# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 141 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #7001–7050 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/141 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/140.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/142.md) ### Fast-varying Natural Frequencies and Damping Ratio Identification for Linear Time-Varying System Authors: Melisa Bozaci, Alice Cicirello Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20138v1 This work proposes a physics-enhanced machine learning approach for the system identification of Linear Time-Varying (LTV) systems under time-varying operating conditions in terms of fast-varying natural frequencies and damping ratios by combining a long short-term memory network with an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The proposed approach uses vibration data (displacement and velocity measurements), domain knowledge of modal damping ratios, and a physics-based model that can yield an approximate natural frequencies time-dependency model. The approach is validated using synthetic data generated from a finite element model of a 2-blade offshore wind turbine under realistic environmental and operating conditions. This system displays fast time-varying frequencies due to operating conditions, whose identification is particularly challenging because of the wind and wave loading. The robustness of the proposed approach is assessed under assumed incorrect system information (e.g. damping ratio). The proposed approach is evaluated across different environmental and operating conditions to show its applicability to different operating regimes. The results show the approach can accurately identify the selected fast-varying natural frequency, 1st Fore-Aft (FA-1) mode, with a maximum root mean square error of 0.0012 Hz. The results demonstrate that the model trained on EKF estimates depends on accurate damping values, whereas the model trained on physics-based data exhibits robustness to incorrect damping assumptions. The approach is extended to damping ratio identification for the selected mode by estimating the root mean square error between models trained on EKF estimates and physics-based data. The results show that the approach can yield a good approximation of the FA-1 mode damping ratio using grid search, offering an improvement over covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification. --- ### Think Thrice Before Reranking: Multi-perspective Evidence and Reasoning Integration for Text Reranking Authors: Lijun Liu, Zhengzong Chen, Wenyan Li, Yuanyuan Zhao, Fei Huang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20131v1 Reasoning-based reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising improvements in text ranking. However, current methods predominantly rely on a single reasoning trajectory, resulting in rankings that are susceptible to reasoning errors and inherently constrained in modeling the multifaceted signals underlying document relevance. To resolve this dilemma, we propose MERIT-Rank(Multi-perspective Evidence and Reasoning Integration for Text Reranking), a framework that models complementary reasoning trajectories to improve reranking robustness. MERIT-Rank formulates a Multi-Trajectory Reasoning Space (MTRS) that evaluates query-document relevance from multiple perspectives and introduces a joint reranker that consolidates these reasoning paths into a unified ranking decision. We further develop Progressive Rank Policy Optimization (PRPO), a progressive training framework that stabilizes reasoning trajectories while continually improving ranking quality through staged optimization objectives. Experiments on both reasoning-intensive and traditional retrieval benchmarks show that MERIT-Rank consistently achieves superior performance over competitive baselines. The 4B model notably outperforms most 7B and even 32B rerankers on BRIGHT. --- ### AdaRepair-Mem: Adaptive Experience Orchestration for Repository-Level Program Repair Authors: Z. C. Luo, J. C. Guo, W. J. He, S. Y. Wang, J. C. Yu, F. M. Zhao, Y. Chen, T. Cao, L. Q. Liu, N. Zheng, W. Xu, J. Jiang et al. Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20130v1 Recent memory-augmented repository-level program repair methods reuse historical repair experiences to improve LLM-based issue resolution. However, our analysis reveals three limitations in existing repository-level memory retrieval. First, episodic memory is highly imbalanced across repositories, leaving low-resource repositories with little effective support. Second, more memory does not monotonically lead to higher repair success, suggesting that relevance, quality, and redundancy matter more than raw memory volume. Third, memory accumulation is phase-misaligned: repositories may contain many reproduction experiences but few patch or refinement experiences. To address these problems, we propose an adaptive experience retrieval framework for repository-level program repair. Our framework introduces coverage-aware retrieval, which falls back to cross-repository or repair-type-based memories when same-repository memory is insufficient; quality-aware selection, which ranks memories by relevance, historical utility, specificity, and redundancy; and stage-aware routing, which separates and retrieves memories for reproduction, localization, patch generation, patch refinement, and validation. Evaluated on SWE-Bench-Lite and SWE-Bench-Verified, the proposed framework improves repair performance on under-covered repositories, reduces noisy memory retrieval, and better supports failed-to-fixed patch refinement. Our results show that the key to memory-augmented repair is not simply accumulating more experiences, but retrieving the right experiences for the right repair context. --- ### Local Sparsity Enables Unsupervised LLM Safety Detection Authors: Xin Chen, Gil Kur, Alexander Shevchenko, Andreas Krause Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20129v1 Deployment-time safety methods for large language models (LLMs) are predominantly supervised and assume access to unsafe training data. Nevertheless, new attacks and harm categories regularly arise, not captured by models trained in such a supervised fashion. An alternative approach is to view this problem through the lens of anomaly detection, namely, to rely solely on modeling safe data and flagging out-of-distribution inputs. However, LLM activations lie in a high-dimensional space, raising concerns about whether anomaly detection is statistically feasible. We show that, under the linear representation hypothesis (LRH), there may indeed be hope. In the LRH concept space, which is typically recovered via a sparse autoencoder (SAE), nearby points share a small common active support. Using this local sparsity insight, we propose a framework for locally masked SAE-based anomaly detection, supported by theoretical