# Research Papers — 2026-08 · bundle page 95 of 240 > Full-text markdown of papers #4701–4750 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/95 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/94.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-08/page/96.md) ### On the Slow Convergence to Trivial Solutions of Algorithms for Hard Optimization Problems Authors: Ali Hussaini Umar, Jean Barbier, Matthieu Jonckheere, Manuel Sáenz Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.DM, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18910v1 Hard combinatorial optimization problems, many of which are NP-hard, present fundamental algorithmic challenges. Average-case analysis on random instances has emerged as a powerful framework for understanding typical algorithmic performance beyond worst-case guarantees. A substantial body of work has established negative results: for sufficiently hard instances (often controlled by the underlying graph connectivity/constraints density), no known polynomial-time algorithm can significantly outperform naive heuristics in the double asymptotic limit where both problem size and constraints density tend to infinity. We revisit this picture by studying the finite-size behavior of some optimization algorithms across easy, intermediate, and hard regimes. Through rigorous analysis of large-graph asymptotics combined with numerical experiments on canonical problems (maximum independent set and maximum $K$-SAT), we demonstrate that while algorithms do eventually converge to theoretically predicted bounds, this convergence can be remarkably slow. In the intermediate regime where instances are already highly constrained, local algorithms achieve solutions substantially better than their predicted performance in the high-constraint-density limit. This gap between finite-regime and asymptotic behavior has important practical implications: sophisticated algorithmic design remains crucial even when asymptotic theory predicts inevitable failure. --- ### Learning-State-Aware Dynamic Generative Data Augmentation on Small-Scale Datasets Authors: Ting Xiang, Chenxi Deng, Jinhui Zhao, Bingting Jiang, Ke Zhang, Changjian Chen, Zhuo Tang Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18907v1 Small-scale image classification is often limited by the scarcity of training data. Generative data augmentation (GDA) based on pretrained generative models has emerged as an effective solution. However, existing methods rely on task-agnostic augmentation strategies that overlook downstream model needs. Although recent dynamic GDA methods incorporate model feedback to guide augmentation, they still struggle to reliably determine sample-specific augmentation strengths and adapt augmentation strategies to different image regions while balancing image diversity and class semantics. To address these issues, we propose learning-state-aware dynamic generative data augmentation (LSADA). Specifically, LSADA constructs a learning state for each sample based on its current loss and loss-decrease rate, which is then mapped to a sample-specific augmentation strength. Furthermore, LSADA introduces a decoupled data augmentation and diffusion fusion strategy that applies strength-controlled transformations to class-relevant regions and generates diverse class-irrelevant regions, progressively fusing them to improve image diversity while preserving class semantics. Experiments on nine public datasets show that LSADA outperforms the existing SOTA dynamic GDA method by an average of 4.5% on six natural image datasets and 2.5% on three medical image datasets. --- ### A FEM-Based Surrogate Modelling and Optimization Framework for Physics-Constrained Electromagnetic Coil Design Authors: Yucheng Liu Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18903v1 This work evaluates surrogate-assisted optimization of a seven-parameter current-excited coil--core benchmark subject to geometric, manufacturing, and separate core and copper mass constraints. A Python--MPh--COMSOL workflow couples a two-dimensional axisymmetric finite-element method (FEM) model to a Matern 5/2 Gaussian-process (GP) probabilistic surrogate. Here, physics-constrained denotes a design problem evaluated by a governing-equation FEM model and restricted by explicit physical, geometric, manufacturing, and material-allocation constraints; it does not denote a physics-informed GP architecture. Sequential Bayesian optimization (BO) ranks candidates using expected improvement (EI), and every reported incumbent is verified by FEM. Five paired runs show that optimizer ranking depends on the available FEM-evaluation budget: EI--BO improves rapidly at small continuation budgets, COBYLA is stronger at the earliest checkpoint, and BOBYQA attains the highest mean terminal response. A retrospective finite-pool study further finds no robust endpoint advantage of EI over posterior-mean ranking on this smooth response surface. The broader result is that early progress, terminal response, information use, and wall-clock cost can favor different methods in simulation-driven design. A selected-design check at a common total current preserves the observed BOBYQA--COBYLA--EI-BO ordering. The conclusions nevertheless remain conditional on this axisymmetric benchmark and do not establish a fixed-current optimum, fixed-power performance, or electrical-efficiency superiority. --- ### Quantum Tensor Network Learning with DMRG Authors: Gustav J L Jäger, Martin B Plenio, Hans-Martin Rieser Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18901v1 Tensor Networks are a relatively new machine learning approach. The architectures proposed initially are inspired by approaches from quantum many-body physics simulations. One common layout is the matrix product state (MPS) also known as a tensor train optimized with gradient descent techniques. We introduce a global normalization condition, so that the MPS represents a quantum state. We investigate two optimization methods that find the locally optimal tensors and compare them regarding their effectiveness. One is based on gradient descent and the other on an adaptation of DMRG. --- ### TestifAI: Tomography-Based Testing for Deep Learning Systems Authors: Arooj Arif, Tobias Hartung, Elena Botoeva, Alexandros Koliousis Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18900v2 As AI systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical application domains (e.g., autonomous driving), associated risks increase too. Deep learning models underlying modern AI systems, therefore, must undergo thorough testing to ensure their correct behaviour. A single robustness test involves thousands of inferences to empirically verify if a model's outputs remain stable under a bounded perturbation of its inputs. However, existing testing frameworks lack the means to systematically explore and summarise robustness across a combinatorial space of perturbations. We propose TestifAI, a deep learning testing framework for efficient and accurate estimation of robustness against combinations of perturbations. TestifAI enables users to specify operational conditions as structured spaces of semantic input perturbations (e.g., image blur, brightness and zoom) and discrete severity levels (e.g., low, medium and high). Users can query model robustness for any combination (e.g., "low blur, high brightness, and medium zoom"). To achieve efficiency and accuracy, TestifAI introduces partial model tomography, a novel approach to reconstructing model behaviour in a multi-perturbation space from tests that apply only a small number of perturbations (lower-order projections). To estimate robustness against at least three perturbations, TestifAI trains an auxiliary model on the results of tests involving up to two perturbations only, avoiding execution of an exponential number of tests. Our experiments on five image and language classification tasks show that TestifAI can predict higher-order (3 and 4 perturbations) test outcomes from low-order (1 and 2 perturbations) observations with an aggregate robustness estimation error of less than 7%, while reducing the number of inferences by 60-80%. --- ### \textsc{TestifAI}: Tomography-Based Testing for Deep Learning Systems Authors: Arooj Arif, Tobias Hartung, Elena Botoeva, Alexandros Koliousis Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18900v1 As AI systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical application domains (e.g., autonomous driving), associated risks increase too. Deep learning models underlying modern AI systems, therefore, must undergo thorough testing to ensure their correct behaviour. A single robustness test involves thousands of inferences to empirically verify if a model's outputs remain stable under a bounded perturbation of its inputs. However, existing testing frameworks lack the means to systematically explore and summarise robustness across a combinatorial space of perturbations. We propose TestifAI, a deep learning testing framework for efficient and accurate estimation of robustness against combinations of perturbations. TestifAI enables users to specify operational conditions as structured spaces of semantic input perturbations (e.g., image blur, brightness and zoom) and discrete severity levels (e.g., low, medium and high). Users can query model robustness for any combination (e.g., "low blur, high brightness, and medium zoom"). To achieve efficiency and accuracy, TestifAI introduces partial model tomography, a novel approach to reconstructing model behaviour in a multi-perturbation space from tests that apply only a small number of perturbations (lower-order projections). To estimate robustness against at least three perturbations, TestifAI trains an auxiliary model on the results of tests involving up to two perturbations only, avoiding execution of an exponential number of tests. Our experiments on five image and language classification tasks show that TestifAI can predict higher-order (3 and 4 perturbations) test outcomes from low-order (1 and 2 perturbations) observations with an aggregate robustness estimation error of less than 7%, while reducing the number of