# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 109 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #5401–5450 of 13298 published in 2026-09, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 13298-paper 2026-09 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/109 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/108.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/110.md) ### LiFR v2: Completion-Augmented Event Propagation for High-Rate Dense Prediction Authors: Tao Wan, Xiaoshan Wu, Yifei Yu, Bo Wang, Xiaoyang Lyu, Muxin Liu, Aoxuan Pan, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25803v2 High-rate dense perception in dynamic environments is limited by the low update rate of RGB cameras, as rapid scene changes can occur between frames. Event cameras offer temporally dense but spatially sparse measurements, complementary to spatially dense RGB observations. Direct fusion cannot fully exploit this complementarity, while event-guided propagation fails on newly appearing or disoccluded regions without valid RGB support. We present LiFR v2, a unified propagation-completion-memory framework for causal anytime and streaming dense prediction from an RGB keyframe and events. LiFR v2 introduces an Event-Guided Completion Module (EGCM) to recover task-relevant representations where propagation is unsupported, and a History Retrieval Module (HRM) to reuse completed representations across successive queries. The framework supports semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and multi-task dense prediction, and we further introduce SHF-Emerge to evaluate rapid object emergence and disocclusion. LiFR v2 achieves 74.37% mIoU on DSEC and 56.13% on SHF-Emerge, improving LiFR-Seg by 1.85 percentage points on the latter, while reducing SHF-Emerge depth RMSE from 1.564 m to 1.118 m over the propagation baseline. It also exceeds 100 FPS for both segmentation and depth, demonstrating accurate and efficient high-rate perception beyond RGB frame rates. --- ### Latest Exact Match Attention Authors: Moritz Brösamle Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25802v1 We introduce latest exact match attention (LEMA), an attention variant for transformers where queries and keys are binarized and each query attends only to the latest exactly matching key. We prove that LEMA transformers with chain of thought can simulate word-RAMs, as was recently shown for the less restrictive rightmost hard attention. In contrast to prior hard attention variants, the restriction to exact matches enables an efficient converse direction: word-RAMs can simulate LEMA transformers at a cost per token independent of the context length. Together, these results yield a close correspondence between the two computational models in terms of both compute and memory. Beyond the theory, we propose a training method for LEMA transformers that handles their non-differentiable operations with a straight-through estimator for the binarization and a soft attention surrogate annealed towards LEMA. On a synthetic associative recall task, LEMA models trained this way use their growing state to store and recall a large number of associations, outperforming gated DeltaNet (GDN) with its fixed state size. As a first scaling test, we train LEMA language models with up to 834 million parameters. They match softmax transformers of around half their size in loss and, on repeated rare phrases and a needle-retrieval task, remain behind softmax transformers but recall across longer distances than GDN models of comparable size. Finally, we implement dictionary-based inference for LEMA transformers and show constant generation speed comparable to GDN despite their growing state, with the dictionaries residing in main memory rather than VRAM. Code is available at https://github.com/moritzbroe/latest_exact_match_attention. --- ### Reply to comments arXiv:2512.07881 and arXiv:2601.06104 on quantum structure in human and AI-generated language Authors: Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi, Roberto Leporini Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25797v1 We reply to the comments by M. Sienicki and K. Sienicki (arXiv:2512.07881) and by K. Sienicki (arXiv:2601.06104) on our work on quantum-mechanical statistics in human language (arXiv:2407.14924) and on quantum structure in AI-generated language (arXiv:2511.21731). We thank the authors for their careful reading and address what we consider to be the main points of criticism: the exploratory nature of the protocol used in the experiments with large language models; the role of marginal-law violations, and of the Contextuality-by-Default criterion, in the identification of entanglement; the limited diagnostic value of a Bose-Einstein fit taken in isolation; the meaning of assigning the lowest energy levels to the most frequent words; and the relation between the vector spaces used by LLMs and quantum state spaces. We also correct a typographical error in Table 3 of arXiv:2511.21731, which does not affect the reported CHSH value. --- ### When Point Clouds Outperform Pixels: Rethinking Zero-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection Authors: Chenglin Ye, Lupeng Liu, Dongbo Yu, Jun Xiao, Yunbiao Wang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25793v1 Zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection commonly assumes that RGB and point cloud modalities are equally reliable and can contribute uniformly to anomaly localization. We challenge this assumption. Using a set of recently proposed stringent metrics that penalize false anomaly responses in normal regions, we find that point clouds are substantially more reliable than RGB under zero-shot category shift. Motivated by this observation, we propose WOOPS (\textbf{W}hen P\textbf{o}int Cl\textbf{o}uds Out\textbf{p}erform Pixel\textbf{s}), a reliability-aware zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection framework. To strengthen the more reliable geometric modality, we design a Multi-view Information Decoupling module to suppress heterogeneous information from multi-view point cloud projections and enhance point cloud feature quality. To avoid unconditional fusion, we further introduce a Modality Reliability Calibration module to adaptively calibrate modality contributions according to their reliability. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves the best or competitive performance under the new metrics in both unimodal and multimodal settings. Further analysis demonstrates that point cloud information also improves RGB-only inference, while ablations verify the effectiveness of both modules. Code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### Evaluating Accuracy and Probabilistic Reliability of Zero-Shot Time Series Foundation Models Authors: Panagiotis Michael, Moysis Symeonides, Demetris Trihinas Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25788v1 Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) promise a paradigm shift toward zero-shot forecasting by eliminating task-specific training. However, existing works often overlook trade-offs between predictive accuracy and probabilistic calibration. This paper presents a benchmark study of six TSFMs evaluated on energy, traffic, and financial datasets. We contrast their performance against statistical baselines and a supervised DL model. The study reveals that while TSFMs outperform statistical methods and supervised models, they are subject to a fundamental trade-off between point accuracy and probabilistic reliability. Specifically, xLSTM architectures provide robust probabilistic calibration across horizons. In contrast, patch-based transformers offer competitive accuracy but face calibration issues at long horizons, while transformer-based models exhibit context saturation points for optimal zero-shot reasoning. These findings offer evidence-based guidance for balancing generalization and uncertainty quantification in real-world deployments. --- ### A Lightweight Plastic-Memory Framework for Graph Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning Authors: Zihan Mei, Zhili Qin, Tongze Zhang, Hongyuan Liu, Junming Shao, Qinli Yang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25781v1 Graph Incremental Learning has garnered increasing attention as dynamic graph data continues to emerge across diverse fields. Conventional approaches primarily address catastrophic forgetting by preserving node-related knowledge through replay or distillation techniques; however, they often incur high computational costs and inefficiency. This issue is further exacerbated in real-world scenarios where labeled data for new classes is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight plastic-memory framework specifically designed for few-shot incremental learning on graphs. The core idea of our framework is the construction of a plastic-memory module that evolves over time, continuously updating and expanding its memory to accommodate new classes while retaining previously learned knowledge. In contrast to existing techniques, our memory module is both lightweight and effective, featuring an innovative evolving micro-clustering structure that dynamically updates representations of class prototypes, sub-prototypes, and their interaction weights. Building on this memory module, we introduce a memory-driven meta-learning framework that enhances adaptability to new tasks in its inner loop while maintaining stability for earlier tasks in the outer loop. