# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 131 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #6501–6550 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/131 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/130.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/132.md) ### Moral Entropy: Auditing Bias and Uncertainty in Moral Judgment Authors: Maciej Skorski Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21992v1 Most work in computational ethics treats annotator disagreement on moral content as noise to be voted away, collapsed into majority vote or the more permissive any-annotator rule the moment a single annotator flags an item. We argue this uncertainty should instead be modeled and learned from. We introduce Moral Entropy, a Bayesian framework that keeps a full posterior over the true label and decomposes its entropy into aleatoric uncertainty (irreducible disagreement about the moral content) and epistemic uncertainty (from insufficient or noisy annotation) -- and lets any heuristic consensus rule be audited against a calibrated ground truth via entropy methods such as cross-entropy/KL, Brier score, and expected calibration error. Across three corpora and fifteen discourse domains, auditing the standard aggregation rules against this posterior reveals bias that no current pipeline reports: the any-annotator rule disagrees with the calibrated posterior on roughly 30% of items -- pooled, almost entirely false positives, though the errors invert at the foundation level (19.9%/38.9% mean FPR/FNR on MFTC) -- while the stricter majority and two-vote rules miss 63-83% of true positives. --- ### Time series generation with spectrally aligned latent flow matching Authors: Camilo Carvajal Reyes, Felipe Tobar Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21989v1 Latent flow models have proven to be a reliable and cost-effective method for time series generation. However, the latent compression induces unwanted artefacts, such as a spectral mismatch with respect to the underlying dataset, thus hindering their use as training surrogates. In this article, we propose a spectrally-aligned latent-flow time series generator, where the latent space for flow matching is trained to preserve dynamical properties that are relevant for the suitability of synthetic samples. We find that incorporating fine-tuning losses based on canonical signal representations such as the Fourier, wavelet and signature transforms helps overcome these issues. The interpretability of these transformations allows us to ensure that the synthetic signals are aligned with the true ones in terms of relevant features, such as smoothness or targeted spectral content, as opposed to relying on pointwise reconstruction losses only. We compare the proposed aligned models against a base latent-flow model and the state of the art over real-world long-range univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets. Our quantitative results validate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of its performance on metrics reflecting signal realness and computational efficiency, while being aligned to the training set with respect to its local structure. --- ### Multiplicative Optimism for Constant Regret in Games Authors: Ashkan Soleymani, Georgios Piliouras Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21976v1 We introduce Multiplicatively Optimistic Regret Matching (MORM), an uncoupled learning rule for finite general-sum games. Under simultaneous full-information self-play, every player achieves external regret $O(\sqrt n\log d)$ uniformly over all horizons, using only one-step optimism. The analysis combines a potential-based regret-matching argument with multiplicative stability and Hellinger control of strategy movement. A learning-rate safeguard additionally gives $O(\sqrt{T\log d})$ regret in the face of adversarial utilities. --- ### NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities Authors: Jagadeesh Balam, Travis Bartley, Edresson Casanova, Sanjay Chauhan, Chen Chen, Zhehuai Chen, Zijia Chen, Francesco Ciannella, Slyne Deng, Mikyas Desta, Harishchandra Dubey, Slim Essid et al. Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21967v1 We introduce NemotronLabs VoiceChat, an open full-duplex speech-to-speech model with native tool-calling capabilities. NemotronLabs VoiceChat combines a streaming speech encoder and decoder-only language model with parallel specialized output streams for agent text and structured function calls, an auxiliary RNN-T branch for incremental user transcription, and a streaming TTS decoder. This design enables the model to listen, transcribe, reason, invoke tools, and speak within a unified streaming architecture while preserving the temporal behavior required for natural conversation. On Full-Duplex-Bench 1.0, NemotronLabs VoiceChat achieves the lowest pause-handling takeover rates among evaluated open-weight systems, 100\% takeover following user interruptions, and a 4.33/5 post-interruption response-quality score. On Full-Duplex-Bench 1.5, it resumes its response after user backchannels in 93\% of cases. NemotronLabs VoiceChat obtains a 55.1 normalized average on VoiceBench and, on Full-Duplex-Bench 3.0 (FDB 3.0), achieves 82.5\% tool-selection F1, while argument accuracy and end-to-end tool execution remain areas for improvement. These results demonstrate that full-duplex interaction, speech recognition and generation, general language capabilities, and external tool use can be integrated in a single open speech-to-speech model without sacrificing real-time conversational behavior. --- ### Learning Cardiac Features: ECG Biometrics Across Time and~Exercise Authors: Luca Thiebaud, Paul Chauchat, Mustapha Ouladsine, Stéphane Delliaux Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI, q-bio.TO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21962v1 Electrocardiograms (ECGs) carry subject-specific patterns enabling reliable individual discrimination, forming the basis of ECG biometrics. Beyond authentication, this paradigm holds significant potential to secure sensitive cardiac data and to serve as a pretext task in self-supervised learning. Yet, most studies remain confined to singlesession, resting data, leaving robustness to temporal and physiological variations largely untested. We address this gap by evaluating ECG biometrics under realistic conditions involving exercise-induced stress and cross-session variability. A Siamese ResNet with late multi-lead fusion strategy is trained on a large ECG dataset extracted from cardiopulmonary exercise tests and evaluated with a exercise-and time-aware protocol, as well as on public benchmarks. This first extensive assessment of ECG biometrics under combined physiological and temporal variability achieves an intra-session rest-to-peak EER of 1.7% and stateof-the-art 3.9% on the CYBHi dataset. Findings support the presence of an intrinsic cardiac signature resilient to physiological and temporal drift. --- ### Schedule optimization for tau-leaping in masked discrete diffusion Authors: Cecilia Secchi, Giacomo Zanella Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: math.ST, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21960v1 Masked discrete diffusion models are commonly accelerated using the so-called tau-leaping discretization method, which reveals several coordinates in parallel at each sampling step. The sampler replaces the joint conditional law of each revealed block by a product distribution, incurring a factorization error $\varepsilon_\text{fact}$ present even with perfectly learned predictors. We analyze the standard sampler on $N$ coordinates with $K$ sampling steps, whose random block sizes depend on a denoising schedule. Our analysis uses an exact integral representation of $\varepsilon_\text{fact}$ in terms of a distribution-dependent dependence density $ρ$, which records how conditional dependence evolves as the revealed fraction of coordinates grows. We develop estimators for this profile and quantify how estimation errors affect schedule selection. We derive recursive stationarity equations for the finite-$K$ optimization problem and, under a monotonicity condition, characterize its unique optimizer. In the joint limit $N,K\to\infty$, we obtain an explicit characterization of the optimal limiting smooth schedule and quantify the cost of random block sizes relative to a deterministic planner. When $ρ_N$ converges uniformly to a strictly positive continuous profile, optimizing over fixed smooth schedules can improve the leading constant but not the $N/K$ scaling of $\varepsilon_\text{fact}$. By contrast, if $ρ_N$ degenerates, suitable schedules can improve the asymptotic order relative to the uniform schedule. Examples based on stationary processes and exchangeable mixtures illustrate these two regimes. --- ### RACER: Role-Aligned Competence Estimation for Human-AI Routing Authors: Joshua Strong, Emma Sun, Alexander Capstick, Pramit Saha, Cheng Ouyang, J. Alison Noble Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21953v1 Learning to defer asks a predictive system when to act autonomously and when to defer to a human expert. Population-adaptive deferral extends this problem to unseen experts using a small context set of expert behavior. Neural context encoders such as L2D-Pop can be query-dependent, but may learn routing shortcuts tied to absolute class coordinates. Identity-Free Deferral (IFD) removes such shortcuts through role-indexed classwise competence profiles, but its estimates are constant within each class and cannot capture instance-level expert specialization. We propose RACER---Role-Aligned Competence Estimation for Routing---a role-relative framework for estimating an unseen expert's competence from context. RACER estimates the posterior-predictive probability that the expert