# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 123 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #6101–6150 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/123 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/122.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/124.md) ### Modeling Clinical Workflow for SYNTAX Scoring from Coronary Angiography Videos Authors: Suzhong Fu, Jingqi Dong, Xuan Ding, Rui Sun, Yiming Yang, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23553v1 The SYNTAX score is a clinically established tool for assessing anatomical lesion complexity in coronary artery disease and guiding subsequent treatment. However, automated SYNTAX scoring is commonly formulated as a direct regression problem from coronary angiography videos to patient-level scores. In this work, we reformulate SYNTAX scoring as a vessel segment identity-preserving anatomical reasoning problem and propose a hierarchical modeling framework that explicitly aligns learning with the clinical workflow. Our approach maintains vessel segment identity across frames and views, estimates stenosis severity at the segment level, and aggregates evidence hierarchically according to coronary anatomy. Simultaneously, to address the scarcity of domain-specific data, we integrate and complete multiple public coronary angiography datasets, constructing a large-scale resource featuring completed vessel segmentation and derived structural annotations. Experiments demonstrate that vessel segment-level stenosis embedding enhances explanatory power and reduces prediction variability compared to baseline models, with the R^2 score improving by 0.201 and dev STD decreasing by 18.4%. These results highlight the necessity of structure-aligned modeling for reliable and stable automated SYNTAX scoring from multi-view coronary angiography videos. The GitHub link is https://github.com/VersaceSu7/SYNTAX_score_777. --- ### Paragraph Boundaries Are Not White Space:Compression Depth as the Signature of Hierarchical Structure Authors: Shuyang Xiang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23551v2 Standard positional encodings treat position as a one-dimensional reading-order coordinate, but reading order alone does not determine hierarchical textual structure. We use a hierarchical rotary positional encoding (hRoPE) that represents paragraph, sentence, and token indices as separate channels, hold the token sequence fixed, intervene on the paragraph coordinate $p_1$, and measure cross-paragraph attention with a token-distance-exact estimator. Attention is compressed in every corpus, but compression alone is not diagnostic of true structure: an architecturally identical channel with density-matched random labels is compressed too. What distinguishes real structure is the depth of compression: the real-versus-random depth gap is resolvable in two of three corpora and not in the third, and real-structure depth varies more strongly across corpora than the control's. Comparing eight corpus-only quantities across three constructs (lexical persistence, paragraph length, embedding-based coherence), none fully reproduces the cross-corpus ordering of depth, though embedding-based coherence comes closest. At the paragraph level that relation transfers as a common slope, but with the opposite sign to the corpus-level ranking: controlling for length, diversity, and position, paragraphs with more similar neighbors compress less deeply, with no detectable slope difference between any pair of corpora, while length, lexical-diversity, and position effects remain corpus-specific. Compression depth, not its location, is the reproducible signature of genuine paragraph structure in our setting. --- ### Physics-residual machine learning predicts oxygen-evolution catalyst activity beyond the training range from sparse polarization measurements Authors: Yong-Woon Kim, Jihyeok Lee, Sungtae Park, Sooseok Choi, Yung-Cheol Byun Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23549v2 Discovery campaigns for oxygen evolution reaction catalysts repeatedly choose, make and measure catalysts. High-throughput platforms stop polarization curves below potentials that damage the catalyst, so the endpoint, the activity at a target potential or current density, often lies beyond the measured window, and the catalysts of most interest are more active than any measured before. Existing methods do not predict these endpoints accurately when few or no endpoints of a new library have been measured. Here we present physics-residual machine learning (PR-ML), which predicts each endpoint as the sum of a Tafel term, computed from the catalyst's own measured curve with an estimated slope, and a residual term learned from labelled catalysts. In twelve Ni-Pd-Pt-Ru thin-film libraries, the current density at 1.70 V$_{RHE}$ was predicted from the currents at 1.40 and 1.55 V$_{RHE}$. Fitted only on earlier libraries, with ridge regression as the residual learner, PR-ML predicted the Ni--Ru library, whose currents mostly exceed theirs, with a mean absolute error of 0.194 mA cm$^{-2}$, against 1.330-1.882 for data-driven models. With five endpoints from the new library and extremely randomized trees as the residual learner, PR-ML gave a similar error, which the same learner used alone reached only with 20, and identified 63-83% of the catalysts more active than the best labelled catalyst, against 2%. In two independent datasets, this fraction rose from at most 1% to 33-95%. Our approach supplies catalyst selection with accurate endpoints beyond the measured part of each curve and above all earlier measurements. --- ### SewFusion: Tailored Generation of Topology and Panel-Level Geometry for Sewing Patterns Authors: Jiaxin Lin, Xiao Pan, Hangjie Yuan, Luyan Liang, Wan Li, Daquan Feng Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23548v1 Generating sewing patterns from images and text requires modeling a heterogeneous representation composed of discrete topology and continuous geometry. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms: diffusion-based methods enable holistic geometry generation by converting the entire pattern into a continuous representation, but weaken discrete topology modeling; in contrast, autoregressive methods preserve discrete topology through next-token prediction, but tie continuous geometry regression to token-level hidden states with limited panel-level context. To bridge this gap, we propose SewFusion, a unified autoregressive framework that adopts tailored generation mechanisms for discrete topology and panel-level continuous geometry, using next-token prediction for the former and flow matching for the latter. To support panel-level continuous geometry generation, we introduce a Panel Geometry VAE that learns a fixed-size latent space for variable-length panel geometry, together with Panel Geometry Flow for latent generation. We further propose Panel-Forcing to reduce the training--inference mismatch in topology context and improve robustness to topology prediction errors. Extensive experiments on SewFactory and GCD-MM demonstrate that SewFusion consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across various settings, achieving +6.36% Panel Accuracy, +11.30% Stitch Accuracy, and -1.90 Vertex L2 error in the image-text-based generation setting. --- ### Preserving Geometric Integrity in Graph Prompting via Measure-Constrained Optimal Transport Authors: Xiangyu Wang, Shuo Wang, Ruiyi Fang, Zhao Kang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23547v1 Graph prompt learning enables parameter-efficient adaptation of frozen Graph Neural Networks to downstream tasks through lightweight prompt parameters. As routing becomes increasingly node-adaptive, however, independently optimized local decisions can collectively concentrate assignment mass on a small subset of a finite shared prompt bank, even when individual node--prompt matches remain locally meaningful. We propose MINT (Measure-INtegrity Transport), an entropically regularized optimal transport framework that formulates node-to-prompt adaptation as a globally coupled allocation problem. The transport cost favors local geometric compatibility, while a prescribed prompt-side marginal explicitly controls graph-wide prompt utilization. We further derive an exact variance decomposition that separates prompt-side geometric variance into retained prompt-update variation and within-node barycentric dispersion, together with a conditional stability bound for the frozen-encoder forward map. Across standard citation networks and additional heterophilic graphs, MINT remains competitive in few-shot adaptation. Controlled and end-to-end experiments further distinguish the roles of routing and topology: fixed-marginal routing controls graph-wide prompt utilization and has measurable end-to-end effects on citation networks, while topology augmentation provides a complementary, graph-dependent mechanism for addressing structural mismatch. Code is available at https://github.com/Ga1axy0051/MINT. --- ### Towards robust multimodal 3D object detection via visual foundation models Authors: Ziying Song, Lin Liu, Hongyu Pan, Shaoqing Xu, Lei Yang, Mingzhe Guo, Caiyan Jia Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23541v1 Multimodal 3D object detection is fundamental to robust perception in autonomous driving because it integrates complementary information from LiDAR and camera sensors. However, existing methods often fail to maintain robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) corruptions caused by sensor noise, adverse weather, and environmental changes. To address this problem, we propose RoboDistill, a robust and generalizable multimodal 3D object detection framework that leverages visual foundation models (VFMs), such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM). First, we introduce SAM-AD, a domain-specific pretraining strategy that fine-tunes SAM on autonomous-driving imagery to extract feature representations with rich semantic information. Second, we design the AD Feature Pyramid Network (AD-FPN) to refine and upsample SAM features at multiple scales for seamless fusion with LiDAR features. Third, we develop the Depth-Guided Wavelet Attention (DGWA) module, which suppresses high-frequency sensor noise while preserving critical contextual information. Finally, we introduce KD Fusion, in which the pretrained SAM-AD serves as a teacher that distills high-quality visual knowledge into a lightweight point-cloud network, thereby improving robustness under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments across 27 challenging OOD corruption settings show that RoboDistill generally delivers stronger or competitive detection performance and robustness relative to representative state-of-the-art methods. This work bridges the gap between VFMs and 3D object detection and advances robust multimodal perception for real-world autonomous-driving applications. --- ### SemDHT: Certified Semantic Discovery for Peer-to-Peer Agent Networks over Exact-Key