justifications. We validate it on various architectures and datasets, including both capability-testing datasets and safety-specific datasets. Finally, when we allow algorithms to use 1% out-of-distribution data for calibration, locally sparse methods achieve near-optimal performance, demonstrating their ability to capture meaningful safety information while using only 1-2% of SAE neurons for computation. --- ### Multi-Dimensional Prosody Judgment For Live Streaming Speech Synthesis Authors: Zifan Guan, Longyu Lu, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20124v1 Evaluating live streaming speech synthesis (TTS) requires assessing fine-grained, highly expressive prosody such as emotion, intonation, and energy which traditional MOS predictors fail to capture. While proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) like Gemini can evaluate these aspects, they are too costly for massive inference and reinforcement learning feedback. To address this, we first introduce Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost-effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini into Qwen3-Omni. However, we identify a critical flaw in standard multi-dimensional evaluation: verdict coupling. The judge tends to lazily align all individual dimension scores with its overall preference, collapsing a rich multi-dimensional rubric into a single preference bit. To resolve this, we further propose Decoupled-Live-ProsodyJudge (D-LPJ). D-LPJ eliminates the overall verdict target to prevent blind following, masks uncertain pair-dimensions during Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT), and introduces a novel span-local GRPO strategy that applies normalized advantages strictly to their corresponding rationale spans. Evaluated on highly curated human-annotated test sets, 10 sample balanced-order LPJ achieves higher point accuracy than a single Gemini call, while D-LPJ successfully produces independent,decoupled dimension judgments. Furthermore, in a Best-of-8 TTS candidate selection tournament, the LPJ-selected utterance falls within the human top-3 in 85.29% of high-confidence cases, demonstrating its efficacy for fine-grained TTS preference optimization. --- ### QoS-Aware Federated Learning for Multimodal In-Cabin Interaction in Smart Vehicles Authors: Baran Can Gül, Mert Nakıp, Nasser Jazdi, Michael Weyrich Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20123v1 Modern smart vehicles leverage multimodal sensors, ranging from high-bandwidth vision systems to low-rate physiological monitors, to provide personalized in-cabin services. However, integrating high-fidelity multimodal fusion with collaborative training is often hindered by the heterogeneous and time-varying Quality of Service (QoS) constraints of vehicular networks. Standard Federated Learning (FL) approaches enforce rigid synchronous rounds that fail to account for these resource asymmetries, leading to safety-critical timing violations and energy exhaustion. In this paper, we propose FedQoS, a novel asynchronous, event-triggered FL framework that decouples local computation from global communication via a two-phase gating mechanism. First, we introduce a resource-aware training gate that initializes local learning only when sensing buffers and energy reserves meet safety thresholds, preventing ML tasks from compromising core vehicle mobility. Second, a QoS-aware transmission policy gates uplink updates based on an efficiency score that balances model novelty against instantaneous latency and energy costs. Locally, clients optimize an objective featuring a staleness-aware proximal term that dynamically adjusts the global anchor strength based on update age. Extensive experiments on multimodal vehicular datasets demonstrate that FedQoS achieves competitive personalized accuracy with only marginal performance loss compared to FedAvg, while substantially reducing QoS violations, cutting communication overhead by 76.7\%, and lowering latency cost by 26.0\%, demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy and efficiency balance for real-world vehicular deployments. --- ### Perception, Layout, and Validation: Calibrated Confidence for Reliable Straight-Through Processing of Financial Documents Authors: Yichao Jin, Yushuo Wang, Yuxuan Han, Kwan Ching Yee Sonia, Weiyang Song, Chiu Jin-Chun Kent, Wong Chong Hwee, Wong Tiong Kiat, Kenneth Zhu Ke, Jingyuan Zhao Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20110v1 Straight-through processing (STP) on extracted key-value fields from financial documents without human review requires a calibrated probability together with a bounded guarantee on the residual error of the auto-approved tier. The emergence of modern Vision Language Models (VLMs) provides an out-of-the-box capability for extracting the key-values, but their verbalized confidence signals are unreliable and weakly track field correctness. This paper introduces a decomposed confidence layer along three interpretable channels, including perception, layout, and validation. Together with a final conformal risk control, the score can be used for reliable STP of financial documents. The method is validated on three public datasets covering real invoices, synthetic invoices, and ad-buy forms, using two different VLM families (Qwen3.6-27B and Gemini-3.1-Flash-Lite). Our decomposed score consistently improves the separation of correct from incorrect extractions, substantially raising the AUROC from 0.54-0.74 for VLM verbalized signals to 0.90-0.99 with contributions from all three designed channels. Crucially for industrial deployment, this enables usable STP. The native VLM confidence signals could clear only 0.1%-7.0% of fields under risk control at a target error of <10%. In contrast, the proposed method auto-approves 49-72% of fields while holding the empirical error of the accepted tier at or below the target. --- ### AnyviewMeter: Adapting Robotic Reward Models with Camera Geometry and Multi-View Attention Authors: Yuang Tu, Runjia Tan, Yujie Yan, Jinghan Hu, Chen Lv Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20106v1 Robotic reward models evaluate task execution from visual observations, but their predictions can change with camera viewpoint and occlusion even when the underlying task state is unchanged. Adapting a pretrained reward model to a local task therefore requires accounting for how that task is observed. We introduce AnyviewMeter, a geometry-conditioned adaptation framework for robotic reward models that represent task progress as a scalar reward signal. It combines low-rank fine-tuning with token-aligned Plucker rays and synchronous block attention: ray conditioning incorporates camera geometry into visual features and attention queries and keys, while block attention fuses synchronized views inside the pretrained decoder. The framework supports both single-view reward prediction and joint multi-view evaluation