is correct on a query under each candidate class role, then combines these estimates with the model posterior to obtain the Bayes-relevant expert-correctness probability. Nonparametric and neural kernel-pooling estimators use candidate-role relations, shared aggregation, and symmetric summaries, excluding absolute class-identity channels. We prove coherent class-relabelling invariance, derive a Bayes-aligned deferral surrogate, and give a plug-in regret bound relating routing regret to classifier and competence-estimation error. On controlled synthetic benchmarks, including a PathMNIST histopathology context-scaling study with simulated experts, RACER benefits from additional context under hidden subtype dependence and gives the strongest aggregate performance on a separately sampled unseen-expert split in the CIFAR-100 synthetic experiments. On the radiologist and human--AI chest-radiography benchmarks (VinDr-CXR and CheXpert), the RACER family is competitive or best in budget-swept deferral, with calibration results varying across metrics and datasets. --- ### GALA: Geometry-Aware Latent Action Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Model Pretraining across Embodiments Authors: Yichen Liu, Puzhen Yuan, Xiang Zhu, Yanjiang Guo, Jianyu Chen Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21948v1 Learning large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models from multi-embodiment datasets remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces across end effectors. Although latent action models (LAMs) can learn embodiment-agnostic action representations from diverse video data, existing image-based LAMs often fail to capture fine-grained end-effector articulation, particularly finger-level geometric changes in human and dexterous robot hands. To address this limitation, we propose GALA, a Geometry-Aware Latent-Action modeling framework that augments image-based latent actions with 3D end-effector geometric motion. However, naively incorporating point clouds yields fine-grained action representations with limited shared semantics, hindering cross-embodiment pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce the Unified End-effector Motion Representation (UEMR), which preserves fine-grained motion information while improving the cross-embodiment generalizability of latent actions. Building upon UEMR, GALA combines visual latent actions that capture scene-level dynamics with geometric latent actions that capture shared fine-grained end-effector articulation, providing effective supervision for VLA pretraining from multi-embodiment data, including action-free ego-centric human videos. Experiments on fine-grained motion probing, cross-embodiment retrieval, and downstream VLA evaluation demonstrate GALA's effectiveness in modeling generalizable fine-grained motions across embodiments, achieving 68.3% RoboCasa-GR1 success rate and 75.5% real-world success rate. Code, appendix, and demos are available at https://puzhenyuan.github.io/GALA-website/. --- ### Learning to Move Cities: Deep Meta-Models and Reinforcement Policies for Calibration and Control in Urban Networks Authors: Adewumi Augustine Adepitan, Christopher J. Haruna, Oluwasegun Adegoke, Ayooluwatomiwa Ajiboye, Oluwatobi Oluwasakin Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21945v1 Urban transportation networks present complex optimization challenges spanning calibration of high-fidelity simulators and real-time operational control. This paper presents a shared latent-space framework that connects simulator calibration and reinforcement learning control through a common learned representation of urban traffic dynamics. First, we develop a combinatorial MLP-autoencoder architecture that learns low-dimensional manifolds linking simulator inputs (origin-destination demand, network parameters) to outputs (travel times, congestion patterns), enabling efficient Bayesian optimization for calibration. This approach demonstrates superior sample efficiency compared to traditional dimension reduction methods, achieving better fit to observational data within fixed computational budgets. Second, we implement a deep Q-learning agent with experience replay and target networks to optimize dynamic traffic assignment through scheduling and routing adjustments. In empirical evaluations on benchmark networks, our approach reduces system-wide travel times by up to 51% compared to baseline operations. The learned latent representation is not only used to reduce the dimensionality of Bayesian calibration, but is also incorporated into the reinforcement learning state representation, allowing the control policy to operate on compressed and calibrated traffic dynamics. This shared latent-space formulation provides a unified pathway from simulator calibration to adaptive operational control within intelligent transportation systems. Our results highlight the transformative potential of deep learning methods in urban mobility planning and management, particularly for large-scale networks where traditional optimization approaches face computational bottlenecks. --- ### Guiding Agents of Quantum Games to Equilibrium using Matrix Exponential Fixed-Point Iteration Authors: Alireza Habibi, Luis F. Abanto Leon, Setareh Maghsudi Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: quant-ph, cs.GT, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21944v1 In recent years, quantum game theory has gained significant attention as a framework for studying decision-making in multi-agent systems using quantum principles. However, computing equilibrium strategies is challenging because the dimension of the joint Hilbert space grows as the product of the players' local dimensions. In this paper, we consider an extended Gutoski-Watrous (EGW) game in which each player's quantum strategy is represented by a local density matrix. We derive tensor-contraction expressions for the payoff functions and their gradients, thereby avoiding the explicit construction of the full joint density matrix and its computationally expensive multiplication by the payoff operators. Building on the resulting effective Hamiltonians, we propose the Matrix Exponential Fixed-Point Iteration with Annealing (MEFPIA) algorithm to search for equilibrium points in EGW games. We compare MEFPIA with the Matrix Multiplicative Weights Update (MMWU) algorithm in terms of convergence. For the tested instances and parameter settings, both algorithms approach the same strategy profiles and payoffs, while MEFPIA achieves lower relative error in fewer iterations. These results indicate that MEFPIA is a promising numerical method for equilibrium search in multi-agent quantum games. Our findings provide important insights into the quantum game theory's potential for addressing complex decision-making processes, as well as opening up new paths for future research and exploration in multi-agent quantum systems. --- ### When Should a Failing Robot Ask? Initiating Corrective Human-Robot Dialogue from Audited Sensor Evidence Authors: Eshika Pathak, Leela Krishna Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21942v1 A robot that fails at a task faces the first decision in corrective dialogue: act on its own diagnosis, consult another onboard sensor, or interrupt a person. Choosing well requires knowing how much the robot's sensors reveal about the cause and how reliable the robot's own diagnosis is. We build a simulated benchmark in which every failure's true cause is known, because we injected it, and measure what each sensor reveals, with explicit checks against data leakage. Some failures are diagnosable from camera images; others only from the robot's force data (0.99 from force data, no image method above 0.55). We then test six open vision-language models. Their behavior tracks the surface of the prompt, not the evidence: moving the refusal option from last to first in the answer list collapses refusal rates from 78-100% to 0-6% in three of the six swept model-and-family pairs. Accuracy from frames stays at or below a majority-class baseline under every prompt variant, with or without worked examples, and stated confidence carries no information about correctness. Handing the same models the force data as ten lines of text produces the first above-baseline diagnoses, in four of the six models: much of the failure reflects missing sensor data, not missing ability. We pose the choice as a three-action decision problem, act, consult your own sensors, or ask a human, whose optimal policy follows from measured accuracy. The models do not follow it, and their ask rates ignore a fourfold change in question cost. One question to a human still lifts them from that baseline to roughly the answerer's own reliability (0.70-0.81 when they ask). The decision to ask should be tied to measured accuracy and stated costs, not to the model's confidence. --- ### End-to-End Hard-Label Cryptanalytic Model Extraction Using Efficient Sign Recovery Authors: Akira Ito, Takayuki Miura, Yosuke Todo Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21941v1 The importance of deep neural networks (DNNs) is widely recognized, and the parameters obtained through training are regarded as valuable assets. Recently, attacks that extract these parameters using only oracle queries to a DNN have been actively studied at IACR conferences. The hard-label setting is the most challenging setting for model extraction, where an adversary can observe only the final output label, such as "dog" or "cat." At Eurocrypt 2025, Carlini et al. proposed polynomial-time hard-label extraction of ReLU-based MLPs. However, one step of this attack process, i.e., sign recovery, requires a large number of queries and substantial computation. Implementing this step in a black-box setting remains difficult. Consequently, a fully black-box end-to-end demonstration