks, confirming its ability to accelerate exploration and improve final returns in challenging sparse-reward domains. --- ### Frequency-Aware Continual Learning for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Large Language Models Authors: Tenghui Huang, Jiawen Kang, Dongning Liu, Changyan Yi, Chengjun Cai, Anjia Yang, Li Li, Dong In Kim Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19680v1 Smart contract vulnerability detection with Large Language Models (LLMs) faces three causally linked challenges. First, new vulnerability categories demand parameter-efficient adaptation, since full retraining is prohibitive for sequentially arriving tasks. Second, training per-task adapters on a shared backbone causes catastrophic forgetting of previously learned vulnerabilities. Third, the resulting multiplicity of adapters must be consolidated into a single model, since task identity is unknown at inference time. Each challenge arises directly from the solution to its predecessor, making an integrated framework essential. We propose a three-stage pipeline in which each stage addresses one challenge and feeds into the next. The adaptation stage uses Frequency-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation (FA-LoRA), which performs adaptation in the Fourier domain with per-frequency importance gates, requiring only 0.4% trainable parameters while outperforming standard LoRA and QLoRA. The continual learning stage applies Forget-Aware Replay (FAR), which uses these frequency gates to estimate per-sample forgetting risk via loss dynamics and prioritizes vulnerable knowledge for rehearsal, achieving an average Micro-F1 of 0.8022 across sequential tasks. The deployment stage employs Anchor-Protected Progressive Merging (APPM), which exploits the asymmetric generalization produced by FAR training to identify the strongest-generalizing adapter as an anchor and consolidates all adapters into a single model via anchor-protected weighted merging with frequency-domain gate competition. APPM achieves a Micro-F1 of 0.8085, within 2.7% of the independent per-task upper bound, at a merge cost of 156 ms and no additional runtime memory. Experiments on DIVE confirm the framework effectively addresses all three challenges for evolving blockchain ecosystems. --- ### CacheRoute: Planned Prefix-Affinity Routing for Large-Scale LLM Serving Authors: Huang Cheng Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19677v1 Prefix caching avoids prefill only when a repeated request returns to a server that still holds the prefix KV. Cache-blind balancing disperses that reuse; fixed affinity preserves it but can overload a server. CacheRoute resolves this tradeoff with a periodic routing plan. It admits high-rate keys to a stable warm set and places their assignments by expected load. Hot keys may use more than one destination, although every key in our primary semi-synthetic aggregate uses exactly one. On Llama-3.3-70B in fp8 across 60 H100 GPUs, CacheRoute sustains 176+/-11 QPS at a 3.5-s p99 SLO, 2.3x the strongest of five baselines. Served KV-cache hit rate rises from 64.1+/-1.3% under cache-blind balancing to 93.2+/-0.5%. A second semi-synthetic aggregate and controlled 8B and burst experiments separate the effects of affinity and placement. Two 32B workloads provide the counterexamples: when affinity recovers too little KV work, its residual load skew reduces or erases the improvement. We therefore recommend gating any deployment with a shadow replay rather than enabling affinity from workload statistics alone. --- ### Escaping the Quicksand: A Call to Arms Authors: Peter Sewell, Jean Pichon-Pharabod Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.PL, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19674v1 Computing has been an astonishing success - but the accumulated technical debt exposes us all to huge costs in business and societal risk. For 75 years, we've built systems to prose specifications with test-and-debug development. That works well enough for industry to thrive, but it's an expensive and ineffective feedback loop, and leaves everyone relying on shaky foundations. Now, AI-enabled engineering is amplifying the success by reducing coding costs, but also amplifies the risks, by rapidly increasing technical debt, and by automating detection of the vulnerabilities therein. How can we do better? Research has long pursued mathematical proof of correctness, which, unlike testing, can cover all cases. This too has advanced massively, but it remains hard to apply, both technically and because of a deep-seated cultural disconnect. Instead, we argue for a pragmatic approach to flexible combinations of testing, *specification*, and proof, that provides more effective feedback loops for both AI and human development. Most simply, one can incrementally co-develop executable-as-test-oracle partial specifications alongside conventional prose descriptions, code, and tests. This clarifies design and makes testing much more discriminating. Developers can and should do it today. Or, even better, one can use specifications that support the full gamut of testing, property-based testing, symbolic execution, and proof. This enables a range of intertwined feedback loops, again both for AI and humans, from cheap testing to more expensive proof. However, making it really practical needs *semantics infrastructure*: specifications and tooling for the main programming languages and other abstractions, which we now more-or-less know how to build, but which is not yet in place. We call the community to arms to create and deploy it - to enable a future built on firmer ground. --- ### SAGE-XGBoost: Spatially Augmented Graph