through parameter-efficient adaptation of a pretrained Robometer model. On PickCube, single-view adaptation improves progress prediction in every camera group and reduces mean absolute error under a changed field of view by approximately 21% relative to RGB fine-tuning. Across simulated manipulation tasks, joint multi-view prediction reduces progress error by 41-69% compared with averaging single-view RGB predictions and improves temporal ordering in approximately 88% of task-camera groups. On real tasks with fixed and wrist-mounted cameras, mean absolute error decreases by approximately 21% relative to averaged RGB fine-tuning. These results support camera geometry and joint visual evidence as useful components of task-specific robotic reward adaptation. --- ### Design of the IBM Granite 5.0 TurboCTC ASR Model Authors: Brian Kingsbury, George Saon, Masayuki Suzuki, Hong-Kwang J. Kuo, Takashi Fukuda, Samuel Thomas, Vishal Sunder, Avihu Dekel Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20104v1 We describe the architecture, training methodology and inference speedups of Granite 5.0 Turbo CTC, a 470 million parameter encoder-only model with an excellent speed-accuracy tradeoff. The architecture uses pyramidal temporal subsampling within Conformer blocks using strided depthwise convolutions, block-diagonal (chunk-wise) self-attention, and conditioning on intermediate predictions from the middle layer. Training highlights are the use of only publicly available data, the novel use of a Muon optimizer, and balanced data sampling. Inference speedups include replacing 1 x 1 convolutions with linear layers and optimizing the attention computation in the Conformer blocks. Collectively, these result in a model that is on the speed-accuracy Pareto frontier of the Open ASR leaderboard for English short-form ASR while being twice as fast as the fastest competitor. The model can be used under a permissive license and downloaded from https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc. --- ### A Smaller Transformer in Your Transformer Authors: Dhananjay Tomar, Marius Aasan, Andreas Kleppe, Adín Ramírez Rivera Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20100v1 Recent findings indicate that Vision Transformers settle into locally similar computational phases, implying a level of depthwise computational redundancy. However, existing methods to exploit this redundancy either fail to reduce inference compute or severely degrade model expressivity. In this work, we formalise a unified view of block redundancy that decouples the geometry from specific surrogate interventions. We then introduce Transformer-Within-Transformer (TWT), a post-hoc method that fuses contiguous groups of redundant layers into a single learned surrogate layer. TWT reduces parameter count and inference compute while remaining competitive with original models using half the depth on natural images, and in several downstream histopathology settings, TWT matches or even improves on the original baseline. --- ### CARE-VI: Conservative Adaptive Reliability Estimation for Value Improvement in Off-Policy Actor-Critic Learning Authors: Xiang Zou, Shengzhu Shi, Junqi Gao, Zhichang Guo Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20098v1 Reliable temporal-difference targets are central to off-policy actor-critic learning. Direct value improvement refines the next-state target with alternative actions, but the reliability of this refinement depends on how candidate actions are ranked, reviewed, and weighted. Noisy rankings may force premature candidate commitment, reusing selection scores may bias target valuation, and fixed enhancement weights may amplify weak evidence. To address these risks, we develop Conservative Adaptive Ranking and Screening (CARS), which retains an ordered candidate prefix within a preset budget and narrows it only when the observed boundary gap exceeds a disagreement-scaled uncertainty radius. Selector-Evaluator Value Assessment (SEVA) uses selector critics to order candidates and a separately parameterized evaluator critic to review the selected value, then caps the reviewed value at the selector reference. Dynamic Adaptive Risk-aware Enhancement (DARE) then regulates each residual correction using candidate reliability, the gap between selector and evaluator signals, and a finite stage factor. Together, CARS, SEVA, and DARE form CARE-VI, an evidence-regulated target construction framework that preserves the backbone interfaces for critic regression and actor updates. The analysis bounds the CARS boundary error, the SEVA selected-value overestimation, and the one-sided deviation of the DARE residual displacement from its population counterpart, and establishes fixed-policy recovery after the finite-stage perturbation ends. Experiments with SAC, TD3, and TD7 on four MuJoCo tasks show that CARE-VI achieves the highest mean return in all twelve settings. Grouped ablations and scalar diagnostics support the roles of the three components in improving target reliability. --- ### A Scalable Trust Discovery Architecture for the Internet of Agents Authors: Song Zhang, Jiankang Yao, Hongtao Li, Xiaojun Zhang, Xugang Shen, Xin Li, Yanbiao Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20095v1 The Internet of Agents is expected to enable large numbers of autonomous agents to discover, verify, and collaborate with each other across heterogeneous platforms. However, current agent protocols mainly address tool invocation and inter-agent communication, leaving scalable agent registration, trustworthy identification, and capability-oriented discovery largely unresolved. To address this, this paper proposes a scalable trust discovery architecture for the Internet of Agents. The proposed architecture adopts a hierarchical and distributed design consisting of three layers: Agent Root for trusted registry governance, Agent Registry for agent registration and metadata publication, and Agent Resolver for distributed capability discovery and trust-aware resolution. The architecture further introduces a registry-suffix-anchored composite identity scheme, which binds an agent native identifier to a trusted registry suffix to generate a globally discoverable identity. It also incorporates a dual-certificate and multi-level authentication mechanism to strengthen identity trust among agents. We implement a prototype and evaluate it through large-scale agent registration and resolution experiments. The prototype achieves an average registration latency of 58ms and an average discovery latency of 25ms, and it supports more than 19,000 registration requests per second and more than 29,000 agent discovery requests per second. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, providing a practical approach toward scalable and identity-trusted agent ecosystems in the Internet of Agents. --- ### Solving Minimum Span Antibandwidth and Cyclic Antibandwidth Labeling Problems Authors: Hieu Truong Xuan, Khanh To Van Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20091v1 The Antibandwidth and Cyclic Antibandwidth problems are NP-hard graph labeling problems that aim to maximize the minimum (cyclic) distance between labels assigned to adjacent vertices. Extensive research on these problems has resulted in a variety of mathematical formulations and computational approaches. However, their minimum span perspective, in which a prescribed minimum (cyclic) distance is fixed and the objective is to minimize the label span, has received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we consider this complementary perspective by introducing the Minimum Span Antibandwidth/Cyclic Antibandwidth Labeling (MSABL/MSCABL) problems and developing a unified Boolean Satisfiability (SAT)-based framework for solving them. The SAT-based framework formulates MSABL/MSCABL as a sequence of decision problems and exploits their monotonicity to accelerate the search process. We also consider two SAT solving strategies, parallel and incremental SAT solving: the former examines multiple candidate spans concurrently, while the latter reuses a single SAT instance while progressively restricting the label domain. The proposed approaches are evaluated on benchmark instances from the Harwell-Boeing Sparse Matrix Collection and compared with CPLEXCP, CPLEXMIP, and Gurobi. The results show that SAT-based approaches are highly competitive in solution quality, with the parallel approach performing best overall for MSCABL and the incremental approach for MSABL. With the no-hole constraint, they remain competitive with CPLEXCP and significantly outperform CPLEXMIP and Gurobi, particularly for MSCABL. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SAT solving as an exact approach for MSABL and MSCABL. --- ### UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20089v1 Self-evolving methods reduce the need for human-annotated trajectories by allowing tool-using agents to generate their own training data. Yet existing methods typically separate trajectory generation from evaluation, relying on static verifiers that cannot adapt to emerging failure modes or self-consistency signals that may reinforce errors shared across trajectories. Jointly adapting planning, execution, and evaluation offers a promising alternative, but introduces a fundamental coordination challenge: each component continuously changes the data or feedback used to train the others. We address this challenge with \textbf{UnifiedPlayers}, a cooperative framework comprising a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that produces multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that constructs executable verifiers. We design role-specific rewards that coordinate the three players toward a shared learning objective under GRPO. Across two model backbones and twelve reasoning benchmarks, UnifiedPlayers outperforms the strongest prior baseline by at least 3.5\% on mathematical reasoning and 3.9\% on general reasoning tasks. Moreover, the learned verifier achieves 84.2\% adversarial detection accuracy, while its reward signal exhibits 2.03$\times$ higher per-question variance than a self-consistency baseline, providing more discriminative verifications. These results highlight cooperation among specialized players as a promising path toward self-enhanced tool-integrated agents. --- ### G^2RA-NET: Graph-based Cross-Slice Relation Modeling with Attention Gating for Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Shengye Wang, Zonglin Wu, Liang Fan, Yule Xue, Haozhe Zhao Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20088v1 Medical image segmentation supports quantitative clinical analysis and computer-aided diagnosis. Recent methods for medical image segmentation have improved both local feature representation and volumetric context modeling. However, existing methods still strug- gle to efficiently model cross-slice relations in anisotropic volumet- ric images, limiting segmentation consistency and accuracy. This pa- per proposes G^2RA-Net, a medical image segmentation framework that combines graph-based cross-slice relation modeling with atten- tion gating. Graph-Based Slice Relationship Modeling (GSRM) cap- tures anatomical dependencies across consecutive slices by repre- senting each slice as a graph node and propagating semantic con- text through graph message passing. The Cross-Slice Attention Gate (CSAG) then selects relevant neighboring context and emphasizes target anatomical regions through attention-guided feature modula- tion. Experiments on brain MRI and abdominal CT datasets demon- strate that G^2RA-Net outperforms representative methods in seg- mentation accuracy and boundary quality. Ablation studies further validate the proposed design. --- ### SETTer: Sparse-Encoder Transformer for Long-term Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Authors: Abraham Ezema, Chijioke Eze, Ferdinanda Ponci, Antonello Monti Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20086v1 Long-term multivariate time series plays a significant role in many application areas such as power systems, trading, etc. However, their accurate prediction is quite difficult for conventional forecasting methods as they often exhibit high dimensionality and complex relationships. Recent works show that transformer-based approaches are quite effective for long-term forecasting thanks to their attention mechanism. However, in the presence of complex high-dimensional inputs, they show evidence of oversmoothing, limited capacity, and opacity. To this end, this paper introduces SETTer, a transformer-based model that addresses these challenges by incorporating novel techniques for decoupled self-attention and hybrid masking. The proposed techniques enable SETTer to effectively capture the dominant short- and long-term patterns across the temporal and channel dimensions. In addition, we enrich the model layers with simple explainable structures that indicate the discriminative pattern of SETTer. We show that with a single-layer transformer architecture, SETTer can effectively model long-term dependencies in the presence of varying data complexities. Extensive experiments on real-word benchmark datasets for long-term multivariate time series forecasting demonstrate that SETTer outperforms state-of-the-art models in 88% of the scenarios. --- ### Position Paper: Neurotransmitters as a Missing Dimension in Artificial Neural Networks Authors: Yupei Li, Manuel Milling, Berrak Sisman, Björn Schuller Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20083v1 Artificial neural networks (ANNs), as core components of modern deep learning (DL) systems, lack the adaptive flexibility and long-term stability exhibited by biological systems. This limitation largely stems from the fact that conventional ANNs rely on uniform, local, and