# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 140 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #6951–7000 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/140 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/139.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/141.md) ### SenseFuse: Label-Free Fusion of Image and Shape Encoders for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation Authors: Euiseok Han, Tri Ton, Hwanhee Kim, Seungyeon Ryu, Chang D. Yoo Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20475v1 Open-vocabulary scene understanding is fundamental for robotics, laying the groundwork for spatial reasoning and object manipulation. While closed-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation heavily leverages 3D shape information, state-of-the-art open-vocabulary methods remain predominantly restricted to 2D image features or image-distilled representations during mask labeling. In this paper, we propose SenseFuse, a label-free fusion method that balances 2D image and 3D shape encoders for robust open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation, refining only the mask-labeling stage of existing pipelines. We reveal that 2D image and 3D shape encoders exhibit largely disjoint failure patterns and rarely share identical wrong labels, whereas two 2D image encoders frequently repeat the same errors. This distinct behavior makes the 2D and 3D pair inherently complementary. We introduce an adaptive mechanism that selects a scene-level fusion weight to maximize a label-free sensitivity measure, estimated directly from a single scene's unlabeled proposals in milliseconds. SenseFuse improves labeling accuracy in every evaluated setting across ScanNet200, Replica, and ScanNet++, recovering 67-100% (median 93%) of the gain achievable with an oracle weight, and it raises instance AP in 21 of 22 reported settings. Code is available at https://github.com/hanes1207/SenseFuse. --- ### How Do Agent Harnesses Create Value? Planning Information and Release Control in Stateful LLM Agents Authors: Yukun Zhang, Kemu Xu, Yishen Chen Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20474v1 Agent harnesses supply planning guidance, organize execution, and check completion. We study how these components affect success, erroneous acceptance, and cost in two Retail experiments and an Airline pilot in $τ^2$-bench. The primary comparison pairs prewritten task-specific plans (Fixed) with shuffled policy text matched in word count (Sham), isolating the contribution of guidance content. Across 265 matched cells, Fixed improves oracle-verified success by 7.17 percentage points (90\% task-clustered bootstrap interval, 1.15--13.36 points), with gains concentrated in higher-complexity tasks. A read-only terminal verifier rejects 61\% of Retail oracle-invalid episodes while withholding 17\% of correct ones, at less than one cent of additional cost per episode. Which component matters more depends on the loss assigned to erroneous acceptance: at low liability the planning gain dominates; at high liability the verifier's avoided false passes dominate---and a standalone verifier captures nearly all the false-pass benefit of the full planning-plus-verification stack at a fraction of its cost. --- ### Deep Learning-Based Classification of Cognitive and Resting States Using Electroencephalography Signals Authors: K. A. Januka S. Fernando, Harshit Srivastava Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20467v1 The categorization of cognitive and resting states derived from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is crucial for comprehending fluctuations in brain activity linked to various mental states. EEG provides a non-intrusive approach for documenting brain function in both resting and task-oriented cognitive conditions, whilst deep learning techniques enable the automatic extraction of significant patterns from intricate EEG data. This study presents a deep learning framework to distinguish between resting and cognitive states through EEG records. The proposed framework integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) stacked with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for the extraction of features from EEG signals. Time-frequency analysis is conducted to explore the salient aspects of signals, and the derived features are then assessed utilizing conventional deep learning and machine learning classifiers, including the suggested 2D-Net architecture. The proposed approach and feature extraction strategy outperform the evaluated comparative methods, achieving accuracies of 83.177% for resting-versus-mathematical task classification, 76.107% for resting-versus-memory task classification, and 83.432% for resting-versus-music task classification. The findings illustrate the efficacy of integrating signal processing with deep learning methodologies to discriminate resting from cognitive states utilizing EEG signals. --- ### Training Neural Networks to Approach the Optimum Bayes Estimator in Dense Multi-Emitter Localization Authors: Yi Sun, Mona Sharifi, Muzna Yumman Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20465v1 We train neural networks on synthesized frames to approach the optimum Bayes estimator for dense emitter localization. The result justifies the future work on training neural networks to achieve high-throughput large-FOV super spatiotemporal resolution SMLM. --- ### Correlation-Free Transition Path Sampling through Shooting Point Generation Guided by Committor Learning Authors: Maximilian Negedly, Sebastian Falkner, Alessandro Coretti, Christoph Dellago Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: physics.comp-ph, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20461v1 Studying the dynamical behavior of a system often depends on characterizing how it transitions between long-lived states. Because such transitions are rare, observing them usually requires specialized enhanced sampling techniques. Transition Path Sampling (TPS) is a well-established method for generating reactive trajectories, which is simple to implement and does not require the definition of a preconceived reaction coordinate. However, its efficiency is limited by its sequential nature and the resulting correlations between sampled paths. Previous work addressed this limitation by combining TPS with a sampling scheme based on conditioned Boltzmann Generators, a generative machine learning model capable of sampling a given target probability distribution. This approach produces uncorrelated transition paths but relies on an accurate reaction coordinate, which is rarely known in advance. Building on recent advances in committor learning, specifically on the Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Mechanism Discovery (AIMMD) method, in this work we introduce GenAIMMD, an iterative algorithm that actively and self-consistently learns the ideal reaction coordinate (the committor) and trains a conditioned Boltzmann Generator to sample from arbitrary bias windows along it. GenAIMMD thereby provides a correlation-free and fully parallelizable path sampling scheme that does not require prior knowledge of the system's transition mechanism. We apply GenAIMMD to a two-dimensional toy model and a higher-dimensional polymer system. In both cases, GenAIMMD succeeds in training the Boltzmann Generator and learning the committor. Benchmark results show a substantial increase in performance compared to standard TPS. --- ### Fingerprinting Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Chao Huang, Meng Tong, Kejiang Chen Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20457v1 While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable a wide range of image-text reasoning tasks, recent incidents indicate that they are vulnerable to illicit deployment and unauthorized distillation. Existing solutions for model provenance are typically confounded by shared language backbones in MLLMs and struggle to detect violations of distillation. To bridge this gap and safeguard model ownership, we present the first study on multimodal model fingerprinting. Inspired by recent findings that self-attention acts as a low-pass filter and that its low-frequency components are informative, we develop AttnPrint for white-box provenance. Specifically, we extract cross-modal attention distributions and isolate their low-frequency components to serve as model fingerprints. To facilitate black-box auditing, we further introduce DistillTrace, which employs hypothesis testing of MLLM outputs to identify potential model infringement. We conduct extensive experiments on 154 model instances across 19 multimodal architectures. Notably, AttnPrint achieves strong derivative-model detection performance while remaining robust to five downstream modification techniques. DistillTrace also provides evidence of distillation relationships under three parameter-independent techniques. --- ### GraphSkillAA: Attribution-Guided Skill-Graph Updating with Targeted Validation and Rollback Authors: Ziqiao Shang, Ling-Yue Ge, Lan-Zhe Guo Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20455v2 External skills provide domain knowledge and procedures without updating model parameters, but flat collections obscure skill applicability, dependencies, and composition. Graphs organize skills into addressable nodes and explicit relations, supporting selection and composition. Yet existing skill-graph methods use this structure mainly for retrieval, rather than to localize updates, scope retesting, or precisely roll back rejected changes. We introduce GRAPHSKILLAA (GraphSkill Abductive Attribution), which uses one addressable graph for skill selection, execution, failure attribution, targeted updating, validation, and rollback. Nodes separate applicability, execution, and exclusion conditions; typed edges encode prerequisite and enhancement relations. The frozen student records used nodes and edges, while the teacher contrasts related successes and failures to route each supported repair to the smallest relevant field or relation; execution lapses or insufficient evidence leave the graph unchanged. A Local Gate retests affected examples, while