on trained deep ReLU MLPs has remained a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new sign-recovery algorithm based on a completely different principle from the existing method. Our method requires no dedicated queries for sign recovery. In our experiments, it achieves higher sign-recovery accuracy than the existing method. Consequently, it enables efficient sign recovery even for trained models. With our sign-recovery algorithm, all steps of hard-label model extraction can be implemented in a black-box setting. By combining these implementations, we demonstrate end-to-end model extraction from models trained on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, with width 16 and 4 or 6 hidden layers, achieving over 98% label agreement. --- ### AutoViewMem: Self-Configuring Orthogonal Views for Conversational Long-Term Memory Authors: Zijie Cao, Xijun Qu, Zhicheng Gu, Xiaoshu Chen, Duanyang Yuan, Yanning Hou, Sihang Zhou, Jianxing Gong, Jian Huang, Yang Mei Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21940v1 Long-term memory is essential for large language model (LLM) agents to maintain consistency and personalization over extended interactions. Existing memory systems typically rely on fixed granularities or static schemas, but these designs struggle when heterogeneous information, such as preferences, events, constraints, and temporal updates, is embedded in a single mixed representation. The resulting semantic interference makes top-K retrieval sensitive to noise and often leaves relevant evidence poorly ranked. We present AutoViewMem, a data-driven framework that organizes long-term conversational memory into self-configuring, low-overlap semantic views before indexing. AutoViewMem discovers candidate views from interaction traces, selects a compact complementary view set, and uses these views to guide write-time structured extraction of provenance-grounded memories. This representation-first design moves semantic disentanglement from retrieval time to write time, allowing standard top-K similarity search to retrieve focused evidence without explicit routing or iterative retrieval. We further apply offline consolidation to improve memory compactness and consistency. Experiments on the LoCoMo and PersonaMem benchmarks, under both Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones, show that AutoViewMem improves long-horizon question answering and personalization over strong memory baselines while preserving a simple inference pipeline. --- ### Info3R: Information-Adaptive Test-Time Training for 3D Reconstruction Authors: Sunghyun Baek, Hanna Bae, Minchan Kwon, Junmo Kim Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21938v1 Transformer-based models have recently achieved strong performance on 3D reconstruction from images, and recent works extend them to process video streams in an online manner for real-world deployment. However, existing methods overlook two key signals when handling long image streams: the importance of each incoming frame and the information saturation of the model's internal state. In this paper, we propose Info3R, a novel information-adaptive test-time training method for the online 3D reconstruction. We introduce an information-aware state update that modulates the state update strength based on the redundancy and informativeness of each incoming frame. To restore the state's plasticity -- its capacity to incorporate new observations -- we propose a dynamic state reset, triggered by the cumulative magnitude of state updates and the model's prediction confidence and accompanied by an anchor-to-world alignment. Our method achieves consistent improvements on camera pose estimation, video depth estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while substantially mitigating the performance degradation in the long sequence evaluation. Notably, on KITTI Odometry, our method achieves on average 1.68x lower ATE than LongStream, demonstrating its robustness on extended outdoor sequences. --- ### Joint Remaining Useful Life Prediction and Capacity Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Partial-Charging Data Authors: Khoa Tran, Ho-Si-Hung Nguyen, Phone Wai Yan Moe, Hung-Cuong Trinh, Thi-Hoang-Giang Tran Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21932v3 Joint remaining useful life (RUL) prediction and capacity estimation require representations of both gradual degradation and recent battery behavior. This paper presents a cross-expert framework using partial-charging measurements without requiring measured historical full-cycle capacity as an input. The RUL Expert captures long-term degradation from nominal 10-min segments sampled across a 30-cycle history, while the Capacity Expert characterizes recent battery behavior from statistical descriptors of nominal 40-min segments over ten consecutive cycles. Their complementary representations are integrated through feature-wise linear modulation for joint RUL and capacity prediction. A key contribution is a three-stage training strategy that progressively controls frozen and trainable components: supervised representation pretraining, independent expert pretraining, and final fusion training with both experts frozen. This staged optimization preserves expert-specific degradation knowledge while improving the balance between the two prediction tasks, with RUL treated as the primary prognostic objective. On two public battery-aging datasets, the reference configuration achieves mean RUL root-mean-square errors of 143.69 and 161.10 cycles and capacity errors of 12.36 and 7.28 mAh, respectively. On Dataset I, cross-expert fusion reduces both mean errors relative to either standalone expert. The proposed framework achieves the lowest reported RUL RMSE among the compared methods on both datasets while maintaining competitive capacity-estimation accuracy. --- ### Joint Remaining Useful Life Prediction and Capacity Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Partial-Charging Data Authors: Khoa Tran, Ho-Si-Hung Nguyen, Phone Wai Yan Moe, Hung-Cuong Trinh, Thi-Hoang-Giang Tran Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21932v1 Joint remaining useful life (RUL) prediction and capacity estimation require representations of both gradual degradation and recent battery behavior. This paper presents a cross-expert framework using partial-charging measurements without measured historical full-cycle capacity as an input. The RUL Expert encodes nominal 10-min segments from ten cycles sampled within a 30-cycle history using a pretrained gated recurrent unit (GRU) encoder, a two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN), and a temporal GRU. The Capacity Expert processes statistical descriptors of nominal 40-min segments from ten consecutive cycles using a 2D-CNN and a Transformer. A feature-wise linear modulation module uses the short-term representation to condition the long-term representation for joint prediction. Training comprises supervised autoencoder pretraining, independent expert pretraining, and fusion training with frozen experts. On two public battery-aging datasets, the reference configuration achieves mean RUL root-mean-square errors of 143.69 and 161.10 cycles and capacity errors of 12.36 and 7.28mAh, respectively. On Dataset I, fusion reduces both mean errors relative to either standalone expert. The results demonstrate a trade-off between RUL and capacity accuracy: the proposed method attains the lowest reported RUL RMSE among the compared methods on both datasets, whereas several baselines yield lower capacity errors. --- ### Kinks vs. Smoothness: Identifiability of Real Analytic nICA for Laplace-like Sources Authors: Isaac Manring, Kejun Huang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21926v1 Many machine learning systems try to explain complex data - like images or financial time series - in terms of hidden, independent factors that generated them. Recovering the true underlying factors, rather than some scrambled version of them, is the central challenge of nonlinear Independent Component Analysis (nICA). We prove identifiability (exact recovery) up to trivial ambiguities for real analytic generating functions when source probability density functions have a finite number of discontinuities in the first derivative. The Laplace distribution is the most prominent example satisfying this assumption. Our proof relies on the contrast between kinks in the source distribution and the smoothness of real analytic functions. Real analytic functions comprise a broad class of generating mechanisms, and can be approximated with Normalizing Flows or Variational Autoencoders with standard activation functions (e.g., tanh, softplus, GELU), so our result applies with minimal changes to existing training pipelines. We perform experiments on real and synthetic data with both Normalizing Flows and Variational Auto-Encoders demonstrating their identifiability properties. In experiments on CelebA data we recover several interpretable latent factors controlling unique attributes across the dataset. --- ### What Should We Ask Next? Retrieval-Aware Question Learning for Interactive ReID Authors: Lyucheng Qian, John Yuehan Zhang, Pingyu Wang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21924v2 Interactive retrieval with partial evidence constitutes a sequential information-acquisition problem: an agent must choose questions that acquire useful evidence for the next retrieval update. Existing systems train this decision by imitating an offline ordering of candidate QA pairs. However, a question's value depends on the response it elicits and its downstream effect on retrieval. We establish that candidate discriminativeness and perceived usefulness provide weak supervision for this objective, then introduce RAVEL, a retrieval-aware online reinforcement learning framework for