DHTs Authors: Taotao Wang, Chonghe Zhao, Shengli Zhang, Soung Chang Liew Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23539v1 Agents may need capabilities exposed through external agent endpoints or service APIs. When a requester is not already bound to a provider, it must discover advertised capabilities matching its task and interface requirements. Over exact-key distributed hash tables (DHTs), broad retrieval transfers large candidate lists, whereas selective retrieval may miss relevant providers or require more replication and lookups. Open publication also lets providers inflate their exposure unless publication bounds are enforceable. We present SemDHT, a certified semantic index for discovering agent-accessible capabilities over exact-key DHTs. A two-layer semantic sketch uses coarse cells to group nearby descriptors and residual codes to narrow candidate selection. Providers publish at a bounded set of derived keys, while requesters probe precision keys before broader recall keys within a lookup budget. Anchor committees certify each descriptor's publication-key set, enabling storage services and requesters to enforce descriptor-to-key consistency. On real API descriptors and task queries, SemDHT achieves recall@10 of 0.955 against exact embedding-space neighbors and 0.947 against ToolBench relevance labels. On a corpus with controlled density augmentation, it matches the candidate exposure of tuned locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) over a DHT at recall 0.95 with 7.7x fewer lookups and reduces publication fan-out from 16 to 10. A Go/libp2p prototype deployed on same-region and cross-region 200-peer cloud overlays replays 299 Internet queries. With parallel probes and cold certificate caches, SemDHT achieves mean completion-time speedups of 3.64x and 4.11x over LSH, respectively. --- ### Decoupled Causal Discovery Authors: Zhengkang Guan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23535v1 Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental yet challenging task in scientific research. While existing approaches are primarily based on conditional independence tests, structure scores, or restrictive functional assumptions, we propose Decoupled Causal Discovery (DCD), a novel decoupling-based perspective that does not rely on these methodologies. DCD directly identifies the Markov boundary (MB) by decoupling non-target variables via weighting functions, such that only variables within the MB preserve dependence with the target under the decoupled distribution. Building on this, DCD iteratively constructs the Completed Partially Directed Acyclic Graph (CPDAG) by exploiting structural asymmetries within the MBs. We establish the theoretical identifiability, soundness, and completeness of DCD. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that DCD achieves strong performance, particularly excelling in challenging noise regimes. --- ### PosEviLoc: Position-Conditioned Spatial Evidence for Language-Based 3D Localization Authors: Tianyi Shang, Yike Shi, Zhenyu Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23534v1 Language-based 3D localization retrieves the point-cloud submap containing a target position from descriptions of nearby objects and their spatial relations. Existing methods typically compress queries and submaps into global descriptors, potentially obscuring object-level semantics and cross-description spatial coherence. We propose Position-Conditioned Evidence Localization (PosEviLoc), a query-position-aware framework for coarse text-to-point-cloud localization. Instead of relying on global matching, PosEviLoc evaluates each candidate submap using explicit semantic and spatial evidence. It models direction as a relation jointly determined by an object position and a hypothetical query position. The resulting Query-Position Spatial Evidence Field (QSEF) measures the fraction of query descriptions supported at each hypothetical position, explicitly capturing their agreement without using the ground-truth query pose to construct the evidence field. A Multi-Level Evidence Readout (MER) summarizes this evidence in a compact representation, which a lightweight MLP converts into a retrieval score. Across five benchmarks, PosEviLoc outperforms MNCL by an average of 17 percentage points in Recall@1. When used as a plug-and-play reranker, it improves MNCL by an average of 16 percentage points. Moreover, PosEviLoc introduces substantially fewer parameters and achieves faster inference speed than existing methods. --- ### GeoBalance: Geometry-Aware Monitoring and Reconstruction with Asymmetric Optimization for Balanced Multimodal Learning Authors: Zechang Xiong, Da Li, Rong Yin, Kexin Tang, Biao Yang, Pengyuan Li, Wenkang Kong, Yulan Hu, Shengyu Zhu, Hao Peng Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23533v1 Multimodal classifiers can converge to modality-dominant solutions in which one modality dominates the joint prediction, suppressing the learning of others. Existing balancing methods mainly adjust losses, gradients, or modality contributions, largely treating modality imbalance as an optimization problem while implicitly treating the weak modality as under-optimized but representationally intact. In this work, we find that this assumption does not always hold, as persistent modality dominance can induce a representation-level collapse of the weak modality, which we term \emph{manifold modality collapse} (MMC). MMC manifests as a coupled geometric degradation in which weak-modality representations collapse onto fewer directions within each class and become less separable across classes. Motivated by this observation, we propose \emph{GeoBalance}, a geometry-aware framework that monitors these two geometric properties and reconstructs the weak modality representation only when it exhibits signs of MMC. Once triggered, GeoBalance uses a fixed Simplex-ETF class scaffold and spectral regularization to restore class separation while preventing collapse onto a few feature directions. To preserve reconstruction during joint training, asymmetric gradient projection removes the joint-gradient component conflicting with reconstruction, leaving non-conflicting optimization unchanged. Extensive experiments across six multimodal benchmarks demonstrate great improvements over competitive balancing methods, validating its effectiveness. --- ### Predicting Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Neural Operators via Observable Spectral Error Decomposition Authors: Hang-Cheng Dong, Pengcheng Cheng Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23529v1 Neural operators have emerged as powerful surrogates for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), yet their reliability under distribution shift remains a critical barrier to deployment. Existing approaches to out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in operator learning are largely empirical and black-box: they report aggregate error metrics without explaining why errors arise or when they will grow. We propose a structure-preserving framework that makes OOD generalization predictable and auditable. Our key idea is to parameterize the learned solution operator as a spectral filter $h_θ(λ)$ acting on the eigenvalues of the underlying elliptic operator, implemented via Chebyshev polynomial expansions and trained with a weak-form objective. This parameterization admits an exact decomposition of the energy-norm error into two observable components: a model-dependent spectral approximation term and a distribution-dependent spectral weighting term induced by the input. From this decomposition we derive three diagnostics: a conservative in-band supremum $\vareps_{\mathrm{sup}}$, a global RMS proxy $\vareps_{\mathrm{rms}}$, and a sample-dependent effective metric $\vareps_{\mathrm{eff}}(f)$. These diagnostics can be computed without access to ground-truth solutions. Through four controlled experiments, we show that $\vareps_{\mathrm{eff}}(f)\|f\|$ consistently predicts energy error under in-distribution, in-band spectral shift, out-of-band tail, and compound shifts, whereas global metrics can be systematically misleading. Our framework shifts OOD assessment of neural operators from black-box benchmarking to operator-structure diagnostics, providing a practical route to auditable scientific machine learning. --- ### Distributional Balancing with Machine Learning for Clinical Trial Augmentation Using Real-World Data Authors: Zern Ke, Mingshi Cui, Gemma Moran, Javier Cabrera Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23524v1 In clinical trials, randomization of treatment and control groups is typically used to ensure the groups have similar covariate distributions on average, resulting in unbiased causal effect estimation. Such balanced covariate distributions are hard to achieve in practice, however, due to recruitment costs, patient dropouts, and more. One possible solution to this problem is to include control patients from external, real world databases. In this paper, we propose DBML, a method that selects control units from a real world database by matching the distribution between the treatment group and the potential control group, instead of matching units between two groups. DBML has three steps. First, we detect anomalous database units (with respect to the treatment distribution) using a variational autoencoder. Second, we re-weight the remaining database units to match the distribution of the treatments. Finally, we use these weights to sample units for our control group. The proposed method is compared to alternative matching-based algorithms and weighted algorithms, achieving superior performance in covariate balance. --- ### Feature Suppression and Differential Privacy for Residential Traffic Classification: A Two-Home Federated Study Authors: Márton Pál Lipcsey-Magyar, Adrian Pekar Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23521v1 Residential traffic classification supports service management, but learning across homes must account for heterogeneous traffic and privacy constraints. Privacy-aware training may impose uneven costs across traffic categories. We study this tradeoff in simulated two-client federated learning using 1.62 million preprocessed gateway-collected flows across six categories. We compare a full-feature baseline, feature suppression (FS), and differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) under one fixed record-level privacy setting. FS-mild excludes four timing features from 16 model inputs; it provides no formal privacy guarantee. With size-proportional aggregation, FS-mild achieves higher combined macro-F1 and worst-group F1 (the minimum per-class F1 across homes) than DP-SGD in all five seeds at both model capacities under stratified and temporal splits. The tested DP-SGD configuration incurs pronounced minority-category losses, especially in the smaller home, but FS-mild does not uniformly improve on the full-feature baseline. On stratified-split models, loss-based and shadow-model membership probes