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the framework's superior performance in balancing stability for old knowledge and adaptability to new knowledge. --- ### Statistical Gains from Looped Estimation under Parameter Budgets Authors: Xinyu Tian, Xiaotong Shen Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25778v2 Memory constraints in artificial intelligence motivate accurate function approximation with fewer parameters. We study looping, which repeatedly composes one update function with shared parameters; each output becomes the next input. A looped Transformer, for example, reuses one block, whereas its conventional untied counterpart uses separately parameterized blocks. We compare their parameter requirements for a given worst-case approximation accuracy, or equivalently, their approximation accuracy under a common budget limiting distinct trainable coefficients. We then ask whether this representational parsimony improves statistical accuracy. For general likelihood models, we establish an upper squared Hellinger risk bound for looped sieve maximum likelihood and a minimax lower bound for the jointly tuned untied family. Further loop iterations improve the approximation bound without adding parameters, while increasing computation and the fitted-class complexity bound. For targets of known Hölder smoothness, looped residual feedforward networks and post-layer-normalized Transformers attain the minimax polynomial rate up to logarithmic factors with a fixed number of bounded real parameters. At sufficiently large fixed budgets, looped worst-case risk vanishes while optimal worst-case untied risk remains bounded away from zero. The loop-to-untied risk ratio also tends to zero under specified growing-budget conditions. Regression, binary response, and energy-based generative models illustrate the theory. --- ### Disentangling Heterogeneous Traffic Dynamics for Multi-Step Traffic Forecasting via Adaptive Spectral Decomposition Authors: Zijun Huang, Chenrui Fu, Wenhao Wang, Xiaochuan Gou, Chih-Chieh Hung, Guanyao Li Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25777v1 Accurate multi-step traffic forecasting remains challenging because observed traffic signals contain heterogeneous temporal dynamics with different characteristics and levels of predictability. Existing approaches typically model these dynamics within a unified representation or rely on predefined decomposition rules, which may limit their ability to flexibly separate persistent patterns from rapidly varying fluctuations. To address this issue, we propose the Adaptive Decomposition Network (ADNet), a component-specific forecasting framework that adaptively disentangles traffic dynamics into dominant and residual components. ADNet introduces a learnable complementary spectral decomposition mechanism that determines the contribution of each frequency bin to the two components. Unlike hard frequency partitioning, every frequency bin can contribute to both components with different learned proportions, allowing the decomposition to be optimized jointly with the forecasting objective. The reconstructed components are then modeled by two dedicated spatiotemporal forecasting branches, and their predictions are integrated to generate the final multi-step forecast. Experiments on the Alameda and Orange regions of the TraffiDent dataset show that ADNet achieves the best performance in 20 of the 24 reported region-horizon-metric comparisons, with particularly clear gains at longer forecasting horizons. Capacity-controlled ablation experiments further show that the learnable decomposition substantially outperforms a fixed decomposition and provides additional improvements beyond the dual-branch architecture alone. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive decomposition and component-specific modeling for multi-step traffic forecasting. --- ### Graded Representation Theory of Equivariant Neural Networks Authors: Mani Shayestehfar Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: math.RT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25776v1 Nonlinear activations can create equivariant interactions between irreducible representations that linear maps cannot. We use the Gaussian degree decomposition to extend ordinary polynomial degree to such nonlinear maps, and prove that for a fixed coordinatewise equivariant layer each degree factors into a polynomial determined by the linear maps and a scalar determined by the activation. This separates three distinct obstructions, coming from symmetry, coordinates, and activation. --- ### TRACE: Trajectory Representation and Consistency Estimation for AI-Generated Video Detection Authors: Huangsen Cao, Hongkang chu, Siyao Yu, Xin Ding, Jianfeng Dong, Yongwei Wang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25775v1 Recent advances in generative video models have enabled the synthesis of visually realistic content, posing significant challenges to synthetic video detection. Existing detectors often rely on appearance artifacts, semantic inconsistencies, and temporal patterns that may be generator-specific, limitating generalization to unseen synthesis models. We investigate whether responses to a pretrained generative model provide more transferable forensic cues. Our key observation is that real and AI-generated videos exhibit distinct \emph{velocity responses} under a pretrained Flow Matching video model. This distinction persists when different pretrained video-generation backbones are used as probes, suggesting that velocity responses offer transferable forensic signals beyond visual artificts. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{TRACE} (\emph{\underline{T}rajectory \underline{R}epresentation \underline{a}nd \underline{C}onsistency \underline{E}stimation}), a generation-process-aware framework for AI-generated video detection. TRACE leverages a pretrained video DiT as a velocity-field probe to extract representations at multiple flow time points, and models cross-frame consistency through velocity differences between adjacent frames. We further introduce a \emph{Real-Centered Trajectory Optimization} objective that encourages generator-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments on AIGVDBench demonstrate that TRACE generalizes effectively across diverse generators, substantially outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods on unseen open- and closed-source video generation models. --- ### Video-HopChain: Multi-Hop Questions and Confidence-Gated Exploration for Video Reasoning Models Authors: Trung Nguyen Quang, Yuhao Dong, Shuo Sun, Shuai Liu, Shulin Tian, Kim-Hui Yap, Ziwei Liu Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25773v1 HopChain has shown on still images that multi-hop data synthesis improves vision-language reasoning, because long chain-of-thought reasoning exposes errors that compound across steps, while most data used for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) rarely demands a chain of visual evidence, so these weaknesses are likely to stay unexposed. We observe the same problem in video, where this framework has not yet been explored. We therefore build Video-HopChain, a dataset of 22,550 multi-hop video questions over 13,378 videos, together with a held-out benchmark of 1,000 questions. Each question chains three to six yes/no questions about moments in one video, and each yields one of two integers depending on its answer. The final answer is the sum of these integers, so an exact match on that sum gives the verifiable reward that RLVR needs. We first train Qwen3-VL-8B with GRPO on a standard video dataset, and a second stage on Video-HopChain then raises the mean over eight video understanding and reasoning benchmarks from 55.4 to 57.9 and improves every one of them. Training on such a dataset, however, exposes a known limitation of GRPO: its learning signal comes from the reward variance within a group, so hard questions whose rollouts are all incorrect and easy questions whose rollouts are all correct both leave the group with no gradient. To recover these groups at the same compute budget, we introduce Confidence-Gated Exploration (CGE). With 8 rollouts per question, CGE samples the first 4 as usual. If these 4 are either all correct or all incorrect, it samples the last 4 with the policy's most confident token masked inside the reasoning span, and removes the masked positions from the loss while all 8 rollouts enter the advantage. With CGE, the mean rises further to 59.3. We release the dataset, the checkpoint, and the data generation and training code. --- ### Reading Right, Answering Wrong: How Visual Configuration Changes Affect Evidence Use in VLMs Authors: Dingyang Lin, Yingfeng Luo, Chenglong Wang, Chenwei Zhu, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25770v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on tasks such as visual question answering, yet small image resizes can turn correct answers into errors. We investigate whether changes in visual configuration, such as image tiling and token arrangement, contribute to this instability. Across seven checkpoints and four benchmarks, equally small resizes cause more correctness flips when they switch configurations. Surprisingly, in over half of these cases, models answer the question incorrectly but can still read the correct answer when told what to read. Furthermore, attention interventions in LLaVA-NeXT suggest that configuration changes can weaken the use of readable information during answering. We therefore guide models using field cues and their own transcriptions. With annotation assistance, these forms of guidance together correct 97.2% of errors with readable information. These findings show that configuration changes can affect how models use information they can still read. --- ### Towards Omni-dimensional GUI Agent Navigation with Masked Trajectory Prediction Authors: Yan Zhang, Pei Fu, Daiqing Wu, Huawen Shen, Ruoceng Zhang, Shaojie Zhang, Jiahui Yang, Yu Zhou, Can Ma, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25769v1 Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents autonomously interact with software to fulfill user requests, where GUI navigation stands out as the most critical and challenging capability. Mastering this capability demands a complex synergy of step-wise decision-making, state-action alignment, and long-horizon planning. While directly mixing these corresponding navigation tasks seems intuitive to simultaneously acquire these skills, such a direct combination is severely bottlenecked by inconsistent optimization objectives and profound data heterogeneity. To overcome these barriers, we propose the MaP (stands for ``\textbf{M}asked Tr\textbf{a}jectory \textbf{P}rediction''), a unified framework that seamlessly harmonizes divergent GUI navigation tasks. By modeling multi-turn GUI interactions as a trajectory and defining training objectives through component masking and prediction, MaP shifts the optimization from task-specific marginal distributions to a consistent objective. Furthermore, to handle the data heterogeneity across multiple navigation tasks, we design a role-aware adapter learning module that dynamically routes each token to a specialized representation space. Extensive experiments on five representative GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate that MaP effectively mitigates gradient conflicts and significantly outperforms the direct mixture training, establishing a robust paradigm for multi-task GUI navigation. --- ### Neurosymbolic Action Model Learning under Partial Observability Authors: Adem Kikaj, Lennert De Smet, Giuseppe Marra, Luc De Raedt Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25766v1 AI planning studies how an agent can reach a goal by executing a sequence of actions. To plan correctly, the agent needs an action model describing when each action can be executed and how it changes the world. Constructing such models by hand requires domain expertise, and can be costly and error-prone. Action models can instead be learned from available data using existing neurosymbolic approaches, but they currently assume access to complete traces of fully observable images . These approaches fail to learn action models under partial observability where some of the images might not be present or are not fully informative of the current state of the world. Hence, this paper proposes NeSyAM, a novel neurosymbolic modeling paradigm for action model learning under partial observability. In addition, the paper presents a unified variational framework for theoretically analysing the limitations of existing methods compared to our proposed approach. NeSyAM is then tested extensively on six visual planning domains and three observation regimes to show it consistently recovers relevant parts of the true action model under partial observability. --- ### The Limits of Simulated Societies: How Post-Training and Survey Fine-Tuning Erase Cross-Cultural Variance Authors: Rojin Ziaei Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25760v1 Using large language models (LLMs) to simulate diverse human populations has the potential to transform many aspects of computational social science, yet many evaluations score the average response rather than the spread of opinion within real groups. Here, we develop a diagnostic framework that measures point accuracy alongside dispersion retention, the ratio of predicted to human standard deviation ($\dr$), on 10{,}000 respondent--question pairs from the World Values Survey (WVS) spanning twelve countries and six continents. We evaluate eleven zero-shot language models and five variants fine-tuned on WVS data with SFT, DPO, and GRPO. We identify a failure mode we term \textit{consensus collapse}, where alignment training compresses outputs toward one stereotype per group. Along the post-training trajectory from the Llama~3.1 70B base to the Tulu~3 checkpoints, the first stage, supervised instruction tuning, removes half of the spread with minimal accuracy gain ($\dr$ 1.22 to 0.59; accuracy $+0.9$ points), the later stages do not restore it, and a gap opens between WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries that survey fine-tuning then deepens while pursuing higher point accuracy. The most accurate model (Tulu~3 70B-DPO fine-tuned on WVS, 57.9\%) keeps half the human spread overall ($\dr = 0.50$) and 11\% of it for Nigeria, against 0.70--0.87 for WEIRD countries. Raising the sampling temperature to 1.0 leaves the Wasserstein-1 distance ($\wone$) to human distributions unchanged for both fine-tuned DPO models, and GRPO on Qwen~3.5 9B does not restore the spread under either an accuracy reward or a distribution-shaped reward. Mixing the aligned model with an unaligned prior raises $\dr$ from 0.51 to 0.62 on a held-out split but leaves Nigeria at 0.36. Point accuracy alone therefore misjudges these simulators, and current post-training trades diversity for consensus. --- ### Minimal Recurrent Behavioral Memory for Imitation under Partial Observability Authors: Xianyao Li, Fang Xu, Rui Min, Ruitong Tian, Jing Du Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25757v1 What is the least recurrent memory needed to reproduce a specified expert under partial observability? The instantaneous requirement is the conditional entropy of the expert's behavioral quotient, but recurrence must also preserve distinctions that future observations will not restore before use. We characterize this minimal recurrent behavioral memory by a compatibility relation: under transitivity its classes attain the exact minimum, while the general case is an entropy minimization over closed compatible state assignments, with exact certificates on finite instances. A sole-carrier measurement protocol separates behavioral sufficiency, excess code rate, and information carried by observations or other memory paths; experimental bit requirements refer to the induced symbolic behavioral model under the stated occupancy. Across manipulation tasks, learned code rates remain near zero- and two-bit requirements as hidden modes grow to $512$, and anticipatory memory follows a $2\to1\to0$ requirement despite zero instantaneous demand during waiting. Learning this representation remains difficult: event-agnostic future-behavior supervision yields $36/40$ sufficient seeds with one frozen configuration and improves the longest-horizon pixel setting from $0/8$ to $6/8$ sufficient held-out seeds (closed-loop success from $0.08$ to $0.57$). On unmodified community benchmarks, the protocol certifies delay-independent requirements, which sufficient codes match at mid-delay. The supervision aids commitment but can induce predictive surplus; annealing it lets imitation and rate training reduce that surplus, separating the information-theoretic target from the ability to learn it. --- ### Syndrome, Synergy, and Safety: Structured Reasoning and Knowledge-Driven Alignment for TCM Prescription Generation Authors: Zheng Chen, ZhiCheng Du, Haoxuan Li, Peiwu Qin Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25755v1 Applying large language models to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) prescription generation reveals three clinically critical gaps: models produce end-to-end mappings without auditable reasoning following the li-fa-fang-yao paradigm (SR Gap), treat each encounter in isolation without follow-up adjustment via sui zheng jia jian (LA Gap), and fail to enforce absolute contraindication rules such as Shi Ba Fan (SC Gap). We propose a progressive four-stage framework (SFT $\to$ PG-CoT $\to$ Dynamic $\to$ K-RL) that addresses each gap: PG-CoT constrains CoT distillation under the li-fa-fang-yao paradigm to produce auditable diagnostic chains, Dynamic SFT models patient trajectories with explicit transition reasoning, and K-RL encodes deterministic pharmacological rules as rule-based DPO preference signals. Across 12 fine-tuned models and 6 zero-shot baselines, our framework substantially improves prescription quality over zero-shot baselines---with a 7B model (Mistral-7B) surpassing zero-shot GPT-5 on all three TCM evaluation metrics. --- ### Dual Covariance Gaussian Splatting SLAM: Decoupling Rendering and Registration for Robust Real-Time Tracking Authors: Edward Beng Wai Tan, Siew-Kei Lam Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25746v1 ICP-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM tracks in real time by registering incoming frames against map Gaussians, using each primitive's covariance for both rendering and registration. These two uses place conflicting demands on one covariance. The mapper shapes it to minimize photometric error, often flattening it against surfaces, while robust registration typically benefits from measurement uncertainty. We propose a dual-covariance parameterization. Each Gaussian keeps a single mean but holds two covariances: a rendering covariance optimized by the mapper, and a tracking covariance derived from an RGB-D sensor noise model. We further use the tracking covariances as Gaussian anchors for image corners, providing constraints in directions where depth geometry is weak. We evaluate on TUM RGB-D, ScanNet, Replica, and two outdoor sequences recorded with a RealSense D435i on wheeled and handheld platforms. We achieve robust tracking performance across multiple scenes and reduced odometry drift, while tracking at $\sim$ 60 FPS. --- ### Modular Norm RandOpt: Population-Efficient Ensembling through Architecture-Aware Perturbations Authors: Kirato Yoshihara, Hiroaki Hamade Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25745v2 RandOpt samples weight-perturbed language models and ensembles top-ranked candidates through plurality voting, but its global perturbation scale ignores heterogeneous module geometry. We propose Modular Norm RandOpt, an architecture-aware sampling method using module-wise natural norms and calibrated scales while preserving selection and voting. It outperforms RandOpt using $3\times$ fewer candidates on Countdown and at least $12\times$ fewer on GSM8K, with corresponding wall-clock savings. Evaluations across seven tasks and three Qwen scales ($0.5$B--$3$B) show higher mean accuracy than RandOpt on Countdown, GSM8K, and MATH-500 at every scale. The gains extend to Llama 3.2 $3$B and Gemma 3 $4$B on Countdown and GSM8K. On Qwen2.5-1.5B, our ensembles also achieve higher mean accuracy than iterative baselines on both tasks at comparable main-run evaluation budgets. On GSM8K, a tail-density diagnostic implies only a $1.2$--$1.8\times$ candidate reduction, while most ensemble improvement is associated with more favorable correct-expert support. These results highlight perturbation geometry as a key design choice for population-efficient, gradient-free search around pretrained models. --- ### SAMI3D-DW: Interactive Segmentation of Any 3D Medical Images Authors: Ping Gong, Shiyuan Su, Fandong Zhang, Xinchen Han, Haowei Sun, Yiming Li, Yizhou Yu Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25743v2 Interactive segmentation of 3D medical images supports quantitative analysis of anatomical structures and disease while allowing users to specify and refine their targets. Despite substantial progress by nnInteractive and VISTA3D, reliable segmentation across diverse clinical targets remains challenging, particularly for complex anatomical structures and the heterogeneous, long-tailed spectrum of pathology. We present SAMI3D-DW V1 (hereafter SAMI3D-DW), an interactive 3D segmentation model trained on Deepwise's large-scale proprietary medical image datasets. We evaluate the model under simulated user interactions on a CT/MR benchmark comprising 4,326 cases from 219 source datasets, spanning 107 anatomical and pathological