interactive person re-identification. RAVEL initializes from supervised question generation, observes the current Top-4 candidates directly, and optimizes the question policy with rank feedback from the full question-answer-retrieval loop. Experiments on Interactive-PEDES show that RAVEL delivers progressively stronger retrieval performance across five interaction rounds. Further analysis shows that RAVEL allocates more of its interaction budget to localized open-ended prompts targeting specific attributes. --- ### What Should We Ask Next? Retrieval-Aware Question Learning under Partial Evidence Authors: Lyucheng Qian, John Yuehan Zhang, Pingyu Wang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21924v1 Interactive retrieval under partial evidence is a sequential information-acquisition problem: an agent must decide which question will create the most useful evidence for the next retrieval update. Existing systems train this decision by imitating an offline ordering of candidate QA pairs, although question value is determined by the response it elicits and its downstream effect on retrieval. We establish that candidate discriminativeness and perceived usefulness provide weak supervision for this objective, then introduce RAVEL, a retrieval-aware online reinforcement learning framework for interactive person re-identification. RAVEL initializes from supervised question generation, observes the current Top-4 candidates directly, and optimizes the question policy with rank feedback from the full question-answer-retrieval loop. Experiments on Interactive-PEDES show that RAVEL delivers progressively stronger retrieval performance across five interaction rounds. Further analysis shows that RAVEL reallocates the questioning budget toward localized open-ended attributes, which provide more useful retrieval evidence and yield the largest gains on initially difficult queries. --- ### Riemannian Simultaneous Inference for Tangent Vector Field Regression Authors: Xiaotian Chang, Yangdi Jiang, Qirui Hu Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21910v2 We consider nonparametric tangent vector field regression on a Riemannian manifold without boundary. Because responses at different points lie in different tangent spaces, the proposed kernel estimator first parallel transports nearby responses to the target tangent space and then forms a volume-corrected local average. We first derive its uniform second-order bias, finite-bandwidth covariance, and stochastic rate. For simultaneous inference, the tangent norm is written as a supremum over the unit tangent bundle. Exact covariance whitening gives a unit-variance Gaussian field whose correlation length is of order $h$ along the base manifold and of order one along the fibre. Its local covariance geometry leads to a Gumbel limit with an explicit intrinsic constant. Combining this limit with Gaussian approximation and cross-fitted covariance estimation yields a feasible simultaneous confidence tube for the regression field. We further discuss improved finite-sample inference with bandwidth selection and high-order bias corrections. Simulations on various manifolds support the proposed inference procedure. A randomized reconstruction of global wind data illustrates how the tube's cross-sections describe spatially varying uncertainty. --- ### Riemannian Simultaneous Inference for Tangent Vector Field Regression Authors: Xiaotian Chang, Yangdi Jiang, Qirui Hu Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21910v1 We consider nonparametric tangent vector field regression on a Riemannian manifold without boundary. Because responses at different points lie in different tangent spaces, the proposed kernel estimator first parallel transports nearby responses to the target tangent space and then forms a volume-corrected local average. We first derive its uniform second-order bias, finite-bandwidth covariance, and stochastic rate. For simultaneous inference, the tangent norm is written as a supremum over the unit tangent bundle. Exact covariance whitening gives a unit-variance Gaussian field whose correlation length is of order $h$ along the base manifold and of order one along the fibre. Its local covariance geometry leads to a Gumbel limit with an explicit intrinsic constant. Combining this limit with Gaussian approximation and cross-fitted covariance estimation yields a feasible simultaneous confidence tube for the regression field. We further discuss improved finite-sample inference with bandwidth selection and high-order bias corrections. Simulations on various manifolds support the proposed inference procedure. A randomized reconstruction of global wind data illustrates how the tube's cross-sections describe spatially varying uncertainty. --- ### Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning Authors: Ayah G. Ahmad, Claire E. Borden, Maegan Tucker Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21909v1 In this work, we conduct a systematic comparison of two state-of-the-art motion-imitation reinforcement learning (MIRL) pipelines, one built on SCONE/HyFyDy and one built on MuJoCo/MyoSim. HyFyDy emphasizes physiological realism through detailed musculotendon modeling, while MuJoCo prioritizes computational efficiency and scalable policy learning. While recent work has demonstrated that both pipelines reproduce human kinematics with high fidelity, it remains unclear if they accurately capture the underlying neuromuscular behavior that produced the movement. This limitation is particularly important for robotic assistive-device design and control, where outcome measures such as muscle activation patterns and metabolic cost are often used as optimization targets. To conduct a systematic comparison, our work compares both pipelines using a common set of human motion-capture and electromyography (EMG) measurements. The results find that while both pipelines produce similar kinematics with relative accuracy, the muscle activations from HyFyDy are more aligned with the experimental EMG, as supported by the average pooled (RMSE, r) values for muscle activations from HyFyDy and MuJoCo: (0.164, 0.4) and (0.344, 0.11), respectively. While we conclude that the more advanced physiological realism of HyFyDy currently makes it more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, both require further development to bring physiological realism to GPU-parallelizable simulation environments and advance robotic assistive device design. --- ### Intervention Granularity Matters: Coherent Treatment Bundles in Counterfactual Simulation with Clinical World Models Authors: Fangzhou Wang, Yixuan Yang, Camilla Balzarotti, Rishikesan Kamaleswaran Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21906v1 Counterfactual simulation with a clinical world model means fixing a patient's history, changing the treatment, and reading off the predicted response. Doing so requires deciding what counts as one intervention. In clinical settings, interventions are documented as bundles: a co-occurrence audit of 945,707 patient-hours from MIMIC-IV shows groups of components, such as every parameter of a dialysis circuit, that never appear apart, so an edit that changes one component on its own describes an hour that never occurs in the data. We hypothesize that the granularity at which an intervention is edited changes how a world model responds, and test this with Clin-JEPA, a latent world model of patient trajectories conditioned on hourly treatment text. At 1,019 documented onsets of invasive ventilation, we keep the patient's history and other treatments fixed and compare editing one ventilator setting with editing the complete configuration recorded for a real patient with the most similar recent trajectory. The complete bundle moves the predicted next state further than any single setting, consistently across all five settings, and the difference remains after accounting for how much each edit changes the model's input. Intervention granularity therefore materially affects the response of a clinical world model: single-component edits may understate treatment sensitivity, and bundle-aware editing may offer a better-supported basis for counterfactual treatment simulation. --- ### The Role of Radiometric Features in Cross-Site Leaf-Wood Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds Authors: Roman Kaharlytskyi, Derek T. Robinson, Roberto Guglielmi Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21903v1 Leaf-wood segmentation of individual trees from LiDAR point clouds is essential for quantitative structure models (QSMs) used in non-destructive biomass estimation. Existing segmentation methods typically exclude radiometric features (e.g., intensity, return number) to maximize cross-sensor compatibility. We challenge this design choice by evaluating cross-site and cross-platform generalization: training on the public Heidelberg dataset (terrestrial TLS, 1550nm) and testing on a novel dataset from Ontario, Canada (RPA-LS, 905nm). Results show that geometry-only methods - including state-of-the-art deep learning models trained on high-density LiDAR datasets - fail to generalize to the sparse, top-down geometry of aerial scans, achieving F1 scores <= 0.56. Incorporating radiometric features (intensity, return number, number of returns) improves F1 to 0.61, but more critically, increases wood recall by 119% from 0.16 to 0.35. Furthermore, geometry-only approaches often result in fragmented stem and branch components. We find that leveraging radiometric features preserves greater structural connectivity, resulting in more coherent architectures that are better suited for QSM reconstruction. We demonstrate that while geometric patterns are view-dependent and prone to overfitting scan patterns, radiometric features encode physical material properties that generalize across disparate