show near-chance aggregate discrimination without a consistent ranking across probes; this does not establish equivalent privacy. These findings support FS as an input-minimization baseline, not a substitute for formal privacy. --- ### ITSY: Causal Discovery From Irregular Time-Series Data Authors: Wenbo Xu, Yue He, Yunhai Wang, Yueguo Chen, Kun Kuang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23516v1 Structural causal models for time series recover contemporaneous and lagged effects, but most methods require complete observation windows and become misspecified when samples are missing. We introduce ITSY, the first continuous-optimization method for causal discovery from irregular time series under a linear model. ITSY reformulates the structural equation so that prediction uses the nearest available history rather than the possibly missing current slice, and jointly imputes missing values while learning both graphs. A weighted reconstruction objective corrects the noise transformation induced by this reformulation. Across synthetic regimes varying missingness, scale, graph density, and noise, and on a real world benchmark, ITSY consistently improves graph recovery over representative SCM-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results establish a focused solution for irregular linear first-order dynamics and clarify the assumptions required for nonlinear or higher-order extensions. --- ### AgentBetta: Verification-Driven Adaptive Configuration of an AI Nano-Agent through Selective Expansion and Verified Contraction Authors: Md. Ashraful Babu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23512v1 Large language model agents are typically deployed with predefined configurations, although the required model capability, context, tools, permissions, memory, and computational resources can vary substantially across tasks. This study develops and evaluates AgentBetta, an adaptive AI Nano-Agent framework that represents these factors as an executable configuration and updates them through verification-driven diagnosis, selective expansion, and verification-based counterfactual contraction. The evaluation distinguishes controlled mechanism validation from external agent comparisons. On the AB-ConfigBench benchmark, AgentBetta achieved 91.38% verified success while reducing median context allocation from 64,000 to 8,000 context characters and median tool exposure from five tools to zero compared with the fully provisioned configuration. The configuration-deficiency diagnosis achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.819 with precision of 1.000 across the evaluated dimensions, and selective expansion avoided unnecessary changes to unrelated configuration dimensions. Post-success contraction preserved verification outcomes in 56.41% of evaluated one-dimension contraction probes, indicating that some successful configurations contained removable capability under the tested conditions. External evaluations indicate that adaptive configuration can improve the balance between verified task completion and capability exposure; however, the results vary across benchmarks and agent families. In particular, the cross-family replication did not reproduce the primary-backbone accuracy ordering, and specialized systems remained advantageous for certain task domains. These results support interpreting AgentBetta as a configuration-adaptation mechanism that regulates capability allocation and inference expenditure rather than as a universal replacement for specialized agent architectures. --- ### GARO: Geometry-Aware Redundancy Optimization for Real-Time and High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting Authors: Huiwen Xue, Kaixing Zhao, Zuheng Ming, Tingcheng Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23509v1 Novel view synthesis is a key task for dynamic scene reconstruction, where high rendering speed is essential for applications such as virtual reality. Existing deformable Gaussian Splatting methods achieve high-fidelity dynamic scene modeling, but still face limitations in memory usage and rendering efficiency due to the large number of redundant Gaussians. To address these challenges, we propose Geometry-Aware Redundancy Optimization (GARO), a unified redundancy measurement framework in the adaptive density control stage of the traditional dynamic scene reconstruction pipeline. This framework first selects low-gradient candidates using an optimization activity assessment strategy, and then evaluates geometric complexity through low curvature analysis to further filter and prune redundant points, resulting in a compact and expressive Gaussian representation. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GARO achieves robust trade-offs between quality and speed, with PSNR remaining stable and rendering speed improved by 2x, validating the efficiency and effectiveness of GARO. --- ### Heating in human-HVAC interaction for smart homes: An interdisciplinary overview Authors: Delong Korus-Du, Gunnar Stevens, Alexander Boden, Lenneke Kuijer, Apostolos K. Vavouris, Md Shajalal, Philip Engelbutzeder, Omid Veisi, Peter Tolmie Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23508v1 As part of HVAC systems, residential heating provides foundational infrastructure for human habitation in cold weather. However, research on how residents interact with HVAC systems, particularly heating systems, remains fragmented across architecture, engineering, informatics, physiology, psychology, sociology, and design. Based on 541 studies from these fields, this review integrates interdisciplinary research on Heating in Human-HVAC Interaction in smart homes.The resulting synthesis is conceptualized through the Situated Interaction Dynamics of control and feedback between users and systems. User-initiated interactions involve monitoring past and present system performance and planning future operation, while system-initiated interactions rely on sensor networks to trigger automation or provide information enabling user action. These interaction dynamics connect Residents' Experience and Practices with Heating in HVAC System Mechanics. Residents' Experience and Practices include thermal comfort and energy management, where thermal comfort involves both individual physiological and psychological experiences of indoor climate and social practices shaped by norms, empathy, and negotiation among cohabitants. Heating in HVAC System Mechanics includes thermal conditions and energy performance. Thermal conditions concern the regulation of air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air velocity, and relative humidity, while energy performance concerns efficiency and environmental impact. This overview highlights four interdisciplinary tensions: sensed versus lived conditions, personalization versus negotiation, efficiency versus health, and automation versus agency. The resulting framework offers a conceptual lens to interpret heating interactions and design Human-HVAC Interaction that balances IEQ-driven healthy thermal conditions, affordability, and sustainability. --- ### Detecting Phone-Induced Pedestrian Distraction via a Multimodal Fusion Transformer Authors: Yuanzhe Li, Hounian Liu, Xiaotong Chang, Yidi Huang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23507v1 The increasing reliance on mobile phones has made phone-induced pedestrian distraction increasingly prevalent. Activities such as texting, watching videos, and making phone calls have become significant contributors to traffic accidents. Reliable detection of pedestrian distraction is essential for autonomous vehicles, as it improves situational awareness and enables timely risk assessment, thereby supporting safe motion planning and vehicle control. We propose a multimodal fusion Transformer (MFT) for detecting phone-induced pedestrian distraction. MFT jointly extracts skeletal dynamics from body pose keypoints and visual appearance features from pedestrian images, effectively leveraging the complementary information provided by the two modalities. A cross-modal attention module is proposed to capture inter-modal dependencies through multi-head cross-attention, facilitating effective fusion of complementary information across the two modalities. Then, a temporal attention fusion module, implemented with a Transformer encoder, is employed to capture temporal dependencies. MFT is trained and evaluated on a manually annotated dataset comprising 287 pedestrian instances with 20,741 images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MFT attains an overall accuracy of 95%, exceeding the performance of six baseline approaches by 6%. --- ### Pay More Attention To Text In High-Resolution MLLMs Authors: Zhongkuan Mao, Wenzhuo Zhao, Xianjie Liu, Yidong Wang, Zhao Gao, Ronghao Xian, Yao Jiang, Yi Zhang, Liangjian Wen, Keren Fu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23495v1 Failures of high-resolution MLLMs are commonly attributed to a visual problem, motivating zooming, cropping, and related visual interventions to recover fine-grained evidence or suppress interference. Yet recent studies suggest that relevant visual evidence is already encoded in intermediate representations, indicating that visual-side improvements alone insufficient. This raises a natural question: does the remaining bottleneck lie in the text that guides visual search? We identify a previously overlooked linguistic bottleneck: questions formulated for answering do not necessarily specify the visual evidence required for localization. To address this mismatch, we introduce EviSpec, a training-free compiler that derives complementary evidence specifications while preserving the original question for final reasoning. We further validate it through matched-control experiments that isolate the roles of evidence specification and localization. With the search budget fixed, structured evidence specifications yield an 8.6% relative gain over generic requests. With evidence geometry matched, the evidence localized by EviSpec yields a 14.8% relative gain over random evidence. Together, these controls isolate the benefit of specifying what evidence to seek rather than merely expanding visual access. Across all five MLLMs, EviSpec consistently improves upon the corresponding baseline on each of the three benchmarks, yielding average relative gains of \textbf{10.4%, 8.8%, and 12.4%} on V\textsuperscript{*}Bench, HR-Bench-4K, and HR-Bench-8K, respectively. Beyond high-resolution reasoning, EviSpec also achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA and hallucination-focused benchmarks. --- ### CE$^4$L: Continual Ego, Exo, and Ego-Exo Learning Authors: Hongwei Yan, Kanglei Zhou, Yuchen Liu, Qingyu Shi, Yi Zhong, Liyuan Wang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23492v1 Perception for embodied agents is video-based, often multi-view (ego, exo, or both), and inherently continual, with simultaneous task and viewpoint shifts. Yet continual learning (CL) remains dominated by exo-only recognition tasks, obscuring