Embeddings--Machine Learning Framework for Natural Hazards Susceptibility Mapping under Data Scarcity Authors: Mohammad H. Vahidnia, Ali Pourkarimi Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19672v1 Natural hazard susceptibility mapping is often constrained by limited labeled data, reducing the generalizability of conventional machine learning and limiting the applicability of complex deep learning models. This study proposes SAGE (Spatially Augmented Graph Embeddings), a structurally informed feature-engineering framework that combines controlled noise-based data augmentation with neighborhood-based graph embeddings to improve prediction under data-scarce conditions. A K-nearest neighbor graph is constructed to derive local spatial statistics, which are reduced using principal component analysis and integrated with environmental covariates and spatial coordinates. The resulting features are used with XGBoost to develop the SAGE-XGBoost model. The framework was evaluated for landslide and wildfire susceptibility mapping. SAGE-XGBoost consistently outperformed conventional and spatially explicit machine learning models. Compared with Spatial XGBoost, it achieved an absolute improvement of above 33 percentage points across the two case studies. The model reached AUC values of approximately 0.97 for landslide susceptibility and 0.95 for wildfire susceptibility. Feature importance analysis confirmed the contribution of graph embeddings to prediction, while their integration improved spatial coherence and reduced local noise amplification. Overall, SAGE-XGBoost provides an efficient and transferable alternative to deep representation learning for environmental hazard assessment and other geospatial prediction tasks under limited supervision. --- ### The Asymmetric Harms of LLM Compression Authors: Yuan Wu, Mairui Li, Lesia Semenova, Chudi Zhong Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19670v1 Large language models (LLMs) compression reduces deployment costs, but standard aggregate metrics like perplexity and accuracy often mask underlying behavioral shifts. In this work, we systematically evaluate 3 LLMs across 11 compression methods to investigate the effects of compression on knowledge retention, model confidence, and social bias. We find that compression disproportionately reduces the relative retention of head knowledge compared to tail knowledge. Furthermore, compressed models often remain substantially confident in their incorrect answers on newly lost knowledge. Finally, we demonstrate that stable aggregate bias scores can conceal substantial, opposing shifts in stereotypical preferences across demographic subgroups. Together, these findings reveal asymmetric behavioral changes that aggregate performance measures fail to capture, highlighting the need for granular evaluation of compressed models before deployment. --- ### Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning Authors: Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu, Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19669v2 Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage. First, the SFT stage typically relies on an off-the-shelf vision encoder to encode the helper image, yielding suboptimal latent representations that may not be well aligned with the downstream reasoning task. Second, existing RL methods treat the latent component only through deterministic regularization, which constrains policy drift but does not create alternative latent trajectories for exploration. To address these limitations, we propose Scaffolding Minds. Our approach learns a dedicated scaffolding encoder that provides an optimized target in latent space, and learns both the mean and variance of the RL sampler. We further show that these two improvements are complementary, together yielding substantial gains over strong baselines. Empirically, our method improves over the strongest latent reasoning baseline by +9.5 points on FrozenLake spatial planning, with the gain widening to +19 points on the 32x32 grids, and by +5.6 points on average across nine visual-centric reasoning benchmarks. --- ### MUST-PET: MUltimodal Self-supervised learning across Tracers for whole-body PET/CT-based lesion segmentation Authors: Bashirul Azam Biswas, Amartya Bhattacharya, Biratal Raj Wagle, Matthew E. Maeder, James B. Yu, Indrani Bhattacharya Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19666v1 Deep learning-based whole-body PET-CT lesion segmentation can support cancer staging, treatment planning, and response assessment, but generalization is limited by scarce annotations and domain shifts. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can address these challenges but remains underexplored in pan-cancer, multi-tracer PET-CT. In this work, we propose MUST-PET (MUltimodal Self-Supervised learning across Tracers), a multimodal, multi-tracer SSL framework for generalizable whole-body PET-CT lesion segmentation. MUST-PET is trained and validated on a diverse, multi-institutional collection of pan-cancer PET-CT scans acquired with FDG and prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-targeted radiotracers. MUST-PET uses context-aware masked reconstruction, where one modality is partially masked and reconstructed using complementary information from both PET and CT. The pretrained model is subsequently fine-tuned with labeled samples and evaluated for reconstruction quality, lesion segmentation, label efficiency, and generalizability across independent held-out datasets. MUST-PET reduces reconstruction error, improves lesion segmentation over training from scratch, and performs well with limited labeled data and on unseen