sensors and environments. --- ### ExpBoN: Exponential-Noise Best-of-$n$ for Efficient Test-Time LLM Alignment Authors: Yanxiao Liu, Sicheng Wan, Deniz Gündüz Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21899v1 Best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling is a simple yet effective inference-time alignment method, but hard maximization provides only coarse control over the trade-off between reward and distribution shift. Soft Best-of-$n$ (Verdun et al. 2025) provides smoother control and converges to the optimal distribution associated with KL-regularized reward maximization. In this paper, we introduce ExpBoN, an alternative soft BoN method based on the exponential-noise report-noisy-max mechanism. It admits an exact finite-$n$ decomposition, which yields exponentially fast convergence in total variation, expected reward, and both directions of KL divergence. We provide comprehensive theoretical analyses of its convergence and regret behavior. We further integrate ExpBoN into the guided speculative inference (GSI) framework (Geuter, Mroueh, and AlvarezMelis 2025), resulting in ExpGSI, for efficient reward-guided LLM alignment. ExpGSI yields substantial reductions in computational cost while maintaining comparable accuracy. Experiments on MATH500, MMLU-STEM, and Minerva Math with the Qwen2.5-Math and Qwen3 model families show that ExpGSI reduces estimated computation by $14\%$-$39\%$ across candidate budgets for Qwen2.5-Math and by up to $45\%$ at $n=16$ for Qwen3. Overall, our results provide a theoretical and algorithmic foundation for exponential-noise BoN and efficient test-time LLM alignment. --- ### LLMs as Feature Engineers for Text-and-Tabular Prediction Authors: Merwan Barlier, Blaz Skrlj Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21894v1 We introduce an iterative framework that automates the extraction of interpretable, schema-bound categorical features from unstructured text for tabular prediction models. To navigate the feature space, a generator LLM proposes semantic definitions, a separate extractor LLM materializes the features, and a downstream tabular model evaluates their predictive performance. We optimize this search by translating explicit model errors, such as AUC ranking inversions, into natural-language feedback, steering the LLM to resolve specific predictive failures. Evaluated across three public datasets, this error-driven loop accelerates feature discovery by up to $3\times$ compared to unguided search. Empirically, the generated features demonstrate strong multi-view complementarity, strictly outperforming any subset when combined with TF-IDF and dense embeddings. Finally, the framework guarantees instance-level interpretability: the discovered features dominate SHAP importance rankings and provide a fully transparent, semantic audit trail for every prediction. --- ### Detecting Pretraining Data in Large Language Models from a Free-Energy Perspective Authors: Chenye Ke, Zirui Liu, Qi Liu, Yan Zhuang, Jintao Zhang, Zhenya Huang, Shijin Wang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21888v1 Detecting pretraining data in large language models is challenging because high likelihood can reflect either training exposure or strong generalization. In the joint space of prediction loss and predictive entropy, a likelihood-only detector uses a horizontal boundary and can mistake predictable non-members for members. Motivated by this, we introduce an inclined boundary that evaluates prediction loss relative to predictive entropy. Our analysis shows that entropy correction can preserve the expected membership signal while reducing its variance, thereby improving standardized member--non-member separation. We further extend the mean--variance analysis to the more general setting with a nonzero mean entropy gap. Interestingly, this entropy-adjusted score admits a Helmholtz free-energy interpretation, leading to Energy Transfer Detection (ETD), which views pretraining data detection from a macroscopic residual free-energy transfer perspective. Extensive experiments show that ETD achieves the best average detection performance, improving average AUROC by up to 3.5\% and TPR@5\%FPR by up to 5.1\%, while remaining robust across diverse settings. --- ### Catena: A Comprehensive Software Suite for Large-Scale Connectomics Authors: Samia Mohinta, Pedro Gómez-Gálvez, Shi Yan Lee, Daniel Franco-Barranco, Michael Clayton, Stephan Preibisch, Jan Funke, Albert Cardona Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21887v1 The gold standard datasets for mapping connectomes are electron microscopy volumes of densely labeled neural tissue at nanometer resolution. Yet reconstructing and proofreading neuronal arbors and annotating all synapses requires pipelining multiple software tools that are often fragmented, inconsistently maintained, or proprietary, hindering reproducibility and automation. Here, we introduce Catena, an open-source, comprehensive, developer-centric software suite for connectomics that integrates modules for 3D neuron and organelle segmentation, synapse detection, microtubule tracking, and neurotransmitter inference. Catena organizes its modules in composable, chunk-wise processing pipelines in a completely documented, extensible, and adaptable design. We further reduce compute and ground-truth data requirements with pretrained machine learning models, facilitating fine-tuning. Catena ships fully containerized modules that encapsulate evolving dependencies for consistent execution across workstations and clusters. By consolidating open components, shareable models, and containerized runtimes, Catena delivers a reproducible and scalable approach to mapping cellular connectomes from electron microscopy volumes. Code and documentation: https://github.com/Mohinta2892/catena.git --- ### Near-Optimal Acceleration for Smooth $\ell_p$ / $\ell_q$ Nondual Convex First-Order Oracle Optimization Authors: David Martínez-Rubio, Brian Bullins, Cristóbal Guzmán, Mathieu Molina Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21880v1 We study the optimization of convex objectives with $(L,κ-1)$-Hölder-continuous gradients in $\ell_q$ over $R B_p^d$, $1<κ\le 2$. (MG26) provides selectors with a movement bound for the problem of chasing high-dimensional convex nested sets for every $p<q$ and generally reduces Lipschitz convex optimization to bounds on the movement of selectors. We couple that movement with Hölder descent yielding a polynomial-runtime first-order method whose feasible output, in the high-dimensional regime $T\le d$ and for $p<\min\{q,2\}$, has error $$ \widetilde O_{κ,p,q}\!\left( \frac{LR^κ}{T^{κ(1+1/p-(1/q-1/2)_+)-1}} \right), $$ after $T$ queries to a first-order oracle, solving the COLT 2015 open problem of (Guz15), up to logarithmic factors. At $(p,q)=(1,2)$, the rate is $\widetilde{O}(LR^κ/T^{2κ-1})$, including $\widetilde{O}(LR^2/T^{3})$ cubic decay in the smooth case. --- ### Benchmarking the Explanatory Quality of Open-Weight Vision-Language Models in Face Recognition Authors: Laurent Colbois, Sébastien Marcel Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21879v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently been proposed as promising tools for face recognition, as they can produce natural language explanations alongside similarity scores. This capability is considered appealing for face comparisons in forensic contexts, which require decisions to be transparent and auditable. However, existing evaluations of VLMs for that use case focus mostly on recognition accuracy, while the validity of generated explanations remains unquantified. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking framework for VLM-based face recognition that treats explanation quality as a core evaluation axis. We propose two criteria that explanations should satisfy: relevance, i.e., reliance on identity-stable facial features; and faithfulness, i.e., alignment with the visible image content without hallucinated features. We jointly develop a methodology enabling the quantification of relevance and faithfulness of evaluated models, based on constraining model outputs to a structured explanation format that supports automated querying and auditing. Using this framework, we benchmark several families of open-weight VLMs, jointly evaluating face verification accuracy and explanation quality. Our results highlight remaining shortcomings of produced explanations, and emphasize the need for such explanation quality metrics to get a complete picture of model performance. The proposed benchmark and open-source evaluation harness provide a foundation for proper benchmarking and future fine-tuning of explainable face recognition systems. --- ### Geometric Mean Pooling for Equal-Weight Multiplicative Coarse-Graining Authors: Ang-Kun Wu, Fangdi Wen, Jingtao Zhang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21876v2 As an alternative to the additive and extremal biases of average and max pooling, we introduce Geometric Mean Pooling (GMP), a signed pooling operator that combines the product of feature signs with the geometric mean of feature magnitudes. Motivated by local-to-global composition in quantum many-body physics, GMP retains both joint sign information and a characteristic multiplicative scale without introducing learnable pooling parameters. We show that non-overlapping hierarchical GMP preserves the corresponding global multiplicative statistic and evaluate it on synthetic sequence tasks, iterative coarse-graining, image classification, and molecular lipophilicity regression. On the synthetic tasks, GMP recovers product-based signals more accurately than average and max pooling and maintains predictive performance under the tested levels of multiplicative input noise. On image and molecular data, however, its effectiveness depends on the