inferences by 60-80%. --- ### Syntactic Simplification of OWL Class Expressions Authors: Alkid Baci, N'Dah Jean Kouagou, Caglar Demir, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18899v1 Class expression learning often produces complex OWL class expressions that are difficult to interpret and reason over. However, by following theoretically grounded simplification principles, this complexity can be reduced. In this paper, we propose Class Expression Simplifier (CES), a novel algorithm for the syntactic simplification of class expressions in Description Logics (DL). CES aims to preserve formal semantics while reducing representational complexity. It systematically applies rewriting rules to eliminate redundancies and identify simpler yet equivalent expressions, thereby producing more compact and human-readable representations without altering logical entailments. We evaluate the effectiveness of CES on class expressions learned from two medium-sized ontologies, demonstrating measurable improvements in reasoning efficiency and reductions in verbosity. This work contributes to the broader goal of making ontology-driven applications more accessible, maintainable, and scalable, with direct implications for knowledge graph construction, semantic search, and Web-scale reasoning. CES is implemented within the open-source Python framework OWLAPY and is publicly available. --- ### Assessing Quality of Experience in Natural Language Generation of German Text Authors: Dinh Nam Pham, Shushen Manakhimova, Vivien Macketanz, Sebastian Möller Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18888v1 The rapid advancement of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has made the reliable evaluation of generated text increasingly critical, as these systems, such as large language models (LLMs), are now widely deployed in real-world applications. However, traditional automatic metrics fail to capture the multifaceted nature of perceived quality. In this paper, we introduce TextQ-German, a novel dataset suite for human-centered evaluation of German NLG from a Quality of Experience (QoE) perspective, covering automatic text summarization and machine translation. Through crowdsourcing studies with German speakers, we collect human quality ratings and identify relevant perceptual quality dimensions for each task. We develop automatic QoE prediction models, including transformer-based, linguistic feature-based, and hybrid approaches. Hybrid models outperform pure transformer baselines in almost all experimental settings, while linguistic features alone can approach the performance of fine-tuned language models. The dataset is extended with LLM-generated outputs annotated with overall QoE scores. Final validation on held-out sets indicates generalization to unseen data. Our work contributes a publicly accessible resource for NLG evaluation and baselines for automatic QoE prediction, providing a foundation for developing NLG systems that better align with human quality perception. --- ### Graph-Based Approaches to Learning Epileptogenic Zone Localization Using Stereo-EEG Recordings Authors: Daniel Wendelken, Brian Ervin, Ravindra Arya, Ali A. Minai Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18887v1 The epileptogenic zone (EZ) is the brain region that generates seizures in an individual, and is the target of epilepsy surgery. Localizing the EZ from stereo-EEG (sEEG) recordings supports surgical planning, but manual interpretation is time-consuming and focuses on seizure recordings. Graphical learning models of resting-state functional connectivity among the recorded brain regions are an attractive alternative, but depend crucially on the network topology chosen for the model. We present a controlled study of graph-based models to explore how graph topology affects EZ localization from resting-state sEEG in 40 patients. Using the same simple learnable model and leave-one-patient-out evaluation, we compare dense graphs, anatomy- and geometry-informed priors, budgeted sparsification methods, and learned sparsification, including the proposed Region-Bridge-$c$ topology. To compare graph constructions fairly, we control the number of incoming edges per node and vary graph sparsity. At $\approx 30\%$ edge retention, Region-Bridge-$c$ achieves the highest observed mean PR-AUC ($0.371\pm0.015$; ROC-AUC $0.743\pm0.010$) while using $\approx 69\%$ fewer edges than Dense (PR-AUC $0.349\pm0.014$). Spatial-$k$ is competitive, whereas random pruning requires near-dense retention. Learned sparsification benefits from anatomical node metadata but, on average, does not surpass the best fixed prior. Across all topologies, the best choice varies by patient. These results suggest that graph construction should be evaluated explicitly rather than treated as fixed preprocessing. --- ### Training-Free Inference-Time Self-Reflection and Cost-Bounded Early Stopping for Large Language Models Authors: Wei Yu, Suxing Liu, Minjie Yu, Jiahao Wang, Zhijian Zheng, Haocheng Deng, Bing Li Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18884v1 Reinforcement-learning training of reasoning LLMs (e.g., GRPO) is expensive and requires a controllable environment, committing every contribution to a full training pipeline. We present EvoResearcher, a training-free, inference-time protocol that adds cost-bounded self-reflection to a single frozen LLM backbone. The protocol iterates generate -> self-critique -> revise until a maximum depth D is reached or the critique returns the CONFIRMED sentinel, an implicit early stop that lets the backbone self-verify its answer under a strict compute budget. Four self-reflective meta-reward components (correctness, efficiency, reflection depth, tool-call diversity) act as design principles instantiated as prompt-level mechanisms, so their benefits accrue with zero gradient updates. We validate the protocol on Big-Bench Hard (100 questions) and establish cross-domain behavior on GSM8K (500) and MATH (500) on the same frozen backbone, with cross-model replication on Qwen2.5-72B. All experiments use pure-reasoning benchmarks; the tool-call diversity component is validated in prompt-level form, and the environment-level and multi-agent extensions are design blueprints left to future work. On clean BBH the protocol does not raise accuracy beyond the 95% Wilson interval; its value is cost-bounded self-verification, with the CONFIRMED early stop terminating 82-88% of items at equal accuracy (about 2.1 generations per question). --- ### Falcon Perception-HD: High Density Perception via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Sofian Chaybouti, Yasser Dahou, Ngoc Dung Huynh, Reda Alami, Hilde Kuehne Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18881v1 Autoregressive perception models trained to localize visual entities under the open-vocabulary setting are mostly trained using Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with maximum likelihood, yet it optimizes a proxy objective (per-token cross-entropy) that is fundamentally misaligned with perception metrics such as precision and recall. In this paper, we explore post-training reinforcement learning (RL), specifically GRPO, to directly align these models with their evaluation metrics. Building up on the recently introduced Falcon Perception, we design an RL framework that addresses perception-specific challenges: reward design for set-structured outputs and multi-head sampling control. We discover multiple benefits from RL for perception: first, RL unlocks state-of-the-art performance in very dense scenes (up to 500 objects per scene), a regime where most existing systems degrade sharply or collapse; furthermore it fixes common issues in autoregressive perception models like mask repetitions and removes almost entirely the need for NMS and coordinate deduplication, which improve both performance and efficiency and remove the need for hyperparameters tuning; overall, we notice improvements on all levels of difficulties in referring expression segmentation (on PBench and SACO-Gold), and we find an elegant way to preserve the knowledge of whether an object exists or not (as evaluated by MCC) without training on negative samples. We show that a simple reward that penalizes false negatives and positives is sufficient. We develop two hybrid self-annotation pipelines, respectively tailored for difficult referring expressions and very dense scenes, and show their benefits on RL-training. Model weights are released as a Falcon Perception revision~\footnote{https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/Falcon-Perception}. Datasets will be published. --- ### DentAgent: Evidence-Centric Multi-Agent Coordination for Multimodal Dental Reasoning Authors: Zijie Meng, Xiwei Dai, Yixuan Tang, Jin Hao, Yang Feng, Fudong Zhu, Xiaoqiang Liu, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18878v1 Oral diseases affect billions of people worldwide, underscoring a pressing need for accurate and reliable dental assessment that integrates heterogeneous evidence from domain knowledge, radiographs, intraoral photographs, and 3D dental data. Most existing dental AI systems remain modality- or task-specific. Although recent vision-language models support flexible dental question answering, directly generated response leaves evidence implicit and untraceable. To address these limitations, we introduce DentAgent, an evidence-centric multi-agent framework, in which the Orchestrator coordinate five specialized agents spanning various modalities. Each specialist utilizes domain tools to convert observations into structured evidence records. The Evidence Blackboard manages these records as a shared evidence state, tracking coverage, gaps, and conflicts before response generation. This standardized evidence representation integrates isolated dental capabilities into a unified agentic workflow. Across four benchmarks, DentAgent demonstrates leading performance, even surpassing the senior specialists by 17.3 percentage points on multi-label diagnosis, which supports its value for broadly applicable and traceable multimodal dental reasoning, and highlights its potential as a