a Big Gate evaluates the merged graph on the complete update pool; rejected changes are rolled back. With GPT-5.6-sol, GRAPHSKILLAA reaches 81.5%, 66.7%, and 91.2% on SearchQA, LiveMath, and DocVQA, respectively, and attains the highest observed mean in every main setting. These results show that object-level attribution and graph-scoped validation make a skill graph a locally optimizable, testable, and reversible external state. --- ### Online Supervised Dimension Reduction with Random Features: Diagnostics and Computational Trade-offs Authors: Zhenlin Yao, Wei Xiong Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20454v1 Accurate optimization of a supervised spectral objective need not produce an accurate population subspace or a better predictive representation. We investigate these distinctions for Online Kernel Supervised Principal Component Analysis (OKSPCA), which combines a centered cross-moment in finite random-feature coordinates with an Adam-style orthonormal basis update for an established objective. Fixed-map consistency, concentration and perturbation results describe the estimator and its exact subspace; same-target comparisons then assess the practical iterate separately. Across six predictive benchmarks, performance depends on the declared pipeline: replacing the tracker with the exact empirical target leaves the two regression deficits largely unchanged. Direct classification-rank models capture nearly all terminal objective energy on average, but a saved intermediate state exhibits substantial geometric deviation; a controlled sample-size study further separates empirical accuracy from population recovery. In distinct numerical-service workloads, exact on-request computation is faster in the tested classification settings, whereas Adam saves time relative to the tested full thin-SVD service for some dense wider-regression requests, alongside persistent geometric error. These diagnostics limit explanations based solely on terminal optimization accuracy and distinguish numerical cost from quality, rank coverage and freshness; they establish neither practical-tracker convergence nor predictive or deployment benefits from basis availability. --- ### Seismic Site Response Prediction from Sparse Observations Using Finite-Element-Pretrained Latent Dynamics Authors: Yi Zhu, Su Chen, Xiaojun Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20451v1 Numerical site-response predictions often deviate from observations, yet correcting these discrepancies is difficult because records are limited in both sensor coverage and number of events. This study proposes the Transfer-Enabled Forced Latent Autoencoder for Response Equations (FLARE-T) to improve these predictions by learning and calibrating low-dimensional latent dynamics that connect the base acceleration input to acceleration outputs at multiple depths. FLARE-T learns a low-dimensional response manifold and input-driven dynamics from dense finite-element simulations. It then trains a sparse encoder to map simulated sensor responses into the learned coordinates and uses limited records to calibrate the dynamics within them. A short response window initializes each prediction, while the complete base motion drives the response. The framework was evaluated using a layered-soil centrifuge test and the Lotung field vertical array. Test-set results show that FLARE-T improved multi-depth acceleration histories and 5%-damped pseudoacceleration response spectra relative to the original finite-element models, reducing errors at every evaluated sensor for motions of different intensities and, at Lotung, for both horizontal components. Two Lotung source models with different constitutive parameters achieved comparable test-set accuracy, indicating reduced dependence on precise prior calibration. FLARE-T therefore provides a data-efficient means of combining dense numerical response information with limited field records to improve future site-response predictions. --- ### The Organization of Inference: Information, Resource Constraints, and AI Production Authors: Yukun Zhang, Kemu Xu, Yishen Chen Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20449v1 The economic value of inference depends on how capacity and task information are distributed across stages of AI production. We study these organizational margins using controlled workflow experiments on externally verified software-engineering tasks. In two matched resource panels, direct execution records the same success rate of 59.6 percent at logical-token ceilings of 12,000 and 24,000, while success under information-constrained planning rises from 36.2 to 51.2 percent. The planning disadvantage narrows by 15.0 percentage points (95 percent task-cluster bootstrap interval: 4.2 to 25.8). A strict read-only planning campaign varies whether the planner sees the task issue. At 12,000 tokens, issue access raises success by about 16 percentage points over issue-hidden planning. Compared with direct execution, task-informed planning is about 10 points lower at 12,000 tokens; at 24,000 tokens, it shows a 29.6-point advantage. In the resource panels, direct execution uses substantially less than either ceiling, while the planning workflow's binding rate falls from 46.2 to 0.8 percent and downstream execution accounts for 89.9 percent of the increase in total use. Scale determines the capacity available to a system; workflow and information structure shape the productive value --- ### Cross-Architecture Foundation-Model Distillation for Edge Flood Segmentation Authors: Fabian Schmalstieg, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20441v1 Geospatial foundation models can provide strong flood-segmentation performance, but their size limits deployment on memory-constrained edge hardware. We distill a 300-million-parameter Prithvi-EO-2.0 teacher, fine-tuned on the 252 manually labeled Sen1Floods11 training scenes, into a 0.7-million-parameter EfficientViT-B0 student. The teacher supervises additional unlabeled Sentinel-2 imagery, allowing the student training set to grow without new manual annotations. At the matched budget of 252 scenes, teacher-supervised training is competitive with direct training and improves STURM-Flood performance across tested configurations; a geometry-matched control shows that label source alone does not explain the difference. Scaling the teacher-supervised pool to 2,500 scenes narrows the remaining student--teacher gap: the float student reaches 0.787 water intersection over union on the Sen1Floods11 test split against 0.822 for the teacher, matches the teacher on STURM-Flood under our evaluation protocol, and remains below it on WorldFloods-v2. After activation replacement and quantization-aware training, the student runs as a 1.5-megabyte 8-bit integer (INT8) TensorRT engine on a Jetson Xavier NX at 5.57 milliseconds of graphics processing unit (GPU) compute per 512-by-512 image, with approximately 14 megabytes of runtime device memory. A fixed modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) threshold is competitive with both models on the two clean external benchmarks, so we interpret those benchmarks as generalization tests rather than as evidence of learned-model superiority over a spectral rule. The results support the conclusion: foundation-model supervision can amplify a fixed manual annotation budget into a substantially larger training set and yield a compact, deployable edge model. --- ### A Mathematical Model of Motivated Emotional Mind - Cognitive Embodied System Authors: Wiesław L. Galus, Janusz A. Starzyk Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20437v1 This article presents a mathematical model of the Motivated Emotional Mind cognitive architecture developed for embodied intelligent systems. Such a system learns to maintain its homeostasis through a generalized form of reinforcement learning based on its internal motivations, termed motivated learning (ML). The principal contribution of this article is a rigorous formalization of the re-entrant loop integrating feedforward processing, lateral interactions, and feedback pathways, together with the representational selection mechanisms that govern adaptive system responses. The model specifies how ongoing exteroceptive and interoceptive signals, bodily-motivational context, and memory traces are bound into associative memory structures termed semblions, which compete for access to further processing and top-down reconstruction. The formalization encompasses secondary perception, representational competition, curiosity, procedural gaps, and action selection directed toward limiting allostatic violations. Within this framework, motivated learning is tailored to embodied systems whose dynamics are shaped by needs, affect, and the current regulatory state. Unlike standard reinforcement-learning models, the proposed approach incorporates need thresholds, goal generation and shifting goals, bodily state, resource constraints, and action uncertainty, thereby providing a more adequate account of response selection under regulatory pressure. Global affect functions as a central control signal, modulating the learning rate, representational valence, and the balance between exploration and exploitation. The model presented here is a step toward a more rigorous formalization of cognitive phenomena and may provide a basis for further theoretical analysis, computer simulation, and implementation in artificial-intelligence systems inspired by biological processes. --- ### When Do Language-Grounded Explanations Help? A Graph-Bottleneck for Farm Monitoring Interpretable Sheep Facial Pain Authors: Alam Noor, Miguel Guti'errez Gait'an Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20427v1 Automated pain recognition from facial expression could make continuous welfare assessment practical in sheep, but adoption depends on trust: a stockperson cannot act on a score that arrives without justification. We ground a model in the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES) by letting each detected facial region attend over text embeddings of the clinical descriptors and then test whether the resulting explanations mean anything. They do not. Ablating