# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 107 of 266

> Full-text markdown of papers #5301–5350 of 13298 published in 2026-09, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 13298-paper 2026-09 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Layout-Guided Masking for GROBID: Lightweight Structural Gains in Large-Scale Scientific PDF Ingestion

Authors: Luca Foppiano, Sana Khamassi, Vipul Gupta
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL, cs.DL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26381v1

Transforming scholarly PDFs into machine-readable fulltext remains a bottleneck for large-scale information systems. Recent vision-based parsers improve accuracy, but need GPUs and may introduce noise into the extracted text. GROBID, a modular font-stream parser running on CPU, is the de-facto standard for structuring scientific articles and underpins several of the largest open scholarly corpora. We pair it with a lightweight CPU detector localising figure, table, and paratext (header, footer, page number) regions, encoded as typed-area masks whose tokens are routed to GROBID's specialised models or discarded. On two PMC corpora, Bioinformatics (1,926 articles) and Materials Science (2,595), scored against JATS with a section-aware structural protocol, our extension improves over plain GROBID on most metrics (NS $+0.025$/$+0.013$; $+0.086$ paragraph recall on Materials Science, $d_z{=}1.08$), and caption-linked figure recovery improves on both corpora. On the external Table-BRGM benchmark, table detection recovers F1 $0.16 \to 0.94$ and table structure follows (GriTS-Top $0.27 \to 0.78$, below the strongest GPU system). On body text, against four vision-based systems (Docling, MinerU, olmOCR, dots.ocr), it has the best paragraph precision on both corpora, the best section detection on Materials Science, and a character error rate within 0.004 of the best GPU parser. End-to-end on CPU, it costs $2.7$--$3.2\times$ less than the cheapest GPU system (Docling) and $10$--$14\times$ less than generative parsers.

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### MAVP: Map-Aware Visuomotor Policies for Mobile Manipulation

Authors: Jinhe Tang, Ruixiao Dai, Weiming Zhi
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26378v1

Successful mobile manipulation requires coordinated base and arm motion while maintaining accurate spatial positioning. However, demonstration-trained policies can struggle to realise the intended base motion reliably, leading to spatial misalignment and subsequent manipulation failures. We present MAVP (Map-Aware Visuomotor Policies), a framework that improves execution reliability by predicting explicit base-pose targets and tracking them using localisation feedback. MAVP reconstructs a static map from teleoperated demonstrations and expresses demonstrated base trajectories in a shared map frame, providing consistent spatial supervision across demonstrations. At execution time, the policy receives RGB observations, joint states, and the robot's current map-frame base pose, and jointly predicts target base poses, arm actions, and gripper actions. A low-level controller tracks the predicted base targets using feedforward motion and pose error feedback, enabling correction of execution deviations. We additionally use pose-noise augmentation during training to improve robustness to errors in the policy's pose input. Across six real-world manipulation tasks and three policy families, MAVP achieves higher task success rates than unanchored velocity control in all tasks. Videos and additional results are available at https://123qwedsa123.github.io/mavp/.

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### FairMean: Promoting Fairness in Distributed Learning under Label Poisoning Attacks

Authors: Huigan Zheng, Jiaojiao Zhang, Yongxiang Liu
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26377v1

Fairness-aware distributed learning prioritizes clients with large losses to reduce performance disparities, but label poisoning can create large losses, thereby inducing a fairness--robustness conflict. We propose FairMean to manage this conflict. FairMean weights client gradients using a bounded, nondecreasing function of local loss. The increasing weights prioritize high-loss clients to promote fairness, while the upper bound prevents excessive loss-induced amplification of poisoned-client gradients. In the absence of label poisoning, we show that minimizing the FairMean objective is more conducive to solution fairness than minimizing the standard average-loss objective. Under label poisoning, we establish an average-stationarity bound whose attack-dependent term is proportional to the square of the poisoned-client fraction. Experiments show that FairMean promotes fairness by reducing accuracy variance while improving worst-client accuracy.

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### KwaiMind Technical Report

Authors: Boheng Zhang, Fan Yang, Jia Sun, Junlong Wu, Wenwu Ou, Yuting Hu, Zijun Li, Dewen Fan, Fei Zuo, Honglie Wang, Huaiqing Wang, Pengcheng Wei et al.
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26375v2

Commercial image editing requires product identity preservation, accurate text rendering, and user appeal alongside general editing quality. We present KwaiMind, an image editing system combining general capabilities with e-commerce specialization. An agent-based data engine maintains approximately 1.8 million high-quality editing pairs. Built on a multimodal diffusion transformer, KwaiMind undergoes continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, followed by preference optimization and online reinforcement learning. A general-purpose vision-language judge and specialized rewards for click-through rate (CTR), text rendering, and product consistency guide specialized policies, which are consolidated through on-policy distillation. We introduce Ecom-Bench, covering 11 commercial editing tasks with task-specific visual evaluation and CTR-based ranking. KwaiMind achieves the strongest overall scores among evaluated open-source editors on ImgEdit, GEdit, both language splits of REDEdit, and Ecom-Bench visual quality, and the highest aggregate CTR ranking score among compared systems. Offline, CTR-guided optimization increases the proportion of generated images whose predicted CTR exceeds that of the original product image from 12.16% to 37.41%. In an online A/B experiment, CTR-based selection of product main images yields an approximately 2.44% relative increase in actual CTR. These results demonstrate the value of domain-specific data and reward-driven alignment for commercial image editing.

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### HySparse2: Hybrid Sparse Attention with Two-Level KV Sharing

Authors: Jianyu Wei, Yizhao Gao, Qihao Zhang, Shimao Chen, Zhengju Tang, Yu Cheng, Shengjie Zhou, Zihan Jiang, Yifan Song, Hailin Zhang, Liang Zhao, Bo Yang et al.
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26368v1

Long-horizon and multi-turn agents typically generate short actions and process long observations from tools and environments. This growing context demands efficient prefill, compact KV-cache storage, and accurate long-context retrieval. To meet these demands, we introduce HySparse2, a hybrid sparse attention architecture with two-level KV sharing. At the outer level, KV Bridging adopts a YOCO-style self-decoder and cross-decoder structure, but bridges only full-attention layers. The self-decoder uses hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA), while the cross-decoder uses hybrid sparse attention. The KV caches for full-attention layers in the cross-decoder are generated from the hidden states of full-attention layers in the self-decoder. At the inner level, HySparse2 retains HySparse's core KV Reuse design with two refinements. First, it replaces block-level sparsity with token-level sparsity for finer long-context retrieval. Second, it removes the separate SWA branch from sparse layers and instead forces a sliding window of recent tokens into the sparse selection. This two-level KV sharing allows all cross-decoder KV caches to be constructed from self-decoder hidden states. Prefill can therefore exit after the self-decoder, skipping all cross-decoder layers. On an 80B-A3B MoE model, HySparse2 outperforms HySparse and Hybrid SWA on long-context retrieval and multi-turn agentic tasks, while substantially reducing prefill computation and KV-cache storage.

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### GitScholar: A Dataset for Predicting AI Research Impact from GitHub Engagement

Authors: Emilien Guandalino, Lorenz K. Müller, Beatrice Alessandra Motetti, Konstantin Berestizshevsky, Lukas Cavigelli
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26361v1

With the rapid pace of AI research and the hundreds of daily new publications, staying up-to-date with the latest developments has become increasingly difficult. For researchers, quickly identifying impactful work is essential, yet manually reviewing each new publication is impractical. Automated impact prediction methods help address this challenge, usually by combining various information sources available, such as a paper's content or citation history. In this work, we propose using GitHub engagement as an additional source and demonstrate that it provides both a timely and accurate signal. To this end, we introduce GitScholar, a novel dataset that links GitHub activity from 444,000 repositories to over 558,000 AI arXiv papers. Our experiments show that GitHub reactions improve early prediction precision by up to 12% over a strong academic baseline. Additionally, we find that GitHub signal offers near-complete coverage of high-impact AI papers, and consistently correlates with future academic success. GitScholar is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/huawei-csl/GitScholar.