categories, organized by a medical taxonomy and evaluated with a category-balanced DSC score. SAMI3D-DW achieves the highest category-macro Dice among evaluated methods in both interaction modes. With one point, it scores 0.5756 versus 0.5316 for nnInteractive, the strongest baseline, rising to 0.7771 versus 0.7495 with five points. With bounding-box initialization, the scores are 0.7129 versus 0.6530. After five corrective clicks, SAMI3D-DW reaches 0.8004 versus 0.7868. For radiologists and clinicians, SAMI3D-DW enables segmentation of complex anatomical structures, including intracranial vessel trees on CT and MR angiography, with a few clicks. In a preliminary in-house comparison involving neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), SAMI3D-DW-assisted tumor annotation took minutes per case and approximately one-fifteenth of the time required for manual annotation, highlighting its potential to support volumetric treatment-response assessment. --- ### Fysiverse-3D-Vision Technical Report: Generating Executable 3D Worlds from Images through Unified Spatial Reasoning Authors: Dingkang Yang, Yizhou Liu, Wendong Cheng, Zizhi Chen, Shunli Wang, Yang Liu, Hongsheng Li, Lihua Zhang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25741v1 Generative models have advanced image-conditioned 3D content creation, yet generating controllable and executable 3D scenes from a single image remains challenging. Existing 3D generative approaches can synthesize visually plausible objects and scenes, but their spatial layout estimation is coupled with specific asset generators. They struggle to jointly model object semantics, metric geometry, and scene-level spatial relationships, which are essential for interactive editing, physical simulation, and embodied applications. We propose Fysiverse-3D-Vision, a unified vision-language-geometry framework for generative 3D scene reconstruction and executable asset construction from a single image. We establish a shared representation where spatial reasoning and geometric reconstruction mutually enhance each other, allowing object layouts to be inferred beyond the constraints of individual asset generators. Our model integrates textual supervision, semantic visual cues, and geometric representations within a unified Transformer to capture scene context, metric geometry, and object-level interactions. An object-conditioned layout module performs cross-attention between target object representations and global geometric features to predict object translation, rotation, and scale. Training progressively learns geometry-language alignment, introduces layout reasoning while preserving reconstruction capability, and refines physical consistency through collision-aware optimization. By separating spatial layout reasoning from asset synthesis, Fysiverse-3D-Vision provides an adaptable interface for interactive scene editing, object-level manipulations, and executable 3D content generation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior geometric consistency, layout estimation, rendering quality, and physical property understanding compared with existing approaches. --- ### OmniFysics-Nano-V2 Technical Report: Understanding the Physical World Across Modalities Authors: Yizhou Liu, Jinghang Han, Kaixiang Qiu, Qi He, Minghao Han, Yue Jiang, Xujia Chen, Wei Zou, Shunli Wang, Lihua Zhang, Dingkang Yang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25738v1 Omni-modal models have expanded multimodal interaction across vision, audio, speech, and language. However, their training is predominantly organized around semantic descriptions and general-purpose objectives, leaving physical attributes, interaction states, and causal mechanisms only partially specified. This gap is not simply a matter of modality coverage: adding more modalities does not by itself provide the supervision needed to connect observations with the physical structure of the world. We present OmniFysics-Nano-V2, a compact omni-modal model for physical-world perception and understanding. The model supports image, video, audio, speech, and text inputs within a shared reasoning framework, together with text and speech generation. To address the lack of explicit physical supervision, we construct a dual-branch physics-aware data pipeline that grounds salient objects in structured physical attributes and aligns visual changes with acoustic events, intermediate responses, and interaction outcomes. To address homogeneous training objectives, we curate reinforcement-learning prompts by reward diversity and adopt a two-stage Group Relative Policy Optimization curriculum that progresses from general task correctness to fine-grained physical perceptual reasoning. Experiments across multimodal, audio-visual, and physical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed data and training strategy improves physical-world understanding while preserving broad omni-modal competence. The proposed model achieves leading result on 17 of 21 benchmarks against SOTA omni-modal models. By equipping AI systems with both omni-modal and physical-world perception capabilities, OmniFysics-Nano-V2 is poised to become a cornerstone of next-generation Physical AI. --- ### Beyond Class Marginals: Bounding Rehearsal Gaps without Freezing Class Co-occurrence Authors: Congren Dai, Nat Roongjirarat, Fei Ye Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25735v1 Class-balanced replay controls class frequency but does not determine the interval between successive replay appearances of a class. We study this interval, the rehearsal gap, separately from the class marginal and class co-occurrence, and introduce randomised-pass replay (RPR), which visits each resident class once per shuffled pass. For a fixed set of C resident classes and replay batch size b less than or equal to C, RPR preserves the balanced time-averaged class marginal and bounds every gap by 2*ceil(C/b)-1; a churn-conditional bound applies while the resident set changes. The scheduler uses no future class information and adds no replay examples or forward passes. In a linear-head ER-ACE diagnostic, joint absence from the incoming and replay batches produces a one-sided classifier-bias gradient. Longer absence episodes are associated with larger negative bias displacement, and removing the incoming-loss mask attenuates the scheduling effect. In the primary ER-ACE experiments, RPR improves final average accuracy by 0.72-1.67 percentage points relative to independent class-balanced retrieval under reservoir storage, with positive effects also observed under balanced storage. Pretrained ViTs show positive effects on the tested LT10 streams with small replay batches, while matched larger-batch controls show no material effect. Fixed-cycle and reused-pass controls change more than one temporal statistic, so the experiments do not isolate rehearsal-gap length from all other forms of temporal dependence. The accuracy effects depend on the learner and operating regime. --- ### Annual Earth-observation embeddings encode wildfire disturbance and support simplified burned area mapping Authors: Jovana Knezevic, Clement Atzberger, Zhengpeng Feng, Adam F. A. Pellegrini, Srinivasan Keshav, David Coomes Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25731v1 Medium-resolution (10-30 m) burned area mapping is vital for monitoring wildfires and their impacts, but remains difficult to scale. Existing methods require either curated fire-specific imagery or dense time-series analysis. Here, we tested whether annual Earth-observation embeddings retain wildfire disturbance signals sufficiently to map burned areas without either requirement. Using Tessera and AlphaEarth embeddings, we tested individual burn-scar delineation, mapping of all same-year fires within an area, regional wall-to-wall mapping, cross-continental transfer, and intra-annual fire timing. Tessera strongly encoded wildfire disturbance, allowing even linear models to separate burned from unburned pixels; the signal was weaker in AlphaEarth. Models trained on a single Tessera embedding matched or exceeded equivalent models using paired pre- and post-fire HLS imagery, and outperformed post-fire imagery alone. The same approach mapped all same-year fires within benchmark scenes (F1 = 0.90). Applied across California, with no California fire data used for downstream training, it recovered 97% of reference burned area and detected substantially more small and medium-sized fires than GABAM or MCD64A1. Separately, a model trained on 2018-2021 US fires transferred without retraining to 88 European fires from 2024-2025 (F1 = 0.88). For well-detected fires, ignition timing was recovered with a mean absolute error of 13 days. Performance declined for fires ignited near the end of the calendar year, and wall-to-wall deployment produced systematic false positives in some unseen landscapes. Annual embeddings nevertheless achieve high segmentation accuracy while moving the burden of dense time series processing upstream, providing a promising path towards simpler regional burned area mapping. --- ### Self-Supervised Combinatorial Optimization with Constraints via Frank-Wolfe Authors: Akbar Rafiey, Yifei Xu, Nikolaos Karalias Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25728v1 Self-supervised learning for combinatorial optimization has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving discrete optimization problems with neural networks, but a central challenge remains: handling hard combinatorial constraints within continuous, gradient-based training. Continuously extending combinatorial objectives to convex domains is a powerful technique, yet existing approaches often require projection steps that constrain neural network outputs to lie inside the feasible polytope and rely on ad-hoc and problem-specific constructions. We propose a general framework in which the neural network is allowed to predict arbitrary continuous vectors that could potentially lie outside of the feasible polytope. These predictions are then approximated by sparse convex combinations of feasible solutions using a geometric decomposition algorithm based on Frank--Wolfe methods and approximate Caratheodory results. This decomposition induces an a.e.