an entire descriptor changes the predicted logit by about $10^{-4}$, and the most-attended cue agrees with the predicted pain level in only $32.6\%$ of regions, although the attention maps, the learned gate, and the generated text all proposed otherwise. We therefore remove the appearance bypass with a concept bottleneck whose classifier reads only SPFES concept scores, supervised by per-region state annotations that image-level pipelines discard. This costs $0.05$--$0.10$ in Cohen's $κ$ but yields concepts that are demonstrably learned: minority pain-indicating states are recovered at $3.5$--$8.3\times$ their base rates, and the ear and eye severity orderings emerge without severity supervision. Removing the supervision alone leaves $κ$ unchanged while concept accuracy falls to $0.109$, showing that architectural necessity does not imply semantic validity. We also show that pooled concept accuracy is misleading under clinical imbalance and provide a cross-validated, protocol-matched benchmark of seven methods on this dataset. --- ### WeVisDoc: From Coverage to Capability for Robust End-to-End Document Parsing Authors: Hao Yu, Kang Liu, Linnan Zhao, Jiabo Zhan, Chong Sun, Chen Li, Jing Lyu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20423v1 Document parsing converts document images into structured content and requires reliable performance across diverse layouts and acquisition conditions. Yet training corpora are biased toward common document types and clean digital pages, while expanding coverage alone does not specify how to address a parser's remaining weaknesses. We present WeVisDoc, a two-stage data-centric framework for robust end-to-end document parsing. Stage I broadens semantic, structural, and appearance coverage through heterogeneous data and structure-preserving degradation synthesis. Stage II uses a held-out probe to measure the Stage I parser's residual errors within fixed visual-structural clusters. These diagnostics guide targeted data construction and reallocation of the target-token budget. WeVisDoc-4B achieves an Overall score of 95.38 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and a mean Overall score of 75.54 across the three PureDocBench tracks, ranking first among the compared end-to-end parsers in all four settings. Compared with Stage I, Stage II improves Overall scores for the 2B and 4B models on both benchmarks, with larger gains on the degraded PureDocBench tracks, including a 4.03-point gain for the 4B model on the Real Degraded track. --- ### SCGFM-ART: Amortized Relational Transport for Structure-Centric Graph Foundation Models Authors: Xiaodong He, Xincheng Wang, Zhao Kang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20419v1 Graph foundation models (GFMs) aim to learn transferable representations across severely heterogeneous graph domains. However, severe domain shifts in topology, graph scale, and feature semantics impede the construction of a unified, domain-agnostic representation space. To address this, we propose SCGFM-ART, a structure-centric GFM framework that aligns arbitrary graphs onto a shared relational atlas via Amortized Relational Transport (ART). The relational atlas serves as a universal coordinate system defined by a finite set of relational landmarks (bases), while ART directly predicts reusable, end-to-end graph-to-base transport plans, bypassing costly runtime Gromov-Wasserstein optimizations. Under this formulation, SCGFM-ART decomposes a graph into a unified representation: globally via its relational response coordinates relative to the atlas, and locally via its node-to-role structural correspondences. These correspondences project disparate node attributes into a canonical role space, resolving structural and semantic heterogeneity within a singular alignment interface. Rigorously modeling graphs and atlas bases as finite measured relational spaces, we establish coordinate fidelity bounds, prove stability under predicted transport plans, and derive an amortized coverage bound that guarantees our learning objective tightly surrogates ideal relational coverage. Benchmarked across 14 cross-domain graph- and node-level classification tasks, SCGFM-ART achieves state-of-the-art transferability, securing superior average ranks of 2.29 and 1.14, respectively. Topological perturbation analyses demonstrate that node-role transport retains fine-grained structural nuances beyond global coordinates. On real-world benchmarks, the amortized formulation yields 44.2 to 85.1 times faster frozen target-domain inference by avoiding iterative alignment at test time. --- ### TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation Authors: Danyan Zhou, Jinxuan Lu, Jiawei Lin, Tianxing Chen, Chuqiao Lyu, Wenbo Ding Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20414v1 Tactile signals provide direct contact and force measurements that are essential for understanding physical interactions and enabling dexterous robotic manipulation. However, tactile sensing requires direct measurement at contact interfaces, making large-scale data collection reliant on intrusive, costly, and restrictive instrumentation. We present TouchSight, a monocular egocentric vision framework for dense full-hand contact force prediction that leverages 500 hours of pressure-glove recordings and extensive hand-object interaction (HOI) data. To address the appearance gap between gloved training data and bare-hand real-world scenarios, we construct TwinTouch-20H: 20 hours of paired visual data in which generative video models re-render gloved recordings as bare-hand observations against new backgrounds while preserving the original measured tactile labels. TouchSight predicts dense force from both gloved and generated bare-hand videos, outperforms prior contact prediction methods on OakInk2, qualitatively generalizes to natural bare-hand egocentric videos from unseen datasets, and improves consistently as glove supervision scales. These results demonstrate that dense tactile signals can be recovered from egocentric vision alone, without tactile instrumentation at capture time. --- ### Stress-testing Alignment Midtraining Authors: Sid Baines, Jonathan Bostock, Maria Angelica Martinez, Andrew Draganov, David Africa, Daniel Tan Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20412v1 When aligning frontier models through post-training techniques, it is not possible to directly demonstrate all of the behaviours we want a model to exhibit in all possible deployment environments; our model must generalise outside of the post-training distribution. One proposed solution is alignment midtraining (AMT), which continues pretraining on large volumes of alignment-relevant documents to encourage generalisation in later stages of training. Despite the prominence of AMT as an alignment approach, there is limited public evidence for its effectiveness. To resolve this, we identify several assumptions around midtraining and evaluate them across scale: up to 110 billion-parameter models and 1 billion midtraining tokens. For instance, we study a scenario where post-training data is ambiguous between two possible motivations. We find that midtraining can steer the model's motivation in simple versions of this setting. However, the presence of a tiny fraction of finetuning data which suggests a competing motivation erases the effects of AMT. We also study scenarios in which we want an AI to follow a number of rules, but only demonstrate a subset of them. We find that demonstrations must be present either in midtraining or post-training datasets for these rules to be robustly learned. Based on these and other findings, we do not believe that there is sufficient public evidence for us to confidently state that midtraining can address the core difficulties inherent in aligning powerful AI systems. --- ### The Bias of Nonlinear Two-Time-scale Stochastic Approximation under Constant Step-Sizes Authors: Djamel Rassem Lamouri, Dorian Baudry, Nicolas Gast Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20409v1 Two-timescale stochastic approximation (TTSA) is a fundamental tool for analyzing coupled iterative algorithms in reinforcement learning, optimization, and stochastic control. However, finite-time guarantees for nonlinear two-timescale schemes remain difficult to obtain, especially under constant step-sizes. In this paper, we study nonlinear TTSA with step-sizes $α\ggβ$. Under standard stability, regularity, and Markovian noise assumptions, we upper bound the mean-squared error and the bias of both iterates around their limiting equilibria. Our bounds scale as $O(α+β^2/α^2)$, which we prove to be tight when $β\leα^{3/2}$. The analysis separates the contributions of initial conditions, fast-timescale tracking error, Markovian dependence, and timescale coupling, thereby clarifying the origin of the $β^2/α^2$ term. Our results reveal qualitative differences from the linear TTSA setting previously studied, showing that nonlinear dynamics introduce additional finite-time effects that are absent in the linear case. --- ### Xeno-Interpretability: Investigating the Alien Minds of LLMs Authors: F. Pierucci, M. Bracale Syrnikov, M. Prandi, M. Galisai, F. Giarrusso, P. Bisconti Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20408v2 Large language models are usually interpreted through concepts that humans already possess: truthfulness, refusal, deception, personality, harmfulness, and related categories. This paper asks whether models may also represent and use distinctions for which no adequate human concept exists. We call such internal structures xeno-representations, and their study xeno-interpretability. We distinguish the human-interpretable semantic space from the xeno-semantic space: the region of model-native representations for which no adequate human conceptual counterpart is available. We show that the space of possible internal distinctions in an LLM is substantially larger than the space available through finite human descriptions. We then separate experimental identification from semantic interpretation: an internal representation may be reproducibly located, geometrically characterized, causally manipulated, and linked to downstream behaviour