representation, target parameterization, and placement of local and global pooling. These results position GMP as a complementary, regime-dependent inductive bias for tasks in which equal-weight multiplicative composition is plausible, rather than as a universal replacement for standard pooling operators. --- ### Geometric Mean Pooling for Equal-Weight Multiplicative Coarse-Graining Authors: Ang-Kun Wu, Fangdi Wen, Jingtao Zhang Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21876v1 As an alternative to the additive and extremal biases of average and max pooling, we introduce Geometric Mean Pooling (GMP), a signed pooling operator that combines the product of feature signs with the geometric mean of feature magnitudes. Motivated by local-to-global composition in quantum many-body physics, GMP retains both joint sign information and a characteristic multiplicative scale without introducing learnable pooling parameters. We show that non-overlapping hierarchical GMP preserves the corresponding global multiplicative statistic and evaluate it on synthetic sequence tasks, iterative coarse-graining, image classification, and molecular lipophilicity regression. On the synthetic tasks, GMP recovers product-based signals more accurately than average and max pooling and maintains predictive performance under the tested levels of multiplicative input noise. On image and molecular data, however, its effectiveness depends on the representation, target parameterization, and placement of local and global pooling. These results position GMP as a complementary, regime-dependent inductive bias for tasks in which equal-weight multiplicative composition is plausible, rather than as a universal replacement for standard pooling operators. --- ### Chronosphere: Space-Time Tessellation of Local Climate Experts Authors: Daniel Cher, Eric Xing, Kexing Li, Brian Wei, Isaac Corley, Nathan Jacobs Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21872v1 We introduce Chronosphere, a spatio-temporal neural field that learns representations of climate. A central challenge in geographic representation learning is modeling environmental processes whose spatial and temporal complexity varies widely. Yet existing location encoders typically fix a single level of detail everywhere. Global bases such as spherical harmonics spread capacity uniformly across space and time. Localized bases resolve only predefined regions. Learned tessellations adapt, but are inefficient at representing higher frequencies. Chronosphere unifies these approaches, pairing an adaptive tessellation of learnable sites on the spacetime torus $S^2\times S^1$ with a shared bank of local basis functions. Both where capacity is placed and how much detail each region carries adapt to the data, across space and time. Trained to reconstruct climatology, Chronosphere matches or leads state-of-the-art location encoders across spatial and temporal tasks, with the largest gains under spatial and temporal transfer. --- ### Neural Cellular Automata Learn General Features in their Hidden Channels Authors: Etienne Guichard, Stefano Nichele Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21870v1 Modern deep learning models achieve impressive generalization through over-parameterization, but this paradigm often struggles with overfitting and memorization in few-shot regimes. Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) offer a highly parameter-efficient alternative, yet research has focused primarily on their output, leaving the role of their internal hidden channels largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the internal dynamics of NCA hidden channels and introduce a novel transfer-learning mechanism that injects a pretrained teacher's hidden states into a student model to guide early optimization. Evaluated on few-shot and scale-variant MNIST benchmarks, NCAs outperform comparable recurrent and feed-forward architectures, demonstrating superior generalization with a minimal parameter budget (~9,800 parameters). Mechanistic analysis reveals that the hidden channels decouple feature extraction from uniform classification consensus by absorbing morphological complexity and converging to mutually orthogonal states. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these hidden channels capture general, scale-invariant topological primitives rather than class-specific templates. This allows a student model to achieve strong few-shot performance on unseen classes using features transferred from a teacher trained only on a subset of digits (0-5). Our results highlight the potential of utilizing hidden-state dynamics as a robust, decentralized computational substrate for parameter-efficient transfer learning --- ### Morphology-Aware Ambiguity Learning for Wafer Defect Decision Support Authors: Seungjun Chu, Seokhyun Chung Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21866v1 Wafer map defect recognition is commonly formulated as a fixed-taxonomy classification problem that assigns each wafer to a single defect class. However, some wafers exhibit morphologies near class boundaries, for which forcing a single prediction may be less informative than providing plausible diagnostic alternatives. This paper proposes a morphology-aware ambiguity learning framework that supports three diagnostic actions: automatic single-class diagnosis, assisted diagnosis with two plausible defect classes, and full review. Using the radial, angular, and geometric characteristics of training wafer maps, the framework constructs a class-level ambiguity matrix representing defect-class pairs with similar morphology and plausible diagnostic alternatives. It guides the model to learn plausible alternative classes rather than treating all incorrect classes equally. During inference, the matrix determines whether an uncertain prediction can be represented by a meaningful two-class diagnostic set or should be escalated for full review. Experiments on WM-811K show that the proposed framework outperforms conventional approaches in defect recognition and diagnostic decision support, providing meaningful two-class alternatives while reserving full review for cases with unresolved ambiguity. Illustrative cost analyses further show the potential cost advantage of the proposed routing strategy. The diagnostic behavior of the framework remains consistent across different backbone architectures. --- ### AutoRecLab: Describe the Experiment, Get the Code! Authors: Moritz Baumgart, Philipp Meister, Justus Krell, Michael Schmidt, Bela Gipp, Joeran Beel Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21863v1 Empirical evaluation is central to recommender-systems (RecSys) research, but turning experimental designs into executable code remains a manual and error-prone task. We present AutoRecLab, a Python-based autonomous RecSys lab that automates RecSys experiments from natural-language prompts. Given a research idea, AutoRecLab derives explicit experiment requirements, builds and validates a prototype, and iteratively expands it into the requested full experiment. The workflow combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for documentation lookup, static type verification, and execution-steered tree search. In our demonstration, AutoRecLab autonomously implements an explicit-to-implicit feedback conversion study. In a baseline comparison across six algorithms and three datasets, 8 of 9 runs succeed at an average cost of approx- imately $1 per run with GPT-5.4-mini. --- ### TrialAtlas: Multi-Agent Research Organization for Clinical Trial Design and Optimization Authors: Jiacheng Lin, Zifeng Wang, Zheng Chen, Erick Scott, Ziwei Yang, Fanyang Yu, Sheng Zhong, Jimeng Sun Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21859v1 Nearly 90% of drugs entering clinical development ultimately fail, despite billions of dollars in investment. Pharmaceutical companies therefore rely on clinical development planning (CDP) and probability of technical and regulatory success assessment to anticipate development risks, yet these decisions remain labor-intensive and subjective, requiring experts across clinical science, statistics, regulatory affairs, and competitive intelligence to jointly acquire, synthesize, and reason over heterogeneous evidence. Here, we introduce TrialAtlas, a memory-augmented multi-agent research organization for CDP that mirrors this collaborative process by coordinating specialized agents for literature synthesis, competitive trial intelligence, regulatory precedent analysis, and integrated reasoning over trial design and development risk. TrialAtlas further learns from historical clinical trials and regulatory outcomes, including prior New Drug Applications (NDAs), to ground its decisions in accumulated development experience. To evaluate these capabilities in an authentic regulatory setting, we introduce TrialAtlasBench, constructed from 291 FDA Complete Response Letters and spanning three practical tasks: detecting trial design deficiencies, recommending actionable design improvements, and predicting technical and regulatory success. TrialAtlas achieves an F1 score of 50.0% for deficiency detection, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.1 points, and reaches 85.3% balanced accuracy and 84.7% F1 for prediction of technical and regulatory success, improving over the best baselines by 6.7 points in balanced accuracy and 12.0 points in Cohen's kappa. In expert evaluation, 86.4% of TrialAtlas-generated concerns were judged valid, compared with 83.1% for OpenAI DeepResearch and 59.3% for Gemini DeepResearch. --- ### Watermarkable Multi-Draft Speculative Sampling via Poisson Processes Authors: Yanxiao Liu, Sicheng Wan, Zhan Gao, Deniz Gündüz Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21858v1 Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks, motivating two important