external datasets, demonstrating the potential of multi-tracer SSL for label-efficient, generalizable whole-body PET-CT. segmentation. --- ### ReCache: Efficient KV Cache Reuse and Compression for Tool-Augmented LLM Agents Authors: Yichu Fang, Sitong Wei, Haozhe Hu, Xiaoyu Shen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19662v1 Agentic language models repeatedly encode tool and skill schemas that recur across requests in different combinations and orders, preventing standard prefix caching from reusing their key--value (KV) states. We introduce \textbf{ReCache}, a framework for independently caching resource representations while reducing their inference-time computational and memory overhead. Resource-wise attention removes cross-resource interactions and assigns resource-local positions, producing composition-invariant KV blocks. ReCache then restricts resource visibility to contribution-selected layer--KV-head-group routes and retains only invocation-critical fields through structural and semantic pruning. We evaluate ReCache on a benchmark assembled from seven public tool- and skill-use datasets, including resource-disjoint tests. Resource-wise attention matches dense invocation performance (82.3\% versus 82.4\% Inv-F1) while providing a 3.655$\times$ time-to-first-token speedup. The complete framework reduces allocated KV-tensor memory by 92.43\% and accelerates attention by 1.423$\times$. These results show that separating reusable schema encoding from selective resource access substantially reduces agentic inference costs with limited effectiveness loss. The code is available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/ReCache. --- ### FleetSieve: Decision-Critical Profiling for SLO-Aware LLM Fleet Configuration Authors: Huang Cheng, Scott Zhang, Aubert Li Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19659v1 Choosing tensor-parallel (TP) degrees and replica counts for an LLM serving fleet is difficult because performance is not monotonic in TP and the feasible choice can change with load. Exhaustive profiling resolves this uncertainty, but measures many configurations that do not affect the final resource allocation. We present FleetSieve, which selects measurements according to their expected effect on a resource-coupled, SLO-aware fleet decision. FleetSieve models capacity and tail latency jointly, compares conservative and optimistic allocations, and stops when their remaining decision gap is below a specified tolerance. On a fixed H100 measurement grid for a 31B-parameter open-weight model, FleetSieve reaches the oracle aggregate decision using 22,200 GPU-seconds, 6.9% less than uniform random profiling in the fixed comparison. Across 200 random reveal orders, its mean saving over random profiling is 5.4% (95% bootstrap CI: 3.5-7.2%). The fixed-comparison saving is 21.5% for Chat, while FleetSieve does not use the fewest GPU-seconds for Code. Joint capacity and tail modeling also avoids selecting a configuration whose 46.4-second completion p99 violates a 30-second SLO. In a 16-GPU allocation, an incorrect sparse-profile decision loses up to 1.93 requests/s and 12.4 percentage points of max-min fulfillment. Boundary repeats and BurstGPT measurements support the observed load-dependent tail-latency mechanism. --- ### Rationally Enriched Chebyshev Trunk Bases for DeepONet Surrogates of High Péclet Entrance Transport Authors: Mingeun Choi, Satish Kumar Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19658v1 This study demonstrates a rationally enriched Chebyshev (REC) trunk for deep operator network (DeepONet) surrogate models of singularly perturbed and high-Péclet transport problems whose solution profiles are characterized by thin localized boundary or wall layers. The REC trunk combines Chebyshev polynomial dictionary elements with rational dictionary elements constructed using the adaptive Antoulas-Anderson (AAA) algorithm. Over five independent training runs, the resulting REC-trunk DeepONet is evaluated against a vanilla DeepONet and a Chebyshev-trunk DeepONet whose prescribed dictionary consists only of Chebyshev polynomials across three problems whose singular perturbation parameters are diffusion-to-advection ratios: a singularly perturbed scalar boundary-value problem (BVP), the thermal entrance problem with a prescribed wall temperature, and the concentration entrance problem with an absorbing wall. Across the held-out test profiles, the REC-trunk DeepONet improves over the vanilla DeepONet and remains comparable to the Chebyshev-trunk DeepONet in predicting the scalar profile, with its clearest advantage over the Chebyshev-trunk DeepONet appearing when the perturbation parameter lies between $1.00\times10^{-4}$ and $1.78\times10^{-4}$, where it reduces the profile-error metrics by up to $19.5\,\%$ relative to the Chebyshev-trunk DeepONet. In predicting the wall-normal temperature and concentration profiles, the REC-trunk DeepONet reduces the profile-error metrics by up to $60.2\,\%$ and $32.2\,\%$ relative to the vanilla and Chebyshev-trunk DeepONets, respectively, while suppressing artificial near-wall oscillations as the Péclet or mass-transfer Péclet number ranges from $10^{2}$ to $10^{4}$. --- ### DeltaML-Bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Real-World Research Repositories Authors: Josias Moukpe, Priyanka Aryal, Matthew Kenney Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19653v1 Autonomous agents for machine learning experimentation must navigate heterogeneous repositories, repair training pipelines, and evaluate candidate improvements under realistic compute constraints. Existing benchmarks only partially capture these