technical foundation for population oral health assessment and management. --- ### RVLoss: Runoff Vote Loss for Self-Supervised LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation Authors: Shiming Wang, Liangliang Nan, Julian Kooij, Holger Caesar, Yancong Lin Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18864v1 LiDAR scene flow estimates point-wise motion between two consecutive scans, referred to as the source and target. Leading self-supervised methods typically minimize the Chamfer loss, the nearest neighbor distance between the flow-compensated source and the target. However, nearest-neighbor search does not enforce motion rigidity, often leading to inconsistent flows within object instances. Existing approaches address this issue with additional regularization terms, but flow consistency among points remains limited, especially for large objects. We propose RVLoss, a self-supervised loss that incorporates motion rigidity by design through a runoff vote mechanism. Our key observation is that the point-wise motion, calculated from nearest neighbor search, can often be grouped into a small set of dominant flow candidates by voting (top-k voting). Furthermore, when compensating the source by these candidates, the flow that best represents the underlying rigid motion often yields the highest consensus after a second voting (top-1 voting). Based on this insight, we incorporate the two-stage runoff vote into loss design and create cluster-wise rigid flows and free-form flows as pseudo-labels for self-supervised learning. RVLoss can be seamlessly integrated into existing feedforward architectures. Experiments on the Argoverse2 2026 Challenge show that models trained with RVLoss achieve state-of-the-art performance among self-supervised approaches, outperforming baseline models trained with alternative loss designs by 20%. Moreover, cross-dataset evaluations demonstrate consistent performance improvements across four additional datasets. Code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### Sharper Regret Bounds for Time-Varying Gaussian Process Bandits with Constant Exploration Authors: Matthias Mandl, Hanne Kekkonen Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18863v1 We study Bayesian optimization in a time-varying environment where the unknown reward function evolves according to a Gaussian process drift model. Existing GP-UCB analyses in this setting typically require the exploration parameter to grow with the horizon to maintain uniform confidence bounds. Using per-round local confidence events, we show that GP-UCB can instead be run with a constant exploration parameter and obtain an expected-regret bound whose coefficient depends on the drift rate. We also derive a sharper time-varying maximum-information-gain bound. For the squared exponential kernel, it yields $\tildeγ_T/T=\widetilde{\mathcal O}(ε^{1/2})$ and expected average regret $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(ε^{1/4})$ in the persistent-drift regime. The same constant-exploration analysis also yields realized-regret guarantees. Simulations support the predicted logarithmic dependence of the bound-suggested exploration parameter on $1/ε$. --- ### SkillGate: Training In-Policy Skill Selection in Long-Horizon Agents Authors: Qingyao Li, Wenxiang Jiao, Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Yuan Lu, Yi Guo, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18852v1 Agent frameworks increasingly package procedural knowledge as skills: instruction files an agent reads on demand, while public libraries now hold thousands of them. Which skill to read has thus become a decision the policy itself makes in the middle of an episode, yet no existing signal trains it. We show that the default remedy, outcome-rewarded RL over the candidate slate, cannot teach it, for a structural reason we identify and name selector credit starvation: under a broadcast, sequence-level advantage, the few tokens that name the chosen skill carry a vanishing share of the loss, and the credit they inherit is increasingly wrong-signed as trajectories lengthen. A correct choice is punished whenever the execution after it fails, even though the choice itself is among the most valuable decisions in the trajectory. Auditing a completed run's own training artifacts confirms all three properties, each worsening monotonically with horizon. SkillGate removes the failure by construction: it partitions the token support into two disjoint credit channels, outcome credit reaching only execution tokens, and a separate action-local advantage reaching exactly the skill-naming tokens, positive only when a trajectory's single read is the correct one. On five agentic benchmarks under a 16-candidate slate, SkillGate lifts a 9B policy from 40.8% to 53.2% trial success, well ahead of the identical budget spent on outcome reward alone, while cutting exposure to misleading candidates by two thirds and reading fewer skills. --- ### Multi-stage neural operator learning with application for convolutions Authors: Zhiping Mao, Zhenye Wen, Yong Zhang, Xiaofei Zhao Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18851v1 Convolution integrals widely exist in applications, and to enable fast and accurate computations, this paper introduces two general multi-stage neural operator learning frameworks. The first, Deep Collocation Neural Operator (DCNO), is a supervised approach that iteratively refines the operator approximation by learning residuals from input-output data pairs. The second, Deep Galerkin Neural Operator (DGNO), is an unsupervised framework applicable when the target operator can be represented by a PDE, leveraging the weak form of the PDE residual for training. Both methods progressively construct basis operators through multiple training stages to enrich the approximation space, leading to significantly improved accuracy over standard one-shot operator learning. We provide theoretical analysis for their approximation capabilities and implement them for learning convolutions. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that both DCNO and DGNO achieve high accuracy, approaching machine precision under single float for convolution problems, and offer substantial efficiency gains for numerous queries or parametric variations compared to traditional solvers. We also extend these frameworks to handle multi-input operator learning scenarios involving variations in both the density and kernel of a convolution. --- ### GEAR: Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring for Two-Stage Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models Authors: Qi Qin, Jiajie Zhu, Dali Chen, Yuzhao Zhang, Jia-Xing Han, Peng Zhang, Ying Yan, Yifan Sun, Yu Su Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18849v2 Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve strong performance through in-context learning, but context-dependent inference imposes substantial latency and memory costs, hindering large-scale deployment. We propose GEAR (\emph{Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring}), a modular two-stage framework that distills TFMs into lightweight MLP or tree-based predictors that can be deployed on commodity CPUs. Stage 1 uses synthetic covariates solely as teacher-query locations and trains the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. Stage 2 re-anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out-of-fold teacher predictions, whitch avoids self-labeling leakage. We further derive a risk certificate characterizing the trade-off between generated-query volume and generator fidelity. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena demonstrate the broad applicability of GEAR. Two-stage MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by 1.81--2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.19--1.35 points on multiclass tasks, with additional gains over real-data-only distillation of 1.76--2.19 and 2.09--2.40 points, respectively. On binary tasks, the gains also transfer to LightGBM and XGBoost, and all three student families outperform CatBoost, the strongest non-TFM baseline, in mean AUC. Ablations show gains beyond longer training or alternative warm starts, greater stability from staged than mixed optimization, and generator-dependent diminishing returns as query volume increases. Finally, GEAR reduces median inference time by 57--2866 times and peak prediction memory by 1.9--3.3 times, while retaining higher AUC than matched supervised baselines. --- ### GEAR: Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring for Two-Stage Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models Authors: Qi Qin, Jiajie Zhu, Dali Chen, Yuzhao Zhang, Jia-Xing Han, Yu Su, Peng Zhang, Ying Yan, Yifan Sun Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18849v1 Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve strong performance through in-context learning, but context-dependent inference imposes substantial latency and memory costs, hindering large-scale deployment. We propose GEAR (\emph{Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring}), a modular two-stage framework that distills TFMs into lightweight MLP or tree-based predictors that can be deployed on commodity CPUs. Stage 1 uses synthetic covariates solely as teacher-query locations and trains the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. Stage 2 re-anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out-of-fold teacher predictions, whitch avoids self-labeling leakage. We further derive a risk certificate characterizing the trade-off between generated-query volume and generator fidelity. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena demonstrate the broad applicability of GEAR. Two-stage MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by 1.81--2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.19--1.35 points on multiclass tasks, with additional gains over real-data-only distillation of 1.76--2.19 and 2.09--2.40 points, respectively. On binary tasks, the gains also transfer to LightGBM and XGBoost, and all three student families outperform CatBoost, the strongest non-TFM baseline, in mean AUC. Ablations show gains beyond longer training or alternative warm starts, greater stability from staged than mixed optimization, and generator-dependent diminishing returns as query volume increases. Finally, GEAR reduces median inference time by 57--2866 times and peak prediction memory by 1.9--3.3 times, while retaining higher AUC than matched supervised baselines. --- ### ORBITER: Conflict-Aware Decision-Making for Agentic Last-Mile Delivery Authors: Mingzhao Li, Chenxi Liu, Yan Zhao, Hao Miao Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18846v1 Last-mile delivery aims to handle dynamically arriving orders with couriers while modeling complex spatial and temporal correlations. Recent learning-based methods model spatiotemporal dependencies among orders to predict courier service sequences, but leave next-order decision making unexplained. Describing the current delivery state in language allows LLMs to reason explicitly about the spatial, temporal, and behavioral cues behind an individual decision. As direct predictors, however, LLMs remain sensitive to task presentation and often produce unreliable decisions. To address these challenges, we introduce ORBITER, an agentic Order Arbiter for next-order decision-making in last-mile delivery. ORBITER models courier service through decision points, each containing the courier's spatiotemporal state and visible orders and exposing local trade-offs for modeling and verification. Fixed proposers rank the candidates, and a structured report identifies where their rankings disagree. The LLM uses task-specific tools to gather evidence on the leading alternatives, while an independent critic checks the resulting decision against that evidence. We conduct extensive evaluations on data in four cities, where ORBITER outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines by up to 9.2% on average showing its effectiveness. --- ### Beyond Placement and Articulation: Usage-Driven Code Scenes for Embodied Interaction Authors: Zijian Xiao, Zipeng Ye, Jinkun Hao, Xiong Yang, Yuchen Xie, Ran Yi Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18840v1 Indoor scene synthesis provides essential environments for embodied AI, robotic manipulation, and simulation-based policy learning. Recent code-based scene generation methods produce editable and extensible environments, yet they remain focused on visual construction and object-level articulation, leaving the functional usage of scenes largely unmodeled. To address this problem, we present RoomWright, an agentic usage-driven framework for generating 3D scenes represented entirely as code for embodied interaction. RoomWright performs usage-driven object reasoning, which treats each anchor as a task centre and admits task-required objects and their affordances. A code agent further enables multi-part interaction by compiling each interaction into a trigger, condition, effect rule that updates structured object states, capturing causal dependencies across objects. Moreover, since manipuland orientation is ambiguous and hard to recover from pixels, RoomWright alleviates this via annotation-informed usage-guided orientation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The resulting scenes are executable, editable, and simulation-ready, providing interactive environments for embodied AI and policy learning. --- ### Verifiable abstention makes AI leak diagnosis accountable in urban water distribution networks Authors: Tianwei Mu, Yue Wang, Mingzhe Yuan, Manhong Huang, Wenhong Wang, Xuerui Yin, Qing Luo, Min Xiao, Hui Yang, Jun Li, Dan Xue Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18836v2 Leak localization is usually evaluated as forced-choice prediction, although sparse hydraulic observations may not justify excavation. Here, we quantify a pressure-information limit and use it to recast localization as selective, evidence-gated decision-making. A physics-grounded executor falsifies competing leak, demand, sensor and valve hypotheses in a hydraulic twin. Deterministic code computes every number and every acceptance predicate; an independent large language model auditor may add a rejection but never overturn a failed check. Forced retrieval placed only 95 of 300 leaks in the correct zone. Across 550 mixed events, the gate acted on 223 (214 correct); on a third-party 33-leak benchmark, all four accepted events were correct. In a replay of 194 audited City D repairs, the pressure tier authorized five excavation recommendations, three matching the repaired district, while the district-inflow tier returned the correct district for 85 events. Observability limits with machine-checkable abstention enable auditable utility intervention. --- ### EVADE: Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape Authors: Mohaimenul Azam Khan Raiaan, Nur Mohammad Fahad Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18833v1 Medical vision-language models (VLMs) can achieve high accuracy but remain unreliable: they are systematically overconfident, benefit little from test-time reasoning, and lack the ability to reliably calibrate trust in their own responses. We introduce EVADE (Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape), an inferential, non-training method that enhances the safety of deploying a single frozen VLM. EVADE responds and, when uncertain, localises the region most diagnostically relevant, re-answers on a zoomed view, and commits only when both the entire image and the zoomed view responses agree; otherwise, it abstains. To directly address verification hallucination in single-model self-checking, our main idea is to verify gate consistency across different image views rather than re-reading the model's own text. Experimental evaluation on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and PathVQA using Qwen2.5-VL-7B reports that EVADE is the only method that simultaneously improves both calibration and selective risk while maintaining accuracy, reducing expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 45% compared to zero-shot. Chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and self-verification all fail at least one axis. A grounding analysis reports that self-proposed regions perform better at diagnostic structure localisation than centres or random crops. However, a 7B VLM cannot use this localisation to revise answers. Therefore, reliability gains come from the consistency gate and calibrated abstention. --- ### EfficientSync: Real-Time Lip Synchronization via Deformation-Based Reference Texture Mixing Authors: Fa-Ting Hong, Runzhen Liu, Luchuan Song, Hongmin Cai, Chuhua Xian Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18832v1 Audio-driven lip synchronization manipulates the mouth region of a talking-face video to match the driving audio while preserving head pose, identity, and background. Although the task is inherently local editing, prevailing approaches reconstruct the entire lower face with heavy GAN- or diffusion-based decoders, incurring substantial latency and, more critically, hallucinating intra-oral details such as teeth and lip wrinkles instead of preserving authentic textures. We contend that the bottleneck in identity preservation is not the scarcity of reference frames, but the lack of a mechanism that faithfully transfers the genuine textures they already contain. We therefore present EfficientSync, a real-time deformation-based framework that retains reference textures rather than resynthesizing them. First, the Dynamic Texture Mixer reformulates multi-reference fusion as channel-wise selection, evaluating each spatially aligned reference in a global context and aggregating them by channel-wise weighted summation, preserving textural integrity at low cost. Second, Spatio-Temporal Shifted Adaptive Masking decomposes the source frame into lip-generation conditions and an independent background prior, suppressing lower-face leakage while blending the synthesized mouth seamlessly into the background. Third, STAR Sampling, a zero-overhead pre-processing step, retrieves the sharpest and most topologically diverse reference frames. Experiments on HDTF and VFHQ show state-of-the-art visual quality and identity preservation at 166 FPS on a single GPU. Video demos: https://alunaticat.github.io/EfficientSync/index.html. --- ### MLREF: Efficient Module Reuse for Reward Design in Reinforcement Learning via Large Language Models Authors: Chenglin Liu, Xun Wang, Ruishuo Chen, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18827v1 Reward function design remains a bottleneck in reinforcement learning. While large language models (LLMs) have enabled automated reward generation, existing methods generate and revise reward functions as monolithic programs, making it difficult to reliably preserve and reuse effective components discovered in earlier iterations, leading to unstable performance across iterations. To address this, we propose Module Level Reward Evolution Framework (MLREF). At the core of MLREF is a module pool, a persistent repository of reusable reward components. MLREF treats the module pool as the primary optimization object: the pool evolves across iterations by accumulating successful modules, refining underperforming ones, and reusing proven components; while reward functions are constructed as linear combinations of modules drawn from this pool. To drive this evolution, MLREF integrates three mechanisms: reflection-based refinement, hybrid credit assignment, and a merge strategy with rollback, which together improve the effectiveness and robustness of reward optimization. Experiments on 17 tasks show that MLREF outperforms strong baselines by 25.2% in locomotion and 6.6% in manipulation, with more stable optimization dynamics. --- ### Understanding Multilingual Medical ASR Adaptation Through Layer-Wise Analysis Authors: Souranil Kahali, Rituparna Bose, Abner Hernandez, Tomas Arias-Vergara, Andreas Maier, Ning Ma, Paula Andrea Perez-Toro Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18825v1 Medical automatic speech recognition (MedASR) requires adaptation to specialised terminology, limited annotated clinical data, and multilingual use