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### PACT: From Credit Assignment to Critic Alignment

Authors: Jiayan Fu, Hang Xu, Yong Zhang, Zhaokai Luo, Yao Hu, Dongyan Zhao, Mu Chuan
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26355v1

Reinforcement learning has become a central component of large language model (LLM) post-training, yet token-level credit lacks a generally accepted mathematical definition, leaving its relationship to commonly used training signals unclear. We formulate three regularity conditions, namely Completeness, Prefix Consistency, and Neutrality, and prove that they uniquely determine token-level credit. This characterization provides a unified basis for explaining phenomena across existing algorithms and guides the development of an improved actor-critic training procedure. Through this lens, an ideal teacher in On-Policy Distillation (OPD) acts as an implicit critic, yielding an expected policy gradient proportional to that induced by token-level credit. Response-level REINFORCE Leave-One-Out (RLOO) signals match the expected policy-gradient contribution of token-level credit despite their coarser granularity. We further establish approximate credit sparsity under bounded outcome rewards and show how intermediate critic errors in Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) can become comparable to the underlying credit. These motivate Policy Aligned Critic Training (PACT), which adopts an Actor-then-Critic update order to apply importance sampling correction to critic training and better align the critic with the updated policy. In agentic mathematical reasoning, PACT achieves 72.87% average accuracy across four benchmarks, outperforming GRPO and PPO by 8.80 and 13.16 percentage points, respectively. On SWE-bench Verified, PACT achieves a pass rate of 67.4%, outperforming PPO, GRPO, and SAO by 2.4, 2.0, and 3.8 percentage points, respectively.

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### HYDRA: Proactive Android Malware Drift Adaptation via Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning

Authors: Han Chen, Hanchen Wang, Hongmei Chen, Lu Qin, Wenjie Zhang, Ying Zhang
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26352v1

Concept drift, driven by the rapid evolution of Android malware, severely degrades the performance of machine learning detectors. Current adaptation strategies are often reactive, responding only after performance has dropped and imposing a significant manual annotation burden, or they are proactive but rely on unstable adversarial training and incomplete, single-level graph representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose HYDRA (Hybrid Drift Adaptation), a proactive adaptation framework that learns drift-invariant representations from hierarchically structured data. HYDRA first models applications using a hybrid graph structure, combining fine-grained Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) and coarse-grained Function Call Graphs (FCGs) to capture comprehensive behavioral patterns. It then introduces a novel cross-domain contrastive learning objective that aligns historical (source) and new (target) data distributions. By generating pseudo-labels for unlabeled target samples, our method pulls representations of semantically similar applications together, regardless of their domain, within a single, stable optimization process. This approach unifies feature learning and domain alignment, eliminating the need for complex adversarial objectives. Extensive experiments on large-scale, time-ordered malware datasets demonstrate that HYDRA achieves substantially lower False Negative and False Positive Rates than state-of-the-art baselines while requiring up to 87.5% fewer labeled samples. Our work thus offers a robust and efficient solution to combat concept drift in security applications.

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### TransBERT: A Framework for Synthetic Translation in Domain-Specific Language Modeling

Authors: Julien Knafou, Luc Mottin, Anaïs Mottaz, Alexandre Flament, Patrick Ruch
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26347v2

The scarcity of non-English language data in specialized domains significantly limits the development of effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. We present TransBERT, a novel framework for pre-training language models using exclusively synthetically translated text, and introduce TransCorpus, a scalable translation toolkit. Focusing on the life sciences domain in French, our approach demonstrates that state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks can be achieved solely by leveraging synthetically translated data. We release the TransCorpus toolkit, the TransCorpus-bio-fr corpus (36.4GB of French life sciences text), TransBERT-bio-fr, its associated pre-trained language model and reproducible code for both pre-training and fine-tuning. Our results highlight the viability of synthetic translation in a high-resource translation direction for building high-quality NLP resources in low-resource language/domain pairs.

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### Blaming Across the Aisle: Political Contrasting and Blame Attribution in the Danish Parliament

Authors: Markus Lundsfryd Jensen, Rune Egeskov Trust, Kenneth Christian Enevoldsen, Sara Kolding
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26346v1

Political discourse is widely perceived to be growing more hostile, yet robust evidence remains scarce. This study examines blame attribution in the Danish Parliament from 1997 to 2026, combining a purpose-built classifier, BlameBERT (F1: 0.80), with multilevel statistical modeling. The classifier is constructed using an annotation-efficient pipeline for blame attribution in low-to-mid resource languages. The results reveal a banana-shaped trajectory, with blame declining until around 2016 before entering a significant and sustained increase in recent years (2019-2026). Government status consistently influenced blame attribution - an effect we term political contrasting - with opposition parties blaming substantially more than governing parties. This effect was moderated by ideology: The blame-dampening effect of governing was less pronounced among right-wing parties, and ideological extremity amplified blame more strongly on the right. In recent years, the interaction between political wing and ideological extremity intensified, suggesting an ideological hardening of the blame rhetoric concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. Taken together, these patterns suggest that the perceived rise in harsh political language reflects not merely a general rhetorical drift, but an ideologically asymmetric hardening of political discourse. A sensitivity analysis showed that the conclusions were robust to varying classification thresholds.

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### Geometry-Aware Hyperbolic Residual-Quantized Variational Autoencoders

Authors: Alessio Colombo, Melika Ayoughi
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26342v2

Residual Vector Quantization turns continuous representations into discrete, multi-level token sequences. Yet most methods operate in Euclidean space, despite the coarse-to-fine structure of the resulting codes and the latent hierarchies present in many data domains. Hyperbolic geometry offers a natural alternative for hierarchical representations, but naive hyperbolic extensions introduce geometric inconsistencies: non-associative hyperbolic addition prevents consistent residual aggregation, while standard straight-through gradient estimation ignores the geometry of the latent space. We propose a geometry-aware hyperbolic residual quantization that addresses these issues in both the forward and backward passes. In the forward pass, Hyperbolic Residual Aggregation restores the telescoping behavior of residual quantization on the Poincare ball. In the backward pass, a discounted Hyperbolic Straight-Through Estimator routes the reconstruction gradient through the quantizer as a single geometric block, avoiding unstable recursive gradient transport across residual stages. Evaluations on hierarchical prediction, recommendation, image tokenization, and neural audio coding tasks show that our method improves the stability and structural organization of hyperbolic residual codes over naive hyperbolic baselines. At the same time, we observe a clear structure-compression trade-off: Euclidean residual quantization remains preferable for pure compression, while geometry-aware hyperbolic quantization is most useful for hierarchically organized discrete latent spaces.

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### Designing and Analysing Argument Mining Pipelines: Towards a Comprehensive Assessment

Authors: Siddharth Bhargava, Sara Tonelli, Patricia Martín-Rodilla
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26338v1

Argument Mining (AM) transforms natural language into its underlying argument structures. This transformation is typically realized through a sequence of AM tasks that form an end-to-end AM pipeline. However, AM approaches often differ in how they conceptualize these tasks, making direct comparisons between them difficult and opaque. This calls for a more nuanced, task-level analysis of AM approaches to enable clearer comparison and assessment. This work presents a preliminary meta-study that systematically reviews several state-of-the-art end-to-end AM works and analyzes their pipelines through a triple-perspective framework---a linguistic, computational and domain perspective---to understand how the pipelines model arguments as structures, computes them, and integrates domain knowledge. We further propose a general design to the linguistic and computational perspectives, illustrating how key AM tasks are designed for modeling and computation of argument structures. Our proposed framework lays the groundwork for methodology-centered descriptions across AM approaches, facilitating deeper understanding and more systematic comparisons in future research.