aspects of deployment: inference efficiency and output provenance, which can be tackled by speculative sampling and watermarking, respectively. However, recent works have shown that combining these two goals is highly nontrivial and can be potentially impossible. In this work, we develop a novel multi-draft speculative sampling algorithm based on Poisson processes that improves the frontier of this fundamental trade-off. The proposed algorithm has strong sampling efficiency on its own and, more interestingly, is naturally watermarkable: we can embed an unbiased watermark without degrading speculative acceptance. Moreover, our algorithm is based on an exact list-coupling-without-communication scheme, which yields a drafter invariance property that benefits both sampling and watermarking. It is the first multi-draft, drafter-invariant speculative sampling scheme that maintains both watermark strength and sampling efficiency, and we experimentally verify its strong performance in both aspects. --- ### Do Personality-Tuned LLMs Make Better Social Agents? Authors: Tim Krabbe, Xiaodan Shi Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21857v1 LLMs are increasingly used in social simulations for socially interactive agents and robots, offering more flexibility than rule-based systems. However, even though they mimic human behaviour very well, there is a persistent alienness to them. This work investigates whether personality-aware fine-tuning can reduce this gap by improving the consistency and controllability of personality-conditioned dialogue generation compared with instruction prompting alone. We fine-tune two small open-weight LLMs, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct, using a corpus that combines personality-labelled social media posts and dialogues to create a personality-based dialogue engine for social simulation. The resulting models are evaluated across multiple social interaction scenarios using three independent LLM judges, which assess personality fidelity and provide evidence-based behavioral interpretations. We additionally quantify inter-rater agreement and lexical characteristics of the generated dialogue. Results indicate that fine-tuned models are not better at role-playing different personalities than their respective baseline models. However, low inter-rater agreement limits the confidence with which these results can be interpreted. Concerning the quality of generated texts, fine-tuned models are mostly comparable to the baselines, with fine-tuning improving the linguistic diversity of the Qwen models. While the results appear generally usable and the baseline models offer the best overall performance, future studies should place greater emphasis on the quality and domain alignment of training data for accurate personality role-playing. --- ### The Weight Is Over - Interactive Diffusion on Consumer GPUs Authors: Frieder Ganz, Maximilian Müller Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21849v1 On-device inference is booming, but the momentum is almost all in language models. Diffusion pipelines are memory hungry, latency-sensitive, and require orchestrating an embedder, a transformer, a decoder, and often further postprocessing that is not as standardized as LLM inference loops are. We navigate the trade-off between performance, quality, and model footprint to reach as many client devices in the wild as possible. We make three contributions: an embedding translator that maps a small text encoder into a large encoder space to cut weight and latency; a reproducible sweep recipe for navigating the speed/quality/memory triangle in diffusion pipelines; and an interactive on-device image generation editor achieving sub-second TTFI on recent GPUs. --- ### Reusing Latent Speech Representations for Query-Conditioned Topic Localization in Transcripts Authors: Steffen Freisinger, Philipp Seeberger, Thomas Ranzenberger, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21844v1 Long transcripts are costly inputs for downstream NLP systems and often contain irrelevant context. We study query-conditioned topic localization: predicting the sentence span in a transcript that best addresses a topic-title query. To improve span localization, we reuse ASR encoder states as sentence-level representations and fuse them with textual embeddings. This lets lightweight span locators exploit speech information without running a separate audio encoder. Experiments on two public datasets show consistent gains over text-only baselines, especially under strict boundary-matching criteria. Cross-dataset experiments further indicate that the benefits are strongest for structured or semi-structured speech, while gains on spontaneous speech are limited and mixed. --- ### EnterpriseVal: Quantifying the Efficacy, Reliability and Value of Generative AI in the Enterprise Authors: Abbas Raza Ali, Muhammad Ajmal Siddiqui, Moona Zahid Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21841v1 Frontier language models now produce professional deliverables that expert graders judge to match human work on a substantial share of economically valuable tasks, yet most enterprise GenAI initiatives fail to show a measurable business effect and a large fraction of agentic projects are expected to be cancelled. We argue that this is substantially a measurement problem: public benchmarks answer "what can the model do?", whereas a deployment decision requires "is this workflow fit, reliable, safe and worth scaling - here, on our data, under our controls?". We present EnterpriseVal, a use-case-level evaluation system that closes this gap. It comprises (i) a formal specification of the use case and of the frozen socio-technical configuration under test, model, prompts, retrieval, tools, guardrails and human oversight, with an autonomy level and consequence tier that jointly set the required evaluation intensity; (ii) a metric catalogue spanning fidelity, utility, efficiency, reliability, assurance and oversight; (iii) a grading protocol that scales blinded expert judgement with calibrated LLM-as-judge scoring through prediction-powered inference; (iv) a two-tier threshold gate, stated as an executable algorithm, that maps metric vectors with confidence bounds to REJECT/CONDITIONAL/SCALE decisions; and (v) a value-and-risk model in which the reviewer catch rate is a measured parameter. We report a pilot across three workflows in a global bank. In credit-memo drafting, human-graded citation precision reached 88% and hallucination rate 1.6% for the best model against gates of 70% and 5%; in procedure transformation, analyst refinement effort fell from an estimated 27.4 to 2.9 hours per document. We separate established results, documented pilot evidence, the proposed system and open hypotheses, and specify the experiments required for full validation --- ### Federated Deep Clustering Networks for High-Dimensional and Heterogeneous Data Authors: Morris Stallmann, Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Marcin Pietrasik, Anna Wilbik Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21829v1 Clustering high-dimensional data is a fundamental task in unsupervised machine learning with applications to a variety of domains. In the centralized data scenario, this task is commonly solved using deep clustering methods that utilize deep neural network architectures to learn clustering-friendly latent space representations. In Federated Learning, where data is distributed between clients and is private, deep clustering methods are less explored. In particular, recently introduced federated deep clustering methods, despite showing very promising performance, still fall short in reliably providing good performance if data across clients are non-identically-independently distributed. In this work, we introduce a generalization of Deep Clustering Networks to the federated scenario, named FedDCN, that simultaneously optimizes a reconstruction loss and a clustering loss. To ensure robustness and latent space alignment in non-identically-independently distributed data scenarios, FedDCN generates synthetic data augmentations, and its learning objective includes a geometric regularization for latent space alignment. Through experimental evaluation, the effectiveness of the approach under IID and non-IID assumptions is demonstrated, and future research directions are identified. --- ### Touvigation: Embodied Adaptive Object Acquisition for Blind and Low-Vision Users in Unfamiliar Indoor Environments Authors: George Xi Wang, Xiangyu Li, Shaoyue Wen, Jiaqian Hu, Junan Xie, Yupeng Wang, Ziyue Shi, Qijun Chen, Maaike Bouwmeester, Yuhua Jin, Jing Qian Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21828v1 Blind and low-vision users often face challenges when locating and physically acquiring objects in unfamiliar indoor environments. Existing vision-language-model-based assistants can provide semantic descriptions but may introduce latency, hallucinations, and guidance that is poorly aligned with embodied action. We present Touvigation, a hands-free object acquisition system that combines vision-language understanding with persistent local spatial modeling to provide low-latency, body-relative guidance. Drawing on formative interviews with eight blind and low-vision participants, we design a multi-stage guidance framework that adapts spatial references as users transition from orienting, to walking, to reaching and tactile verification. We evaluated Touvigation with 12 blind and low-vision participants against a multimodal large-language-model assistant and unassisted search. Touvigation achieved 100% task success, compared with 58% for the multimodal assistant and 85% for unassisted search, while reducing completion time and cognitive workload. Our findings demonstrate how persistent spatial grounding and adaptive embodied guidance can