gradient-based parameter updates, while neglecting internal learning principles that are biological mechanisms such as neurotransmitters signalling or neuroplasticity. Consequently, many existing approaches focus on architectural expansion or mathematical fine-tuning techniques such as regularisation or parameter isolation. Inspired by the superior adaptability and plasticity of mammalian brains, we posit that neuromodulation with neurotransmitters constitutes a third axis of learning, complementary to neural activity and synaptic plasticity, and should be explicitly modelled in artificial neural networks. In this positional paper, we argue that incorporating neuromodulatory principles into ANN design represents a promising and underexplored research direction, and we advocate for greater attention to this perspective in the development of adaptive and continual learning systems. --- ### MATCH: Model-Aware Tool Learning with Curriculum Scheduling and Hierarchically Gated Rewards Authors: Shihao Liu, Hao Yin, Lijun Liu, Zhengzong Chen, Yuanyuan Zhao, Fei Huang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20082v1 Tool learning enables large language models (LLMs) to use external tools for tasks beyond parametric knowledge. Reinforcement learning can optimize tool-call behavior from feedback, but current methods still face two problems: fixed-threshold curricula can become misaligned with the policy's evolving capability boundary, and additive rewards can leak argument-level credit when the predicted tool is wrong. To address these problems, we propose MATCH, a closed-loop framework for model-aware tool learning with curriculum scheduling and hierarchically gated rewards. Model-Aware Curriculum Learning (MACL) maintains reward-derived sample difficulty that co-evolves with the policy, and each epoch selects samples near the current capability boundary together with a top-k pool of harder cases. Hierarchical Tool-call Gated Reward (HTGR) scores tool name, argument key, and argument value as a gated chain, granting credit at each level only when prerequisites hold. The same HTGR rewards drive both GRPO updates and MACL's difficulty refresh, closing the loop between policy optimization and sample scheduling. On API-Bank and BFCL V3, MATCH reaches 72.19% and 62.87% overall accuracy, outperforming the main supervised and RL-based baselines. Backbone experiments further show consistent improvements across four backbones from two model families. --- ### Reading Emotions in the Token Space: Discriminative Adaptation of SpeechLLMs for Emotion Recognition Authors: Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esaú Villatoro-Tello, Manjunath K E, Kadri Hacioglu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20081v1 SpeechLLMs have shown strong potential for emotion recognition, yet they read the predicted emotion off a generative decoder not suited for classification: it can emit labels outside the target set and favors frequent classes. We propose a discriminative adaptation that reads the final prompt token's hidden state through a classification head, producing a label in one forward pass without modifying the backbone. Because this readout starts from the hidden state the model would otherwise decode, it gives a controlled comparison of generative and discriminative inference in an otherwise identical speechLLM. We keep the head a single linear layer, trading little accuracy for interpretability: each emotion becomes one direction in the LLM output token space, revealing associated tokens. On IEMOCAP, across two speechLLM architectures, it improves Macro F1 and removes hallucinations, with largest gains on realistic ASR transcripts. Our analysis reveals that these emotion directions encode indirect associations mirroring biases in web-scale text. --- ### A Proposal for an Agentic AI Architecture to Support Multi-Domain Decision-Making in the Brazilian Armed Forces Authors: Gioliano de Oliveira Braga, Sidnei Barbieri, Ágney Lopes Roth Ferraz, Wagner Comin Sonaglio, Henrique Curi de Miranda e Lourenço Alves Pereira Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20080v1 The growing complexity of multi-domain operational environments (land, aerospace, naval, cyber, and electromagnetic spectrum) has increased the volume and velocity of data reaching command-and-control (C2) centers, straining the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) decision cycle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems currently employed in defense are, in general, reactive and isolated tools that still rely heavily on human operators to integrate information, assess scenarios, and formulate courses of action. This paper proposes a conceptual Agentic AI architecture for AI systems that can plan, access data sources, execute tools, and act autonomously and audibly, aimed at supporting decision-making across the three Brazilian Armed Forces (Navy, Army, and Air Force). Four application fronts are discussed (decision support, situational analysis, feasibility studies, and countermeasure suggestion), as well as the data and sensor access requirements and the security and permission safeguards necessary for responsible employment across administrative, strategic, operational, and tactical contexts. --- ### Tailored to you: longitudinal effects of personalising language models Authors: Canfer Akbulut, Justine Breuch, Arianna Manzini, Lujain Ibrahim, Matija Franklin, Roma Patel, Iason Gabriel, Kristian Lum, Laura Weidinger Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20077v1 Interest in developing personalised language models is rapidly growing. While personalisation is often viewed as a mechanism to better serve diverse user needs, the effects of sustained interactions with personalised models on people's perception of and behaviour toward AI remain poorly understood. Most critically, downstream consequences outside the immediate human--AI interaction loop, such as effects on users' self-perceptions and interpersonal relationships, remain largely unexamined. In this study, we recruited 992 participants to complete daily advice-seeking interactions with language models over the course of five days, comparing outcomes from a non-personalised baseline against two personalisation approaches: memory-based (conditioned on prior conversational history) and survey-based (conditioned on information collected through a pre-study intake survey). We find that several changes in human-AI interaction over time are driven primarily by repeated exposure rather than personalisation itself. However, participants interacting with personalised models experienced differences in advice-seeking and information-sharing attitudes and behaviours: participants in the memory-based condition engaged in greater self-disclosure and rated the model as less creepy, while participants in the survey-based condition reported higher regret about having shared