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### On the Role of the Projector in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: Last-Layer Rank Dynamics Drive Representation Quality

Authors: Siladittya Manna, Priyangshu Mandal, Umapada Pal, Saumik Bhattacharya
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26334v1

The dimensional collapse of representations in self-supervised contrastive learning is an ever-present issue. One notable technique to prevent such a collapse of representations is using a multi-layered perceptron network called Projector. In several works, the projector has been found to heavily influence the quality of representations learned in a self-supervised contrastive pre-training task. However, the question still lingers. What role does the projector play? Assuming the projector mitigates dimensional collapse, what prevents the terminal layer of the base encoder from functioning as the projector in the absence of an explicit multi-layer perceptron (MLP) head? In this work, we intend to study what happens inside the projector by examining the rank dynamics of the same and the encoder through empirical study and analysis. Through mathematical analysis, we observe that the effect of rank reduction predominantly occurs in the last layer. Motivated by this insight, we propose a weight regularization strategy applied specifically to the last layer. We demonstrate that this targeted approach yields better performance than applying orthogonal weight regularization across the entire network (WeRank), both with and without a projector. Our method improves Top-1 accuracy by more than 1% on SimCLR on the ImageNet100 dataset and consistently outperforms baseline SimCLR variants on CIFAR datasets, supporting our interpretation of the projector's role.

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### Disaggregated Quantization: Specializing LLM Prefill and Decode

Authors: Andrei Panferov, Maximilian Kleinegger, Sweta Priyadarshi, Tijmen Blankevoort, Dan Alistarh
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26333v1

Prefill and decode reward different approaches to quantization: low-precision arithmetic accelerates prompt processing, while compact weights reduce memory traffic during generation. We propose "disaggregated quantization" (DQ), which specializes computation formats, weights and storage placement to both of these phases. On Qwen 3 and Gemma 3, removing activation quantization specifically on decode improves accuracy on decode-heavy tasks without increasing inference cost. Training separate compute-native prefill weights accelerates prompt processing relative to weight-only inference while matching or exceeding its accuracy at 2-3-bit decode on both decode-heavy and prefill-heavy tasks. With released Qwen3.8-27B GGUF decoders, training an NVFP4 prefiller improves 1-bit accuracy by 32.5 points on MMLU-Pro and 35.3 on MMMU-Pro without modifying the decode checkpoint. To accommodate the additional checkpoint on a single device, offloaded disaggregated prefill (ODP) streams its weights from SSD, amortizing loading over prompt length. On the same 27B model, ODP delivers a 1.78x time-to-first-token speedup over the weight-only baseline at 8K prompt length in llama.cpp. We evaluate accuracy under disaggregated serving in vLLM and further validate shared-weight format disaggregation through post-training quantization on models up to 2.8T parameters.

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### Error Bounds for Statistical Estimators in BTL Model with Parametric Multivariate Utility Functions

Authors: Yicheng Li, Huifu Xu
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26326v1

We study preference elicitation under the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model where the true partworth vector is unknown and has to be estimated as a parameter with elicited preference information. The set of selected pairwise queries is non-uniform, deterministic, and arbitrary over a collection of alternatives, provided that it satisfies a joint identifiability condition. We focus on understanding when the canonical maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is finite and admits sharp error bounds without explicit compactness constraints on the feasible set or external regularizers. To this end, we derive minimax lower bounds under the standard bounded dynamic range condition, and find that the same Fisher-information geometry in the classic Cramér-Rao lower bounds underpins the finite-sample difficulty of the estimation problem. By combining a non-asymptotic expansion of the likelihood score equation with a fixed-point localization argument, we identify a design-dependent sample size threshold above which the unconstrained canonical MLE exists and is unique with high probability. The same expansion yields a decomposition of the estimation error into a linear stochastic term, an explicit second-order bias, and a higher-order remainder. A refined analysis gives sufficient sample size conditions under which the canonical MLE attains the minimax rates up to logarithmic and constant factors. These results provide a unified non-asymptotic theory for parametric utility elicitation and reveal when the inference is determined by response data alone rather than by external regularization. Preliminary numerical results are consistent with the theoretical findings.

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### Leveraging Vision-Based Point Cloud Map Priors for Camera-Based 3D Object Detection and Online Vectorized HD Mapping

Authors: Markus Käppeler, Rohit Mohan, Abhinav Valada
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26325v1

Camera-based 3D object detection and online vectorized HD mapping provide compact scene representations for autonomous driving, but both depend on accurate metric geometry and remain limited by depth ambiguity. Over long-term deployment, observations from repeated traversals can be accumulated into persistent point cloud priors that provide geometric context beyond the current observations. Existing explicit point cloud prior approaches, however, rely on LiDAR-based map construction and therefore require expensive 3D ranging sensors. We propose a framework that constructs a static point cloud prior map from previous camera traversals using Pi3X and augments each point with DINOv3 features. At runtime, a local prior patch is retrieved using global localization, encoded with a sparse voxel backbone, and fused in bird's-eye view (BEV) with lifted multi-view camera features. Task-specific sparse transformer heads then predict 3D objects and vectorized map elements from the fused representation. On Argoverse 2, the vision-based prior improves a strong baseline from 0.287 to 0.299 CDS and from 0.669 to 0.750 vectorized mapping mAP. Ablations show that semantic DINOv3 features are particularly important for vectorized mapping. These results demonstrate that vision-built geometric-semantic priors provide an effective form of long-term scene memory for camera-based perception, improving both tasks without LiDAR for prior-map construction or online inference.

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### TriWorldBench: A Tri-View Consistency Perspective on Embodied World Models

Authors: Xuanyi Liu, Haofeng Wang, Ruiqi Li, Danni Yu, Rui Wan, Ruixu Zhang, Siyu Tao, Xue Yang, Shaofeng Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Jiaqi Zhang, Siwei Ma
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26314v1

Embodied world models predict the outcomes of robot actions to support learning and planning. For robots equipped with head and wrist cameras, this requires complementary views: the head view captures the overall task, while wrist views reveal local gripper-object interactions. However, evaluating these views independently cannot determine whether they describe the same action and object state. We introduce TRIWORLDBENCH, a benchmark for evaluating embodied world models through synchronized head, left-wrist, and right-wrist videos. It contains 500 episodes across 50 bimanual manipulation tasks and uses 19 metrics to assess tri-view consistency, task alignment, physical and 3D coherence, motion quality, temporal consistency, and visual quality. By combining cross-view checks with measurements tailored to each camera, the benchmark evaluates whether plausible individual videos also form a consistent prediction of the intended task. We summarize overall performance with TWB-Score and retain per-view results to identify where predictions fail. This extends world-model evaluation beyond single-view visual quality. Code, data, and metric definitions are available at https://github.com/TriWorldBench/TriWorldBench.

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### PreGS: A Parameter-Transfer-Based Multi-Expert Graph Neural Network for Node Classification

Authors: Zhicong Cai, Yinglong Zhang, Xiaoying Hong, Xuewen Xia, Xing Xu
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26310v1

Graph neural networks have achieved strong performance in node classification by aggregating information from graph neighborhoods. However, a single aggregation mechanism may be insufficient to capture diverse structural patterns across graph datasets. Moreover, independently training multiple structural branches can introduce substantial overhead without necessarily producing stable node representations. To address these issues, this paper proposes PreGS, a parameter-transfer-based multi-expert graph neural network framework. PreGS first pretrains a multi-head graph attention network (GAT) and transfers the linear transformation weights of its first-layer attention heads to multiple GraphSAGE experts. The transferred experts are frozen and used as complementary structural branches. The fused raw node features, GAT head representations, and GraphSAGE expert representations are fed into a multilayer perceptron (MLP), whose output is further fused with the pretrained GAT logits. Based on PreGS, we further develop PreGSv2, which introduces source-level weighting and a structural gating mechanism for adaptive multi-source feature integration. Experiments on eight public graph datasets show that PreGS and PreGSv2 achieve competitive performance against representative graph neural network baselines. Ablation, parameter-transfer, sensitivity, aggregator, visualization, and training-time analyses further validate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/LH-Czc/PreGS.