-differentiable, self-supervised loss defined as the expected value of the discrete objective. The same procedure provides an automatic rounding guarantee at inference time. We demonstrate strong empirical performance across multiple combinatorial problems, including the Quadratic Assignment Problem, Maximum Coverage, and the Traveling Salesperson Problem. --- ### Signed Graph Pre-Training and Prompt Learning Authors: Zihan Mei, Rong Pan, Yuzhou Chen, Yixuan He Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25722v1 Signed graphs arise in trust--distrust networks, financial correlation systems, biological interaction graphs, and many other domains in which edges can be positive or negative and may also be directed. While signed graph neural networks have improved task-specific learning, graph transfer learning on signed graphs remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we introduce TopoSIGN, a pioneer topology-guided graph pre-training and prompt learning framework for signed graphs. TopoSIGN combines a structural encoder built on the magnetic signed Laplacian with a novel persistent-homology branch that summarizes signed topology through Dowker-complex persistence images. The fused embeddings are then transferred to a prompt learning function. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of TopoSIGN in extracting useful structural information in signed graphs, as well as the adaptability and flexibility of the proposed general framework. --- ### Slow Decay and Silenced Expression: Iterated Subliminal Trait Transfer in Language-Model Lineages Authors: Ryan Vo, Duc-Vu Nguyen, Matt Kretchmar, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25721v1 Language models are increasingly trained on the outputs of other models, forming chains that we call lineages, in which a trait present in one generation can pass to the next. Prior work on subliminal learning has shown that a teacher's trait can transmit to a student through filtered data carrying none of the trait's content. However, the evidence covers only a single training step. We study whether such a trait holds or fades across lineages. We instill the trait into three copies of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and iterate the training step to depth ten from each, reading every generation two ways on the same held-out prompts: a keyword screen that looks for expressions of the trait in the model's output, and an activation probe that projects each model's displacement from the base onto a direction built from the other lineages' teachers. We report two findings. First, the trait persists through ten generations across three lineages. The instilled models express it on every completion; the keyword-screen rate falls to 55.6% after the first step and to 21.1% by generation ten. The base itself matches the screen on none of its 300 completions. Second, the trait can be present internally while absent behaviorally. When the model's default system prompt is removed at evaluation, the generation-ten students' keyword-screen rate is zero on every prompt while the probe score stays positive on every prompt. Steering the untreated base with the displacement of a generation-ten student, which is trained and measured under the default system prompt, induces screened expression of the trait even with the system prompt removed, while that same student shows no expression of the trait with the system prompt removed. --- ### FoMo: Forking Moment in Generative Trajectory as a Perceptual Distance Authors: Jaihyun Lew, Mingi Jung, Minjun Park, Wooseok Song, Sungroh Yoon Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25716v1 Reference-based image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aim to reflect how humans perceive the perceptual distance between a pair of images. To learn how the human visual system (HVS) operates, recent reference-based IQA metrics heavily rely on human-annotated data. Mean opinion score (MOS)-based pointwise scoring, which assigns a scalar quality value per image, is preferable for annotation but is prohibitively expensive to collect at scale and is known to be noisy due to inconsistent human judgments. As an alternative, two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) pairwise labels have gained popularity due to their reliability and efficiency, but they capture only relative comparisons between pairs. In this paper, we propose a fully automated data generation pipeline that generates pointwise perceptual distance labels between image pairs without any human annotation. Our approach exploits the generative dynamics of diffusion models as a perceptual distance proxy, where the coarse structure of an image is generated in the early timesteps and the fine details are generated in the later timesteps. Images that fork early in the generation process share only coarse structure and are perceptually far apart; images that fork late differ only in fine detail. We demonstrate that the diffusion trajectory aligns well with the human visual system, and use this forking moment, FoMo, as a reference-grounded distance label to supervise the training of a reference-based IQA metric. The pointwise labels, which support universal comparison between arbitrary image pairs, enable an information-rich training objective. Extensive experiments across diverse backbone architectures confirm the effectiveness of our generation pipeline, outperforming human-annotated datasets in multiple benchmarks. --- ### LingLan: An Advancing Traditional Chinese Medicine Diagnosis LLM with Multimodal Data Authors: Zheng Chen, Zhicheng Du, Haoxuan Li, Yingshan Liang, Peiwu Qin Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25715v1 Though artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms modern medicine, its integration into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been relatively slow, primarily due to TCM's reliance on holistic, subjective diagnostic methods---namely Inspection, Auscultation and Olfaction, Inquiry, and Palpation(I-AOI-P)---which are difficult to align with quantitative, standardized medical systems. In this work, we introduce a Unification Framework for Multimodal Data (UFMD), which automatically processes tongue and pulse images into structured, clinically standard descriptions, integrating multi-source diagnostic information into a unified digital record of I-AOI-P process. Building on this structured data, we create LingLan-14B, a TCM-specific large language model fine-tuned via supervised learning to emulate the diagnostic logic and workflow of I-AOI-P process. Experimental results show that our method significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy, achieving a relative improvement of 103.5% over the baseline (62.72% vs. 30.82%) and reaching an F1-score of up to 82%. --- ### TCMaster: Confidence-Aware Querying and Workload-Guided Physical Design for Multi-Source Traditional Chinese Medicine Knowledge Graphs Authors: Zheng Chen, Yuzhu Li, Haoxuan Li, Zhongde Zhang, Lianshun Jin, Peiwu Qin Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25712v1 Multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs) need query mechanisms that expose reliability and exploit domain structure. This paper presents TCMaster, a property-graph query substrate for confidence-aware traversal and workload-guided physical design over Traditional Chinese Medicine KGs. TCMaster integrates pharmacopoeias, prescriptions, molecular databases, and LLM-extracted micro-semantics into a KG with approximately 221K entities and 723K base edges. It annotates edges with provenance-level confidence, rewrites Cypher queries with confidence predicates, ranks multi-hop paths under PRODUCT, MIN, or weighted-average policies, and uses ontology skew through direction selection, herb-attribute bitmaps, and materialized shortcut edges. On Neo4j, direction selection improves attribute lookup by a factor of 1.47, shortcuts accelerate high-fanout target counting by a factor of 4.42, confidence filtering removes 39.3 percent of low-quality heterogeneous paths, and KG retrieval improves TCMbench QA accuracy by 20.0 percentage points. --- ### Optimal Tradeoffs Between Network Size and Parameter Magnitude in Neural Approximation and Minimax Regression Authors: Baicheng Li, Zuowei Shen, Haizhao Yang, Shijun Zhang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25710v1 The statistical accuracy of neural networks depends on both their approximation power and the complexity of the class fitted from data. While increasing network size is a natural way to improve approximation, parameter magnitude provides another resource whose role must be quantified in both respects. We establish a sharp width--magnitude tradeoff at fixed depth using one elementary bounded $1$-Lipschitz Dyadic--Triangular Activation. For the unit $β$-Hölder ball on $(0,1)^d$ with $0<β\leq1$, the optimal $L^p$ approximation error for $0<p<\infty$ is of order $(N^2\log(eNT))^{-β/d}$ when the network width satisfies $N\geq2d+3$ and the parameter magnitudes are bounded by $T\geq1$. Matching lower bounds hold for every fixed globally Hölder activation; its Hölder exponent affects the constants but not the rate. Under bounded design densities and independent centered sub-Gaussian noise, approximate least squares over the full clipped class at depth $23$ attains the classical Hölder minimax risk $\mathcal{O}(M^{-\frac{2β}{2β+d}})$ without logarithmic loss whenever $N^2\log(eNT)\asymp M^{\frac{d}{2β+d}}$, where $M$ is the sample size. This yields a continuum of statistically optimal choices, ranging from unit parameter radius to fixed network size. At fixed size, four hidden layers with at most $8d+7$ nonzero parameters give a near-optimal radius, while six layers with at most $8d+27$ attain the optimal order $\log T=\mathcal{O}(η^{-d/β})$ at approximation error $η$. The same decoding method also yields fixed-size Transformer approximation. --- ### On the Gradient Heterogeneity Dynamics of Adversarially Robust Federated Regression Authors: Leonardo F. Toso, James Anderson, Nirupam Gupta, Rafael Pinot Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25705v1 Federated learning (FL) is intrinsically heterogeneous: honest clients may have different data-generating models. On top of that, adversarial clients can make heterogeneity even more pronounced by sharing arbitrary updates. Existing analyses typically control the interaction between statistical heterogeneity and adversarial behavior through gradient-dissimilarity conditions. However, the underlying bound is imposed a priori and may yield conservative guarantees even for least-squares