cases. Although large-scale pretrained ASR models such as Whisper achieve strong generalisation, their behaviour after medical and multilingual adaptation remains insufficiently understood beyond word error rate (WER). This paper investigates how multilingual medical adaptation reshapes the internal representations of Whisper models through layer-wise encoder analysis. We compare zero-shot decoding, English-only fine-tuning, German-only diagnostic fine-tuning, two-stage EN->EN+DE continuation, and direct EN+DE fine-tuning across Whisper model sizes. Fine-tuning substantially improves MedASR performance, but the best model depends on the adaptation setting: Whisper-Medium gives the lowest English WER (7.72%) and the lowest combined EN+DE WER under direct EN+DE training (26.30%); German-only Whisper-Large-v3 gives the lowest German WER (44.96%), but as a within-corpus diagnostic on 86 single-speaker training utterances rather than robust generalisation. Layer-wise analysis of the two-stage Whisper-Small trajectory shows that English medical fine-tuning produces the dominant encoder shift, whereas multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted representation space. Domain and language information remain highly recoverable across layers, while linearly recoverable error-predictive cues weaken as WER improves. --- ### Identifying Implicit Premises for Logical Reconstruction of Argument Graphs Authors: Xuyao Feng, Anthony Hunter Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18821v1 The logical reconstruction of argument graphs from natural language text is challenging because of the prevalence of enthymemes (i.e., arguments with implicit premises). There are natural language processing methods for identifying enthymemes in text, and there are symbolic methods based on abduction for identifying missing premises in a logical representation of enthymemes. However, there is a need for methods to generate implicit premises to logically show a known entailment or contradiction relationship between a pair of statements. To address this, we propose a neuro-symbolic pipeline that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate implicit premises that are translated into logical formulae and used with logical formulae representing explicit premises and explicit claims to show the logical relationships between them (entailment, contradiction, or neutrality). Our approach is evaluated on the Microtext Argumentative Corpus. --- ### Pairwise Logical Selection of Enthymeme Completions under Semantic-Link Uncertainty Authors: Xuyao Feng, Antonis Bikakis Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18820v1 Arguments often omit premises or claims, forming enthymemes. We study pairwise logical selection between two candidates for the omitted component. Existing natural language methods can identify or generate candidates but often do not expose how the selected candidate completes the inference, while logic-based approaches usually assume that the required formulae and background knowledge are available. We extend a prior neuro-symbolic pipeline from missing-premise to missing-claim selection and replace binary entailment outcomes with logical-resistance scores. Top-Link uses weighted Partial MaxSAT under a single configuration of highest-confidence semantic links. We then introduce Possible-World Atom-Link Formalization (PWAL), which keeps translated formulae fixed and marginalizes logical resistance over alternative cross-formula semantic-link configurations. We evaluate PWAL on five tasks: ARCT and a CDED-derived task for missing-premise selection, iDebate- and AAE2-derived tasks for missing-claim selection, and alphaNLI for abductive hypothesis selection. Relative to Top-Link, PWAL raises strict accuracy by 2.95-30.86 percentage points and reduces tie rates by 4.57-58.00 percentage points on all five tasks. When ties receive half credit, accuracy still increases by 0.45-6.04 percentage points. PWAL also records the translated formulae, sampled link configurations, and resistance components for every comparison, providing a transparent trace of each score. --- ### A Unifying Relational Perspective on Expressive Lottery Tickets Authors: Lorenz Kummer, Samir Moustafa, Anatol Ehrlich, Franka Bause, Marco Nennstiel, Przemysław Andrzej Wałȩga, Nils Morten Kriege Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18819v1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used, but how parameter sparsity affects the expressivity of relational (RGNNs) and temporal (TGNNs) variants is poorly understood. The Strong Expressive Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SELTH) posits the existence of sparse GNNs that preserve Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) expressivity on static graphs. We generalize this existence result to a probabilistic statement for multi-relational and temporal domains via the relational WL (RWL). We prove that sufficiently parameterized RGNNs contain sparse subnetworks that maintain 1-RWL expressivity and derive a lower bound on the probability that a random pruning yields such a subnetwork. We show that common TGNNs and cross-graph message passing schemes admit RGNN reformulations such that they inherit these guarantees and, moreover, that the expressivity of a sparse RGNN is connected to its optimization behavior under common update regimes. Experiments instantiate the bound, compare it to empirical probabilities on synthetic data, and study how pre-training expressivity relates to optimization and prediction quality metrics on temporal and molecular benchmarks. --- ### Do Large Language Models Hallucinate Electric Fata Morganas? Authors: Kristina Šekrst Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18816v1 AI hallucinations - that is, outputs which are made up, cannot be verified, or contradict the source material - are generally regarded as an engineering flaw to be dealt with. This paper contends that they also have philosophical significance when it comes to the question of machine consciousness. We examine the known causes of hallucinations in large language models - such as source-target divergence, discrepancies between training and inference, and overfitting - and we present two empirical investigations. In the first, we apply successive generations of the GPT model to ambiguous factual questions under different temperature settings, finding that higher temperatures result in plausible but incorrect answers while lower temperatures lead to factually accurate ones. The sampling parameters that cause a model to seem creative or spontaneous and thus more likely to pass behavioral tests of intelligence are the same ones that increase its hallucination rate. In the second, we look at an encoder-only model that has been trained on encyclopedic data and which answers questions of the same type factually and without embellishment, indicating that hallucinations are due to exposure to subjective and socially diverse training data rather than to the development of any cognitive ability. Using references to Turing, Searle's Chinese Room, the frame problem, and the cybernetic tradition of Wiener and Ashby, we claim that a model's self-reports of emotion or sentience come within the definition of hallucination, and that any future occurrence of machine consciousness might remain epistemically inaccessible since it would be indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced hallucination. --- ### A strengthening of the MCFL-ness of $O_2$ Authors: Marco B. Caminati Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.FL, cs.AI, cs.LO, math.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18813v1 In the last years, a number of proofs of the fact that $O_2$ is a multiple context-free grammar (MCFG) were given. Such results can be exploited in the fields of both computational linguistics and of computational algebra. Here, we focus on a recent such proof spelled in terms of factorizations of string tuples, and give a new result with a stronger characterization of such factorizations than in existing theorems. --- ### Many Optimizers But Only One Training Path: Repeated Resampling for Adaptive Optimizer Selection Authors: Ronald Richman, Mario V. Wüthrich Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18810v1 An optimizer is usually chosen before training a deep neural network and then kept fixed. Treating optimizer choice as a hyperparameter could boost performance, but it requires several complete training runs and discards all but the winner. Repeated Optimizer Resampling (ROR) instead searches during one evolving run. Every $b$ epochs, each candidate optimizer scouts from the current model weights for $s$ epochs. The best scout continues for the remaining $b-s$ epochs, and that completed segment becomes the new incumbent if it improves the validation objective. This design allows the preferred optimizer to change as training progresses. We compare two variants of ROR on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and two motor insurance claim-count models. Nine fixed optimizers and both ROR variants are evaluated with the same ten seeds. One-epoch ROR uses 24\% to 35\% of the aggregate training needed to identify the best fixed optimizer exhaustively and remains close to that optimizer on all four tasks. These results support short scouting as a practical way to search over optimizers without completing every candidate run. --- ### Tensor Field Models Authors: Alexander Strunk, Roland Assam Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, math.DG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18808v1 This paper introduces Tensor Field Models (TFMs), realization-level Mathematical Structures in which a learned Operator maps a product of admissible component-section families to a prescribed family of time-dependent tangent sections on a Generative State Manifold. Analytic and dynamical restrictions are encoded through the choice of admissible families rather than imposed by the root definition. Constructed, component-separable, and Tensor Bundle TFMs provide structured refinements of this common object. In the conditional