even when its semantic content cannot be adequately expressed in human terms. On this basis, we sketch an empirical programme to identify xeno-representations. We finally examine the implications for AI safety and multi-agent systems, where model-native representations may propagate and stabilize across interacting agents while remaining only partially visible through human-readable communication. Xeno-interpretability therefore shifts the aim of interpretability from finding human concepts inside models toward discovering and characterizing the representational structures that are native to the models themselves and might affect their behaviour in unpredictable ways. --- ### Learning Principal-Agent Contracts for Equitable Smallholder Carbon Farming under Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection Authors: Rishi Bharadwaj, Yadati Narahari Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20404v1 Agricultural soils are a major untapped carbon sink. Carbon farming is emerging as a promising practice for tapping this potential. Smallholder farmers, who dominate agriculture across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, are key to scaling climate mitigation via carbon farming. It is ironic that real-world carbon programs largely fail to reach them. We study this important gap through the lens of contract design. An aggregator offers a single pooled contract to a heterogeneous population of smallholder farmers who have private adoption costs (adverse selection) and exert unobserved effort (moral hazard), with agronomic outcomes evolving over multiple seasons. We formulate this evolving contracting problem as a POMDP and use reinforcement learning to learn a dynamic profit-maximising contract. We analyse the performance of the aggregator under various conditions. We find that a profit-maximising aggregator does not merely inherit the exclusion of smallholders, it amplifies it. On large farms the aggregator realises 87.7% of achievable adoption, against only 8.2% on smallholdings. Per-hectare Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) costs fall as farm size rises, and the aggregator's pooling contract compounds this gradient rather than offsetting it. A counterfactual that makes MRV costs purely area-proportional eliminates this disparity. Our results and simulation can guide contract and policy design that opens carbon income to smallholders while enabling agricultural soils to contribute to climate mitigation at scale. --- ### Schema-Anchored Latent Reasoning for Semantic Parsing-Based Knowledge Base Question Answering Authors: Guangze Gao, Zixuan Li, Sikui Zhang, Chunfeng Yuan, Wenjuan Li, Bing Li, Xiaolong Jin, Weiming Hu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20398v1 Semantic parsing (SP)-based knowledge base question answering aims to answer natural language questions by generating executable logical forms (LFs) over knowledge bases (KBs). When applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task, a key challenge over large, heterogeneous KBs is selecting question-related schema elements (i.e., relations and classes) and composing them into complex LFs. Recent LLM-based methods often make early discrete commitments to schema elements during intermediate reasoning, allowing incorrect intermediate schema decisions to propagate and finally result in incorrect LFs. To overcome this limitation, we propose SALR, a schema-anchored latent reasoning method for LF construction. It performs multi-step reasoning by generating continuous thoughts in the model's hidden states, thereby delaying the explicit commitment to LF decisions. To ground this latent reasoning process in the corresponding KB schema, SALR aligns continuous thoughts with a codebook of KB schema elements through an alignment objective supervised by schema traces deterministically derived from gold LFs. It then incorporates the aligned schema codes into inputs for subsequent reasoning steps. This schema-mediated feedback guides LF generation without requiring the model to emit an explicit textual reasoning trajectory. Experiments on GrailQA and WebQSP show that SALR achieves consistent overall gains over strong baselines. Notably, on compositional questions from GrailQA, SALR outperforms TIARA, a strong SP-based baseline, by 2.86 F1 points. Further analyses show that schema-mediated feedback affects LF generation and that schema information is recoverable from the latent states. --- ### Model-based Bootstrap for Offline Policy Evaluation in Tabular Reinforcement Learning Authors: Weiwei Wang, Yuqiang Li, Xianyi Wu, Bingyi Jing Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20389v1 Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is crucial in high-stakes reinforcement learning applications, where new policies must be assessed reliably before deployment. In such settings, point estimates alone are insufficient; principled uncertainty quantification, such as confidence intervals and variance estimates, is essential for safe and risk-aware decision-making. A comprehensive way to unify these tasks is to estimate the sampling distribution of the evaluation error. Existing approaches, however, often suffer from limited robustness, scalability, or finite-sample validity. In this paper, we propose a model-based bootstrap framework for uncertainty quantification of OPE in finite-horizon, time-inhomogeneous Markov decision processes (MDPs). Unlike classical bootstrap methods that rely on resampling complete episodes, the proposed method regenerates trajectories from an estimated MDP and can therefore accommodate a much broader range of offline data formats, including complete trajectories, transition-level observations, and trajectory fragments. This flexibility further improves finite-sample statistical efficiency. We establish bootstrap distributional consistency, asymptotically valid confidence intervals, and consistent variance estimation for the target policy value. Extensive simulations show that the proposed method accurately captures the sampling distribution of the OPE estimator, yielding tighter confidence intervals and more accurate variance estimates in most settings. --- ### Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent Authors: Wenyuan Xie, Mengyang Hong, Yongzhong Wang, Yanbiao Ji, Yijin Zhou, Shaokai Wu, Shalayiding Sirejiding, Huayi Zhou, Yi-Chao Chen, Ma Ling, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20388v2 Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to execute long-horizon instructions in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot VLN-CE systems typically maintain spatial states through geometric localization or coordinate-based representations. Recent geometry-constrained navigation removes depth and globally consistent coordinates, but maintaining persistent spatial awareness for place confirmation, progress verification, and recovery remains challenging. We present Navi-Agent, a zero-shot VLN-CE agent that constructs a coordinate-free spatial state from visual observations and executed motion histories. Navi-Agent organizes this state as a navigation topology, where nodes represent visual places and edges represent motion transitions. This representation enables observation-based approximate self-localization, task progress verification, and visual revisitation-based recovery. Navi-Agent performs closed-loop navigation by decomposing instructions into sub-goals, executing local visual navigation, and verifying visited places through the constructed spatial state. Experiments on zero-shot VLN-CE benchmark and real-world robot platforms show that Navi-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among geometry-constrained methods while remaining competitive with approaches relying on geometric localization. --- ### Compact Vision Models for Iris Presentation Attack Detection under Presentation Attack Instrument Shift and Environmental Degradation Authors: Athanasios Angelakis, Marta Gomez-Barrero Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20386v1 Iris presentation attack detection (PAD) is security-critical when a subsystem that appears reliable during development encounters presentation attack instruments (PAIs) or acquisition conditions absent from validation data. We benchmark three compact scratch-trained computer-vision models, each with at most approximately 0.26 million trainable parameters, on the Notre Dame subset of LivDet-Iris 2017 under PAI-driven domain shift and environmental degradation. All models are trained without external pretraining or data augmentation and evaluated over five seeds. A validation-selected threshold is transferred unchanged to the known-attack, unknown-attack, corrupted, and pooled test partitions. From known to unknown attack presentations, Attack Presentation Classification Error Rate (APCER) increases by 17.11-30.47 percentage points and Detection Equal Error Rate (D-EER) increases by 7.38-12.73 percentage points. At the validation-selected threshold, ZACH-ViT obtains the lowest unknown-attack APCER (47.69 +/- 4.84%) and D-EER (38.87 +/- 0.93%), while Compact-TransMIL obtains the lowest Bona Fide Presentation Classification Error Rate (BPCER). ZACH-ViT also gives the lowest unknown-attack BPCER at an APCER limit of 10% (81.29 +/- 1.95%). The high absolute errors show that the comparative advantage of the best compact model does not constitute deployment readiness under unknown PAIs. --- ### MM-Future: Multi-Mode Joint World-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving Authors: Shuai Liu, Hechangle Gong, Hao Jiang, Runlin He, Junxiang Zhan, Kai Huang, Sheng Yang, Shaoqing Ren Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20377v1 Autonomous driving involves coupled decision-making and scene evolution under multi-mode uncertainty. To capture this coupling and uncertainty, we introduce MM-Future, a world-action model that generates multiple paired scene-action hypotheses and models bidirectional interaction within each pair. Each hypothesis is initialized from a structured action prior and an independent future scene source, which are then co-evolved through a modality-aware diffusion Transformer. To support efficient