conditions. We introduce DeltaML-Bench, a benchmark comprising 48 tasks sourced from research papers that require agents to improve published baselines within imperfect, open-source repositories. We evaluate GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4 with a standard Modular agent and a search-based ARG scaffolding. In the 4 x 6h allocation, ARG raises GPT-5's per-run success rate from 9.4% to 33.9%; in the 2 x 12h allocation, GPT-5 ARG reaches 49.0%. Modular configurations exhibit specification gaming rates as high as 47.9%, while no gaming is observed in the evaluated ARG configurations. These results indicate that scaffolding design and integrity checks are important considerations when deploying agents for autonomous ML experimentation. --- ### Can Agent Memory Systems Track Evolving State? Authors: Xinyi Fan, Miri Liu, Ruozhen Yang, Siru Ouyang, Jiawei Han Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19652v1 As LLM-based agents are deployed for longer and higher-stakes tasks, their memory systems continue to have crucial gaps. While existing memory benchmarks focus largely on recall-shaped tasks, we argue an effective memory system must track the evolving state of the world; as facts, constraints, and decisions are revised over a long interaction, answers must reflect the current state and not a superseded one. We define this capability as state tracking and instantiate it in StateMemBench, a benchmark of 234 multi-session scenarios spanning two conversation-length regimes. Its closed-pool grading scores whether an answer reflects the current state, the superseded state, or fails otherwise, separating state-tracking failures from other errors by construction. Our analysis shows that this task is challenging for existing memory systems, retrieval-augmented baselines, and long-context baselines. We then present StateMem, a state-first memory method that explicitly tracks supersession and relational dependencies, and show it improves current-state accuracy over the strongest same-backbone baseline by 1.8x (0.205 -> 0.363) on DeepSeek-V4-Flash and over the strongest memory system by 1.6x (0.149 -> 0.233) on Qwen-3.5-9B, while remaining competitive with the long-context baselines. Finally, we show the same state approach can be applied as a lightweight single-call wrapper over existing memory systems, lifting current-state accuracy by +32 to +67 points on StateMemBench across six memory and retrieval backends. A length- and cost-matched control attributes +15 to +32 of those points to state structure rather than added context. --- ### PL-NBA: A Possession-level Universal Basketball Video Dataset Supporting Multiple Visual Understanding Tasks Authors: Yunhao Zhao, Haoying Sun, Jiarui Li, Zhuming Wang, Ya Jing, Xiangbo Shu, Lifang Wu, Changwen Chen Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19646v1 Visual understanding in sports has emerged as a hot topic in computer vision in recent years. Most existing basketball video datasets adopt single action or activity as sample, which can neither preserve the temporal continuity of game events nor support complex tasks such as action anticipation. To address this issue, this paper constructs the first possession-level basketball video dataset (PL-NBA), in which each sample is composed of a complete NBA offensive possession. Collected from 60 NBA games, PL-NBA contains 11,000 valid offensive possession clips and 31,567 annotated events with player names, captions, event types and timestamps. Each video clip includes multiple events and preserves the continuity of events, which is helpful for analysis of tactic. Experiment is conducted on multiple visual understanding tasks, including event recognition, video captioning, temporal action localization and action anticipation. Experimental results show that existing methods achieve limited performance on above four tasks, demonstrating that PL-NBA is a challenging benchmark for sports video understanding. --- ### When Guidance Goes Off-Scale: Recalibrating Diffusion Transformers under Analog Compute-in-Memory Nonidealities Authors: Wenshuai Yao, Wenyong Zhou Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19644v1 Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) incur high memory traffic and energy costs because sampling repeatedly evaluates large denoisers dominated by linear operations. Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) can alleviate these costs by executing linear operations within weight-storing memory arrays. However, CIM nonidealities perturb effective weights, with errors accumulating along the state-dependent denoising trajectory; their interaction with classifier-free guidance (CFG) remains underexplored. In this paper, we characterize the impact of analog CIM nonidealities on DiT sampling. Although conditional and unconditional predictions can each remain close to their clean counterparts, their difference (the CFG residual) is disproportionately attenuated and rotated. Identifying this residual as a controllable failure channel, we propose a retraining-free, sampler-side recalibration that adjusts only the CFG scale for a given CIM condition. Trajectory-level analysis shows that moderate recalibration strengthens the target-oriented component preserved in the distorted residual, enabling earlier commitment to a prompt-consistent semantic region. In contrast, excessive guidance amplifies the full noisy residual and degrades quality, resulting in a finite, noise-dependent optimum. Extensive experiments on PixArt-Sigma, PixArt-alpha, and DiT-XL/2 show that the optimal guidance scale increases with CIM noise. Using 30,000 samples per condition, guidance