realizations considered here, a structured condition $c=(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ is mapped componentwise to a reusable collection $\mathbf H_c=(H_{c_1}^{(1)},\ldots,H_{c_n}^{(n)})$. In the architectures evaluated here, the component representations remain distinct and are combined only by the Field Operator to produce the generated Vector Field. All learned models are trained using Flow Matching. Experiments show that TFMs can improve performance and that amortized sampling enabled by reusable condition representations can accelerate generation. --- ### Forgetting, plasticity, and co-observation: a third facet of continual learning Authors: Timm Hess, Abhishek Jha, Gido M. van de Ven, Tinne Tuytelaars Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18803v1 Efficient continual learning remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks. While catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity are widely considered the primary obstacles to overcome, we show that these two issues cannot fully explain the performance gap between naive sequential training and offline joint training. In this paper, we highlight data co-observation as a distinct factor influencing continual learning performance. By decoupling the constraints of separate data access from stability and plasticity, we systematically investigate the representational benefits gained by observing training data together. Empirically, we demonstrate a consistent performance difference between joint and separate training across both supervised and self-supervised paradigms in generic data-incremental "chunking" scenarios, whilst mitigating forgetting and controlling for plasticity. Our findings indicate that simultaneous observation of training data (co-observation) yields benefits to the learner's generalization that extend well beyond mere knowledge retention, and that this effect does not require a specific continual distribution shift. Furthermore, we contextualize prominent continual learning mechanisms through this lens: while distillation-based approaches act only as effective knowledge retention mechanisms, our results suggest that the empirical success of memory replay goes beyond the mitigation of forgetting, actively reintroducing the benefits of data co-observation into the learning process. --- ### Decomposing Wrong-Consensus Agreement in LLM Self-Consistency Authors: Lizhuo Zhang, Mengmeng Tang, Chenfeng Long, Xiaoyong Tang, Xiang Luo Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18795v2 Agreement among repeated samples of a language model is routinely read as evidence about answer reliability, yet wrong answers can agree just as strongly as right ones. This paper asks what information wrong-consensus agreement actually contains, and answers with a quantitative decomposition. A pluralistic agreement index Gamma, normalized by the reference scale d=(1-p)/(C-1), is split into a mechanical component (agreement delivered by a per-case answer preference alone) and a preference-unexplained residual. The mechanical reference is leak-free: each case's preference and accuracy are estimated from its other runs only. On public GPT-4.1 per-run data, coverage phi (the mechanical/empirical ratio) shows a benchmark-associated direction: 0.81-0.93 on multiple-choice GPQA-Diamond against 0.59-0.78 on open-domain AIME, where a residual of 1.54-2.80 Gamma units survives, more than absorbed by a calibrated run-level preference-heterogeneity reference. A controlled replication under one fixed protocol (four runs per question, K=32 votes) on five open-weights checkpoints (Qwen3.5-9B/122B, Qwen3.8-27B, Gemma4-26B/31B) finds near-complete mechanical coverage in all ten cells (phi approximately 1, with a small overshoot consistent with a quantified finite-donor plug-in bias), robust to a two-run design; the largest cell (qwen3.5-122b, p=0.222) sits inside the GPT-4.1 AIME accuracy range and still saturates (phi=1.041). A cross-system contrast at comparable aggregate accuracy contrasts near-complete mechanical agreement in the open-weights models against a larger preference-unexplained residual in the frontier family. This contrast is confounded with sampling protocol by design. Agreement is graded evidence, not certification. No new voting method is proposed; code and evidence are committed. --- ### A Real-Time Tsetlin Machine-based Non-intrusive Load Monitoring System on MCUs Authors: Han Wu, Tianhang Tan, Shengyu Duan, Alex Yakovlev, Rishad Shafik, Tousif Rahman Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18780v2 Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) systems estimate individual appliance energy consumption from a single aggregate meter, without requiring separate sensors for each device. By installing a single meter that measures a building's total electricity consumption, NILM algorithms can determine the active status of each appliance. However, traditional NILM systems use computationally intensive optimization algorithms to process offline data, limiting their capability for on-device deployment, where sensitive household data must be processed locally. This paper proposes a Tsetlin Machine (TM)-based NILM framework, targeting real-time applications on resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs), enabling privacy-preserving edge deployment. The problem is reformulated as a classification task, and the proposed approach achieves an average precision of 90% and recall of 96% for two-appliance classification, and 77% precision and 80% recall for four appliances on the REDD dataset. The trained model occupies only 17 KB of flash memory and achieves an inference latency of 0.43 ms on an ESP32, demonstrating its suitability for NILM applications on MCUs. --- ### SIDScope: A Diagnostic Resource for Semantic-ID Interfaces in Generative Recommendation Authors: Jiandong Ding, Huijie Qin, Tiandeng Wu, Yi Cao Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18779v1 Semantic-ID mappings are reusable interfaces between item tokenizers and generative recommenders, yet released mappings rarely state whether they are coherent, what structure they expose, how generated paths resolve, or what must be revalidated after a refresh. SIDScope is a source-traced diagnostic resource for these decisions. It normalizes item-to-code artifacts, verifies provenance and joins, profiles mapping structure, compares paired revisions, and accounts for path-to-item outcomes in generated traces. Across nine source-traced tokenizer exports from seven families on Amazon and Yelp data - eight executable routes plus one auditable snapshot - SIDScope reveals that interface health is multi-signal rather than scalar. Its central finding is mechanism-conditional: prefix alignment strongly tracks held-out candidate exposure when retrieval consumes SID prefixes, then weakens as scoring becomes prefix-independent. Trained trace accounting exposes a second hidden gap: a valid target path can survive without uniquely retrieving the target item by 1.2-3.0 percentage points. A refresh case establishes a third: repairing the mapping does not by itself restore an inherited generator; model reuse requires a separate handoff check. The package provides frozen evidence summaries, conformance reports, trace labels, table builders, and CPU-only verifiers. It supports decisions about artifact readiness, interface risks, and revalidation before model reuse. --- ### GraphK: Variable-Size Graph Generation with Efficient Edge Construction Authors: Resul Tugay, Eren Oluğ, Elif Ak, Sule Gunduz Oguducu Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18777v1 Graph generation models have advanced significantly with deep learning, yet they remain limited in scalability, flexibility, and ability to model underlying structures. We present GraphK, a novel encoder-sampler-decoder framework for graph generation that overcomes these challenges through structural flexibility and computational efficiency. Unlike autoregressive approaches constrained by vocabulary size (i.e. number of nodes in graph generation), GraphK allows for both upscaling (generating graphs with more nodes than the input) and downscaling, providing a flexible control over output graph size. By learning permutation-invariant latent representations and sampling new node embeddings via maximum likelihood estimation, GraphK generalizes across graph sizes and structures. For edge generation, we employ edge prediction with a KDTree-based top-k neighbor search in the latent space, reducing computational cost. Based on the manifold smoothness assumption, our method effectively captures graph properties. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that GraphK outperforms existing methods, accurately learns graph structures, and generates synthetic graphs without explicit definitions. --- ### MIFR: A Modality-Invariant and Fair Representation Framework for Skin Disease Classification Authors: Asonyu Senge Njih, Yvan Guifo Fodjo, Vianney Kengne Tchendji, Jerry Lacmou Zeutouo, Kerol Djoumessi Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18774v1 Skin diseases represent a major global public health burden, yet machine learning tools developed to assist in their diagnosis suffer from two critical limitations: reliance on only one modality for diagnosis and systematic performance disparities across skin tones. While existing approaches address each challenge separately, this work proposes a modality-invariant framework with fair representation (MIFR) for skin disease classification. The architecture pairs clinical photographs with dermoscopic images using ViT-based encoders, projecting each input into a high-dimensional embedding space via modality-specific projection heads. The resulting model is trained with a five-component multi-objective loss including weighted cross-entropy for classification, confusion and skin-type classification losses for fairness, per-modality supervised contrastive loss for class alignment, and a modality-invariance loss for clinical and dermoscopic modality alignment. Experiments on the HIBA+Derm7pt paired dataset and the external PAD-UFES-20 and ISIC 2019 datasets showed that modality-invariant representation learning provides competitive predictive performance compare to relevant baseline models and competitive fairness on the internal dataset. t-SNE visualizations confirmed that clinical and dermoscopic embeddings of the same disease are geometrically aligned, validating the joint objectives. --- ### To Go Far, Go Together: Diverse Preferences Induce a Curriculum for Reward Optimization Authors: Taehyung Kim, Jongeun Choi Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18770v1 Learning a reward model from human feedback and optimizing a policy against it is one approach to aligning AI systems with individual users. From a fairness perspective, existing work improves such alignment by developing data-efficient and accurate reward models that capture minority preferences despite scarce data. We push this line of inquiry one step further and argue that data-efficient and accurate per-user reward models are not sufficient: users whose reward models are difficult to \textit{optimize} at the policy level can become a new underserved group. We start from the observation that one user's reward model can be easy to optimize from the initial policy while another's is not. We argue that, given a sufficiently diverse user population, a curriculum naturally emerges between easy- and hard-to-optimize reward models. Building on this insight, we propose CurriPO, which grows a tree-structured curriculum to accommodate diverse user-specific objectives, covering the population in a single traversal. Specifically, CurriPO automatically constructs a curriculum over diverse user reward models, allowing it to branch from the existing curriculum and reuse reward models previously incorporated into the curriculum. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly exploit multi-user structure to address optimization in AI alignment. Extensive experiments on personalized continuous control in a simulated environment show that CurriPO achieves $1.2$--$2.1\times$ the population satisfaction of the strongest baseline while substantially reducing training time. Additional analysis attributes much of this improvement to the users left underserved by conventional optimization. --- ### Readable, Faithful, Used: Three Dissociable Properties of Demographic Identity in a Language Model Authors: Fathin Difa Robbani Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18768v2 Large language models are widely used to simulate survey respondents, yet their outputs are homogeneous and unfaithful to real inter-group differences, and whether this reflects what a model knows or uses has remained untested. Using representational similarity analysis against Pew American Trends Panel ground truth, we score demographic read-out locations in Mistral-7B and intervene causally across six attribute types. The internal geometry is faithful: attention-head read-outs dominate the standard residual read-out, reaching selection-corrected $ρ$ up to 0.63 -- about 70% of the measurement-reliability ceiling -- and one head, L11 H16, is significantly faithful across all six types, though race-based types stay weak and prompt-fragile, replicating in a second model family. Yet causal use does not track fidelity: the clearest causal pathway ($p=0.002$) sits in one of the least faithful types, the most faithful type shows no correction-surviving effect, and full identity swaps in the prompt move predictions by under 2% of their error. A 128-dimensional probe on that head lands 21-31% closer to survey truth than the model's answers, yet recovers almost none of the per-question group ordering. Readable, faithfully arranged, and causally used are three dissociable properties of the same model; treating them as one claim is what keeps the "can LLMs simulate populations" debate unresolved. --- ### Gradient Mirage: Trainable yet Label-Unidentifiable Gradients in Large Language Model Split Learning Authors: Shiyu Miao, Yunlong Mao, Zirui Huang, Liang Yao, Tianshuo Zheng, Yanhui Gu, Fan Liu, Sheng Zhong Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18767v1 Gradient matching attacks (GMAs) in LLM split learning (SL) rely on a critical yet underexplored assumption: the gradient exposed at the split interface is a faithful derivative of the client's full-label training objective. This gradient-objective consistency allows a curious server to recover private labels by searching for a sequence whose induced gradient explains the observation. We propose Gradient Mirage, a defense that breaks this consistency without discarding the optimization utility of the backward signal. Our key idea is to induce the adversary to solve a misspecified inverse problem, in which no plausible label sequence in the sequence space can explain the observed gradients. Concretely, Gradient Mirage achieves this by inducing inconsistency across three dimensions: objective, direction, and scale. Selective Autoregressive Supervision derives the exposed gradient from a masked surrogate loss rather than the full-label objective assumed by the attacker; Scale Blinding then applies randomized multiplicative rescaling, obscuring the gradient's natural magnitude; and Directional Privatization further randomizes the gradient direction while preserving its magnitude through the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mechanism under a directional metric differential privacy guarantee. Crucially, utility is preserved: the Top segment still learns from all target tokens via Dual-Track Backpropagation, the exposed gradient remains informative since each supervised token retains its complete autoregressive context, and Bottom-Gradient Recovery restores the effective gradient for Bottom-segment optimization. Extensive experiments show that Gradient Mirage provides substantially stronger protection than existing defenses under comparable fine-tuning performance, achieving a better privacy-utility trade-off. --- ### Learning Canonical Register Automata over Ordered Data Domains Authors: Yong Li, Qiyi Tang, Di-De Yen Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18765v1 Register automata are finite automata equipped with memory that recognize data languages over infinite alphabets. In this work, we investigate active learning algorithms for deterministic register automata (DRAs) over ordered data domains--covering both dense domains, such as the rationals, and non-dense domains such as the integers. We show that the active learning problem for DRAs over both dense and non-dense ordered domains can be treated within a single unified framework. More specifically, we develop and implement a polynomial-time active learning procedure for DRAs over ordered domains, using oracles for membership, equivalence and memorability queries. The memorability queries were originally introduced for learning DRAs over domains with identity tests. Our unified framework also leads to a new consequence: minimization of DRAs over the non-dense ordered domain of integers is decidable, extending a result previously known only for dense domains. Finally, we give improved complexity bounds of several decision problems for DRAs over ordered domains that are closely related to the queries used in active learning. --- ### Enhancing Distance-Based Graph Autoencoders with Structural Penalties for Dynamic Graph Embedding Authors: Aleksandar Tomčić, Miloš Savić, Miloš Radovanović Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18762v1 Graph autoencoders (GAEs) are widely used for learning representations of dynamic graphs. However, their optimisation objectives typically do not take structural heterogeneity across nodes into account. We propose three distance-based GAE variants that incorporate structural penalties into the reconstruction loss. All variants share a two-layer Graph Convolutional Network encoder and a Euclidean-distance decoder trained with distance-based reconstruction objectives. We extend sparsity-corrected loss with two node-level regularization terms: (i) a hub penalty based on degree centrality, and (ii) a penalty based on Natural Community Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (NC-LID). The paper is motivated by prior evidence linking high NC-LID to reduced embedding quality. The proposed methods are designed to emphasize reconstruction errors for structurally ambiguous nodes. Experiments on multiple dynamic graph data sets show that incorporating NC-LID-based regularization consistently improves reconstruction performance over the baseline without structural regularization and the method using hub-aware regularization. These findings highlight NC-LID as a useful structural signal for enhancing distance-based graph autoencoders in dynamic settings. --- ### Beyond Predictive Fairness: Quantifying Attribution Consistency Across Demographic Groups in Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Authors: Kerol Djoumessi, Philipp Berens Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18759v1 Fairness in medical imaging is commonly evaluated through subgroup performance metrics, yet it remains unclear whether models rely on consistent visual evidence across demographic groups. This work introduces the Explanation Consistency Score (ECS), a fairness-aware metric based on Jensen-Shannon divergence that quantifies the similarity of attribution maps across subgroups. Using diabetic retinopathy screening as a case study, ECS is evaluated globally and within disease severity. Experiments reveal that while predictive performance differs across ethnic groups, explanation consistency remains relatively high and shows no significant association with performance disparities. These findings suggest that predictive fairness and explanation consistency capture complementary dimensions of model behavior, motivating fairness evaluations that extend beyond predictive performance. --- ### Epistemic Subordination: Generative AI and the Infrastructure of Knowledge Authors: Gilad Abiri, Emanuel V. Towfigh Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18758v1 Generative AI does not merely produce biased outputs. It encodes the majority's way of knowing as the