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### CHiME-9 ECHI: A Machine Learning Challenge for Enhancing Conversations to Address Hearing Impairment

Authors: Robert Sutherland, Thomas Kuebert, Marko Lugger, Stefan Petrausch, Eline Borch Petersen, Juan Azcarreta Ortiz, Buye Xu, Stefan Goetze, Jon Barker
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26306v1

This work presents the task and results of the CHiME-9 challenge for Enhancing Conversations to address Hearing Impairment. The challenge considers the scenario of four-party conversations in a noisy, cafeteria-style environment with interfering speech sources and sound effects. Participants are provided with audio recordings made with Meta Aria glasses and hearing aid microphones, and clean speech samples of the conversation participants. The task is to extract the speech of the conversation partners from the noisy multi-channel recordings with the goal of improving the intelligibility and quality of the speech, evaluated using objective metrics and subjective listening tests. This paper reviews submissions from seven teams and ranks them on a combination of subjective intelligibility and quality. Results show that while the objective metrics do not reflect listener performance, the top systems were able to make substantial improvements over the challenge baseline in both intelligibility and quality ratings.

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### Target alignment, dilution and forecast selection when cross-sectional forecasts share a common target

Authors: Masoud Soleimani
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: econ.EM, cs.LG, q-fin.ST, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26303v1

Forecasters often score the same units per date against one standardized realized outcome. We show that every standardized forecast splits exactly into a component aligned with this common target and a component uncorrelated with it. Three consequences follow: forecast-error correlation largely mirrors forecast correlation and is therefore a poor measure of diversity; an equally weighted combination beats a no-information forecast only when average alignment is large relative to the combination's dispersion; and the gain from adding a forecaster separates into genuine improvement and mere dilution, which equal-weight admission can mistakenly reward. We develop a cautious selection rule, study it in simulations, and apply it to language-model forecasts of US equity rankings and mechanical signals ranking exchange-traded funds. Selection removes most dilution losses, but no combination beats the no-information forecast.

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### CompKV: Compensation-Aware KV Selection for Long-Context LLM Inference

Authors: Zhen Huang, Ruizhe Yao, Danyi Liu, Xinrui Chen, Shuwei Li, Siru Zhong, Zijian Cao, Yushan Lai, Mingming Guo, Weijie Zheng, Haohuan Fu
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26300v1

Despite their strong performance, large language models (LLMs) are bottlenecked by KV cache memory traffic during long-context inference. Sparse attention is widely used to accelerate LLM inference by computing exact attention over a selected subset of tokens. To recover the contribution of tokens excluded from exact attention, recent methods apply coarse-grained compensation to the omitted attention tail. However, existing methods typically select tokens based on attention mass and only then compensate for the unselected tokens. This decoupled design overlooks their interaction: selection should prioritize tokens that would leave the largest compensation error if omitted. To address this limitation, we introduce CompKV, the first compensation-aware sparse attention framework that divides tokens into blocks and explicitly optimizes selection for the downstream compensation mechanism. Our theoretical analysis shows that the residual left by block-level mean compensation is governed by both block attention mass and within-block logit variation. We approximate this residual using compact block-level statistics, yielding a deployable selection criterion. We further develop an efficient asynchronous implementation. Experiments on RULER and LongBench-Pro show that CompKV performs best among the evaluated sparse baselines while delivering up to a $6.85\times$ self-attention speedup over full attention.

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### ForeDrive: Foresight-Guided End-to-End Autonomous Driving with a Planning-Relevant Latent World Model

Authors: Sinuo Wang, Zichong Gu, Yuhan Huang, Wenxin Wen, Xun Yang, Yiqing Zhang, Xingyu Zhang, Ningyu Che, Jie Ling, Qiankun Yu, Wei Liu, Jing Xu et al.
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26299v2

Existing latent world models are typically optimized for future predictability, yet the resulting representations are not necessarily useful for planning in autonomous driving. Predictions are commonly used for pretraining or auxiliary supervision rather than as direct conditioning signals for trajectory generation. We propose ForeDrive, which learns a planning-relevant latent representation and couples it asymmetrically to a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) planner. The planner consumes multi-horizon latent future representations learned with a JEPA-style world model; planning gradients update the shared online encoder, while stop-gradient routing trains the latent predictor with forecasting losses only. Because predicted futures have varying reliability across horizons and BEV trajectories are misaligned with image tokens, we use gated visual fusion, future-status injection, and Trajectory-Adaptive Bias (TAB) to inject future latents as guidance without overriding the current observation. Trained with pure imitation learning and using only the current front-view image as visual input at inference, ForeDrive attains 89.9 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 90.0 one-stage EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, without reinforcement learning or an external trajectory scorer.

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### Rethinking Pairwise Token Interaction in Spiking Transformers

Authors: Sicheng Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Zhiyuan Li, Jinyan Yu, Qian Zhang, Dengpeng Xing, Zhitong Zhang, Tielin Zhang
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26297v1

Spiking Transformers inherit token interaction mechanisms from conventional Transformers, yet their sparse binary representations fundamentally alter how token-to-token communication is established. In particular, spike-based query-key matching produces highly sparse and input-dependent interaction patterns, coupling information propagation to the instantaneous availability of matching spike events. This motivates a different interaction paradigm in which long-range communication does not rely solely on pairwise spike coincidence. We therefore propose Gated Spike Axial Propagation (GSAP), a spike-native token interaction mechanism that decouples information propagation from context selection. Instead of directly determining communication through query-key matching, GSAP first propagates spike-based context along the horizontal and vertical axes, allowing information to reach distant tokens through structured sequential propagation. A receiver-conditioned gate then determines how much of the propagated context is incorporated at each token, while a lightweight local pathway preserves fine-grained neighborhood information. In this way, GSAP reformulates token interaction as a propagate-then-select process, enabling structured long-range communication while retaining the sparse event-driven nature of spiking representations. Code is available at https://github.com/Fancyssc/GSAP.

---

### On the security and privacy of LLMs in Mobility

Authors: Mauro Conti, Lorenzo Perinello, Umberto Salviati
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26295v1

The mobility sector is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence. With a global market valued at approximately 2.9 trillion dollars annually, considering only cars, the integration of these technologies has the potential to impact more than 1.5 billion vehicles worldwide. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in mobility, concerns about cybersecurity, privacy, and reliability emerge. Accordingly, this paper surveys current applications and assesses these challenges. Since the European AI Act classifies transportation AI as high risk, we derive nine technical classes from its requirements to assess current research and future deployments. Our findings show that research mainly studies GPT and Llama models (over 50\% of reviewed works) and traffic applications while largely neglecting security, privacy, and reliability. This gap extends to AI Act compliance: among 35 reviewed works, only one includes a partial vulnerability assessment and one a partial risk management system. We identify a clear gap between strong optimization performance and regulatory adherence, suggesting compliance is limited less by technology than by a focus on static performance over lifecycle safety, and underscoring an urgent need for security-by-design in safety-critical intelligent transportation systems.

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### Dual-Frontier: When Can an Agent Trust Its World Model?

Authors: Huatai Zhu, Qiang Chen, Ziqian Kou, Wenhao Li, Fei Wang, Yichao Cao, Xiu Su, Yi Chen
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26293v2

Learned world models are becoming essential to general-purpose agents: by predicting action consequences, they support planning and decision-making while reducing reliance on costly trial and error. This reliance creates a fundamental ambiguity: when a world-model-guided decision fails, the trajectory alone may not reveal whether the agent's decision rule or the world model caused the loss. We formalize this failure-attribution problem as a counterfactual decomposition of return loss and prove that its components are not identifiable from passive interaction, even for finite-horizon planners. This obstruction motivates Dual-Frontier, a learning principle that admits a world-model-guided decision only when its predicted advantage exceeds a certified bound on decision-relevant world-model error; otherwise, evidence is allocated to world-model verification. Action-conditioned value bounds and a closed-loop extension guarantee non-decreasing return for admitted decisions. Calibrated gates and simultaneous confidence sequences support adaptive evidence reuse, with sufficient and necessary verification bounds. Controlled learned-model experiments validate the predicted failure modes and certification behavior, while cross-backbone tool-use benchmarks instantiate the same verify-then-promote rule in realistic agent world-model pipelines, consistently improving decision quality and reliability.