recalibration consistently restores generation quality across simulated CIM mappings, closing at least 87% of the CIM-induced FID gap at a CIM noise level of 0.20. It reduces FID from 59.22 to 20.49 on PixArt-Sigma, 72.37 to 21.12 on PixArt-alpha, and 20.89 to 6.62 on DiT-XL/2. --- ### Time-Uniform Self-Normalized Concentration for Discounted Least Squares: Limits and Corrections Authors: Yi-Shan Wu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19643v1 Self-normalized concentration inequalities are standard tools in bandit and reinforcement-learning analyses. A widely used weighted extension claims an analogous time-uniform guarantee for discounted least-squares estimators in non-stationary problems. A simple scalar Gaussian counterexample with a fixed parameter shows that the claimed bounded radius is crossed with probability one. For fixed discount and regularization parameters, we further show that, when $δ\leq1/2$ and $T/δ$ is sufficiently large, any deterministic anytime boundary valid uniformly over the stated conditionally sub-Gaussian model class must be at least of order $R\sqrt{\log(T/δ)}$ at some time by horizon $T$; for nondecreasing boundaries, this order is required at time $T$. We identify the proof error: different terminal times use different Gaussian mixing distributions, so the fixed-time mixtures do not form one supermartingale, and the stopping-time argument does not repair this failure. Finally, we show that the weighted inequality remains valid at each fixed deterministic time, give valid finite- and infinite-horizon corrections, and discuss consequences for downstream analyses. --- ### S$^2$GS: Structured Sparse Gaussian Streaming for Efficient Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction on Edge-IoT Devices Authors: Yiwei Li, Jiannong Cao, Weixun Gao, Rui Cao, Songye Zhu, Yinfeng Cao, Mingjin Zhang Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19639v1 Streaming reconstruction of Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) supports immersive Internet of Things (IoT) services, such as telepresence and digital twin visualization. Existing methods suffer from high per-frame optimization time and large storage footprints, limiting deployment on resource-constrained Edge-IoT devices. To address these challenges, we propose Structured Sparse Gaussian Streaming (S$^2$GS), an FVV reconstruction framework that exploits structure-aware temporal sparsity to selectively update Gaussian residuals, enabling efficient streaming without compromising visual fidelity. In the spatial domain, a streaming octree hierarchically organizes Gaussian residuals, capturing spatial correlations that guide residual updates. In the temporal domain, a structured gating mechanism, comprising hierarchical feature propagation (HFP) and Gumbel-Sigmoid sampling, converts hierarchical dynamic cues into sparse residual update decisions under differentiable optimization. A multi-level discrete scheme is further adopted to provide fine-grained control over residual updates while preserving intricate dynamic details. Extensive experiments across consumer GPUs, industrial edge IoT devices, and a physical telepresence testbed demonstrate that S$^2$GS consistently reduces per-frame optimization time and storage footprint while maintaining competitive visual quality. Compared with QUEEN, S$^2$GS reduces per-frame optimization time by 59% and storage costs by 85% on an RTX 4090 GPU. On the Jetson AGX Orin, S$^2$GS delivers the highest rendering throughput (60+ FPS) and the lowest energy consumption among the evaluated methods, demonstrating its potential for deployment in resource-constrained systems. --- ### TextRefine: Improving Textual Fidelity, Spatial Placement, and Glyph Rendering for Text Editing in Product Posters Authors: Honglie Wang, Jia Sun, Zijun Li, Junlong Wu, Pengcheng Wei, Jiyuan Wang, Yongrui Heng, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Dewen Fan, Qianqian Gan, Fan Yang et al. Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19637v1 Text editing in product posters entails inserting new text or replacing existing text while preserving product appearance, background content, and global composition. Despite recent progress in instruction-based image editing, general-purpose models remain unreliable in this setting: they often omit or incorrectly render the target text, place it over salient products or pre-existing content, and produce structurally distorted or visually inconsistent glyphs. We introduce \textbf{TextRefine}, a task-aligned post-training framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with operation-specific reward optimization to address these complementary failure modes. For text insertion, our text-span-level reward jointly assesses semantic fidelity and target-span coverage, penalizes spatial conflicts with products and existing text, and employs a gated structural constraint to preserve non-text regions. For text replacement, our glyph-level reward leverages the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) posterior of the target character to provide graded supervision for fine-grained defects, including missing strokes, structural deformations, and confusion among visually similar characters. We further introduce \textbf{OpenTextEdit}, a dataset comprising 100K images for text editing in product posters, with multi-text layouts, detailed text attributes, product masks, and challenging low-frequency characters. Extensive experiments on both insertion and replacement demonstrate that TextRefine consistently outperforms the evaluated image editing baselines in textual fidelity, placement reliability, and glyph quality while better