default infrastructure of knowledge itself. We call this epistemic subordination. The training process compresses the full breadth of human expression into a single probabilistic model whose statistical baseline reflects the languages, assumptions, and cultural frameworks of the dominant culture. Minority epistemologies are not excluded but absorbed: present in the training data, yet structurally subordinated in the output. The result is not a collection of discrete biases that can be audited and corrected. It is an epistemic condition embedded in the architecture from which all outputs emerge. This unified harm cuts across three legal domains -- anti-discrimination law, cultural and linguistic rights, and democratic viewpoint pluralism -- and each fails to address it for the same structural reason: existing law regulates downstream, at the level of decisions and applications. The remedy must match the site of harm. If epistemic subordination is produced at the level of model training, then law must learn to govern at that level. --- ### SED-FOD: Scattering-Aware Expert Decomposition for Few-Shot Cross-Sensor SAR Object Detection Authors: Shu Yang, Zhen Chen, Zhiyu Jiang, Yanlei Li, Xingdong Liang Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18755v1 Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) object detection is an important part of remote sensing interpretation. However, because of variations in frequency band, resolution, background clutter, and target scattering responses, the performance of existing detectors often degrades when training and testing data are acquired from different SAR domains. Although domain adaptation methods offer a promising paradigm for solving this problem, most of them mainly pursue domain-invariant feature alignment and suppress sensor-dependent scattering characteristics that are useful for object detection. This problem becomes more challenging in few-shot scenarios, where only a few fully annotated target-domain SAR images are available. To address this issue, we propose a scattering-aware shared-specific feature decomposition framework for few-shot SAR domain adaptation object detection. We decompose detection features into a shared path and several soft-gated scattering-specific expert paths. The shared path learns transferable object structural information and is used for asymmetric domain alignment, while the scattering-specific experts adaptively compensate heterogeneous SAR responses. In addition, routing-domain auxiliary loss is introduced to encourage specific experts to capture sensor-dependent routing preferences, and an expert balancing loss is used to prevent routing collapse. Extensive experiments on four bidirectional heterogeneous SAR detection tasks between FARAD-X/FARAD-Ka and MiniSAR under different few-shot settings have been conducted and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in both forward and reverse adaptation directions. --- ### GreekBarRetrieval: A Benchmark for Greek Statutory Retrieval Authors: Ernest Beta, Odysseas S. Chlapanis, Dimitrios Galanis, Ion Androutsopoulos Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18752v3 Statutory retrieval is necessary for citation-grounded legal question answering, but remains underexplored for Greek. We introduce GreekBarRetrieval, a public retrieval benchmark derived from, and complementing GreekBarBench, which did not include retrieval. The new benchmark comprises 283 bar-exam questions, each accompanied by the facts of the case it refers to, and 6,308 candidate statutory articles to retrieve from. Questions and facts are stated in everyday language, but need to be mapped to the formal terminology of statutes and their abstract legal concepts. A further complication is that not all of the case facts are relevant to each question of a case. Experimenting with three BM25 variants and nine dense retrievers, we find that vanilla dense retrieval far outperforms vanilla sparse retrieval in Recall@100. However, LLM-based query reformulation helps BM25 close that gap, while also improving dense retrieval. With a ten-round ReAct-like LLM reformulation loop that we introduce, BM25 improves further in Recall@100 and obtains the best nDCG and MAP scores of all tested retrievers. Query reformulation also outperforms pseudo-relevance feedback, sparse-dense fusion, and English translation. --- ### Geometric Data Perturbation with Noisy-Anchor Alignment for Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Learning Authors: Keiyu Nosaka, Yamato Suetake, Yuichi Takano, Yukihiko Okada, Akiko Yoshise Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18749v1 Geometric Data Perturbation (GDP) enables one-shot, privacy-preserving collaborative learning: each participant applies a distance-preserving transformation to its private data and uploads only the resulting representation to a central analyst. We study GDP under analyst-participant collusion, in which the analyst combines all uploaded representations with the private data and transformations disclosed by colluding participants to recover a non-colluding participant's private data. Participant-specific independent transformations resist this attack but map participants' data into incompatible representation spaces, degrading downstream model performance. Shared-anchor alignment from Data Collaboration (DC) analysis restores compatibility and improves utility, but we show that disclosing the DC anchor matrix enables exact recovery of non-colluding participants' private data even in the presence of collusion. Adding noise directly to the private-data representations mitigates this vulnerability but substantially reduces utility. We propose adding noise to the anchor representations instead. Each participant independently transforms its private data and the shared anchor matrix, perturbs only the resulting anchor representation, and uploads both representations in a single round. Using the noisy anchor representations, the analyst aligns the private-data representations by solving a Generalized Orthogonal Procrustes Problem. We characterize alignment and recovery errors, specialize a conservative sufficient condition for convergence of the alignment to our setting, and analyze three recovery attacks. Experiments on MNIST and CelebA show that, across the evaluated attacks and deployment settings, anchor noise achieves higher learning accuracy than private-data noise at comparable measured leakage, yielding a more favorable privacy-utility trade-off under the specified collusion model. --- ### Biological-Hybrid Intelligence: A Conceptual Framework for Distributed Biological--Artificial Computation Authors: Michael Taynnan Barros, Sergio Lopez Bernal, Reinhold Scherer Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.NE, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18748v1 Biological and artificial systems offer complementary forms of adaptation, learning, and computation, with advances in in-vitro neurotechnology increasingly enabling bidirectional coupling between them. As these systems become more tightly integrated, a key architectural question is how task-relevant computation should be distributed across both substrates. Yet existing biohybrid solutions optimise the biological substrate, the AI model, or their interface without explicitly addressing how such computation is allocated, reassigned, and evaluated. We introduce Biological-Hybrid Intelligence (BHI), a conceptual framework for distributing computation across adaptive biological and artificial substrates coupled through a bioelectronic interface and coordinated by an orchestrator. BHI treats both substrates as computational entities whose computational responsibilities may change during operation. BHI requires reciprocal co-adaptation and differs from systems that merely decode biological activity, stimulate a living substrate, or adapt a single component. BHI further defines three operating modes: adversarial, collaborative, and codependent, distinguished by whether the substrates compete, divide computational labour, or become mutually necessary for task performance. BHI provides a common basis for comparing computational frameworks, defining benchmarks for latency, viability, interface bandwidth, learning efficiency, and reproducibility. It also highlights governance considerations arising from reciprocal stimulation, adaptation, and data exchange. More broadly, BHI invites computer scientists to consider biological substrates as active computational resources and to ask not only how a task should be computed, but where its computation should reside. BHI therefore reframes biological-artificial integration as a system-level problem of computational allocation, coordination, and control. --- ### Decision-Metric Alignment in Latent World Models: Diagnostics and Action-Conditioned Objectives for MPC Planning Authors: Jiawei Wang, Ke Rui, Yushen Zuo, Yichun Feng, Minglei Li Published: 2026-08-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18746v1 JEPA-style latent world models can use Euclidean distance to a goal latent as the cost for model-predictive control (MPC). Strong decoding of task variables, however, does not guarantee that this particular cost ranks candidate action sequences by real task progress. We call the latter property \emph{decision-metric alignment}. We introduce Plan-Real Spearman, which measures latent--real rank agreement on random plans, and CEM-stage Spearman, which measures the same agreement as cross-entropy-method (CEM) search concentrates its proposal. We analyze sufficient conditions under which latent distance preserves real-cost rankings, identifying encoder distortion, terminal rollout error, and candidate margins as the controlling quantities. Guided by the observed empirical alignment gap, DA-LeWM augments LeWM with inverse-dynamics and demonstration-conditioned goal-action heads. Across all our experiments, DA-LeWM accelerates convergence and achieves higher online success than LeWM, while probe scores remain similar. These results show that action-conditioned objectives improve the geometry used by Euclidean-cost, CEM-based latent MPC. ---