behavior under these real-world coupled shifts. We introduce Continual Ego, E}xo, and Ego-Exo Learning (CE$^4$L), a unified multi-view CL benchmark spanning four representative tasks: cross-view referenced skill assessment, temporal action segmentation, cross-view association, and action anticipation & planning. CE$^4$L highlights challenges largely absent in prior CL benchmarks, including cross-view correspondence, view-dependent asynchrony, and heterogeneous semantic objectives. To this end, we propose Video Incremental Subspace-routed Task Adapters (VISTA), a parameter-efficient baseline method that stores task-specific updates in lightweight adapters and performs training-free routing via residual distance to task-specific whitened subspaces estimated from second-order statistics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significantly varied efficacy of representative CL methods across CE$^4$L settings, while VISTA is consistently competitive and achieves state-of-the-art overall performance. Our source code for benchmarks and methods is available at https://github.com/AnAppleCore/CE4L . --- ### BabelArena: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for LLM Agents Authors: Peng Kuang, Yuchun Fan, Jiangnan Li, Minghao Wu, Jialong Tang, Hao-Ran Wei, Weixuan Wang, Jianhong Tu, Baosong Yang, Tong Xiao Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23490v1 Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute multi-step workflows through tool use and interaction with users and environments. However, current agent evaluations are largely English-centric, limiting our understanding of agent capabilities in multilingual settings. We introduce BabelFlow, a benchmark-general agentic workflow that adapts existing agent benchmarks to new languages by analyzing runtime dependencies, coordinating structure-preserving translation, and combining multi-layer verification with human review to preserve task and evaluation semantics. Using BabelFlow, we construct BabelArena, a task-aligned benchmark comprising 16,146 instances derived from 702 canonical tasks across four benchmark families, 13 domains, and 23 languages. Experiments with five frontier models show that no single model dominates across benchmark families and that cross-language disparities extend well beyond task success. Lower-resource languages exhibit distinct failure patterns, with larger shares of tool-use and control-flow errors rather than answer-quality errors alone, pointing to gaps in reliable task execution across the resource levels of these languages. On the same tasks, agents in low-resource languages also consume substantially more tokens than in English (up to roughly twice the input) without proportional increases in interaction length, and language consistency degrades further on tasks requiring structured output, where switches are directed overwhelmingly toward English. We believe BabelArena provides a foundation for advancing research on reliable and efficient multilingual agents. --- ### Cognitive Action Reasoning for Proactive Robots from Human-Centered Multimodal Observations Authors: Zhihao Gu, Kechao Zhu, Yuanfeng Wu, Mohan Liu, Ankit Kumar Shaw, ChenDong Hong, Xuanyu Chen, Dengchen Mei, Xu Tianyi, Lin Wang Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23486v1 Robots operating in human-centered environments are typically designed to execute explicit instructions, and most robot-learning datasets likewise pair observations with task instructions or low-level actions. Although recent work has begun to explore proactive embodied assistance, existing resources target different settings and action levels, leaving real-world human-centered multimodal decision-making underexplored. We formulate this problem as \textit{Proactive Robot Action Reasoning} (\textit{ProRobo}), an upstream cognitive decision problem in which a robot must determine which action to take based on multimodal human and environmental cues without explicit action instructions. To support ProRobo, we introduce \textit{ProAction}, a real-world multimodal dataset containing 10K samples of visual observations, audio signals, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios in five common scenes. To construct cognitively grounded high-level action supervision, we develop a two-stage human-in-the-loop pipeline that combines appraisal-guided candidate generation with Affective Theory-of-Mind-guided human refinement, explicitly incorporating contextual judgment about human states, urgency, feasibility, and potential risk into action annotation. Based on this supervision, we benchmark representative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and introduce \textit{MMC2Act}, a reference model that implicitly learns the mapping from multimodal observations to cognitively grounded high-level actions. Experiments across modality settings, subject-disjoint generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and human evaluation show that general-purpose MLLMs struggle with proactively reasoning high-level actions from multimodal cues, whereas training on \textit{ProAction} substantially improves performance. --- ### Algebraic Consistency Alone Does Not Certify Temporal Structure in Latent Action Models Authors: Di Wen, Ruodi Zhang, Kailun Yang, Kunyu Peng Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23478v1 Latent action models infer a code for the transition between two frames of action-free video. Recent methods regularise this code to compose additively and reverse antisymmetrically, and report order-of-magnitude reductions in the resulting errors as a label-free certificate that the code has captured temporal structure. We show that this conclusion does not follow. Reconstruction drives the decoded transition toward a difference of state features, for which both identities hold for any pairing, a solution the metric cannot distinguish from one encoding nuisance state or a coordinate convention. Across five source domains, a trained but unconstrained counterpart already achieves 83-97% of the reduction relative to an untrained anchor. The residual fold is governed as much by the decoder family as by what is learned. A constrained model retrained after its temporal pairing is destroyed still reaches, in each domain, a lower error than the unconstrained model on real data. Downstream, preserving the temporal pairing yields no consistent advantage on LIBERO-GOAL or LIBERO-SPATIAL, and across the tested arms the code's mean linear action decodability falls as the algebraic error improves. We also test the most direct repair, a violation-contrastive objective that requires the algebra to fail on destroyed pairings: in the tested configurations it yields only a marginal separation within the reconstruction budget, on training and test triples alike. We recommend a validation protocol that these methods currently lack: a baseline-corrected metric, retraining on destroyed pairings, and a seed-budget analysis. --- ### Comparative Study of Quantum and Classical Machine Learning Models in Binary Classification Authors: Anand Kumar Mishra, Ramanuj Awasthi Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23476v1 A potential path forward is Quantum Machine Learning (QML), which aims to leverage quantum computing in conjunction with classical machine learning to enhance computing efficiency and the expressiveness of models. In this paper, two different quantum classifiers - Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) and Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machine (QSVM) - are compared with three classical classifiers as baseline classifiers - Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) - on the Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset. The quantum circuits were created in the PennyLane framework and simulated on a classical backend. However, in terms of accuracy, classical Logistic Regression performed better with an accuracy of 97.8%, classical SVM and QSVM with an accuracy of 95.6% each, although the Quantum VQC achieved a lower accuracy of 88.9% and had a recall of 100% for the benign class, though it correctly identified only 12 of the 17 malignant cases (a malignant-class recall of approximately 70.6%). The drawback of quantum models is the higher training time; however, since the quantum circuit needs to be classically simulated, the quantum SVM took 23.29 seconds compared to less than 0.01 seconds for the classical linear models. These results indicate that for small structured datasets, classifiers based on quantum computing have not yet surpassed well-tuned classical counterparts. In some respects (e.g., benign-class recall), they perform competitively, though not on malignant-class recall, where the VQC in particular performed worse than the classical baselines, which is worth further investigation on real quantum computers. --- ### RPMem: Learning Long-Term Recurrent Parametric Memory Across Sessions for LLM Agents Authors: Fanyu Zhao, Ruike Cao, Liang Dong, Fugen Yao, Jian Xu, Guanjun Jiang, Han Zhang, Yifei Zhao, Yinsheng Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23466v2 Long-running LLM agents require memory that persists and evolves across sessions. Text-based memory retrieves and reconstructs past interactions at every query, making long-horizon performance increasingly dependent on retrieval quality and contextual reasoning as histories grow. Parametric memory encodes experience directly into model computation, but existing approaches provide limited support for cross-session memory evolution. Their coupling to a specific backbone further restricts memory reuse after model replacement. We introduce RPMem, a two-stage architecture that compiles each session into a model-independent latent memory through forward computation and selectively integrates it with retained memory via a task-trained recurrent gate. The consolidated memory is then mapped to backbone-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters, allowing the encoding capability to transfer when the backbone is replaced. Evaluation across three long-term memory benchmarks and five diverse backbones demonstrates broad generalization with near-constant update cost and memory footprint. With Qwen3-8B on PERMA, RPMem reaches 85.52%, outperforming the strongest parametric and text-based baselines by 5.32 and 12.98 percentage points, respectively. Ablations validate the complementary roles of session compilation and cross-session consolidation, while dynamics analyses reveal that the gate acquires task-specific memory integration strategies. These results establish RPMem as a lifecycle-independent parametric memory framework that maintains evolving cross-session memory that remains reusable across backbone replacements. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Quark-Medical/rpmem/tree/main. --- ### Propose, Verify, Commit: Evidence-Grounded Memory for Long-Horizon Multi-Actor Conversations Authors: Zihao Lu, Zhihang Yuan, Lei Shi Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23465v1 Long-horizon conversational memory is especially challenging in multi-actor settings, where relevant evidence is distributed across participants and contexts and previously established information may later be revised. We introduce EGMEMORY, which formulates long-horizon multi-actor memory as a searchable state machine that separates persistent message-level evidence from an explicit active state. At write time, adaptive state resolution and an evidence-grounded propose-verify-commit protocol govern how this state evolves. At read time, adaptive evidence navigation iteratively resolves the state and supporting evidence required for a query, using conversational structure to narrow the search space and lexical-semantic relevance to rank candidates. The system operates through prompting and tool use without memory-specific policy training. EGMEMORY achieves 68.2% on GroupMemBench and 77.9% on EverMemBench, outperforming the strongest evaluated baselines by 22.7 and 21.4 percentage points, respectively. It further reaches 73.6% on the dyadic LoCoMo benchmark, demonstrating generalization beyond multi-actor conversations. We will release the codebase upon formal publication. --- ### Perplexity Predicts Protection: Choosing Pretrained Backbones for Worst-Client Fairness in Federated Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Authors: Kiran Naseer, Samreen Azhar, Umar Shoaib, Haroon Mahmood, Muhammad Awais Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23463v1 Federated learning lets multiple parties train a shared model without pooling their data, but a client with far less data than the others can end up poorly served even when the group's average accuracy looks fine. We ask whether the choice of pretrained backbone affects this under LoRA fine-tuning, and whether per-word perplexity on the target text predicts which backbone helps the worst-off client before federated training starts. We ran 313 experiments across three text-classification datasets and three similarly sized backbones (RoBERTa, BERTweet, PubMedBERT), each compared against a task-specific baseline on identical data splits. Lower-perplexity backbones consistently produced larger gains for the worst-performing client, with a rank correlation of -0.87 across nine dataset-backbone pairs; a backbone held out of the analysis confirmed the pattern. Personalization with Ditto recovered only 4-12% of the gap between training alone and full federation, and removing aggregation entirely erased the benefit. A client's update also showed no sign of conflicting with the group's update; the two are close to orthogonal, ruling out one proposed explanation for this failure. Practically: measure perplexity on a sample of task text before choosing a backbone, and do not rely on personalization to protect a data-poor client. We release our code, predictions, and full results for others to test. --- ### Long-Tail Rebalancing for Non-Verbal Vocalization-Aware ASR: A Track 1 System for the NVVSpeech Challenge Authors: Shangyue Jia, Jingru Ma, Yangzhuo Li, Daoping Luo, Bowen Tian, Hanchen Lu, Wenze Ren, Yunxiang Chen, Houdun Liu, Su Feng, Lei Xie, Liumeng Xue Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23462v2 Non-verbal vocalizations (NVVs) carry important paralinguistic information but are often omitted by conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The ISCSLP NVVSpeech Challenge requires joint transcription of lexical content and 16 NVV categories under limited and highly imbalanced supervision. We present a data-centric NVV-aware ASR pipeline based on cross-dataset label harmonization and a two-stage sampling schedule. We map heterogeneous source labels to the official taxonomy and exclude samples without a reliable mapping. Our schedule first uses square-root category sampling to moderate the long-tailed distribution and then applies uniform-category fine-tuning. On a fixed local validation split, square-root category sampling performs best among the tested single-stage settings. The final two-stage system obtains an official score of 63.86 and ranks fourth in Track 1. --- ### TRACE: Tractable Routing Autoencoder for Clinical ECG Authors: Shunbo Jia, Runze Ma, Haonan Lyu, Haijin Zhang, Qiang Yang, Caizhi Liao Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23460v1 Deep learning has advanced automated electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis, but the field's most accurate models, foundation models pretrained on millions of recordings, are not decision-pathway auditable: a clinician cannot trace a diagnosis to a physiological pathway or intervene on one. We propose TRACE, a Tractable Routing Autoencoder for Clinical ECG, whose 32-dimensional clinical latent space is specified in advance from domain knowledge rather than discovered by optimization. TRACE partitions this space into perfusion, structure, and conduction subspaces, routes each to its own diagnostic head by design, regularizes the partition with an orthogonality penalty, and reconstructs the ECG through a decoder that permits latent perturbation. On PTB-XL and Georgia, TRACE exceeds unconstrained classifiers and stays ahead of an ECG foundation model pretrained on ten million recordings, evaluated by linear probe on frozen features, at roughly an eighth of the parameter count. On the nine-label CPSC2018 cohort, which carries no structural class, the framework transfers with only the routing table re-specified to a perfusion/rhythm/conduction partition. Joint probe, erasure, and perturbation analyses verify the routing contract, and perturbing the depolarization and repolarization pathways modulates the reconstructed waveform. Removing the specified partition and its orthogonality penalty costs 1.70 AUC and 11.30 macro-F1 points on PTB-XL, and 2.76 AUC and 16.92 macro-F1 points on Georgia. A capacity-matched permutation control places arbitrary assignments within 0.34 AUC points of the ontology routing and leaves macro-F1 statistically level (p=0.619): the ontology supplies decision-pathway auditability at no macro-F1 cost. --- ### RLVR$^{2}$: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rubric-based Ranking Authors: Hao Li, Zhengkun Zhang, Gangqiang Hu, Zhen Zhang, Yude Gao, Dai Dai, Jing Liu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23457v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is expanding from tasks with well-defined correctness signals, such as mathematics and code, toward multifaceted quality requirements specified by multi-dimensional rubrics. Since policy optimization consumes one scalar per rollout, rubric-based pipelines must map multiple criterion scores into a scalar reward. This aggregation is often treated as score scaling, but it implicitly determines how quality dimensions trade off during training. The prevailing practice, normalizing each criterion and taking a linear combination, assumes that cardinal score differences are comparable across criteria and that gains on one criterion compensate for failures on another; both assumptions are unreliable when criteria are semantically heterogeneous. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rubric-based Ranking (RLVR$^2$), a verifiable ranking paradigm for rubric-based RLVR. For each criterion, RLVR$^2$ converts rubric scores into criterion-specific within-group ordinal outcomes, recovers a latent utility from the resulting comparison matrix, and merges these utilities into one training signal. By retaining only within-group ordering and discarding raw score magnitudes, RLVR$^2$ avoids calibrating heterogeneous rubric scales. It further supports objective-preserving attribute adjustment: auxiliary attributes that correlate with observed rankings but are not training objectives can enter the estimation without expanding the rubric or rewarding them directly. Across three model scales and 16 benchmarks, RLVR$^2$ consistently outperforms representative rubric-based baselines, achieving the best overall performance on most benchmarks at every scale. Analysis shows it controls systematic effects tied to reasoning efficiency and response formatting while preserving the quality objective. --- ### Rule-Constrained Assignment for Cue-Ball Identification in Broadcast Snooker Authors: Yuxin Cao, Wei Song, Yuezhong Wu, Jin Song Dong Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23450v1 Accurate cue-ball identification is essential for metric analysis of broadcast snooker. Existing systems evaluate each candidate independently against a fixed white prototype and reject candidates above an appearance threshold. Under broadcast conditions, illumination changes can make colored balls appear white, while intrusions from players and equipment can obscure the cue ball or introduce competing candidates. We formulate cue-ball identification as a rule-constrained assignment problem that jointly assigns detected candidates to the bounded snooker inventory: one cue ball, up to 15 reds, and six colors with known spots. The cue ball is selected by the incremental cost of assigning each candidate to the white slot, and the conventional appearance test follows as the one-slot case. On 419 hand-annotated shots, our method improves identity accuracy from 88.1% to 95.5%, and from 80.5% to 95.2% on held-out venues. Within CueLift, our metric state-recovery system, the assignment expands coverage from 36.2% to 55.4% over 6,241 scorable shots. Assigning an estimate to every shot in a separate evaluation on 2,529 shots preserves this advantage. --- ### PSD: Pseudo Self-Distillation of Memory Representation Capabilities for LLM Agents Authors: Pirzada Suhail, Menglin Xia, Xuchao Zhang, Mayukh Das, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23449v1 Memory systems are becoming a core component of LLM agents, but constructing and maintaining memory remains expensive because it relies on repeated calls to large proprietary language models. This cost creates a major barrier to deploying memory-enhanced agents at scale. In this paper, we present Pseudo Self-Distillation (PSD), a framework that enables small language models (SLMs) to construct hierarchical memory representations by distilling behavior from a strong black-box oracle through a multi-stage training pipeline. Standard distillation methods require access to teacher logits or hidden states, which closed models do not expose. Unlike conventional self-distillation settings, where supervision is derived from a model's own predictions, sampled rollouts, or aggregated outputs, PSD enables a single-model distillation setup while channeling external oracle knowledge through the prompt. PSD uses a single small model in two roles: a teacher that sees a privileged prompt containing the oracle's answer as reference context, and a student that sees only the task prompt. The student learns to reproduce the teacher's output distribution, absorbing oracle-guided behavior into its own weights without accessing the oracle's internals. On LoCoMo, PSD-trained Qwen3-0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B