regression. We instead derive the gradient heterogeneity from the statistical model of linear and nonlinear regression with fresh data samples at every round. Our bounds separate heterogeneity among the honest clients' ground-truth model parameters, finite-sample label noise, and initialization. We then demonstrate that, for any $(f,κ)$-robust aggregator with coefficient $κ= O(f/n)$, where $f$ is the number of adversarial clients and $n$ the total number of clients (with $f/n < 1/2$), convergence holds after an explicit sample burn-in. --- ### Fully Byzantine-Resilient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Haejoon Lee, Dimitra Panagou Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25701v1 We study distributed Byzantine-resilient actor-critic multi-agent reinforcement learning (AC-MARL), where agents collectively learn policies through local interactions. Existing methods guarantee convergence of the agents' parameters only to a neighborhood of the attack-free limit points, resulting in degraded performance. We propose Fully Resilient AC-MARL (FRAC-MARL), a decentralized method in which each agent leverages redundancy in two-hop messages to identify reliable messages. Under linear parameterizations of the value and team-reward functions and Byzantine edge attacks, where adversarial behavior is confined to the communication layer, we prove that agents' parameters converge almost surely to the same limit points as in the attack-free case over time-varying communication graphs. We introduce a novel topological condition for the convergence of our method, present a systematic method to construct such networks, and prove that this condition can be verified in polynomial time. Finally, we demonstrate our method on cooperative multi-robot formation control tasks. --- ### Interpretable AI plus Handheld, Portable Retinal Photographs: A Low-Cost Glaucoma Screening Solution for West Africa Authors: Charis Y. N. Chiang, Tarela Sarimiye, Adeyinka Ashaye, Martin Buist, Michael A. Hauser, Olusola Olawoye, Michaël J. A. Girard Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25697v1 Purpose: To develop and evaluate an interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) framework for glaucoma screening from low-cost portable, handheld retinal fundus photographs in a West African population and to compare its performance with clinical tabletop fundus imaging. Methods: We used data from a community-based study of 681 participants (1,362 eyes) in Nigeria, comprising 414 glaucoma, 478 glaucoma suspect, and 470 non-glaucoma eyes. Fundus photographs were acquired using the low-cost handheld, portable Volk Viva retinal camera and the Canon CR-2-AF tabletop camera. We fine-tuned component models separately to each device to perform vessel segmentation, cup and disc boundary segmentation, and feature extraction to detect optic nerve head features. A final classification model combined these components to classify scans as glaucoma, glaucoma suspect or non-glaucoma. Feature-weight analysis and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping were used for interpretation. Results: The models performed well on both Volk Viva and Canon CR-2-AF images: Vessel segmentation: 0.98 Dice Coefficient (DC) (Volk) and 0.94 DC (Canon); Cup and disc segmentation: 0.95 DC (Volk) and 0.96 DC (Canon); Optic nerve head feature detection: area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.83$\pm$0.03 (Volk) and 0.87$\pm$0.04 (Canon); Classification model: AUCs of 0.85$\pm$0.01 (Volk) and 0.93$\pm$0.01 (Canon). Reports for each image, present model decision confidence scores and decision-rationale visualizations to support clinical interpretation. Conclusions: Volk Viva results were reasonably comparable to Canon CR-2-AF in the component models and not far behind in classification. This shows that interpretable AI combined with low-cost, portable imaging may enhance community-level glaucoma screening, especially in settings with limited specialist access and resources. --- ### C2FXNet: Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert for Unified Object Detection across Adverse Weather Authors: Tianle Fang, Zhenbing Liu, Chong Yin, Bolun Li, Haoxiang Lu Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25693v1 Object detection in adverse weather remains challenging because severe degradations weaken visual quality and disrupt semantic feature representations across diverse scenes. Existing methods usually rely on condition-specific designs, which limits their ability to generalize within a unified detector. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert Network (C2FXNet) that achieves unified detection through hierarchical scene guidance. Specifically, C2FXNet introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism consisting of a Multi-step Reasoning Router (MRR), which performs GRU-based recurrent scene reasoning over compressed multi-scale visual cues and frozen coarse scene prototypes, and a Fine Scene Refinement (FSR) module, which uses image-specific semantic cues to modulate high-level features for local variation handling. Furthermore, a Scene-aware Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) dynamically combines scene-specific experts under the joint guidance of MRR and FSR. By coupling coarse scene reasoning with fine-grained semantic refinement, C2FXNet enables robust multi-scene detection without scene-specific training. Extensive experiments on RTTS, ExDark, and our newly constructed Adverse Weather Dataset (AWD) demonstrate that C2FXNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across foggy, dark, and clear conditions, reaching 63.70%, 71.14%, and 54.19% mAP on RTTS, ExDark, and AWD, respectively. The source code will be released at https://github.com/PolarisFTL/C2FXNet. --- ### Graph Domain Adaptation Does Not End with Representation Learning Authors: Ziqian Liu, Yongxue Xu, Enze Zhang, Jiaqi Zhang, Hao Wang, Maolin Wang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25692v2 Graph domain adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under shifts in both node attributes and graph structure. Existing methods primarily adapt graph representations through propagation redesign, distribution alignment, or source-to-target transition modeling, but still rely on a single graph-propagating path for target prediction. This leaves open whether an adapted graph representation exhausts the predictive evidence available in the target domain, since the graph-aware expert and graph-free local expert may exhibit different failure modes under topological shifts. To address this limitation, we propose EviGDA, an Evidence-Augmented Graph Domain Adaptation framework that complements graph representation adaptation with a graph-free local expert. The graph-aware expert performs message passing and entropy-aware marginal alignment, while the graph-free local expert learns solely from source node features and labels without graph propagation or target alignment. The two experts are optimized independently and combined only at inference through a task-level constant probability mixture, preserving complementary evidence without joint training, learned routing, or target pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on ten datasets and 16 transfer tasks show that EviGDA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Complementary prediction paths add value beyond graph representation alignment. --- ### How Strongly Should Task State Influence an LLM Agent? Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Wonbin Kweon, Jiawei Han Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25686v1 Long-horizon assigned work requires an LLM agent to track the state of a task: which steps are done, blocked, cancelled, or open to repetition. Agent systems either keep this state as text in the prompt and rely on the model to read that text, or move the state into a module that enforces it, and each system is evaluated as a whole, so no one knows how much reliability comes from the state being shown, told, or enforced. We fix the task rules, the model, and paired episodes and vary how strongly task state reaches the agent: a raw transcript, an exact checklist, per-turn directives from a state machine compiled from the brief and advanced only by execution receipts, or an enforcement gate on that machine that refuses state-violating actions; every episode is scored by exact payload matching against dynamic ground truth. Across three models, two reasoning regimes, and two domains, four findings hold without per-turn reasoning: displaying accurate state is unreliable, an unverified ledger the agent writes itself beats an accurate checklist it is shown, directives help in proportion to the model's obedience, and enforcement needs no obedience but is bounded by the correctness of its state and by the matcher that maps requests to steps; per-turn reasoning at a 235B agent compresses these separations without repairing the text rungs. The same gate, compiled from $τ^2$-bench's airline policy, raises a 235B agent's pass$^1$ from 0.39 to 0.54 and changes nothing for a 35B agent that rarely violates the policy; on PM-Bench, where acting turns on recognizing a cue rather than on state, showing the record is the best rung--matching or beating both gates and reversing the ledger-over-checklist finding--and enforcing the matcher's judgement drops a 35B agent below its raw transcript. Enforcement pays when failures are state-decidable and frequent, and hurts when the gate's judgement is wrong. --- ### Initialization and Stopping Tolerance in CPU Dermoscopic Segmentation Authors: Wenhao Xu, Yixian Kong, Ting Pan, Changwei Wang, Feilong Wang, Rongtao Xu Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25685v1 Contour initialization and numerical stopping can jointly affect the evaluation of active-contour segmentation. We examine their interaction using the open-source scikit-image Chan-Vese implementation on a resized ISIC 2017 mirror. A fixed development set of 100 images selects a common input channel; all 600 images in the repository's held-out partition are then evaluated. Otsu thresholding is compared with checkerboard-, disk-, and Otsu-initialized contours under default and tighter level-set tolerances. At the default tolerance, Otsu initialization increases mean image Dice from 0.6011 to 0.6660 relative to checkerboard initialization, a paired difference of 