improve object acquisition for blind and low-vision users. --- ### RheoSampling: Resolving the One-Hot Dilemma in Stochastic Dynamic-Tree Speculative Decoding Authors: Qiao Hu, Yepeng Weng, Bo Zhang, Takehisa Yairi Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21827v1 Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting multiple tokens in parallel, with tree-based methods further improving efficiency through hierarchical structures. Dynamic-tree methods such as EAGLE-3 perform well under greedy decoding via deterministic top-K expansion and global pruning. However, in stochastic decoding (T>0), this mechanism collapses the draft distribution into one-hot probabilities, causing a severe drop in acceptance rate. This creates a dilemma: dynamic-tree methods sacrifice stochastic sampling to preserve context-aware topology, while static-tree methods preserve stochastic sampling with context-agnostic structures. The issue arises because the same probability distribution is used for two conflicting tasks: constructing the tree and verifying tokens. This coupling makes direct injection of randomness challenging due to the resulting stochastic process. We resolve this by decoupling these roles: RheoSampling assigns a token sampled from the draft distribution a proxy probability for tree expansion and pruning alongside its true sampling probability for verification. Specifically, we inject a sampled token among the deterministic top-K slots and treat it with different probabilities during construction and verification, making RheoSampling the first dynamic-tree method with both context-aware top-K construction and stochastic sampling while maintaining losslessness. We establish the lossless guarantee through an equivalence-class analysis that compresses the stochastic tree space into tractable classes. An OT-based verification strategy and a sparse draft mechanism ensure that theoretical gains translate into practical efficiency. Experiments across LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate improvements in acceptance rate and speedup over state-of-the-art dynamic tree methods. This framework may provide a template for analyzing stochastic tree structures. --- ### Object Detection Benchmarks are Incomplete: The Role of Label Errors and Annotation Uncertainty Authors: Sarina Penquitt, Jonathan Klees, Antonia van Betteray, Parssa Jashnieh, Peter Stehr, Matthias Rottmann, Lars Schmarje Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21822v1 While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity. --- ### Adaptive Uncertainty-Aware Modeling and Stochastic Radial Basis Function Predictive Control for Personalized Fluid Resuscitation Authors: Elham Estiri, Hossein Mirinejad Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21821v1 This paper presents a novel framework integrating Bayesian physiological modeling with optimal control strategies to achieve uncertainty-aware, personalized hemodynamic regulation during fluid resuscitation. An uncertainty-aware variational autoencoder state-space model (UVAE-SSM) was first developed to capture the dynamical relationship between mean arterial pressure (MAP) and fluid infusion using limited data, while explicitly modeling aleatoric uncertainty (i.e., randomness in the measurements, such as sensor noise). Then, a Bayesian nonlinear state-space model (BNSSM) was developed by utilizing Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) to capture epistemic uncertainty arising from physiological and patient-specific variability, enabling the creation of a virtual patient generator (VPG). Building on this uncertainty-aware modeling framework, a stochastic radial basis function model predictive control (sRBF-MPC) algorithm was designed to track the MAP target while satisfying physiological constraints. Finally, an online fine-tuning algorithm was developed to adapt the nominal UVAE-SSM using streaming VPG data, enabling progressive personalization during closed-loop therapy. Simulation results across unseen animal subjects and an independent human clinical dataset demonstrated the strong predictive accuracy and cross-population generalizability of the UVAE-SSM and BNSSM models. Closed-loop evaluations confirmed that the proposed sRBF-MPC framework achieved stable MAP regulation while providing better risk-aware control compared to quadratic MPC (Q-MPC) and stochastic quadratic MPC (sQ-MPC). Overall, the proposed framework accounts for inter- and intra-patient variability through online model adaptation, offering a promising step toward uncertainty-aware, personalized hemodynamic modeling and control in critical care. --- ### Matrix AdaGrad: Row-wise and Column-wise Adaptive Subgradient Methods Authors: Wenpeng Zhang, Runsheng Yu, Peilin Zhao Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21815v2 Adaptive optimization methods such as AdaGrad and Adam are widely used in modern deep neural network training, but their adaptive scaling is primarily designed for vector-valued parameters and does not explicitly exploit matrix structure. Recent matrix-aware optimizers demonstrate the benefits of structured optimization, yet a general theoretical framework for deriving matrix-aware adaptivity comparable to that of AdaGrad remains lacking. In this work, we develop an Online Mirror Descent framework with adaptive proximal functions for matrix-valued parameters, providing a principled methodology for deriving matrix-aware adaptive optimization through online regret minimization. By introducing row-wise and column-wise matrix proximal functions, our framework explicitly reveals the trade-off governing adaptive scaling: increasing the scaling factors reduces the gradient-dependent dual norm term while increasing the cost of evolving the proximal geometry. In the row-wise setting, this trade-off becomes separable under diagonal parameterization, allowing the adaptive scaling for each row to be derived independently by minimizing its corresponding row-wise regret bound. The column-wise counterpart follows directly by applying the row-wise construction to the transposed matrix. This framework yields Row-wise Matrix AdaGrad and Column-wise Matrix AdaGrad as concrete instantiations, with regret guarantees that are strictly tighter than those of entry-wise AdaGrad under row-sparse or column-sparse gradient structures. Experiments on matrix factorization and stacked deep MLP training further demonstrate the benefits of matrix-aware adaptive scaling, yielding improved optimization performance in both settings and enhanced optimization stability and trainability at larger learning rates and greater network depths in the latter. --- ### Matrix AdaGrad: Row-wise and Column-wise Adaptive Subgradient Methods Authors: Wenpeng Zhang, Runsheng Yu, Peilin Zhao Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21815v1 Adaptive optimization methods such as AdaGrad and Adam are widely used in modern neural-network training, but their adaptive scaling is primarily designed for vector-valued parameters and does not explicitly exploit matrix structure. Recent matrix-aware optimizers demonstrate the benefits of structured optimization, yet a general theoretical framework for deriving matrix-aware adaptivity comparable to that of AdaGrad remains lacking. In this work, we develop a general Online Mirror Descent framework with adaptive proximal functions for matrix-valued parameters, providing a principled approach to deriving matrix-aware adaptive optimization through online regret minimization. By introducing row-wise and column-wise matrix proximal functions and analyzing the resulting regret trade-off, we derive Row-wise Matrix AdaGrad (Row-AdaGrad) and Column-wise Matrix AdaGrad (Column-AdaGrad), with adaptive scaling determined by the accumulated row-wise or column-wise gradient norms. We establish regret guarantees and show that these matrix-aware bounds can be strictly tighter than those of entry-wise AdaGrad under structured gradients. Experiments on matrix factorization and deep neural-network training further demonstrate the benefits of aligning adaptive scaling with matrix structure, including improved optimization stability and trainability at larger learning rates and greater network depths. --- ### How Many Posterior Samples? Calibrated Stopping for Adaptive Sensing Authors: Vincent Corlay, Andriy Enttsel Published: 2026-09-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.CV, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21813v1 In classification-oriented adaptive sensing, posterior samples characterize uncertainty at the current measurement state and can serve two roles: they may guide the next sensing direction, while their class labels provide votes for the candidate classes and determine whether sensing should continue. We focus on the stopping layer that turns these votes into a declaration, without modifying the posterior sampler or sensing directions. A natural plug-in rule declares when the observed vote share exceeds a threshold. We show that this threshold is not itself a confidence guarantee: when the underlying vote mass equals the threshold, the plug-in rule declares about half the time. As alternatives, we calibrate a fixed-sample rule and a finite-horizon sequential rule to a prescribed false-declaration probability, and study exact curtailment, which stops a fixed-pool rule once its final verdict is forced. We then derive how one-round declaration probabilities determine posterior-sample cost and classification accuracy along a sensing path. On MNIST with DDRM and a fixed PCA-guided probe sequence, curtailment saves up to 62% of posterior samples. Among the evaluated rules at matched operating points, sequential stopping reduces the cost the most. At a high accuracy, that same sequential rule can trade more posterior samples for fewer measurements. ---