match or exceed GPT-4.1-mini on downstream retrieval at a fraction of the deployment cost, with off-policy PSD achieving the strongest results across most conditions. We further show that this memory-construction capability transfers out-of-distribution to LongMemEval, despite the students being trained exclusively on LoCoMo with no exposure to LongMemEval data. --- ### WaveletECO: A Closed-Loop Physical ECO Platform and a Specialized Local Language Model Authors: Guoxiang Xu, Guozhen Ji, Zijian Luo, Zhengrui Chen, Qi Sun, Cheng Zhuo Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23444v1 Engineering change order (ECO) is an important step in repairing timing and electrical violations during the late stages of chip design. Existing Agentic EDA methods primarily focus on tool invocation, with less attention to model decision quality and targeted training. A central challenge in ECO is multi-round decision-making: the model must use the results of each round to determine the next repair action. We propose WaveletECO, which integrates a closed-loop execution platform with large language models to enable agents to execute ECO decisions effectively. We also train a local 9B model through supervised fine-tuning and CPO-SimPO using execution demonstrations and decision-preference data, enabling ECO decision-making with a locally deployed model. Across 594 evaluation runs on 22 designs, WaveletECO-Policy (BF16) and (INT8) score 79.63 and 79.65, respectively, compared with GPT-6 Astra's 77.44. The estimated inference cost of INT8 is about 1/147 of GPT-6 Astra's. These results show that specialized model training supports effective, low-cost multi-round ECO repair, with repair quality retained under INT8 quantization. --- ### PhysReflect: Geometry and Perception Guided Diffusion for Physically-Plausible Mirror Reflections Authors: Shuheng Ge, Hongwei Ren, Li Zhang, Xiangqian Wu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23442v1 Diffusion models generate high-quality images, yet often violate the physical laws governing mirror reflections. Reflections often suffer from geometric aberrations, including positional offsets, directional misalignment, proportional imbalance, and structural distortion. These failures remain evident even in contemporary state-of-the-art generative systems. Existing methods itigate this problem through synthetic data scaling or auxiliary depth conditioning, yet their merely reliance on latent-space noise reconstruction losses as implicit supervision prevents direct enforcement of reflection-specific geometric and perceptual constraints. To bridge this gap, we present PhysReflect, a geometry and perception guided diffusion framework that decodes the predicted clean latent into pixel space at each training step and applies annealed supervision through two complementary differentiable objectives. The Geometric Loss enforces mirror-induced spatial consistency through sparse epipolar correspondence and dense boundary projection alignment, where a SAM2-based TwinTrack mechanism provides stable in-mirror localization for boundary-aware supervision. The Perceptual Loss preserves reflected appearance by combining Semantic Consistency Loss, which maintains reflected identity and appearance via DINOv2 features, and Lighting Consistency Loss, which regularizes depth, surface-normal, and illumination coherence under monocular geometry priors. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that PhysReflect outperforms prior mirror-reflection methods in geometric, perceptual, and physical-plausibility metrics, as well as qualitative visual results. --- ### GAPS: Generative Active Pseudo-view Selection for Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Hongfei Zhu, Haochen Deng, Sitao Zhang, Ling Zhou Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23436v2 Novel view synthesis from sparse observations is severely under-constrained. Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering, it produces floaters, broken geometry, and washed-out backgrounds when trained with few views. We propose an alternating optimization framework that uses a pre-trained image diffusion model to generate geometrically consistent pseudo-views for additional 3DGS supervision. Generation is constrained by depth-conditioned ControlNet, IP-Adapter style transfer, LoRA scene adaptation, and img2img structural anchoring. We introduce Generative Active Pseudo-view Selection (GAPS) to balance reconstruction informativeness and generative reliability when choosing target views. Its annealing schedule shifts from conservative interpolation early in training to exploratory extrapolation later, gradually covering unobserved regions. A dual-criterion admission gate and uncertainty-weighted losses reject unreliable generations, while density-adaptive DropGaussian reduces overfitting in complex scenes. On LLFF with 3/6/9 views, our method improves average PSNR over vanilla 3DGS by 0.40/0.89/0.70 dB. On Mip-NeRF 360 with 12/24 views, the gains are 1.18/0.80 dB. SSIM improves and LPIPS decreases in every setting. Ablations show that active selection and density-adaptive regularization are both necessary; only the full method reduces LPIPS below the no-pseudo-view baseline on unbounded 360-degree scenes. --- ### Tool-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Domain Adaptation in Sequence-Based Omics Tasks Authors: Jie Ying, Zhefan Wang, Zihong Chen, Zhengqing Li, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jian Liu, Fang Hu, Tao Luo, Zhonghang Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Stan Z. Li et al. Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23435v1 Multi-omics sequences contain complex biological patterns, yet deciphering their mechanisms for automated scientific discovery remains challenging. As large language models (LLMs) interpret these sequences, evaluating both predictions and scientific reasoning is critical. However, existing benchmarks for multi-omics sequence tasks rely on classification and regression metrics, neglecting whether models grasp the underlying biological evidence. We introduce OmicsBench, the first reasoning benchmark for multi-omics sequences, comprising 1,160 expert-validated questions across six tasks spanning DNA regulation, RNA processing, and protein function. OmicsBench requires traceable evidence chains, evaluated using instance-specific rubrics developed with domain experts. Evaluating 17 LLMs reveals an inverse relationship: while scientific LLMs outperform general-purpose LLMs in sequence classification accuracy, they fail to provide valid evidence to support their predictions. One plausible interpretation is shortcut learning: specialized models may rely on statistical patterns rather than the biological mechanisms needed for scientific discovery. Motivated by this finding, we introduce tool-augmented on-policy distillation (TA-OPD), a post-training method to align sequence prediction with evidence-grounded biological reasoning. Across five Qwen3.5 models spanning 0.8B to 27B parameters, TA-OPD consistently strengthens biological evidence grounding while improving predictive performance on most tasks. These gains persist across model scales, indicating that stronger sequence reasoning does not arise solely from increased model capacity, but can be improved through evidence-aware training. Together, OmicsBench and TA-OPD provide a framework for diagnosing reasoning failures in multi-omics LLMs and a path toward models whose predictions are better grounded in biologically meaningful evidence. --- ### HOIBlender: Blending Lightweight Detection with Vision-Language Priors for Efficient Human-Object Interaction Detection Authors: Junwen Chen, Keiji Yanai Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23431v2 Human-object interaction (HOI) detection requires grounding an interacting human-object pair and recognizing the verb that links them, often under severe long-tail supervision. Recent methods improve accuracy with stronger detectors and vision-language priors, but many still stack heavy transformer encoders, intricate denoising schedules, or post-hoc semantic calibration on top of the detector. We present \textbf{HOIBlender}, an efficient HOI detector named after its core design principle: blending detector-grounded visual tokens, spatial subject-object reasoning, and BLIP-2 semantic priors inside one lightweight decoding pipeline. HOIBlender builds on an RF-DETR/LW-DETR-style foundation with a DINOv2 backbone and selects top-$K$ image-conditioned tokens directly from the multi-scale projector as subject and object candidates, removing the dedicated encoder stage retained by prior HOI methods. A dual-stage decoder first stabilizes human-object geometry and then performs verb and HOI classification through progressive BLIP-2 prior fusion, with classifier weights initialized from BLIP-2 text embeddings for long-tail categories. Grouped-query training further enriches optimization without increasing inference cost. Across three model scales (Nano, Small, 2XL), HOIBlender consistently outperforms SOV-STG-VLA and Hybrid-SOV-VLA on HICO-DET, reaching $44.49$ Default Full mAP in only $9$ training epochs while maintaining competitive latency and parameter budgets. These results show that lightweight detection, structured spatial-semantic decoding, and deeply integrated vision-language priors can be blended into a single efficient HOI pipeline. --- ### RSPDBench: Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models on Earth Observation Tasks Under Physically Grounded Remote-Sensing Product Degradations Authors: Tanjim Bin Faruk, Khondaker Masfiq Reza, Shrideep Pallickara, Sangmi Lee Pallickara Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23427v2 Vision foundation models targeting Earth observation (EO) tasks are commonly evaluated on clean downstream benchmarks, but operational EO products can already contain spatial, radiometric, alignment, noise, and harmonization defects before reaching the model. Existing robustness evaluations often use generic image corruptions or broad domain shifts, which do not isolate these product-level failure modes. We introduce \textbf{RSPDBench}, a physically grounded \textbf{r}emote-\textbf{s}ensing-\textbf{p}roduct \textbf{d}egradation \textbf{b}enchmark for vision foundation models. RSPDBench evaluates five EO datasets, seven foundation-model entries, and two supervised baselines under audited primitive degradations and compound product chains. Each model is evaluated under its clean-selected native protocol, with robustness measured as the drop from its own clean baseline. Our analysis reveals that degradation sensitivity is strongly structured: resolution-conditioned and channel-grouped encoders protect different failure axes, and the same physical defect can hurt one model while helping another. Compound chains expose failures that isolated degradations do not predict, with model-dependent amplification, saturation, or component dominance, and excess drops up to $38$ percentage points