preserving source-image content. --- ### Complementary, Not Cumulative: Interaction Effects in Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Navier-Stokes Vortex Shedding Authors: Devesh Shah Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19632v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) embed governing partial differential equations directly into the training loss, offering a promising alternative to costly CFD solvers for unsteady flows. Yet the growing list of techniques proposed to improve PINN training is typically validated one at a time, leaving open whether these techniques actually compose. We study this question in depth on the DFG/Schafer-Turek unsteady cylinder wake benchmark. In isolation, nearly every technique performs no better than an untreated baseline. However, combining periodic (SIREN) activations with causal weighting unlocks a previously inaccessible regime, reconstructing velocity and pressure fields to within 4.1% average relative L2 error against an OpenFOAM reference solution. Adding further techniques instead causes catastrophic performance degradation, demonstrating that individually effective PINN interventions can interact nonlinearly and that more elaborate training recipes are not necessarily better. --- ### Scientific Data Skills: Enabling Agent-Ready Scientific Data Services at Scale Authors: Xiaohan Huang, Qingqing Long, Xiaolei Du, Siyu Pu, Jiawen Xu, Haotian Chen, Chenyang Zhao, Jinbiao Liu, Xuezhi Wang, Hengshu Zhu, Yuanchun Zhou Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19625v2 Scientific data are increasingly used by AI agents, yet existing dataset representations provide limited support for reliable dataset discovery and interpretation, constraining their effective use in scientific workflows. This limitation arises because agents must search across heterogeneous repositories and reconstruct dataset-specific semantics and operating procedures from documentation designed primarily for human use. To address this limitation, we introduce the Scientific Data Skill (SciDSK), an agent-ready representation that packages dataset-specific knowledge and operational guidance as a reusable agent skill. A SciDSK integrates dataset descriptions, scientific context, file organization, task-specific usage procedures, quality checks, and provenance information while retaining the underlying data in its original repository. We define a structured SciDSK specification and develop a systematic construction pipeline that grounds each SciDSK in authoritative dataset records and associated supporting materials. We further establish the Scientific Data Skill Bank, a unified platform that publishes SciDSK resources across six scientific disciplines and supports package access, persistent identification, and traceability to source datasets. We evaluate SciDSK through a retrieval benchmark for dataset discovery and controlled cases for dataset interpretation. On the query retrieval benchmark, Agent-SciDSK achieves 80.77% Hit@1, exceeding Agent-Raw by 9.62 percentage points. Across controlled interpretation cases, the SciDSK condition satisfies 23 of 24 assessment criteria, compared with 22 under the web-page condition. These results indicate that SciDSK improves how agents locate and understand scientific datasets, providing a stronger foundation for actionable scientific data use. --- ### Mitigating Identity Essentialism in LLM Agents with Longitudinal Life Trajectories Authors: Hexi Wang, Yujia Zhou, Bangde Du, Weihang Su, Xinyuan Cao, Qingyi Pan, Qingyao Ai, Yueyue Wu, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19621v3 Large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable approach to social simulation, but their credibility depends on how agents are constructed. Existing methods can partially reproduce population-level patterns, yet often fail to capture human-like diversity. Our analysis shows that static-profile agents exhibit stronger demographic separation and within-group compression than humans, a pattern consistent with identity essentialism: demographic labels can encourage models to treat group-average tendencies as individual traits, homogenizing responses within groups. We argue that this limitation arises from two related factors: sparse, static agent representations and the limited ability of prompt-only memory to persistently integrate experience. Inspired by complementary memory systems, we propose LifeMem, a longitudinal memory framework that combines structured life-event retrieval with agent-specific parametric memory for experience integration. Experiments on Understanding Society with three LLMs show that LifeMem improves alignment with human data in terms of response distributions, overall and within-group diversity, and patterns of within-person response change across life stages. These findings highlight the value of longitudinal life-event memory for constructing more faithful and dynamically evolving social agents. --- ### What Matters for Latent Actions in Robot Learning Authors: Xizhou Bu, Qingda Hu, Lei Zhou, Lingfeng Zhang, Yingbo Tang, Zihao Liu, Xinyi Tao, Zhiqiang Ma, Qingqiu Huang, Chufeng Tang, Hongbo Wang, Jing Zhang et al. Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19613v2 Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling robot learning to leverage large-scale unlabeled videos through latent actions that serve as compact surrogates for physical actions. Despite rapid progress, research on LAM remains highly fragmented, with existing methods evaluating different design choices in isolation under inconsistent experimental settings, making it difficult to identify the factors that truly determine downstream robotic manipulation performance. In this work, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of latent action learning for robotic manipulation. We unify representative LAM methods within a common autoencoding framework and systematically investigate 41 LAM design choices across three dimensions, including latent action modeling paradigms, learning objectives and regularization methods, and latent action integration strategies. We further examine four proxy metrics for evaluating latent action quality and assess their ability to reliably predict downstream robotic manipulation performance. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks provide strong empirical evidence that fine-tuning vision-language model (VLM) backbones with latent actions provides a stronger initialization for downstream policy learning, with further validation on real-world robot manipulation tasks. --- ### Forking Fast: Efficiently Estimating Uncertainty Dynamics in Text Generation Authors: Eric Bigelow, Amir Zur, Satchel Grant, Tal Haklay, Can Rager, Owen Lewis, Thomas McGrath, Jack Merullo, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Atticus Geiger Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19611v1 LLM reasoning is stochastic, and so understanding a model requires grappling with the distribution of reasoning chains that it might produce for a given question, i.e., its uncertainty. Resampling-based analyses characterize this distribution, revealing which steps of a rollout determine how the model arrives at its answer. However, a major limitation of these approaches is that resampling text sequences at every token or sentence in a reasoning chain is very costly. Our work strives to make resampling analysis more computationally efficient, while also shedding light on an important scientific question: what is the right statistical model for explaining uncertainty dynamics in text generation? We show that when resampling many reasoning chains, uncertainty dynamics converge to stable patterns, and noise is largely an artifact of sampling rather than an LLM's sensitivity to each individual token or reasoning step. We develop a statistical model for smoothing noisy low-sample rollout data to better approximate high-sample data, allowing us to significantly cut sampling costs. --- ### PEA-DPO: Perception-Enhanced Alignment Direct Preference Optimization for MLLMs Alignment Authors: Jiawei Feng, Jiancan Wu, Xingyu Zhu, Junkang Wu, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19598v1 Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its adaptation to multimodal settings remains unexplored. Through representational analysis, we identify a key limitation in multimodal preference optimization, which we term visual insensitivity: models often fail to distinguish between images and those with critical visual context removed. Our theoretical analysis further uncovers two manifestations of this problem, namely Across-Image Insensitivity and Within-Image Insensitivity. To address these challenges, we propose Perception-Enhanced Alignment DPO (PEA-DPO), a framework for multimodal LLMs alignment, which explicitly leverages visual preference signals to overcome visual insensitivity. We further provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that PEA-DPO provably mitigates both failure modes. Empirical results demonstrate that PEA-DPO enhances sensitivity to visual context while preserving the language modeling capacity of the base model. Evaluations across three hallucination benchmarks using MLLMs of varying scales show that PEA-DPO effectively mitigates visual insensitivity, achieves stronger multimodal alignment, and substantially reduces hallucinations. --- ### OrthoSkillVLA: Continual Skill Learning via Gradient-Informed Skill Subspace Adaptation Authors: Jiaqi Wang, Zhou Fang, Qiongfeng Shi, Yi Zhou Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19589v1 Pretrained Vision-Language-Action models provide a strong foundation for robot learning, but sequentially adapting them to diverse skills can perturb the representations and velocity mappings used by previous skills, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Architecture-based approaches improve retention by isolating skills but lead to increased inference footprint. Recent subspace-constrained methods restrict parameter updates in an orthogonal subspace to minimize interference but impose a unified constraint on the entire model. We analyze the distinct roles of internal VLA components and identify two VLA-specific challenges. First, the VLM maintains broad semantic representations, making it vulnerable to capacity exhaustion, whereas the ActionHead refines semantics into localized velocity patterns that are highly sensitive to perturbations. Second, the final velocity decoder serves as a readout layer. Freezing it forms an output-stage expressivity bottleneck, while updating it risks overwriting previous velocity mappings. To this end, we propose OrthoSkillVLA, a parameter-efficient framework for continual skill learning in pretrained VLA models without demonstration replay. Given the representation heterogeneity, we impose separate subspace constraints on the VLM and ActionHead, preserving reusable semantic capacity while protecting localized velocity patterns. For the output layer, we introduce a lightweight feature-aware MoE decoder, where each skill is allocated a compact expert and a training-free router selects the expert according to feature-space affinity. Extensive simulated and real-world evaluations, together with ablations, demonstrate that OrthoSkillVLA better preserves prior skills while acquiring new ones. --- ### Unregularized Convergence of Single-Loop, Entropy-Regularized Natural Actor-Critic Authors: Zhiqiang Tan Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19587v1 While entropy regularization is widely used to stabilize and accelerate Natural Policy Gradient methods, its ability to yield faster convergence rates for the unregularized objective remains underexplored. Existing analyses often rely on double-loop architectures and invoke a linear entropy penalty. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, we analyze a single-loop, entropy-regularized Natural Actor-Critic algorithm under compatible linear function approximation. By training an uncentered critic, our critic tracking can remain stable even as the training policy approaches determinism and the Fisher information matrix degenerates. We focus on two primary regimes for the optimization landscape: a Stochastic Regime, where we fuse coupled actor-critic updates into a joint Lyapunov recurrence, and a Deterministic Regime, where we pivot to a Policy Mirror Descent framework to circumvent the collapse of Euclidean geometry. By exploiting a positive Minimal Action Gap in the unregularized Markov decision process, we introduce an Exponential Translation mechanism that maps the regularized gap to the unregularized one up to an exponentially decaying tail. By tuning the fixed temperature, our algorithm achieves accelerated unregularized convergence rates, up to approximation-error terms: $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T_{total}^{-1})$ in the Stochastic Regime, and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T_{total}^{-2/3})$ for the average iterate alongside $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T_{total}^{-1/3})$ for the last iterate in the Deterministic Regime. Here, $T_{total}$ denotes the total number of stochastic critic updates (or Monte Carlo rollouts). Furthermore, in the tabular setting, our positive-action-gap analysis yields a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T_{total}^{-2/3})$ average-iterate rate, surpassing the $\mathcal{O}(T_{total}^{-1/2})$ worst-case statistical barrier that applies without a positive action margin. --- ### Kähler landscapes for complex neural network descents and guarantees including a search and destroy of the Calabi-Yau manifold Authors: Andrew Gracyk Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.LG, math.DG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19584v2 We study landscapes for complex-parameterized networks. Our approach is motivated with an information-theoretic manifold perspective of the parameter and via classical optimization guarantees although of complex geometric variety such as through Dolbeault asymptotics. The descent path admits a Kähler information metric under a cross-entropy via the Wirtinger Hessian on the log-likelihood potential. We restrict attention to a descent update rule with natural gradient descent via a differentiated loss scaled by the inverse metric, so the descent path remains in the holomorphic tangent bundle. We emphasize Calabi-Yau information manifolds which profane theoretical guarantees via an ill-curvature-conditioned landscape. Under a Calabi-Yau metric, specifically in a non-compact setting with a global potential so defined geometrically rather than invoking the topological requirements of the Calabi conjecture, a wedged nowhere-vanishing holomorphic form is the top exterior product of the Kähler form up to constants, yielding a constant determinant condition with respect to a background metric and ill-conditioned eigenvalues under nonuniform and almost low-rank assumptions. Moreover, it has been discovered that negative curvature subverts the loss landscape, specifically sectional curvature, so we expand on this and draw interconnections to negative-definite Ricci curvature. Our arguments primarily exist in a geometric analytic modality, although we establish roots in deep learning theory such as through asymptotics at initialization and connections through failure modes of neural network guarantees under vanishing and negative Ricci curvature. --- ### VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models Authors: Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Jize Jiang, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu et al. Published: 2026-08-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19583v3 Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet reliable evaluation remains challenging: benchmarks should adopt inputs aligned with the visual priors of current video models, require valid evolving processes rather than only plausible final states, and calibrate task difficulty to remain challenging yet partly feasible. To this end, we introduce VGI-bench, containing 27 tasks and 810 instances, organized by a two-level taxonomy of task domains and skill tags for fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning capabilities of video generation models. Our evaluations show that current generative systems can solve a subset of visually grounded reasoning tasks, but remain far from reliable, with even the strongest model, Seedance 2.0, achieving only 51.0% under our evaluation criteria. Our analysis further explore the output failure modes, input condition sensitivity, performance transfer boundary from synthetic fine-tuning, and internal denoising perspective revealing limited self-correction, where later steps mainly refine early hypotheses rather than correct reasoning errors. We hope VGI-bench will help stimulate the development of next-generation video generation models. Website: https://hexuan21.github.io/VGI-Bench/ ---