multi-mode rollout, MM-Future compresses multi-view video into planning-oriented representations, dubbed MM-Tokens. Finally, a future-conditioned proposal scorer ranks trajectory candidates by shared history context and their paired predicted future. On NAVSIM navtest, MM-Future achieves 94.0 PDMS and 91.5 EPDMS, while attaining a 32.3 HD-Score in zero-shot closed-loop evaluation on HUGSIM. Ablations show consistent improvements over both single-mode and action-only variants, validating the benefit of multi-mode joint world-action modeling. --- ### Accelerating Sharded Data Parallelism at Scale with Federated Learning Authors: Gianluca Mittone, Marco Aldinucci Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20359v1 The symbiotic scaling of artificial intelligence models and high-performance computing systems continually creates algorithmic challenges in their convergence. Foundation models (FMs) are a crucial example, requiring months-long training on thousands of cutting-edge GPUs. Sharded data parallelism (DP) is the dominant strategy to accelerate such computations by splitting data and models across multiple GPUs. However, it incurs prohibitive communication overhead when deployed at scale, particularly on multi-tier interconnects with heterogeneous performance. Inspired by the efficient communication principles of federated learning (FL), this work introduces two hybrid algorithms - FL+FSDP and FL+HSDP - interleaving sharded DP with FedAvg-style aggregations. Such approaches decouple large DP deployments into smaller, loosely-coupled federation groups, requiring minimal inter-group traffic while keeping the global batch size bounded by the groups' size. Formal analysis of communication costs and experimental validation prove their scalability and flexibility. A Llama3.1 8B pre-training on 512 A100 GPUs shows that, under identical hyperparameters, FL+FSDP and FL+HSDP achieve up to 8.04 faster data processing and 4.48 lower evaluation perplexity than their counterparts, demonstrating superior computational efficiency and improved model quality. These properties stem from reduced communication overhead and the bounded growth of the global batch size relative to the federation group size. --- ### Generating Heterogeneous 3D Geological Microstructures from 2D Images via a Stable Diffusion-Adversarial Model Authors: Ali Aouf, Eric Laloy, Bart Rogiers, Christophe De Vleeschouwer Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20358v1 Characterizing the physical properties of clay and cementitious materials matters across many fields, from materials science to geological waste disposal. Property simulation typically calls for 3D imaging, which is expensive, not always accessible, and technically limited for certain materials. Recent progress in deep generative models offers a way around this, reconstructing 3D volumes from the more easily acquired 2D images. Among GAN-based methods for 3D microstructure generation, SliceGAN has shown strong results for homogeneous isotropic and anisotropic systems. It struggles, however, to capture the finer detail of more complex heterogeneous microstructures, which motivates alternative generative frameworks. We introduce a hybrid approach that draws on the stability and generation quality of denoising diffusion models. Since no 3D ground truth is available, we replace the standard denoising loss with an adversarial loss, which yields a stable training process in our experiments. We show that the resulting model generates microstructures of varying complexity with minimal slice artefacts and close agreement with ground-truth phase fractions and structural descriptors. --- ### Minimax-Optimal Online Contract Design with Unrestricted Bounded Contracts Authors: Rui Ai, David Simchi-Levi, Han Zhong Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20353v1 We study repeated contract design when a principal observes outcomes but not the actions that generate them. The principal may use any bounded outcome-contingent payment vector, and the agent's best response can make expected profit discontinuous in those payments. For every fixed number $m\ge2$ of outcomes, the minimax regret over $T$ rounds is of order $T^{m/(m+1)}$, up to logarithmic factors. The upper bound allows arbitrary action spaces and agent heterogeneity, without smoothness or monotone-surplus assumptions. Its key is an effective-dimension reduction that the benchmark can be normalized even when fixed tie-breaking is not shift invariant, after which revealed preference yields a monotone response map in payment-difference coordinates. A learning policy built on a Lipschitz parametrization of this map attains the rate using only observed outcome categories. The lower-bound construction accounts for how incentive losses accumulate across outcome dimensions. It shows that each additional contractible outcome creates a precise and unavoidable increase in the worst-case cost of learning. --- ### COMPASS: Ordered Clustered Routing at 100K Scale Authors: Ido Greenberg, Hugo Linsenmaier, Piotr Sielski, Shie Mannor, Alex Fender, Gal Chechik, Eli Meirom Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20352v1 Large-scale routing often requires visiting clusters of nodes in a prescribed order, giving rise to the Ordered Clustered Traveling Salesman Problem (OCTSP). Optimizing each cluster independently seems natural, but misses non-local dependencies. We introduce the COMPASS algorithm for OCTSP, which combines search with learning-accelerated routing by orchestrating parallel sub-solvers. COMPASS has no quality ceiling and its solutions keep improving with compute. It exploits the clustered structure, and can reach exact solutions in time exponential in cluster size rather than instance size. Empirically, COMPASS consistently outperforms alternative methods. Unlike common large-scale routing solvers, COMPASS consumes general distance matrices and is not limited to coordinate inputs. We demonstrate scaling to 100K synthetic nodes and to 28.5K real e-commerce nodes. To our knowledge, the latter is the largest reported routing solution over asymmetric distances, 9x beyond established ATSP benchmarks. --- ### A Qualitative Model for Reasoning about Path and Support Authors: Abhishek Jaiswal, Zoe Falomir Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20349v1 Spatial reasoning abilities correlate strongly with performance in STEM fields. Games offer a compelling medium for training these critical skills in developing children who have a natural proclivity for play. However, to facilitate human-like tutoring and player guidance, these games require an AI agent capable of making commonsense inferences from spatial events. Qualitative reasoning (QR) models appear to be a suitable framework for these application domains. As these models reason in symbolic representations, they can seamlessly translate game states into interpretable feedback for human-like player guidance. This paper introduces a hybrid qualitative model designed for Camelot Jr., a block-puzzle game that requires constructing multi-level bridges to connect two avatars stationed on separate towers. The game poses a challenge for the player, who must make platforms stable, plan their path, and ensure they use all the provided blocks. To handle the precise physics required by the domain, we integrate a mathematical center-of-mass stability logic to guide our qualitative solver. Our work facilitates spatial skill training in Camelot Jr. and contributes to the development of human-centric, explainable game-playing agents. --- ### EliGSiR: Continual RGB-D Mapping with Gaussian Splatting under Bounded Compute Authors: Björn Ellensohn, Elmar Rueckert, Christian Rauch Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20348v1 Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting assumes a closed set of observations and long optimization schedules. Continual RGB-D mapping in contrast poses the problem that new observations arrive online, while previously reconstructed regions must be preserved. We present EliGSiR (Evidence-guided Load-adaptive Incremental Gaussian Splatting with Image Replay), a continual Gaussian mapper that controls how the available optimization budget is used as the reconstruction evolves. Map-Guided View Scheduling filters redundant incoming views and reconsiders retained views according to the current state of the map. Load-Adaptive Fidelity adjusts supervision resolution to the current mapping load instead of following a fixed resolution schedule. Targeted Geometry Growth separates depth supervision from Gaussian creation and adds geometric capacity only where repeated RGB-D observations indicate missing or misplaced structure. Together, these mechanisms adapt which views are optimized, how much image detail is used, and where the representation grows while mapping remains active. We evaluate EliGSiR on Replica, TUM RGB-D, ScanNet++, and real RGB-D sensor sequences, considering both the final reconstruction and the map available throughout acquisition. On TUM RGB-D fr3/long_office_household, EliGSiR reaches 21.52 dB with the same ground-truth mapping poses used by the controlled baselines, compared with 19.42 dB for SplaTAM. In the tracked-pose comparison, EliGSiR with live ORB-SLAM3 poses reaches 23.02 dB in 155.5 s, compared with 20.10 dB in 230.9 s for CaRtGS using its native tracker. We further evaluate reconstruction throughout acquisition and show how EliGSiR adaptive view scheduling, supervision fidelity, and geometry growth improve the use of the available mapping budget. --- ### STR-Agent: An LLM-Driven Agent for QoS-Aware Routing in LEO Satellite Networks Authors: Bowen Lu, Mugen Peng, Yaohua Sun, Hongyu Wang, Kerui Guo, Wenjia Xu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20347v1 LEO satellite networks feature dynamic topologies, time-varying links, and diverse service requirements, which make conventional routing schemes difficult to support fine-grained quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. Existing studies mainly optimize routing over network states with predefined objectives, but rarely address the practical challenge of translating unstructured