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### Learning to Fluctuate: Statistical Foundations for Causal Tabular Pretraining

Authors: Zhiheng Zhang
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26290v2

Causal tabular foundation models amortize effect estimation across synthetic mechanisms, but latent-effect supervision rewards posterior shrinkage rather than encoding the repeated-sample response needed in a fixed deployment population. We introduce fluctuation-supervised pretraining (FSP): each synthetic table is labeled by its average treatment effect plus its efficient influence-function fluctuation; deployment remains a frozen forward pass. Along the path $T_{λ,P}=θ(P)+λP_nψ_P$, we prove an endpoint transition: every fixed $λ<1$ retains label ambiguity of order $(1-λ)^2/n$, whereas full fluctuation makes the Gaussian label observable and reduces optimal finite-stratum causal label-prediction risk to order $n^{-2}$. A finite-pretraining bound combines label, network, episode-sampling, and optimization errors; its sampling defect controls fixed-mechanism bias, mean squared error, variance, Gaussian approximation, and, with variance-head accuracy, studentized coverage. Complementary lower bounds separate local $n^{-1}$ ATE risk from the $\log N/M$ excess risk of generic finite-dictionary episode learning. Experiments trace the learned sampling response. Across 24 nonlinear continuous-covariate cells at trained context lengths, continuous-row FSP lowers checkpoint-mean macro RMSE by 7.0% versus S-learner and wins all 12 weak-overlap cells; validation-selected Summary FSP deploys $11.6\times$ faster per table in our warm one-thread benchmark. Under effect shift, matched Raw FSP lowers mean-checkpoint RMSE by 54.2% and teacher defect by 99.0% versus latent-effect supervision, and RMSE by 10.2% versus the released CausalPFN-S checkpoint. Known-effect semisynthesis tests coverage; two randomized-study evaluations show that lower RMSE can coexist with residual attenuation.

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### EADC: Evaluation of Advanced and Deep-level Compliance in Large Language Models

Authors: Yan Zhang, Ruien Li, Yaoyao Peng, Wanxin Ren, Yijia Zhang, Wusheng Zhang, Guangwen Yang
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26175v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used in various industries. However, ensuring their compliance with complex laws and regulatory frameworks remains a great challenge. Existing evaluation paradigms mainly rely on static benchmarks that suffer from three severe limitations: First, the compliance rules being used do not comply with the requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) laws and regulations; Second, they only handle apparent, explicit compliance risks, leaving implicit and covert compliance risks undetected; Third, they fail to track the systematic propagation of risks along logical dependency chains or evaluate compliance within nuanced, context-based real-world scenarios. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce EADC, a novel advanced evaluation benchmark of LLMs based on an AI compliance knowledge graph and AI compliance legal experts. By mapping abstract legal rules into structured logical multi-relational graphs, our framework enables automated, evolving agents to distill and synthesize highly sophisticated adversarial scenarios. This compliance benchmark is reviewed and corrected by human AI legal experts throughout the whole process. The resulting dataset (4,435+ QA pairs) provides an extensive, multi-dimensional taxonomy covering critical regulatory frontiers, including bias and discrimination, fairness, personal privacy protection, and values. Crucially, our compliance dataset moves beyond shallow string-matching by incorporating contextual long-horizon interactions and logic-driven hazard chains, capturing deeply embedded compliance anomalies that bypass traditional filters. Experiment evaluations demonstrate that our framework exposes critical regulatory blind spots in state-of-the-art LLMs, offering a rigorous, AI laws and regulations-aligned benchmark to safeguard high-level and deep compliance in the application of LLMs.

---

### FIRE: Failure-Informed Runtime Engineering for Reliable Language-Model Agents

Authors: Nikita Agarwal, Nivedit Jain
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26048v1

Language-model agents often reach a working solution and then fail to consistently deliver it. We study runtime policies: targeted natural-language instructions and action denials applied by the agent harness at states that preceded observed failures, without changing model weights or the user prompt. With this, keeping capability constant, we observe a meaningful unlock in delivered reliability. Across the complete 87-task Terminal-Bench 2.1 suite, with two attempts per task, policies increase repeated success (pass^2) in all three GPT-5.6 tiers: 50.6% to 54.0% for Luna, 55.2% to 60.9% for Terra, and 64.4% to 73.6% for Sol. Sol's best-of-two success changes by 1.2 points while repeated success rises by 9.2, showing that policies chiefly convert reachable solutions into dependable delivery. We further cover 14 tasks under Terra's frozen portfolio. Policy-guided Terra reaches 71.4%, compared with 64.3% for unassisted Sol, at about half the cost, demonstrating how engineering around models could unlock dependability for a use case. To isolate the mechanism we run a randomized five-arm experiment: real policies reach 61% on eligible tasks, versus 39% without a policy, 36% with a timing-matched sham, and 39 to 43% with generic verification or reconsideration. The intended corrective behavior appears in 22 of 24 coded policy attempts, against at most 14 in any other arm. Runtime policies are therefore a practical reliability layer: they make capabilities an agent already possesses substantially more repeatable.

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### Canonical locks that encode part-whole hierarchies

Authors: Rajat Modi, Yogesh Singh Rawat
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26046v2

One of the challenges in representational learning is how to encode part-whole hierarchies in a neural net. Prior works rely on flattening tree-like structures into string-like sequences and training a sequence-to-sequence model via autoregression. While such a representation works for parse-trees in NLP, it is not entirely clear how to make it work for images. Thus, we propose a geometric primitive called canonical locks. The key idea is that parts/wholes can be modelled as higher-dimensional vectors ($d \geq 4$), and information can be encoded in their relative phase differences. Inductively, the net consists of positionally-bound bottom-up and top-down neural fields, which drive each other to achieve a state of thermal equilibrium. Additionally, we show the existence of a few symmetrical configurations in the net. The computational iterations taken to break these symmetries depend on the angle between parts/wholes arranged on a disk (or more precisely a ring) in higher dimensions. It also appears to have connections to the psychological phenomenon of mental rotation.

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### EMERGE: Resolution-Agnostic Point Cloud Generation with Equivariant Graph-Based Diffusion

Authors: Ilias Mitsouras, Nikolaos Chaidos, Giorgos Stamou, Athanasios Voulodimos
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26039v1

Point cloud generation has emerged as a crucial task for accurately capturing and reproducing the complexity of the physical world. However, existing generative approaches, predominantly relying on Transformers and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), frequently ignore the continuous, non-grid topologies inherent to 3D spaces. Although the integration of graph-based structures has yielded significant benefits in related discriminative vision tasks, such geometric architectures remain noticeably absent from 3D generative modeling. To address this gap, we introduce EMERGE (Equivariant Multi-scale GNN for Resolution-agnostic point cloud GEneration), the first fully $SE(3)$-equivariant graph-based diffusion backbone explicitly designed to generate point clouds while preserving continuous spatial symmetries. Our framework bypasses the rigid resolution dependencies of standard generative pipelines, enabling zero-shot inference at multiple, arbitrary spatial resolutions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that EMERGE achieves State-of-the-Art generation quality across standard metrics, while the strong inherent geometric inductive biases enable significantly faster training convergence compared to existing baseline methods.

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### xWhyL: Causal Interactive Learning

Authors: Nicholas Tagliapietra, Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, Lavdim Halilaj, Juergen Luettin, Kristian Kersting
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26037v1

Explanations are central to causal reasoning, and cognitive science has long established that the human drive to explain is itself a mechanism for learning about causality. Despite this, learning from those abductive signals is largely ignored in artificial intelligence. While explainable AI (XAI) increasingly draws on causal models to generate explanations, the converse direction about what explanations can do for causality remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose xWhyL, a formal framework connecting causality and XAI by learning causal models from explanations. We develop a mathematical theory that translates explanations into a learning signal complementary to observational data, and demonstrate how it enables overcoming the limits of observational causal discovery. As explanations can be derived from incorrect beliefs and clash with data, a tension we call the Causal Tug-of-War, we prove conditions under which our framework rejects misspecified explanations rather than absorbing them. Our practical instantiation, Causal Interactive Learning (CIL), shows how expert explanations can efficiently support causal discovery and distinguish correct from incorrect explanations.