personal information with the AI. We conclude by highlighting the nuanced effects of different personalisation approaches on interaction outcomes, and discussing the implications of these findings for the responsible design and deployment of personalised AI systems. --- ### Marginal utility, matrix factorization, and the Key-Value (KV) cache: a unified information-economic framework for sovereign geo-mining inference Authors: Caroline Gans Combe Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20068v1 This paper builds a theoretical bridge between the economic notion of marginal utility and two machine-learning constructs, matrix factorization and the Key--Value cache of transformer language models. The singular value spectrum of a rating matrix is shown to be a diminishing marginal utility schedule for latent factors, the eigenvalue spectrum of the projected covariance operator to be the marginal utility schedule of a model's learned representation, and cache eviction and low-rank cache compression to be instances of constrained utility maximization under a memory budget. The three collapse into a single allocation rule: retain the top dimensions whose eigenvalue exceeds the shadow price of the binding constraint. The framework is applied to the automated extraction of structured information from geo-mining documents, where it motivates a multi-pass inference protocol, a layer-wise TIES model merging procedure, and a selection policy combining extraction quality, localization drift and energy, scalarized with a Conditional Value-at-Risk term on drift. Two empirical contributions are reported. An 11.2-million-parameter hierarchical classifier, trained in about five minutes on a single GPU, reaches 90.0 per cent level-1 accuracy on a held-out test set from a 973-document uranium-exploration corpus, against 92.0 per cent for a proprietary model on a fifty-document human audit of the same corpus, at a latency of 2.62 ms per card against approximately 2,000 ms for the API and at negligible cost. A diagnostic of uniform-density TIES merging exposes a reproducible degenerate mode in which the merged model returns token-identical outputs across five geographically distinct districts while declaring high confidence; re-executing the merge under layer-wise calibrated densities removes that signature on the diagnostic sample. The full-scale extraction benchmark, including LoRA fine-tuning, is reported as projected rather than measured and remains an empirical extension of… --- ### FCA-Guided Counterfactual Explanations for Multi-Modal Breast Cancer Diagnosis: A Framework Achieving Perfect Validity with Emergent Sparsity Authors: Abdullahi Isa, Souley Boukari, Muhammad Aliyu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20067v1 Deep learning models for multi-modal breast cancer diagnosis achieve high predictive accuracy but remain clinically unacceptable without actionable, counterfactual explanations. Attribution-based methods (LIME, SHAP) are categorically inapplicable to this purpose, as they generate no alternative instances and thus cannot be evaluated on counterfactual quality metrics. This investigation provides empirical evidence that FCA-Guided Counterfactual (FCA-CF) framework that uses a Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) concept lattice as a hard structural constraint on counterfactual search, operating over a multi-modal TCGA-BRCA dataset. We benchmark against four genuine counterfactual methods: Wachter-style CF, DiCE, FACE, and NICE, evaluated on 60 benign-predicted TCGA-BRCA instances. The FCA-CF framework achieves Validity = 1.0000 (100% of counterfactuals successfully flip the prediction), Sparsity = 2.37 features changed (best among all valid methods), and Proximity = 0.900 (normalised L2-based, matching NICE as joint best). The classifier achieves Accuracy = 0.980, F1 = 0.976, ROC-AUC = 0.9947. Ablation analysis confirms that the FCA lattice constraint is the primary sparsity driver (removing it increases sparsity by +40%, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.78), while Phase C greedy refinement accounts for the largest individual contribution (+113% sparsity increase when disabled, p < 0.001, d = 5.01). FCA-guided counterfactual generation achieves a clinically important Pareto-dominant outcome; it is simultaneously the sparsest and among the most proximate of all valid methods, with perfect validity. The emergent sparsity property arising from lattice topology rather than numerical penalty terms constitutes a structurally novel contribution to the counterfactual explanation literature. --- ### PointEvent: Rethinking Event-based Tiny Object Detection via Serialized Motion Evidence Accumulation Authors: Zongze Wu, Baofeng Jia, Weiqi Yan, Jingyuan Zhang, Yu Zang, Xiaoyu Chen, Jing Han Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20066v1 Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and motion sensitivity for tiny UAV detection, yet distant targets generate sparse and fragmented events that are easily overwhelmed by clutter and ego-motion. Existing methods mainly rely on dense event representations or local sparse spatiotemporal modeling, resulting in redundant computation or fragmented modeling of motion continuity across distant asynchronous events. To address this limitation, we introduce serialized motion evidence accumulation, which treats motion continuity as an ordered evidence propagation process. Specifically, the same event stream is organized into locality-preserving spatiotemporal paths and chronology-preserving temporal paths through the latent complementary serializations. Based on this principle, we propose PointEvent, a lightweight event-wise state-space framework that alternates serialized scans across the complementary orders, progressively consolidating fragmented motion evidence beyond fixed local neighborhoods. A high-resolution event branch preserves fine-grained target responses, while compact context modulation suppresses interference. Experiments demonstrate that PointEvent achieves SOTA with the fewest parameters and fastest measured inference among the compared methods. Code: https://github.com/wzz-z/PointEvent --- ### A Free Lunch? Adapting PP-OCRv6 for Historical Text Recognition Authors: Benjamin Kiessling Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20064v1 Despite impressive reported scores, large vision-language models have seen limited practical uptake in historical automatic text recognition because of their computational cost, dependence on large-scale pretraining, and hallucination. Historical ATR therefore continues to rely largely on compact CRNN line recognizers, which are visually grounded and trainable on modest data. Lightweight recurrence-free recognizers promise the accuracy of larger models with the practical advantages of CRNNs, yet have not been comprehensively evaluated on historical writing. We adapt