0.0649 (95% image-bootstrap interval (0.0452, 0.0860)). Otsu thresholding alone achieves 0.6897. The default disk initializer stops after one iteration on 471 images. Tightening the tolerance reduces the Otsu-seed advantage over checkerboard initialization to 0.0197, with most runs reaching the 500-iteration limit. The default-tolerance advantage also reverses between small- and large-lesion strata. These findings show that an improvement over a generic initializer can coexist with deterioration relative to the threshold baseline. Evaluations should retain the unrefined mask as a comparator and report the initial-field definition, stopping tolerance, and observed iteration counts together. --- ### Real-Time Atomic-Resolution Electron Phase Imaging without Probe Calibration via Ptychography-Supervised Learning Authors: H. Yue, C. -C. Chen, C. -N. Hsiao, J. Cheng, Y. Liu, X. Z. Liao, Steve F. Shu Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV, cond-mat.mtrl-sci arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25684v1 Atomic-scale phase imaging is central to resolving defects, interfaces, and weakly scattering atoms that govern the behavior of nanoscale materials. Electron ptychography delivers sub-ångström phase sensitivity but remains an offline technique, because its iterative reconstruction is computationally expensive and sensitive to experimental calibration, preventing live use during data acquisition. Here, a ptychography-supervised local inference framework is presented that converts four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) into an acquisition-compatible phase-imaging workflow. Physics-constrained reference phase maps reconstructed from a single experimental AuPd dataset serve as teacher labels for a compact model that predicts local phase patches directly from diffraction measurements, without explicit probe input or online iterative optimization. Full-field images are assembled by deterministic overlap stitching. The workflow reaches an online latency of about 0.27 ms per probe position and a throughput of about 20,000 positions per second, an approximately 1,000-fold speed-up over GPU-accelerated ePIE, while preserving atomic-scale lattice contrast and reciprocal-space fidelity. Without fine-tuning, the same model transfers across materials (WS2), defocus conditions (high-entropy alloy nanoparticles), and instruments (hBN at 300 kV). The approach amortizes ptychographic redundancy into a fast, generalizable workflow that enables real-time atomic-scale phase imaging for materials microscopy. --- ### Toolcompass: Guiding Tool Trialing, Not Suppressing It Authors: Junlin Fang, Chong Zhang, Do Nguyen-Thanh, Xiaogang Xu, Zhen Fang, Sean Du Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25678v1 Large language model (LLM) agents must generalize from tools seen during training to unseen tools at deployment. A key challenge is tool trialing, i.e., excessive trials waste the interaction budget, whereas selective trials enable exploration of unfamiliar tools. Existing outcome-based post-training leaves wasteful trials unguided, while turn-level supervision may suppress necessary exploration. We introduce ToolCompass, a post-training framework that guides tool trialing by organizing tool-call representations according to shared functions. Specifically, ToolCompass models each function class as a von Mises--Fisher distribution and jointly reduces intra-function variation across domains and increases inter-function separation. This structure transfers experience from seen tools to functionally similar unseen tools, directing exploration away from unrelated alternatives. ToolCompass requires no ground-truth call traces or unseen-tool access and incurs no inference overhead. Experiments on AppWorld and FTRL show consistent gains across GRPO, RFT, and DMPO. improves AppWorld OOD task success by up to 10.71 percentage points over vanilla post-training and performs best among competitive baselines on both benchmarks. --- ### Seeing Is Not Perceiving: When Synthetic Consumers Can and Cannot Pretest Visual Marketing Authors: Yi-Lin Tsai, Yung-Hsiu, Lai Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25677v1 Marketers now deploy generative AI agents as synthetic consumers to pretest visual assets such as logos, packaging, and advertising at a fraction of human-panel cost. However, this procedure assumes that a model seeing a visual cue can also perceive its consumer meaning, which is largely untested. We stress-test the assumption using six canonical visual marketing experiments, varying the two levers managers control: model generation (GPT-4o-mini vs. GPT-5.4-mini) and input format (plain text vs. JSON). Every resulting configuration passed the manipulation checks; however, none of the configurations reproduced more than two of the six human effects, and the remainder were nonsignificant. The one exception was a significant reversal of the human pattern. Providing conceptual or empirical evidence through in-context learning steers average responses toward the human effect. Yet steering has a limit: even when it succeeds, a configuration reproduces less than half of the natural spread of human responses and so understates consumer heterogeneity. We integrate these results into an AI governance protocol (Calibrate, Intervene, Deploy) that delineates when synthetic consumers can responsibly screen creatives and when human panels remain necessary. --- ### Marginal Log-Likelihood Increments under Dirichlet-Smoothed Markov Estimation Authors: Levin David Schwab Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25675v1 For a Dirichlet-smoothed transition model, the effect of adding one workflow trace to the training archive is an exact change in reference-weighted log likelihood. We derive that change and show that it is a weighted reduction of Kullback--Leibler divergence between the reference conditionals and the model. From this form we obtain an upper bound on the gain available to any acquisition, which expresses a millinat difference as a share of what is attainable, an exact covariance identity for the effect of the reference weighting, and a sign criterion for the interaction between two candidates, from which the batch objective is neither submodular nor supermodular. A case study on the BPI Challenge 2012 loan-application log measures all three and finds a positive selection result in one of the four combinations of reference weighting and budget unit. There, of two regressors fitted to identical descriptors and identical labels, the one that predicts individual increments far more accurately, median $R^2$ 0.87 against 0.62, realizes the smaller share of the attainable gain, 61 against 69 per cent, so ranking accuracy for individual traces is neither necessary nor sufficient for batch quality. --- ### Teaching Reinforcement Learning and Humanoid Robotics to High-School Students: An Expert-Validated Curriculum Design on a Low-Cost Open Platform Authors: Yuanzhe Dong, Jie Cao, Shuman Wang Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25674v1 Lower cost open source robots and reinforcement learning (RL) simulation tools create new opportunities for precollege students to engage with contemporary robotics. However, translating a complete research workflow, spanning mechanical assembly, electrical setup, simulation, policy learning, system identification, and physical deployment, into a coherent course for novice learners remains challenging. We present an integrated robotics course framework that organizes these activities around a shared robotic artifact. The framework combines parallel disciplinary tracks, sequencing based on technical dependencies, progressive integration of simulation and hardware, layered performance checkpoints, and structures for balancing collaborative work with individual accountability. We illustrate the framework through a high school curriculum organized around a robot project in which pairs of students assemble an open source humanoid robot, train a walking policy in simulation, and deploy it on the physical platform. The framework was developed through an iterative design process that included formative review by five experts in robotics research, engineering, secondary STEM education, and curriculum design. Expert feedback highlighted three central design tensions: authenticity versus cognitive load, system integration versus timely visible progress, and team construction versus individual accountability. These tensions informed the final framework presented in this paper. This work offers a structured approach for adapting robotics research workflows into interdisciplinary precollege courses; future classroom studies are needed to examine implementation and student learning. --- ### From Utterances to Networks: Modelling Slang Adoption and Diffusion Across Subreddits Authors: Xiaoning Wang, Ted Underwood, Zhewei Sun Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25669v1 Adoption and diffusion of neologisms in online communities have received renewed attention in recent years. As internet slang terms such as APT, referring to a K-pop song, and phrases such as Canon Event meaning an embarrassing but pivotal event, go viral online, it becomes increasingly important to understand the mechanisms that contribute to their success. Prior studies have often explained slang diffusion either from the perspective of social interaction or from the linguistic properties of the slang itself, but rarely from both perspectives together. One major obstacle has been the high cost of annotating slang usage in large-scale online communication. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, make it possible to use them as scalable annotators for such tasks. In this study, we first curate a human-annotated benchmark to evaluate LLM performance in detecting slang usage in real Reddit communication. We then leverage LLM-based annotations to model slang adoption and diffusion. Our results show that slang diffusers with higher bridging capital are associated with increased subsequent adoption, whereas diffusers with higher bonding capital are associated with reduced adoption. We also find that wider contextual usage of a slang term is associated with a longer time before new users officially adopt it. Together, these findings suggest that both social-network structure and linguistic context shape the diffusion of neologisms in online communities. --- ### When Riemann flows with Wasserstein: Generative Modeling of Probability Distributions on Manifolds Authors: Doron Haviv, Edward De Brouwer, Rishabh Anand, Rex Ying, Aïcha Bentaieb, Gabriele Scalia, Hector Corrada Bravo Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25659v1 Many scientific datasets, such as molecular conformational ensembles or single-cell tissue measurements, are naturally modeled as meta-distributions: distributions over probability measures on non-Euclidean domains. Existing generative methods largely assume Euclidean geometry and fail to capture this structure. We introduce Riemannian Wasserstein Entropic Flow Matching (RWEFM), a generative framework on the Wasserstein space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathcal{M})$ of a Riemannian manifold $(\mathcal{M},g)$. RWEFM is trained by regressing a neural vector field onto Riemannian optimal transport velocities, using McCann displacement interpolations as conditional paths. We confirm theoretically that this construction leads to a valid flow matching approach on $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathcal{M})$ and introduce the Riemannian Entropic Map, a GPU-efficient approximation of the optimal transport map on manifolds. Our experiments show that by respecting the intrinsic geometry of the data, RWEFM can generate whole single-cell samples in hyperspherical latent spaces and protein conformational ensembles on the torus. As RWEFM requires only a geodesic distance and a projection operator, it is not restricted to manifolds with closed-form geometry, which we demonstrate by generating distributions on a general triangulated mesh. --- ### Targeted Review for AI-Assisted Biodiversity Surveys: Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling Authors: Timm Haucke, Lauren Harrell, Justin Kay, Mary Clapp, Sara Beery Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25657v1 We increasingly use machine learning to label scientific datasets. The models we develop and deploy are improving all the time, but they are not and will likely never be perfect. Mistakes matter, as errors can propagate into our scientific understanding, particularly when systematically biased. Very reasonably, scientists thus review substantial proportions of ML-generated labels to verify or correct mistakes in pursuit of ensuring their scientific findings are not biased by ML. In this work, we focus on helping scientists optimally allocate this reviewing effort relative to their scientific goals. We focus on a specific class of scientists (ecologists) and a specific, widespread, and impactful modeling target (occupancy modeling, which estimates where species are likely to occur, conditioned on environmental factors). We introduce Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling (ACORN), a method that incorporates ML predictions into occupancy models and strategically selects samples for expert review that are maximally informative for downstream ecological analysis. Across camera-trap and bioacoustic datasets, our method recovers ecological conclusions close to those obtained from fully human-labeled data, while requiring substantially fewer expert reviews than non-targeted review policies. Our results suggest that ML-assisted scientific workflows should optimize expert effort for downstream inference, rather than for classifier accuracy alone, especially when human review budget is limited. Our code is available at https://github.com/timmh/acorn --- ### From Experts to Sub-experts: Fine-grained Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for MoE LLMs Authors: Zhentao Tan, Chang Liu, Yao Liu, Yue Wu, Jieping Ye Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25655v1 As large language models (LLMs) scale rapidly, dense full-parameter adaptation becomes increasingly expensive, motivating sparse and modular architectures such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. This shift raises a key question for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT): at what granularity should parameters be selected and updated? Existing PEFT methods such as LoRA operate on predefined weight matrices, while expert-level sparse tuning methods update entire selected experts. However, we observe that activated experts are internally sparse, with only a small fraction of intermediate channels strongly responding to downstream tasks, indicating that expert-level adaptation is still too coarse. We propose NSFT (Neural Sub-expert Fine-Tuning), a fine-grained PEFT framework that refines MoE adaptation from experts to sub-experts. NSFT decomposes each expert along the intermediate dimension into structured channel groups and selects task-relevant sub-experts by combining routing importance with intra-expert activation saliency. To optimize sparse partial updates, NSFT further introduces learning-rate scaling and dynamic gradient scaling to compensate for the reduced effective update magnitude. Experiments on OLMoE and Ling-mini-2.0 across challenging domain-specific tasks and general benchmarks show that NSFT consistently outperforms representative PEFT and expert-level sparse tuning baselines, while using substantially fewer trainable parameters and preserving competitive general capability. These results suggest that sub-expert-level adaptation is a more precise and efficient PEFT paradigm for MoE LLMs. --- ### CODA: Depth-Aligned Scene Completion and Object Decomposition from a Single RGB-D Image Authors: Dongwon Son, Junhyek Han, Yoontae Cho, Minseok Lee, Hong-seok Choi, Jiwook Choi, Hyungjin Kim, Beomjoon Kim Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25654v1 Robots operating safely in cluttered everyday environments often need to infer scene geometry from partial observations. Methods that detect objects in 2D and reconstruct them independently struggle in such scenes: a missed object is never reconstructed, a merged detection can fuse two objects, and separately reconstructed meshes may overlap or fail to touch their supporting surfaces. We introduce CODA (Complete Once, Decompose Afterward), a generative model that instead reconstructs the complete scene geometry from a single unsegmented RGB-D image, then separates the surface into the surrounding environment and movable objects. Still, generated scene geometry can drift from the observed partial point cloud. To reduce this drift, CODA uses two explicit 3D grounding mechanisms to keep reconstructed geometry consistent with observed surfaces while completing unseen regions. Experiments on HomebrewedDB and our custom cluttered-scene dataset show more accurate reconstructions and a higher fraction of objects remaining in place under simulated gravity than both object-first and scene-first baselines. --- ### GameDirector: Decoupling Gameplay Logic from Rendering for Player-Configurable Game World Models Authors: Zijun Lin, Zhiyang Deng, Yuzhe Wu, Bihan Wen, Yeying Jin Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25652v1 Recent game world models support realistic visual simulation and interactive gameplay based on player inputs. However, they typically learn environment dynamics from pixel-level supervision, jointly modeling perception, memory, state transitions, and rendering within a single end-to-end framework. While this design enables open-ended, action-controllable generation, it still falls short of delivering a complete gameplay experience. Games are governed by explicit mechanics, such as health deduction, skill activation, combat rules, and termination conditions. These mechanics depend on precise and consistent state transitions that generative models alone cannot reliably enforce. In contrast, game engines can guarantee such mechanics through hard-coded rules, but provide limited flexibility for player-driven creation. To bridge these paradigms, we introduce GameDirector, the first agentic framework that decouples rule-based gameplay logic from visual rendering. Given player-defined configurations, the framework acts as an intelligent director that interprets visual observations, updates game states, tactically controls NPCs, and enforces gameplay rules. It then translates these decisions into text prompts that guide the video world model to render the resulting gameplay. This separation allows players to configure characters, states, and rules much like a game developer while preserving coherent game mechanics. Experiments on three games, using data collected by our automated gameplay agent, show that GameDirector achieves accurate state tracking, reliable rule following, and improves boss action quality by more than 39.9% over various end-to-end game world model settings. Overall, by externalizing player-controllable game logic, GameDirector establishes a middle ground between hard-coded simulation and generative modeling, enabling more flexible and closed-loop gameplay experiences. --- ### Decoupling Disease, Covariates, and Individual Variability: A Unified Disentanglement Framework for Medical Image Classification Authors: Shengjie Zhang, Jinglin Zhang, Zhuangzhuang Jiang, Ziqi Yu, Yipin Zhang, Qi Zhang, Xiang Chen, Haibo Yang, Fei Gao, Longbiao Cui, Yuan Zhou, Xiao-Yong Zhang et al. Published: 2026-09-22 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25650v1 Accurately isolating disease-related features from confounding covariates (e.g., age, gender, site) and individual variations remains a fundamental challenge in medical image classification. Traditional regression-based approaches may ignore non-linear relations between image features and true covariates. To overcome this issue, we present a generalized Medical Imaging Disentanglement Learning (MedIDL) framework. MedIDL maps image features into three mutually orthogonal latent spaces through specialized disentanglement heads: a disease classification head guided by a supervised loss, a covariate-alignment head constrained by cross-subject similarity matching, and a Gaussian head absorbing individual variations. We evaluated our framework across 7 datasets encompassing diverse imaging modalities. MedIDL outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised classification methods in accuracy across all datasets. Association analyses demonstrate that MedIDL successfully isolates target-specific latent representations. Gradient-based interpretability mappings localize pathognomonic patterns aligning with established clinical literature. ---