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### Truth for Believable AI: Expressed Doubt, Provenance, and Belief Revision as an Engineerable Stance

Authors: Sebastian Cochinescu
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26035v1

Conversational agents often express answers in a uniformly confident register. We test whether expressed uncertainty, provenance-aware assertion, and explicit belief revision can be implemented as a behavior layer over a fixed language model; we do not test believability or trust. The layer combines three epistemic states, per-claim confidence and typed provenance, a provenance-gated expression rule, and a persistent revision store with auditable acknowledgments and partial resistance to false corrections. We evaluate it on a constructed, mechanically scored multi-session benchmark using a synthetic model and Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct. The synthetic instrument passes all five checks. On the real model, acknowledgment soundness, a by-construction guarantee, holds in 100% of cases, and true corrections are accepted more often than false ones (0.44 vs. 0.15 on held beliefs; 0.875 vs. 0.420 including rule-accepted corrections of unheld facts), but the pre-specified expression-fidelity, contradiction-separation, and provenance margins fail. A disclosed post hoc analysis shows that expression gated on mean answer-token probability ranks correctness below chance end to end (AUC 0.41, conversation-clustered), whereas gating on sampling consistency discriminates (AUC 0.66). A consistency-gated configuration selected from this finding and evaluated under a separately committed protocol meets the conversation-level manipulation and capability-equivalence criteria and replicates on a redrawn conversation set. The manipulation result is selection-dependent, and both criteria remain unresolved when uncertainty is clustered over the 60 facts. The supported conclusions are limited to the by-construction audit guarantee, store-dependent partial correction discrimination, and a benchmark- and model-specific failure of token-probability gating; scaling the fact base is required before human evaluation.

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### Domain-Adaptive Pretraining Enhances Water Treatment Semantic Representation for Large-Scale Structured Literature Mining

Authors: Mudi Zhai, Ruihong Qiu, Qingyun Zeng, T. David Waite, Bing-Jie Ni, Haoran Duan
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26034v1

Water treatment research is expanding rapidly, but much of the knowledge acquired from this research remains scattered across unstructured literature. The field still lacks a dedicated language model that can efficiently capture water treatment-specific domain semantics for large-scale literature mining. Here, we address this by developing WaterBERT, a domain-adapted encoder model designed for semantic representation and structured information extraction from water treatment texts. WaterBERT was developed by continual pretraining on a large-scale water treatment corpus comprising about 2.97 billion tokens. Three fine-tuned models based on WaterBERT were systematically evaluated on downstream tasks, achieving the best overall performance among general-purpose and domain-specific BERT models, with F1 scores of 90.12% for multiclass treatment process classification, 79.50% for named entity recognition, and 74.04% for relation extraction. Beyond these benchmark tasks, we further demonstrated WaterBERT's advantages for large-scale literature processing. Applied to 5,144 Environmental Science & Technology articles, WaterBERT-BERTopic identified coherent, diverse, and domain-specific research topics without predefined categories. Building on WaterBERT, we processed 693,211 abstracts at substantially lower cost than commercial LLMs while retaining competitive extraction performance to construct a structured water treatment knowledge graph. The knowledge graph was then integrated with lexical and dense retrieval to develop a Water Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval System (WaterKERS), which achieved a relevance score of 77.7, substantially outperforming text-based retrieval baselines (54.7-64.5). Through WaterBERT, this study provides a compact and scalable semantic foundation for large-scale information processing and evidence mapping in water treatment research.

---

### Hyperbolic Restricted Boltzmann Machine Neural Quantum State

Authors: H. L. Dao
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: quant-ph, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26032v1

We construct the first type of non-Euclidean non-autoregressive neural quantum state (NQS) in the form of the hyperbolic Restricted Boltzmann Machine (HRBM), which is studied in the variational Monte-Carlo (VMC) setting of the Quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (QSK) model whose ground state exhibits volume-law entanglement. Across a 512-fold increase in the Hilbert space dimension corresponding to a system size increase from $N=14$ to $N=24$, HRBM NQS robustly outperforms its Euclidean version, the RBM NQS, in terms of better ground state energy optimization as well as lower Renyi-2 $S_2$ and von Neumann $S_{vN}$ absolute entanglement entropy reconstruction errors. More importantly, for all QSK system sizes, HRBM NQS demonstrates a superior expressivity in faithfully reproducing the entire entanglement spectrum of the QSK model from the top eigenvalues down to the tail end across 15 orders of magnitude, while RBM NQS consistently overestimates the sub-dominant modes. This work furnishes a proof-of-concept demonstrating that hyperbolic non-autoregressive NQS ansatzë, thanks to the exponential volume of the hyperbolic geometry underlying their constructions, might be more natural at representing volume-law quantum systems than conventional Euclidean NQS. Furthermore, an interesting byproduct of this work is the polynomial scaling result of RBM-type NQS ansatzë in the QSK volume-law system as the Hilbert space increases exponentially.

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### CQ4OE: A benchmark for assessing LLM-assisted ontology generation from competency questions

Authors: Jiayi Li, Ziyuan Wang, Daniel Garijo, María Poveda-Villalón
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26029v1

Ontology generation from Competency Questions (CQs) is a central yet labor-intensive phase of Ontology Engineering. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising automation capabilities, current evaluations remain fragmented. Task formulations are heterogeneous, gold standards often lack fine-grained CQ provenance, metrics conflate lexical overlap with structural and logical adequacy, and reference ontologies are not always explicitly designed around the evaluation CQs. Here, we address these limitations with CQ4OE, a benchmark for the systematic and reproducible evaluation of LLM-based ontology generation from CQs. For each ontology in the benchmark, we build a CQ-driven gold OWL ontology with explicit provenance linking each CQ to the classes, properties, and axioms required to answer it. From this resource, we define two complementary evaluation tasks. CQ2Term supports term-level evaluation of CQ-specific class and property prediction over 99 CQs, and CQ2Onto supports ontology-level evaluation over 118 CQs, including hierarchy, property modeling, and axiom-level structure. We demonstrate CQ4OE with experiments using nine LLMs under zero-shot, iterative, and multi-agent generation strategies, showing that LLMs recover explicit vocabulary terms more reliably than creating ontologies, particularly in property modeling, hierarchy construction, and axiom generation.

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### REVE: Efficient Hallucination Correction for Large Audio-Language Models via Reused Encoder States

Authors: Hongjin Song, Jiasheng Kuang, Xinyu Yang, Qiuyu Fang, Ziyu Wu, Guowu Tan, Xiang Xie
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26028v1

Large audio-language models may mention acoustic events that are absent from the input. A separate audio event detector can verify these mentions, but doing so requires a second audio encoder and a separate forward pass. We propose Reused Encoder States for Verifying Events (REVE), a lightweight method that uses states already computed by the target model. One readout summarizes class scores across audio frames, while another uses pooled states from four consecutive frame intervals. Class-aware score fusion combines their outputs to verify generated event mentions without encoding the audio again. On AudioSet, REVE removes 92.9% of label-unsupported mentions under a faithful-mention recall constraint. With fewer added parameters and no second audio-encoding pass, REVE achieves a reduction comparable to those of CED-Tiny and CED-Base. Its complete verification latency is about 1/18 of the CED-Base path. Results on controlled DESED mixtures and different target-model architectures further confirm the effectiveness of encoder-state reuse.

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### MICRO: Multi-Fidelity Active Search for Severe Error Discovery

Authors: Orlando Leone, Niclas Pokel, Pehuén Moure, Yingqiang Gao, Roman Boehringer
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26025v1

Human feedback can vary in cost and informativeness. Strong feedback can reveal severe errors but is costly, so cheaper quality ratings can help decide which items to annotate. We propose MICRO (Multi-Fidelity Impact Clustered Rollout), an active search framework that allocates a shared budget to these feedback types to maximise confirmed severe error discoveries. MICRO jointly models ratings and annotation losses conditional on item features to steer acquisition. It clusters acquisitions by their predicted impact on severity probabilities to select diverse candidates, then uses rollout to estimate their discovery value. Experiments on WMT20 English-German show that ratings improve both loss reconstruction and severity prediction. MICRO achieves the highest mean discovery count across four budget and rating cost settings, with similar performance to adapted MF-ENS in one and significant gains over all six comparison policies, including two rollout controls, in the other three $(p<.001)$.