PP-OCRv6, a recent compact text recognizer without strong language modeling, for historical line recognition and compare it with a conventional CRNN across generalized pretraining, domain-specific training, corpus-level fine-tuning, and manuscript-specific few-shot adaptation on multilingual Latin- and Arabic-script material. While PP-OCRv6 does not consistently outperform the baseline when trained from scratch, heterogeneous pretraining produces markedly better generalization. Comparisons with the Qwen3.5-based Medusa recognizer further show that fine-tuned PP-OCRv6 can outperform a large VLM tailored towards historical Latin-script HTR. --- ### Robust Workflow Generation via Adversarial Learning for Audio Deepfake Detection Authors: Xiang Li, Pin-Yu Chen, Wenqi Wei Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20063v1 The rapid advancement of speech synthesis and voice conversion technologies has made audio deepfakes increasingly realistic, posing serious security risks in practical applications. While existing detection methods achieve strong performance under controlled conditions, they often fail to generalize under real-world perturbations and corruptions. In this paper, we propose ROGUE, a framework that dynamically constructs robust detection workflows by orchestrating multiple detection tools. ROGUE formulates workflow generation as a sequential decision-making problem and introduces a dual-agent paradigm, where a perturbation agent generates audio perturbations and a policy agent learns to select and execute detection tools under perturbed conditions. Through adversarial learning, ROGUE enables perturbation-aware tool selection, adaptive execution strategies, and improved robustness to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and real-world corruptions demonstrate that ROGUE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both robustness and generalization. Our results highlight the effectiveness of adversarially optimized workflow generation for building reliable audio deepfake detection systems in real-world deployment settings. --- ### AI Should Facilitate Democratic Deliberation at Scale Authors: José Ramón Enríquez, Jiaxin Pei, Alex Pentland Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20059v1 AI systems can strengthen democracy by supporting deliberation at scale by addressing cognitive, social, platform-design, and market-driven frictions, while preserving human agency. Unlike proposals such as liquid democracy that restructure representation through vote delegation, in this position paper, we argue that AI-assisted deliberation offers a more promising path by lowering barriers to meaningful engagement without substituting machine judgment for human choice. Drawing on evidence from online deliberation platforms and experimental research, we identify four guiding principles: preserving agency and autonomy, encouraging mutual respect, promoting equality and inclusiveness, and augmenting rather than substituting active citizenship. We also address critical challenges, including alignment, sycophancy, training bias, and over-reliance on AI systems. We call on the machine learning community to develop deliberation-focused AI systems evaluated not on engagement metrics but on their capacity to facilitate informed, representative, and friction-robust discourse. --- ### Evaluating Explanation Methods by the Predictors They Induce Authors: Jacob Selbæk, Hugo L. Hammer Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20058v1 Explanations of machine learning models are usually judged by criteria that are hard to compare. We propose a simpler test: if an explanation really describes how a model uses its features, it should be possible to rebuild the model's predictions from it. We turn each explanation into a predictor by reading each feature's effect and adding them up, and measure how well that predictor reproduces the model on unseen data. Nothing is fitted, so the score reflects the explanation itself. The test applies to any explanation that can be written as a function of the features; we demonstrate it on partial dependence plots (PDP), accumulated local effects (ALE), SHAP and LIME. We prove that summing partial dependence curves gives the best possible additive summary of a model when its features are independent, and that this fails when they are dependent. Across 13 real datasets and 9 synthetic designs and four model families, which method scores best depends entirely on feature dependence: where features are independent SHAP is slightly worse than PDP, exactly as the theory predicts; on dependent real data SHAP leads. Some widely used quality metrics even prefer a damaged explanation to an intact one. --- ### WiCleanData: Guaranteeing the Type Consistency of Wikidata by Taxonomy Refinement and Constraint Enforcement Authors: Yiwen Peng, Marc Jeanmougin, Thomas Bonald Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20057v1 Because of its collaborative nature, Wikidata suffers from errors, in- consistencies, and excessive complexity, such as redundant classes, ambiguity between instances and classes, wrong taxonomic paths, and type constraint violations. The manual curation of these issues is infeasible at scale. To address these challenges, we introduce WiCleanData, a refined version of Wikidata with a consistent tax- onomy and free from type constraint violations. Specifically, we have designed an automated pipeline that first cleans the taxonomy with language model assistance, then simplifies type constraints by hierarchical aggregation, and finally filters facts accordingly. The resulting knowledge graph, free from any type violation, is made publicly available via a Web interface, enabling easy exploration and downstream applications. --- ### MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution Authors: Loan Bernat, Matthieu Grard, Ariane Herbulot, Florent Lamiraux Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20056v1 Hierarchical robotic systems executing long-horizon manipulation tasks must make high-level semantic decisions that orchestrate stochastic low-level skills. In this setting, failed rollouts are ambiguous: a poor downstream state may reflect an invalid high-level decision, partial observation, or a valid decision whose physical execution failed. Traditional supervised learning lacks data for such recovery states, while reinforcement learning struggles with sparse rewards and non-local credit assignment. We propose MAGMA-GEN, an on-policy data-generation pipeline that converts ambiguous failed rollouts into validated recovery supervision. MAGMA-GEN first uses a privileged coach to hypothesize an early decision-level error and propose localized correction or recovery actions. Because this diagnosis is fallible, candidates are retained only if re-execution from the same state under matched conditions improves downstream progress. This produces