natural-language service requests into adaptive routing decisions. To bridge this gap, we propose STR-Agent, an LLM-driven framework for QoS-aware routing in LEO satellite networks. The key innovation of STR-Agent lies in unifying intent perception, tool-based execution, experience accumulation, and reflection-based policy adaptation within a single agent architecture. Specifically, the Perception Module converts natural-language requests into structured routing semantics, while the Reflection Module dynamically adjusts the service-to-routing-policy mapping according to real-time congestion conditions and historical routing outcomes, rather than relying on a fixed routing objective. In addition, we develop a specialized perception model, and construct a domain-specific supervised fine-tuning dataset for LEO service understanding. Simulation results in a Walker-Delta constellation show that STR-Agent significantly outperforms conventional baselines: it reduces end-to-end delay by up to 60% compared with DQ-Dijkstra, improves average intent-understanding accuracy from 45.4% to 92.45% after supervised fine-tuning, and the Reflection Module further reduces the delay by 120 ms at 600 Mbps. These results demonstrate the potential of LLM-driven agent architectures to enable service-aware and adaptive QoS routing in future LEO satellite networks. --- ### Fast Cross-Strength Multi-Contrast Brain MRI Translation using Latent Bridge Matching Authors: Siddharth Srivastava, Till Bretschneider Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20341v1 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) acquired at different field strengths exhibits pronounced variation in noise, resolution, homogeneity, and contrast, which limits comparability across acquisition settings and complicates downstream analysis. We address this with a unified conditional model for controllable field-to-field synthesis, built on the framework of conditional latent bridge matching. Our single model achieves highly competitive results across the validation phase for all three tasks of the MRIxFields2026 challenge without task-specific architectures or training. We achieve fast generation with only a single inference step, producing all modality and field-strength combinations for $30$ axial slices in under $90$ seconds, as well as cross-modality-strength translation for a full volume in under $70$ seconds, on a single NVIDIA A5000 GPU. We further provide extensive ablations regarding different components of our solution. Code: https://gitlab.com/siddharthsrivastava/mrixfields-2026 --- ### FreqDINO++: A Frequency-Guided Multi-Task Routing Vision Foundation Model for Universal Ultrasound Analysis Authors: Qing Xu, Yixuan Zhang, Yue Li, Xiangjian He, Qian Zhang, Mainul Haque, Rong Qu, Wenting Duan, Jieyun Bai, Zhen Chen Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20340v1 Ultrasound image analysis plays a crucial role in cancer screening and prenatal diagnosis, yet comprehensive assessment requires jointly addressing tasks such as lesion segmentation and benign-malignant classification. While recent vision foundation models have shown remarkable universal representations, unlocking their potential for ultrasound is bottlenecked by the considerable domain gap from natural images. Existing methods typically fine-tune heavy vision encoders for isolated tasks, incurring substantial computational overhead while overlooking the underlying commonalities across heterogeneous tasks. In this work, we propose FreqDINO++, a frequency-guided multi-task routing vision foundation model for universal ultrasound analysis. We first introduce a Multi-task Routing Adapter (MR-Adapter) to support parameter-efficient integration of task-common and task-specific knowledge, a Frequency-aware Feature Enhancer (F$^2$-Enhancer) is then designed to capture the rich multi-scale frequency characteristics of ultrasound images, and a Task-aligned Collaborative Decoder (TC-Decoder) is devised to promote collaboration between dense and global prediction tasks through global-local token interaction. Extensive experiments on large-scale multi-task and external single-task ultrasound benchmarks demonstrate that FreqDINO++ consistently outperforms strong baselines and recent foundation models across 27 diverse clinical task scenarios, while also showing promising generalization to unseen data. The code is at https://github.com/MingLang-FD/FreqDINO-Plus. --- ### Detecting Deceptive Recruitment: A Signal-theoretic Machine Learning Framework for Early Identification of Labour Exploitation Authors: Sajid Siraj, Mahnaz Hosseinzadeh, Amin Vafadarnikjoo, Shuyang Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20336v1 Deceptive online job advertisements have emerged as a primary pathway into forced labour, yet systematic detection methods remain underdeveloped due to data scarcity and absence of empirically validated indicators. We formalise this detection challenge as a classification problem under signalling theory, where exploiters transmit costless signals mimicking legitimate communications across textual, visual, and structural dimensions. Using 464 verified cases (164 deceptive, 300 legitimate) collected through anti-slavery charities across nine origin countries and 21 industries, we develop multimodal detection models combining computer vision, natural language processing, and semantic embeddings. Through systematic feature ablation experiments and repeated stratified cross-validation, we demonstrate that individual modalities achieve substantial discriminatory power (ROC-AUC: 0.87--0.97), whilst their integration yields modest further gains. SHAP-based analysis reveals that text quality and domain-specific risk language are the primary discriminators, with readability indices, risk keyword density, and visa sponsorship mentions ranking highest, followed by visual colour and texture features. These production quality gaps reflect resource constraints that prevent exploiters from maintaining professional standards across all communication channels simultaneously. We operationalise findings through a proof-of-concept decision support system providing interpretable risk scores for practitioners. This work demonstrates how rigorous analytical frameworks can address complex humanitarian operations challenges characterised by information asymmetry and limited ground-truth data. --- ### Structured Four-Stage Legal Translation: From Natural-Language Traffic Rules to PROLOG Authors: May Myo Zin, Wachara Fungwacharakorn, Ken Satoh, Katsumi Nitta Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20334v1 Traffic regulations are written for human interpretation and therefore rely on shared background knowledge and flexible phrasing, which inherently introduce ambiguity, context dependence, and semantic underspecification. These linguistic characteristics conflict with the precision required by computational reasoning engines such as Prolog, which demand explicit logical structure. This study evaluates two baseline translation approaches, Natural Language to Prolog ($NL\rightarrow Prolog$) and Logical English to Prolog ($LE\rightarrow Prolog$), and introduces a new reasoning-guided translation framework called Structured Four-Stage Legal Translation ($S4L\rightarrow Prolog$). The proposed S4L framework performs semantic role extraction, scene completion, logical mapping, and Prolog rule generation within a single guided prompt, enabling direct translation of raw traffic rules into executable logic without human intervention. A benchmark consisting of twenty real-world traffic rules was used to evaluate each approach in terms of syntactic validity, semantic correctness, and logical completeness. $S4L\rightarrow Prolog$ achieves the highest accuracy, correctly formalizing 75 percent of the rules, while $NL\rightarrow Prolog$ reaches 60 percent and $LE\rightarrow Prolog$ reaches 55 percent. Qualitative analysis further shows that S4L captures implicit causal relations, deontic modality, and exception structure more reliably than the baselines. These results demonstrate that structured reasoning prompts can substantially improve the reliability of natural-language-to-logic translation for legal and safety-critical applications. --- ### Sharp Reconstruction Bounds for Autoencoders Using the Same Forward Map Authors: Patricia Medina, Hy P. G. Lam Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, math.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20333v1 We study reconstruction in autoencoders that apply the same forward map before and after setting the observed coordinates to zero. For equal odd input and hidden dimensions $d\geq 3$, among orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms whose Jacobian singular values lie in $(m,M)$, we show that the least uniform reconstruction-derivative error is $\max\{1-M(M-m)/2,0\}$, with affine maps attaining this sharp bound at every prescribed depth. A translated radial rotation can nevertheless reconstruct any prescribed ball exactly with singular values arbitrarily close to one, motivating additional conditions for a finite-data bound. We test this prediction on a 798,452-point terrestrial LiDAR forest scan. At input scale $0.05$, the mean theoretical bound is $0.155$, about $84\%$ of the mean normalized training error $0.185$ across four spatial regions, two depths, and three seeds. At this scale, adding one hidden coordinate reduces the mean reconstruction error below $6\times10^{-6}$. --- ### Near-Optimal Single-Loop Predictor--Corrector Extragradient Method for Strongly Convex--Strongly Concave Minimax Optimization Authors: Minhao Zhang, Zi Xu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20327v2 We study smooth strongly convex--strongly concave minimax optimization in the deterministic unconstrained setting, without assuming a bilinear or separable structure. Although existing multi-loop methods attain near-optimal condition-number dependence, standard single-loop methods generally exhibit a substantial complexity gap. To close this gap, we propose the Single-Loop Predictor--Corrector Extragradient Method with Damped Momentum (PCE-DM), which combines an extragradient prediction--correction scheme with a novel auxiliary feedback recursion for the weaker-curvature variable. PCE-DM uses fixed parameters and two new full-gradient evaluations per iteration after one initialization query, while requiring no inner solves, accuracy schedules, or staged restarts. We develop a Lyapunov analysis that controls the predictor--corrector mismatch through corrected-gradient increments and establish last-iterate linear convergence. Specifically, PCE-DM computes an $\varepsilon$-accurate relative solution, measured by the squared Euclidean distance to the saddle point, within $\mathcal{O}\!