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### Reciprocal Collaboration: how lessons from convergence in GLAMs can enhance interdisciplinary AI research

Authors: Amber L. Cushing, Suzanne Little, Giulia Osti
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26023v1

The need for collaboration between diverse fields of research is increasingly recognised as important by research funding agencies. A significant driver of this need is the current revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. There is a growing interest in the potential impact of AI in different fields including the methodologies they use and the resulting advances in new knowledge, new access and enhanced productivity. However, there is also a corresponding increase in concern about the fundamentals of AI technologies and the way in which trans and/or interdisciplinary research is approached. The resulting collaboration too often ends up as a one-way street where the domain partner acts only as an information provider. For example, the contribution of the AHSS partner might be limited to providing insight about ethics and/or the technology partner may only provide a service to build applied AI-based solutions. In response to this problem, we propose a reciprocal approach to collaboration where both partners seek to understand, cooperate and identify jointly significant impacts. In this paper we explore this relationship between cultural heritage institutions (GLAMs), Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (AHSS) research and technology-led AI research, especially the impact of current technological advances in AI. Drawing from the history of convergence in GLAM studies, we propose five key practices to form a framework for greater understanding across this divide.

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### BOBA: Dynamic Bayesian Optimization through Bayesian Active Inference

Authors: Merlin Angel Kelly, Rishan Patel, Alexander Thomas, Ziyue Zhu, Zikun Quan, Tom Carlson, Youngjun Cho
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26021v1

Dynamic black-box optimization presents significant challenges for Bayesian Optimization (BO), as the objective function evolves over time, causing optimal locations to shift continuously. Existing dynamic BO (DBO) methods using standard acquisition functions such as Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) fail to explicitly account for temporal variations, leading to suboptimal sample allocation and poor tracking of moving optima. Here, we propose BOBA (Bayesian Optimization through Bayesian Active Inference), a novel acquisition function inspired by free energy principles from active inference that explicitly minimizes predictive uncertainty about future states in dynamic environments. BOBA extends traditional acquisition functions by incorporating a forward-looking uncertainty quantification that estimates uncertainty in function changes, enabling more informed exploration-exploitation trade-offs in non-stationary settings. We evaluate BOBA on synthetic dynamic benchmarks, comparing against state-of-the-art DBO methods. Our experiments demonstrate that BOBA significantly improves regret in query-restricted settings, while remaining competitive in time-limited settings. We further analyze variants of BOBA with different exploration strategies, showing how the exploration-exploitation balance can be tuned for different types of dynamic functions. This work contributes both a free energy-based acquisition function for DBO and insights into how active inference principles can enhance optimization in non-stationary environments, with implications for real-time applications requiring continuous adaptation.

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### The Dynamics of Quasiregular Neural Learning

Authors: Matthia Sabatelli
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26018v1

Many learning problems combine a dominant regularity with systematic exceptions. Motivated by U-shaped learning in language acquisition, we study this interaction in controlled quasiregular regression problems where regular and exceptional solutions are explicitly known. Neural networks can partially acquire exceptions, subsequently regress toward the dominant regularity, and finally recover. This overregularization becomes substantially stronger when exceptions are rare, despite their early acquisition, but does not emerge equally across all regularities considered. Our results isolate a simple form of competition between regularities and exceptions during neural learning.

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### Compiling Sufficient Governance Context from Declared Losses and Reachable States: Exact Observation-Contract Synthesis with Cardinality and Cost Objectives

Authors: Gaston Besanson
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26016v1

We call the object this paper derives and certifies a minimal sufficient governance context: given a finite reachable-state model, a deterministic declared verdict, and candidate observable attributes, we compute sufficient observation sets, distinguish attributes that are individually indispensable from contracts that are jointly sufficient, and select among sufficient contracts under a cardinality or declared-cost objective. An observation contract is a set of candidate attributes whose values determine the declared verdict on every reachable state; an authority contract is one selected under an objective and bound to a gate schema. We synthesize every inclusion-minimal sufficient contract where exhaustive enumeration is affordable, and a minimum-cardinality or minimum-cost contract by SAT/MaxSAT encoding otherwise, checking sufficiency directly. On a constructed code/cloud domain, the individually-indispensable core is not sufficient as an observation contract and two distinct reducts exist; a preregistered cost model separates them exactly. On a second, larger, constructed domain, the same pattern recurs, but that domain's cost model does not separate the alternatives: a fully explained cost tie, reported as found. We measure discernibility-family scaling where exhaustive enumeration is confirmed infeasible within a registered timeout, while SAT/MaxSAT synthesis solves in well under a second; MaxSAT showed no measured cardinality advantage over plain SAT. AuthorityBench compares four baselines across three domains; the declared-only baseline is not exactly sufficient on any. Every selected contract is checked for sufficiency, with a counterexample on failure and a check summary, not a portable certificate, on success -- the compiler-focused scope of a two-scope table; an independently specified end-to-end case study is registered follow-up work, not claimed here.

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### VideoX-Qwen: Data-Centric Instruction-Based Video Editing

Authors: JJiahang Li, Dingbao Shao, Xinyu Chen, Song Wu, Jiang Lin, Duo Li, Yuhang Liu, Jiaxin Hu, Shengrong Gu, Ying Tai, Zili Yi
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.AI, cs.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26015v1

Progress in general-purpose video editing depends on constructing large-scale paired supervision and effectively adapting video-generation backbones to instruction-driven editing. Unlike video generation, video editing must execute a requested transformation while preserving unrelated subjects, scene structure, motion, and temporal continuity. We present VideoX-Qwen, an integrated data-construction and model-training framework for general instruction-based video editing. Our scalable production pipeline organizes specialized generation and understanding models into complementary routes for addition, removal, replacement, and attribute editing, followed by quality screening and instruction enrichment. It produces more than 1.2 million directional video-editing records, including over 400,000 records in each major task group, with an automatic acceptance rate of 89%. The resulting corpus provides broad and structured coverage of common editing operations through a unified source-instruction-target interface. We further develop a unified Qwen-Wan editor that combines multimodal semantic conditioning with dense source-video latent guidance. A progressive image-video training strategy aligns the multimodal instruction interface, adapts the video generator to source-conditioned editing, and refines output quality with selected high-resolution data. In a 100-example comparison with UniVideo and Kling O1, VideoX-Qwen achieves the best mean result on nine of eleven reported metrics, including instruction following, editing quality, content preservation, structural and perceptual similarity, and video-distribution quality. Together, the large-scale data-production system and unified training framework provide a practical foundation for more capable instruction-driven video editing.

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### Skytopia: Monocular Drone Navigation with Action-Conditioned Latent World Models

Authors: Yuhang Zhang, Rangya Zhang, Yujing Shang, Zhuoyuan Yu, Weiying Wang, Steven Yang, Qingsong Yan, Chao Yan, Mir Feroskhan
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26007v1

Monocular drone navigation requires reaching a goal in an unseen environment from a single forward-facing camera, which offers few cues for depth and scale. World models address this by modelling how observations evolve under actions, but they are built to be executed: the prediction is produced at deployment and fed back into action generation at every control step. We argue that what a policy needs from a world model is not the prediction but the representation required to produce it: in flight the executed action explains almost all of the change between observations, so prediction reduces to reprojecting a static scene under a known displacement. We therefore introduce skytopia, a policy built on an action-conditioned latent world model, and the 3D Gaussian Splatting platform on which it is trained. A forward objective predicts the representation of the next observation from the intended motion, and an inverse objective recovers that motion from the predicted transition. Because the prediction never reaches action generation, the predictor is discarded and one policy serves point-goal, image-goal, and goal-free navigation. Simulation experiments show that skytopia outperforms every baseline under all three specifications, attaining 57.8%, 66.0%, and 49.0% success rate, while discarding the predictor removes 59.4% of the inference cost. The same policy is subsequently deployed on a physical drone without fine-tuning and reaches goals in indoor, open outdoor, and woodland environments.