beyond the strongest component. These results show that EO robustness cannot be characterized by clean accuracy or generic perturbation tests alone; it must also be measured against the structured defects that remote-sensing products carry into deployment. --- ### Semi-automated reconstruction of indoor geometry from 360-degree video for CFD-based airflow analysis in classrooms Authors: Dhruv Gamdha, James Afful, Shambhavi Joshi, Ulrike Passe, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CE, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23425v1 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used to evaluate ventilation and contaminant transport in occupied buildings, but deployment at scale is limited by three bottlenecks: acquiring room geometry without costly scanning hardware or manual CAD modeling, decomposing the scene into individually manipulable objects, and reconfiguring those objects for alternative layouts without re-capturing the room. We present a semi-automated workflow that converts a single 360-degree video of a room into individually editable, simulation-ready geometry assets. A dense point cloud is reconstructed using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and 2D instance masks from text-prompted SAM 3 segmentation are lifted to 3D using multi-view consensus and depth-band filtering. Points are separated into object instances with an octree, and occlusion gaps are healed with a connectivity graph. Chair templates are fitted by Iterative Closest Point (ICP) alignment, and table geometry is generated procedurally. A browser-based editor supports quality assurance and rapid construction of alternative layout configurations. A steady Reynolds-averaged OpenFOAM solution then drives transient passive-scalar transport; the setup is verified using a mesh-sensitivity study and validated against an IEA Annex 20 benchmark. We apply the workflow to two university classrooms and a tiered lecture-hall auditorium. The capture-to-geometry pass takes two to five hours per room on a consumer workstation. In a controlled obstruction sequence in one classroom, the modeled half-clearance time varies non-monotonically as furniture is added, and a cross-room comparison indicates that clearance behavior cannot be reliably extrapolated between rooms, motivating per-room geometry acquisition. By making that acquisition low-cost, the workflow makes geometry-resolved comparative ventilation studies practical for spaces such as classrooms. --- ### RiverVLN: Phase-Grounded Temporal Vision--Language Navigation for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Authors: Jieling Wu, Yuehao Huang, Jiajun Lv, Tao Huang, Yong Liu, Weiwei Liu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23423v1 Vision-language navigation (VLN) has largely been developed for indoor and terrestrial robots, where language can often be treated as a static goal and motion is approximated by discrete or near-instantaneous actions. These assumptions break down for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs): river navigation requires continuous motion under inertia and limited maneuverability, while long-horizon instructions must be executed through sparse and visually ambiguous maritime landmarks. We introduce RiverVLN, to our knowledge the first benchmark designed for long-horizon USV VLN under continuous riverine motion, and PGT-NAV, a phase-grounded temporal navigation framework for USVs. Rather than directly mapping an entire instruction to motion, PGT-NAV converts it into an ordered sequence of visually verifiable semantic phases and maintains the active phase online through grounded visual and motion evidence. This explicit semantic progress state is fused with visual-motion history and phase-specific grounding to predict six local SE(2) pose increments. The resulting trajectory is executed in a predict-execute-re-observe loop, where the vessel executes toward W3, updates phase and grounding, and replans through a map-based safety layer. Experiments show that PGT-NAV substantially reduces recursive position and heading drift relative to GNM-style and ViNT-style baselines and achieves an average success rate of 0.79 in Unity-ROS closed-loop navigation. Unseen bridge-opening trials and real-world USV experiments further demonstrate that the phase-grounded representation transfers from controlled evaluation to physical USV deployment. --- ### Beyond PUE: A Local Impact Audit Framework for Data Center Environmental Accountability Authors: Sharifa Sultana, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23421v1 Standard data center sustainability metrics, including Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), measure a facility's resource use and emissions intensity, normalized to IT energy use, without directly representing local resource scarcity, infrastructure capacity, or social footprint. This gap has become politically consequential. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, local opposition delayed or canceled roughly $130 billion in projects across the United States, driven overwhelmingly by recurring concerns over water use, power demand, infrastructure capacity, and transparency rather than internal efficiency, matching the total for all of 2025 (11). We propose a five-category local impact audit framework covering efficiency, water stewardship, carbon and renewables, regulatory compliance, and local disclosure. The framework is designed for recurring quarterly assessment and independent verification against public records. We illustrate its application using publicly available data from three Illinois facilities that are currently at the center of local policy disputes, and we examine the data-access barriers that constrain independent verification. We position this framework as both a research contribution and a practical instrument for county-level policymakers evaluating data center permitting and moratorium decisions. --- ### Omni2Web: Benchmarking Audiovisual Website Development Authors: Minghao Han, Zhenghao Xing, Xize Cheng, Yuxuan Wang, Junming Lin, Ling Wang, Yinsong Yan, Yunfei Chu, Qize Yang, Jin Xu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23417v1 Screen-recorded web editing requests contain weak deictic expressions such as ``this'' and ``there,'' whose referents depend on speech, cursor trajectories, page state, and edit history. Such requests require intent recovery beyond the explicit specifications assumed by many existing web-editing benchmarks. We introduce Omni2Web, a bilingual benchmark of 918 instances spanning 13,907 edit steps. It defines three complementary tracks: Direct Editing evaluates webpage editing from recordings, Instruction Recovery measures explicit intent recovery, and Instruction Utility tests whether recovered instructions can drive a fixed code executor. We evaluate 17 open- and closed-source models. The best models attain 51.17 on the Edit Fidelity Score (EFS) for Direct Editing and 49.14 on the Instruction Recovery Score (IRS); under the fixed executor, the strongest recovered instructions reach 51.08 EFS, still far below the 89.69 EFS obtained with oracle instructions. Step-level analyses show that correct grounding does not guarantee successful edits, while some Omni models recover instructions that the fixed coding model executes substantially better than their direct edits. Controlled ablations further demonstrate the value of temporally aligned audiovisual evidence, while alternative judges preserve the leader and broad ordering. Together, these findings reveal substantial headroom in multimodal intent recovery and code execution and highlight the promise of pairing Omni rewriters with coding models. --- ### MuLA-Bench: A Multilingual Long-Form Audio Understanding Benchmark via Multi-Tier Auditing Authors: Zeyu Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Zibo Bi, Pei Zhang, Xize Cheng, Jin Xu, Baosong Yang, Satoshi Nakamura Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23416v1 Long-form audio performance is often summarized by context length and aggregate accuracy, obscuring how language, evidence, and task jointly shape difficulty. We introduce MuLA-Bench: 5,038 open-ended questions over 1,769 in-the-wild recordings totaling 1,377.9 hours, covering 16 languages and eight domains. A balanced Language x Domain semantic track supports controlled comparisons, while a complementary acoustic track preserves naturally occurring non-speech evidence. Evidence-grounded generation, shortcut checks, and language-expert review provide auditable questions without translating a shared source set or injecting target sounds. We evaluate ten audio-language models and conduct pooled diagnostics on a fixed eight-model cohort. Language rankings change across domains and tasks; acoustic-semantic performance gaps vary with the requested operation; and temporal errors can persist after the correct event is identified. Long-range retrieval is comparatively strong, while precise clock alignment and factual grounding of natural acoustic events remain fragile. MuLA-Bench thus exposes conditional failure patterns that a single long-context score does not capture. --- ### Retrieval Geometry Shapes Cache-Based Clip Adaptation Authors: Mahir Shahriar Tamim, Md. Samiul Alim, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Shahriyar Zaman Ridoy, Meharun Nesa, Mohammad Abu Yousuf, Alex Lamb, Mohammad Ali Moni Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23409v2 Cache-based test-time adaptation improves CLIP predictions by storing and retrieving examples from the target stream while keeping the model frozen. However, existing methods largely treat the feature space used for image-image retrieval as fixed, leaving open how much adaptation depends on the retrieval space itself. We study this question by fixing the memory and changing only the retrieval encoder, finding that the same memory can yield very different gains: across sixteen retrieval spaces, ImageNet-A cache gain ranges from at most +0.44 points for CLIP and MAE to +19.7 +/- 0.4 for DINOv2-L, while label-free retrieval-space selection retains 98% of oracle gain on ImageNet-V2. These results show that memory quality depends not only on which examples are stored, but also on how they are retrieved. Motivated by this finding, we propose MARC (Memory Augmented Retrieval for CLIP), a training-free system that uses frozen CLIP for prediction and DINOv2-B for retrieval with a single fusion weight. A single-view cache repairs 1074 +/- 21 baseline errors, compared with 878 +/- 4 for a 64-view ensemble, at roughly one seventh of the cost. Across four ImageNet distribution shifts, MARC reaches a 67.91% OOD average and, at matched DINOv2-B scale and eight views, achieves 64.17 +/- 0.31% versus 62.75 +/- 0.15% for a graph-based cache system while running 2.6 times faster. Overall, our results establish retrieval space as a first-order design choice for robust cache-based adaptation in remote sensing, scientific imaging, and changing visual environments. --- ### Accurate Motion Estimation with Bézier Control Point for Efficient Frame Interpolation Authors: Shuhao Han, Chenyang Wu, Chun-Le Guo, Zheng-Peng Duan, Zhen Li, Ming-Ming Cheng, Chongyi Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23408v1 In frame interpolation tasks, motion ambiguity in the training set causes models to generate blurry intermediate frames. Moreover, the assumption of uniform motion between frames during inference further leads to inaccuracies in the generated intermediate frames. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Accurate motion estimation algorithm with Bézier Control point, ABC-Inter, for efficient frame Interpolation. Specifically, ABC-Inter designs an Accurate Flow estimation Module (AFM) by decoupling two-frame features and mapping to corresponding coordinates to better estimate the optical flow between the two frames. Furthermore, ABC-Inter eliminates motion ambiguity in the training set by introducing Bézier control points that are computed using the input frames and the intermediate ground-truth (gt) frames. This allows the model to estimate accurate optical flow between two frames during the training process, thereby solving the blurriness problem in the generated intermediate frames during inference. Benefiting from the more accurate flow estimation between two frames, we can introduce additional frames and directly use multiple flows to calculate Bézier control points for modeling non-uniform motion without retraining the model. Simultaneously, to realize the estimation of non-linear motion using only two frames, we also introduce a new Bézier control point estimation module which achieves better motion estimation between the two frames by performing fine-tuning on the model in the second stage. Experimental results demonstrate that our ABC-Inter achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets and exhibits excellent visual perception. --- ### OmniEcho: Audio-Visual Spatial Understanding for Omni-Modal Embodied Agents Authors: Ruixun Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Jiacheng Xie, Yuhuan You, Donghua Cai, Junming Lin, Xiong-Hui Chen, Zhifang Guo, Yunfei Chu, Qize Yang, Xize Cheng, Jin Xu et al. Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23407v2 Humans can effortlessly localize the direction of a sound source and integrate it with visual cues for reasoning, yet this remains challenging for embodied agents. In particular, it is still unclear how to effectively evaluate and model spatial audio understanding in embodied settings. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{OmniEchoBench}, a unified benchmark for spatial audio-visual perception and audio-vision-language navigation. OmniEchoBench comprises six tasks over 197 real-world spatial audio-visual scenes, 2,972 question-answer pairs, and 900 navigation samples with first-order ambisonics (FOA) audio collected from 30 real-world environments. To enable scalable training supervision, we develop a controllable rendering pipeline for spatial audio. It preserves geometric consistency among sound sources, visual observations, and agent trajectories. Building on this, we propose \textbf{OmniEcho}, a spatially aware omni-modal model. It introduces an FOA spatial encoder alongside a pretrained semantic audio pathway. Extensive experiments show that OmniEcho achieves state-of-the-art performance on spatial audio-visual perception. For our sound-guided navigation, OmniEcho reaches a performance level close to that of traditional vision-language navigation. These results demonstrate that spatial audio can serve as a valuable signal for embodied scene reasoning and navigation, while also highlighting fine-grained spatial localization and distance estimation as important open challenges. Our code and data will be available in https://github.com/PKU-VaLuE-Lab/OmniEcho/tree/main --- ### ScaleBlind: Point Cloud Completion under Unknown Scale Authors: Shenghui Wu, Chen Wang, Yuan Feng, Guangshun Wei, Yuanfeng Zhou, Changjian Li Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23404v1 Point cloud completion aims to infer a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud and serves as a fundamental building block for downstream tasks such as reconstruction, editing, and simulation. Despite the recent progress, existing learning-based methods often implicitly rely on access to the ground-truth shape scale (GT-scale) during both training- and testing-time normalization, assuming privileged information that is unavailable in real-world inference. This hidden assumption limits practical deployment and can lead to severe completion artifacts, e.g., over- or under-completion and nested shells, once the oracle GT-scale cue is removed. We observe that the recent foundation image generation models exhibit a strong capability of understanding objects and geometries, and producing multi-view consistent renderings, making them promising priors for GT-scale-free 3D completion. Motivated by this insight, we propose ScaleBlind, a novel framework that leverages foundation-model-based image completion to recover global scale directly from partial inputs and then faithfully produces the 3D completion. Specifically, ScaleBlind dreams out complete multi-view appearances from rendered partial views, lifts the inferred missing regions back into 3D to obtain a geometry-aware coarse completion, and further refines it via a powerful cross-modal fusion network with the original partial point cloud. By harnessing 2D foundation priors, our method eliminates the need for accessing GT-scale information at inference. Moreover, it provides a principled bridge between 2D generative priors and 3D point cloud completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework, making ScaleBlind the new state-of-the-art for the point cloud completion task. --- ### Enhancing Shrimp Disease Detection via Deep Learning and Data Refinement for Resilient Aquaculture Authors: Vinh Canh-Thanh Truong, Hai-Binh Pham, Ngoc Hong Tran Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23397v1 Shrimp diseases continue to cause devastating losses in the aquaculture industry, driving a critical need for robust, automated detection. This work contributes the first application of Vision Transformers (ViT) and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to the shrimp farming domain, addressing both performance bottlenecks and data labeling challenges. We propose two deep learning pipelines to classify four key diseases: Healthy, Black Gill (BG), White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV), and a co-infection of both using a dataset of 4,348 images. First, our supervised transfer-learning approach leverages ImageNet-pretrained ViT-Small/16 and EfficientNet backbones. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning framework (SimCLR) with a ViT-Small encoder to extract robust representations from unlabeled images prior to fine-tuning. Our results establish strong new baselines for sustainable aquaculture monitoring. The supervised approach achieves an outstanding 96% accuracy with fast convergence, outperforming traditional generic models, while the label-efficient SSL approach reaches a highly competitive 85% validation accuracy. --- ### Blind Thermodynamic Ontology Discovery from Anonymous Experiments Authors: Linzhe Zhang, Changming Xu Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23387v1 Before a machine learning model can learn a thermodynamic equation of state, it must discover what its measurements represent: which channels scale with system size, which are intensive conjugates, how sectors pair through contact, and which potential governs stability. When sensors expose only an unknown linear mixture of extensive states and intensive responses, passive observations cannot disentangle physical quantities from coordinate artifacts. We formulate the problem of discovering this hidden thermodynamic ontology directly from anonymous controlled experiments. We present an operational identifiability theory and a constructive polynomial-time algorithm that extracts extensive and intensive scaling sectors from replication contrasts, recovers their dual cotangent pairing from thermal contact and reciprocity, verifies a globally admissible concave potential via discrete cyclic concavity, and determines an invariant matroid of reservoir ensembles. We prove that the residual observational equivalence is strictly (x, lambda) ~ (A x, a A^{-T} lambda + beta), establishing the sharp observational limit that no permitted experiment can break. Blind evaluations on van der Waals fluids and Curie-Weiss magnets confirm robust recovery under ill-conditioned mixing, correctly resolving anonymous Maxwell tie-lines while rejecting non-equilibrium continuations. External validation across six real fluids from the NIST WebBook demonstrates that operational ontology discovery transfers across real physical substances without coordinate leakage. --- ### ProxyBuild: Text-Guided Structured 3D Building Generation with Mesh-Anchored Procedural Proxies Authors: Xiang Tang, Ruotong Li, Xiaopeng Fan Published: 2026-09-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23386v1 Text-guided 3D building generation holds tremendous application potential, yet existing generative models typically output inseparable single meshes or non-interactive rendered representations. While procedural modeling can generate editable buildings with hierarchical structures, rule authoring is laborious, and even with the aid of large language models (LLMs), it remains challenging to effectively solve procedural rules under geometric constraints. In this paper, we propose ProxyBuild, a novel hybrid framework for structured building generation. We introduce the Mesh-Anchored Procedural Proxy (MAPP) as a novel intermediate representation, which tightly anchors building components onto geometric shells, thereby decoupling the generation task into two phases: proxy prediction and proxy-to-asset instantiation. First, we construct a building dataset with MAPP annotations to train our designed face-edge bigraph encoder. By explicitly modeling the feature interactions of topological elements on heterogeneous mesh graphs, this encoder accurately infers the semantic roles of faces and edges. Subsequently, conditioned on textual styles and attribute parameters parsed by LLMs, we accomplish high-precision asset retrieval and assembly by integrating a spatial placement logic with hard constraints. Extensive experiments show that ProxyBuild not only significantly mitigates common issues in building generation such as over-smoothing, component collisions, and structural corruptions, but also accurately parses semantic-free shells from diverse sources. Outperforming prior baselines across various metrics, our method can robustly generate structurally clear, detail-rich, and post-editable 3D buildings from text, thereby providing a reliable and interactive content foundation for downstream applications such as virtual reality and digital twins. ---