\left(\sqrt{κ_xκ_y} \log(2κ_xκ_y/\varepsilon)\right)$ full-gradient queries. This result closes the condition-number complexity gap between standard single-loop methods and near-optimal multi-loop methods, matching the known lower-bound order up to logarithmic factors while retaining fixed, explicit single-loop updates. Numerical experiments on regularized linear regression and AUC maximization demonstrate the computational efficiency of PCE-DM. --- ### AgriScope: Pixel-Grounded Multimodal Understanding for Agricultural Images Authors: Abderrahmene Boudiaf, Mohamad Alanssari, Irfan Hussain, Sajid Javed Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20325v1 Agricultural image understanding requires fine-grained recognition of plant diseases, pests, crop structures, and botanical species under complex real-world conditions. Despite recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing models remain limited to text-only outputs and lack pixel-level visual grounding capabilities. In this work, we introduce AgriScope, a unified pixel-grounded multimodal framework for agricultural image understanding. AgriScope jointly supports image-level, region-level, and pixel-level understanding within a unified framework, enabling tasks such as grounded caption generation, referring expression segmentation, and multi-turn multimodal interaction for agricultural imagery. AgriScope integrates biologically specialized semantic representations with dense spatial grounding through biological-semantic encoding, dense spatial representations, and pixel decoding. To support large-scale grounded learning, we introduce AgriGround, a large-scale pixel-grounded agricultural multimodal instruction-tuning dataset containing over 500K images and 11M instruction-following samples spanning plant disease analysis, crop and weed identification, insect pest recognition, and fine-grained botanical understanding. AgriGround is constructed through a multi-stage automatic annotation pipeline that integrates multimodal caption generation, phrase-level grounding, segmentation mask generation, and task-oriented instruction synthesis to produce densely grounded supervision. Extensive experiments across multiple agricultural vision-language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of AgriScope in pixel-grounded multimodal understanding, establishing a strong benchmark for agricultural vision-language learning and visual grounding. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at (https://github.com/boudiafA/AgriScope) --- ### NeuSOGA3D: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Explainable 3D Geometric Reconstruction Authors: Qingde Li, Qingqi Hong, Zihan Li, Jie Tian Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20323v2 Three-dimensional reconstruction from unorganized point clouds remains a challenging problem in computer vision, geometric modeling, and computer-aided design. While neural implicit methods achieve impressive reconstruction accuracy, geometry is typically encoded in latent representations that limit interpretability and reuse within engineering workflows. We present NeuSOGA3D (Neuro-Symbolic Observation-Guided Geometric Abstraction in 3D), a hybrid framework that combines learned perceptual priors inherited from NeuSOGA with explicit symbolic geometric reasoning. The method projects point clouds onto principal orthographic planes, constructs symbolic implicit spline representations from the resulting observations, and fuses them through shape-preserving constructive solid geometry operations to generate a coarse visual hull. Additional geometric detail is recovered through cross-sectional decomposition and volumetric reconstruction using Partial Shape-Preserving Splines. Unlike conventional neural implicit approaches, NeuSOGA3D progressively transforms observations into explicit symbolic entities, including control polygons, implicit spline fields, cross-sections, and volumetric lofts. Experiments on all forty categories of the ModelNet40 benchmark demonstrate the ability of the framework to recover structurally meaningful and CAD-compatible geometric representations from diverse point-cloud observations. The results highlight the potential of combining learned perception with symbolic geometric reasoning for explainable geometric intelligence. --- ### To Copy or Not to Copy: Controlling Speculative Decoding via Intrinsic Model Signals Authors: Roy Eisenstadt, Ido Cohen, Edo Cohen-Karlik, Lior Wolf, Itamar Zimerman Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20186v1 Speculative Decoding (SD) has significantly accelerated Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet existing approaches face a fundamental tradeoff between two drafting strategies: neural drafting and context-based copying. Neural drafts (e.g., EAGLE3) provide robust performance across diverse text settings, while copy-based methods achieve higher speedups in copy-intensive regimes by generating candidates faster and exploiting long repetition spans for near-perfect speculation. We analyze existing copy-based methods and find that they are prone to accidental repetitions where surface-level n-gram overlap does not reflect a structural intent to copy, leading to false-positive triggers that ultimately degrade throughput. We introduce SwitchSD, an adaptive framework that treats copying as a latent control signal of the LLM. By training lightweight probes on the target model's internal representations, SwitchSD identifies genuine copy-intent with high precision (AUC > 0.99). This allows the system to dynamically switch between neural drafting (e.g., EAGLE) and context-based copying. Our results across Llama and Qwen families demonstrate throughput gains of up to 15% over state-of-the-art baselines like EAGLE3, effectively turning copying from a noisy heuristic into a principled, model-aware decoding regime. --- ### Needles in a Raystack: Ultra-Sparse LiDAR Occupancy Detection for Bat Tracks Authors: Nico Klar, Pankaj Rana, Nizam Gifary, Jakob Traub, Aamir Ahmad Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20160v1 Monitoring flying animals is important for understanding and protecting biodiversity, but nocturnal species such as bats are difficult to observe in the field. Using LiDAR, bat movements at night result in ultra-sparse 3D spatio-temporal data in which standard reconstruction losses tend to predict only background and miss real flight paths. We study this problem as voxel-wise occupancy detection in sensor-centric LiDAR raystacks. A lightweight 3D U-Net is proposed that preserves temporal resolution, uses skip connections for spatial detail, and combines weighted binary cross-entropy with Dice loss to handle the strong class imbalance. In real LiDAR recordings of bats over open fields, cross-checked with acoustic monitoring, a reconstruction-based 3D convolutional autoencoder baseline fails to recover foreground trajectories. In contrast, the proposed U-Net recovers sparse foreground occupancy in diagnostic experiments and produces coherent occupancy patterns along bat flight trajectories, providing a practical basis for validation-scale experiments, later clustering of flight tracks, and future integration of bat activity information into biodiversity-aware turbine curtailment strategies. --- ### Special Lagrangian cones in Deep Learning Authors: Tejas Kotwal, Govind Menon Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: math.DG, cs.LG, math.SG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20159v1 We introduce a matrix generalization of the cone of Harvey and Lawson and prove that it is an exact special Lagrangian manifold. We further show that it belongs to a family of exact special Lagrangian manifolds that foliate the balanced manifold arising in deep learning. --- ### QUALS: Corpus Equilibrium for Universal Forecasting via Pattern Quantization and Learnability Synchronization Authors: Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu, Yisong Fu, Weijie Zhu, Yifan Du, Jilin Hu, Bin Yang, Yongjun Xu, Fei Wang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20156v2 Ubiquitous time series data across diverse domains enables critical applications in areas such as transportation systems and power grids. Recently, training foundation models on massive datasets to achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting has emerged as a major research focus. However, current studies predominantly prioritize architectural innovations while insufficiently addressing data diversity, often relying on simple data sampling strategies that fail to manage complex data distributions effectively, leading to inefficient use of training data and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose QUALS, a large-scale time series corpus equilibrium framework. QUALS significantly enhances data efficiency, i.e., enabling existing models to achieve superior performance using only a small fraction of the original training data. Specifically, QUALS operates through two core mechanisms. First, a pattern quantization framework systematically decodes heterogeneous patterns from mixed corpora via vector quantization and uniform binning. Second, a learnability synchronization framework calibrates sampling weights for heterogeneous patterns, bridging the optimization gap between simple and complex motifs to maximize overall training efficiency. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that pre-training on QUALS consistently achieves superior zero-shot performance, even under substantially reduced training budgets. --- ### MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agents Authors: Pritish Mishra, Ishaan Kumar, Akshat Mandoli, Sudarshan Kamath Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20152v1 Generally, most voice agents are cascaded systems, i.e., an ASR model transcribes the caller's audio, a language model reads the transcript and decides what to say and which backend tools to call, and a TTS model speaks the reply. Nearly all of the decision making happens in the language model, but existing evaluations measure it either too broadly or too narrowly. End-to-end voice benchmarks score the full pipeline, so recognition errors and model errors mix into a single number. LLM benchmarks isolate the model but they do not evaluate what makes real phone calls hard, such as transcription issues, caller's voice being split across messages and the requirement that replies follow the language and script specified. We introduce the Multi-Turn Voice Agent Benchmark (MTVA-Bench), which evaluates the language model on the same conditions it faces inside a cascaded system. The caller is played by an LLM following a set of rubrics and tool calls are answered by a mock backend which responds to the arguments the model actually sent. The benchmark contains 49 agents working across 490 reviewed scenarios and supports 7 languages. Scoring is a combination of deterministic checks on tool calls with two LLM judges, one that scores scenario specific rules and one that grades conversation quality without access to the task. Both judges must cite specific messages from the transcript. Task and conversation scores are weighted equally, since a call can complete its task and still go badly for the caller. In a seven-model study, six of the models select the correct tool within 6.4 points of one another, but their overall scores span 24.4 points. Most of the gap comes from argument values, action ordering, rule compliance, and what the model says around its tool calls. --- ### Ischemic Stroke Segmentation and Net Water Uptake Quantification on Multicenter Non-Contrast CT Using Supervised Target-Domain Adaptation Authors: Linus Britt, Maximilian Nielsen, Susan Klapproth, Andre Kemmling, Michael H. Lev, Gabriel Broocks, Rene Werner, Thilo Sentker Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20151v2 Objectives: Quantitative assessment of infarct hypodensity on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT), including net water uptake (NWU), requires manual or semi-manual lesion delineation, often guided by CT perfusion or diffusion-weighted MRI, limiting clinical applicability. Automated segmentation on NCCT could enable efficient biomarker extraction such as NWU but remains challenging across heterogeneous multicenter data. This study aimed to develop and externally test a domain-aware deep learning framework for ischemic stroke segmentation on NCCT and assess its suitability for NWU quantification. Materials & Methods: In this retrospective multicenter study of 801 patients from four datasets, an nnU-Net-based model was trained on NCCT scans from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the Acute Ischemic Stroke Dataset. To adapt to new domains, the model was fine-tuned on target-domain subsets from Boston (n=11) and ISLES (n=75), with evaluation on held-out cases not used for fine-tuning. Automated segmentations and NWU values were compared with expert references. Results: For lesions $\geq$ 30 mL, median Dice was 0.68 (Boston) and 0.56 (ISLES). Including smaller lesions, which predominated in ISLES, median Dice was 0.54 (interquartile range (IQR) 0.30-0.70) for acute lesion segmentation (Boston dataset) and 0.20 (IQR 0.03-0.41) for NCCT lesion segmentations when compared to post-treatment infarct (primary target of the ISLES challenge). Automated NWU mean absolute error was 1.37 percentage points (SD 1.61, Boston). Conclusion: Target-domain adaptation supported NCCT-only infarct segmentation across heterogeneous external cohorts, although performance varied across domains. The approach enabled low-error NWU quantification from baseline NCCT without advanced imaging, supporting further prospective clinical evaluation. --- ### Task-Oriented Semantic Feature Transmission for Multi-Task Satellite Remote Sensing over Low-SNR Channels Authors: Shuoyuan Sun, Hongyu Wang, Mugen Peng, Wenjia Xu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20150v1 Conventional satellite remote sensing transmission follows a reconstruct-then-infer paradigm that optimizes pixel-level fidelity, creating an objective mismatch with downstream tasks such as classification and detection, especially at low SNR. This paper investigates a task-oriented framework that bypasses image reconstruction and directly transmits semantic features extracted by a multitask-pretrained backbone. A lightweight channel adaptation module (CAM) compresses feature dimensionality for bandwidth reduction, and a feature restorer recovers task-relevant structure after channel corruption. With the backbone frozen, the CAM and task-specific downstream heads are jointly optimized with task and feature-level supervision under random-SNR training. Under the adopted AWGN setting, experiments on scene classification and object detection show consistent gains over reconstruction-oriented JSCC baselines across different SNR conditions, with the largest improvements in the low-SNR regime. --- ### Bridging Modalities on the Cortex: Surface-based MRI to PET Translation with a Diffusion Bridge Authors: Yitong Li, Alexandra Samoylova, Fabian Bongratz, Timo Grimmer, Dennis M. Hedderich, Igor Yakushev, Christian Wachinger Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20147v1 Cortical hypometabolism measured by Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) is a highly sensitive biomarker for dementia diagnosis. However, high costs, radiation exposure, and limited accessibility constrain its clinical utility. While cross-modal synthesis from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) offers a promising alternative, existing volumetric generation methods do not explicitly account for the highly folded cortical geometry, where disease-related patterns predominantly reside. To address this, we introduce a novel surface-based diffusion bridge framework DB-SUiT for MRI-to-PET translation that operates natively on the cortical manifold. A conditional Spherical U-shaped vision Transformer (SUiT) is specifically designed to model the intricate cross-modal relationships while preserving surface topology. It combines spherical convolutional encoders for multi-scale surface feature extraction with bottleneck Transformers to capture long-range spatial dependencies, while incorporating demographic and subcortical conditions to refine the synthesis. Evaluated on two datasets, including subjects with different dementia types, DB-SUiT demonstrates high-fidelity synthesis that substantially outperforms other baselines. In automated dementia classification, synthesized PET surfaces improve performance over MRI by 14.2% and PET volumes by 11.3%, approaching the performance of real PET surfaces. In a blinded reader study, synthetic PET achieved 85.5% diagnostic accuracy, compared with 75.8% for MRI and 95.2% for real PET. This further demonstrates cross-cohort and cross-pathology generalization, as the model was evaluated without retraining on an external cohort that included a dementia subtype not represented during training. Our code is available at https://github.com/ai-med/DB-SUiT. --- ### Designing Against Deskilling: Metacognitive Feedback Reduces Cognitive Offloading to LLM Assistants Authors: Sebastian Maier, Kai Schwabe, Manuel Schneider, Stefan Feuerriegel Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20143v1 Cognitive offloading to AI can reduce opportunities to practice skills, creating risks of deskilling. However, it remains unclear how to prevent deskilling without restricting access to AI. Here, we design two interventions to reduce offloading decisions: (1) metacognitive feedback that makes the implications of offloading for users explicit, and (2) an effort-based reward that incentivizes less extensive LLM assistance. We test both in a preregistered online experiment ($N = 704$) with a 2$\times$2 design and a no-AI control. The task was to practice fraction arithmetic with an LLM-based assistant that provided solutions only on explicit request, followed by an unaided test. Metacognitive feedback reduced answer offloading (OR $= 0.47$) and improved test performance (OR $= 1.51$). We found no evidence that the reward affected either outcome. Our results identify metacognitive feedback as a promising design choice to reduce cognitive offloading. --- ### Cross-Modal Attention Acts as a Frequency Filter: Why Verbose Prompts Improve Robustness in Vision-Language Models Authors: Farooq Ahmad Wani, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Mujtaba Hussain Mirza, Oleksandr Pryymak, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Iacopo Masi, Pasquale Minervini, Fabrizio Silvestri Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20139v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) are fragile under image corruption. We find that the wording of the question affects VLMs in two opposite ways. Verbose questions make VLMs substantially more robust---e.g., rephrasing "Is there a cat?" into "Please look carefully and answer: is there a cat?". Conversely, VLMs become more fragile under corruption when the question is semantically complex or finer-grained, e.g., "what colour is the cup left of the chair?" instead of "is there a cup?". Both effects stem from question-conditioned cross-modal attention, which induces a spectral filter over image patches: verbose questions broaden its frequency support, while fine-grained questions concentrate it onto fewer visual scales. The model's answer drifts most when this filter and the corruption sit on the same spatial frequencies. We test the filter view on Qwen3-VL and LLaVA-OneVision across GQA and CLEVR; verbose paraphrasing reduces drift variance by 70--81% on the 8B models. The practical recipe---pad the prompt---further yields measurable gains in accuracy, even under image corruption. ---