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### SE-MSB: End-to-End Unpaired Speech Enhancement using Mamba Schrödinger Bridges

Authors: Andreas Bagge, Andreas Nymand, Michael Riis Andersen, Bjørn Sand Jensen
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26000v1

Speech enhancement (SE) models typically rely on supervised learning with paired data examples where clean speech is synthetically degraded. This paradigm limits performance in real-world scenarios where the target environment's specific acoustic characteristics are unknown. We propose a fully unpaired SE framework that uses principled Diffusion Schrödinger Bridges (DSB) to learn a stochastic transport process between a clean and a degraded speech distribution. Algorithms for learning transport maps are computationally heavy since they require simulating differential equations during training, usually at each training step. Therefore, we propose using a high-efficiency Mamba Diffusion Model designed for end-to-end waveform processing. We compare against state-of-the-art methods for speech enhancement, both paired and unpaired, as well as a classical signal processing algorithm. Experimental results show that we are on par or better than the baselines while being orders of magnitude faster during inference. Furthermore, we show that the flexibility of the DSB formulation allows our model to generalize across SE tasks, offering a robust and efficient solution for real-world speech restoration.

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### Theory for groupoid equivariant neural networks: an approach for steerable CNNs on bounded domains

Authors: Alberto Ibort, Maria Jimenez-Vazquez, Juan M. Perez-Pardo
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, math.DG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25987v1

Equivariant convolutional neural networks are usually built from a group acting globally on the space of signals. This hypothesis is inappropriate for many bounded or stratified domains: an ambient rigid motion may be admissible only on part of the domain, and the boundary introduces geometric types that are invisible to a transitive group action. We develop a theory of groupoid-equivariant neural networks in which the symmetry datum consists of a groupoid, a selected pseudogroup of local bisections, a measure, and input and output representation bundles. For integral channels on the object space, we prove a bisection-equivariant kernel theorem: equivariance is equivalent to a transport constraint on the two-point kernel, and its solutions are classified by one joint-stabilizer intertwiner on each orbit of pairs. As a case study we apply the theory to bounded planar domains. The resulting architecture is implemented through offline nullspace bases and sparse gather--transform--scatter operations. A Poisson--Dirichlet kernel study is used separately to assess boundary-aware inductive bias; the exact inverse is shown to preserve the global symmetries of the rectangle but not general proper local bisections. The numerical results show that the proposed architectures provide significant advantages when symmetries cannot be globally implemented by group actions and provide an accuracy improvement of at least one order of magnitude with respect to the models tested.

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### Interweaving Marginals into Multivariate Sample Paths: Training-Free Dependence Construction for Probabilistic Time Series Foundation Models

Authors: Jinmyeong Choi, Jinkwan Jang, Seul Lee, Taesup Kim
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25980v1

Probabilistic time series foundation models (TSFMs) provide coordinate-wise predictive distributions, but these marginals do not determine a joint distribution over multivariate future trajectories. We study training-free coupling of frozen TSFM marginals into multivariate forecast sample paths. Our primary evaluation fixes the empirical marginal sample multiset at every channel--horizon coordinate across methods, isolating the effect of coupling alone. Historical temporal and channel relations substantially improve their corresponding dependence diagnostics. The same pattern persists when the fixed-marginal constraint is removed and paths are sampled directly, and remains present under native multivariate backbone inference. These results support treating dependence reconstruction as a distinct post-processing problem for probabilistic TSFMs.

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### Faithful Faithfulness Evaluations: Challenges & Pitfalls Learned from a Breast MRI Case Study

Authors: Peachapong Poolpol, Henrik H. J. Detjen, Eike Petersen
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC, cs.LG, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25978v1

Saliency maps are widely used to explain deep learning predictions in medical imaging, yet visually plausible explanations do not necessarily reflect a model's true decision process and may therefore mislead clinicians. We investigate this problem using a Vision Transformer-based breast MRI classifier trained on the ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge dataset and evaluate multiple saliency methods, including Last-layer Attention, Attention Rollout, Grad-SAM, Gradient Attention Rollout, GMAR, Grad-CAM, and HiResCAM. Our study highlights two often-overlooked challenges in perturbation-based faithfulness evaluation. First, method rankings depend strongly on the perturbation strategy, varying across intensity-based perturbations and transformer-based attention masking. Second, benchmarking saliency methods requires distinguishing between class-specific and class-agnostic explanations. To enable fair comparisons, we introduce non-class-specific variants of gradient-based methods and evaluate both settings separately. Across protocols, Grad-CAM and Gradient Attention Rollout consistently emerged as the strongest class-specific methods, although their relative ranking depended on the evaluation design. These findings expose important limitations of current saliency-based explainability approaches and highlight the need for more robust and standardized evaluation frameworks for trustworthy clinical AI systems.

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### NAWE: Digital Watermarking with Neural-Assisted Watermark Extraction

Authors: Roman Chaban, Vitaliy Kinakh, Lilian Rouzaire, Slava Voloshynovskiy
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25972v1

NAWE (Neural-Assisted Watermark Extraction) combines an explicit signal-processing watermarking construction with a pretrained neural host predictor. A periodic, perceptually masked watermark carrier provides synchronization, Polar coding supplies redundancy, and denoising followed by subtraction extracts the embedded watermark. The denoiser remains frozen, without watermark-specific training. A one-factor-at-a-time study compares Wiener, BM3D, DRUNet, and GS-DRUNet host estimators. Comparisons with TrustMark, SSL Watermarking, PixelSeal, and WAM show NAWE's lowest geometric and photometric class BER and strong message recovery, while filtering and noise remain limitations consistent with the non-adaptive selection of the watermark extractor. The comparison retains the systems' different payloads and coding.

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### GRIP: Gaussian Rendering as a Cross-Modal Bridge for Image-to-Point Cloud Registration

Authors: Karim Slimani, Catherine Achard, Eric Marchand, Brahim Tamadazte
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25966v1

This paper introduces GRIP, a pose-conditioned refinement framework for pixel-to-point matching and 2D to 3D registration. Given an initial coarse pose estimate, GRIP addresses the structural mismatch between grid based image descriptors and unordered point cloud descriptors by softly rendering learned 3D point features onto the image grid through Gaussian feature splatting. The rendered point derived feature map is then fused with image features by a pixel aligned transformer, enabling visual semantic and geometric cues to interact in a shared 2D representation. The refined features are decoded and propagated to finer resolutions for dense correspondence estimation and final pose refinement. Experiments on RGB D Scenes V2 and 7 Scenes demonstrate state of the art inlier ratio and competitive registration recall, with stronger performance under stricter evaluation thresholds.

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### GeoPair: Geometry-Preserving Cross-Layer Factorization for Training-Free Transformer Compression

Authors: Baher Mohammad, Ammar Ali, Stamatios Lefkimmiatis
Published: 2026-09-22
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25963v1

Transformer architectures exhibit cross-layer redundancies, yet post-training compression pipelines typically optimize layers in isolation or rely on heuristic grouping strategies that disregard layer-specific activation geometries. We introduce a principled, training-free framework that sequentially optimizes cross-layer weight pairings and shared-dictionary factorizations. Rather than forcing weights of adjacent layers to share a basis or heuristically merging activation statistics, our approach identifies structurally compatible projections and learns a shared representation that better preserves each layer's distinct calibration geometry. Coupled with structured sparsity, this yields highly efficient weight decompositions without sacrificing functional fidelity. Across diverse architectures, scales, and modalities, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, consistently outperforming independent structured weight decompositions and alternative pairwise weight factorizations, which operate under heuristic grouping strategies. By replacing heuristic engineering strategies with a convergent, optimization-driven pipeline, we establish a theoretically grounded foundation for scalable, transformer compression across different modalities.

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