supervised examples from the agent's own failure distribution without per-step human demonstrations. Evaluated on interactive long-horizon manipulation tasks, MAGMA-GEN improves task success and recovery capabilities, against distillation and trajectory-repair baselines under evolving task constraints in both simulation and real-robot execution. --- ### DART: Distillation-Aware Reparameterization for Training-Free LoRA Reuse in Few-Step Video Diffusion Models Authors: Shihong Li, Juntao Xu, JinCao, Maowen Tang, Jun Huang, Jintao Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20051v2 Few-step distillation reduces the inference cost of image-to-video generation, but directly reusing LoRA adapters trained for long denoising trajectories can weaken their intended effects and degrade video quality. We observe that adapters with similar measured static parameter geometry can behave differently under the shortened target schedule, motivating response-aware transfer. We propose DART, a training-free reparameterization method that transports source LoRAs into aligned coordinates through a low-rank distillation bridge. Paired forward evaluations measure channel-level incremental responses under the target schedule to fit coefficients that calibrate response direction, source-relative magnitude, and timestep allocation. Coordinate transport establishes update directions, while calibration adapts their contributions, requiring neither source training videos nor backpropagation. Experiments across multiple distilled I2V models demonstrate improved generation quality and aggregate functional retention over direct reuse. Further analyses show that coordinate transport complements response calibration, with adapter-level benefits encompassing both functional preservation and reduced negative transfer. --- ### The Missing Complement: State-Conditioned Minimal Sufficient Evidence for Coding Agents Authors: Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang, Pengtao Xie Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20050v2 Retrieval assembles repository context by ranking passages for relevance to the current query. A coding agent halfway through an issue has already read much of what such a ranker returns. Relevance is scored per passage, but sufficiency belongs to the set: independently scored passages can fill the budget with support for one requirement while another goes unmet. We formulate state-conditioned minimal sufficient evidence recovery: given a captured agent state, recover a compact evidence combination supplying what its next decision still lacks. SERBench measures this on 500 held-out states from 45 repositories, recording what the agent has seen, crediting only sets that satisfy every annotated evidence requirement of the current decision, and separating set recovery from candidate discovery. MSS-Complement treats acquisition as set construction, not ranking. Three semantic calls propose a jointly sufficient set, search for what it lacks, and return 4-8 intact source units within 6,144 tokens. One configuration, fixed on calibration data, recovers a complete set for 73.0% of those states at five items and 80.6% at eight, against 61.4% and 72.4% for Qwen3 embedding with reranking. A matched control ranking by similarity alone recovers fewer complete sets, placing the margin over it in the set-level policy, not the computation. The lead persists from frozen repository source with no gold-derived pool. On AMA-Bench it answers from a 76.2% smaller answer prompt, with accuracy 2.08 points above that benchmark's own memory agent. Removing one required group from a complete set costs repair-localization precision under two executors. Retrieval for agents is better posed as recovering what a decision lacks than re-ranking what an issue resembles. --- ### Correct Now, Insufficient Later: Auditing Update Sufficiency in Context Compression Authors: Guangzhe Zhang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20045v1 A memory can answer a current query correctly while discarding distinctions required by a later update. We investigate this failure with a paired-history audit: two histories have the same current answer, receive a shared future update, and require different subsequent answers. A pilot evaluates 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms, 12 memory conditions, two repeats, and two model backends. A deterministic frontier selector obtains strict reveal accuracy of 96/96 on DeepSeek and 82/96 on GLM; a structured writer obtains 62 successes with one unresolved outcome and 56/96. The configured four-outcome joint contrast has finite-sample identification intervals of (0.521, 0.542) and (0.292, 0.313), not confidence intervals. A record-level audit distinguishes retained-state adequacy, response delivery, and answer-schema compliance without changing those original scores. It finds 26 and 25 well-formed but semantically wrong structured reveal memories, while all 14 GLM frontier reveal failures contain correct values in the wrong wrapper. Tombstone removal produces 16/16 exact replay failures in the targeted mechanism. Identifier renaming then exposes a separate flaw: original frontier late-reference adequacy falls from 8/8 to 94/320 transformed instances. We provide and test a label-equivariant repair, but it preserves only 2/8 original late-reference answers: eliminating a naming shortcut does not solve unknown future relevance. These results support a scoped evaluation methodology and reproducible failure analysis, not general superiority of the repaired algorithm. Paid pilot evidence, retrospective diagnostics, and new offline tests are reported separately; no independent held-out or natural-task validation is claimed. --- ### Astronex-World 1.0: Real-Time Interactive World Model Foundation Authors: Xin Zhou, Cong Miao Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20034v1 We present Astronex-World 1.0, an open controllable video world-model foundation. Given a text prompt (text-to-video) or an initial observation (image-to-video), the model predicts future visual states under frame-aligned camera trajectories, continuous actions, and an embodiment identifier, and accepts text events inserted at a specified position of a rollout. The family provides a bidirectional model for full-context generation and a causal model with block-causal attention and cross-block KV caching for persistent generation, both built on the Wan2.2-TI2V-5B prior. PRoPE injects camera intrinsics and extrinsics, while a 64-dimensional action stream modulates every Transformer layer. A five-stage training path develops bidirectional camera and action control, converts the backbone to block-causal generation, distills a few-step student, restores mixed-domain dynamics, and applies asymmetric DMD/DMD2 distribution matching. The causal model generates 832x480 video at 24 fps. All five training stages run on two NVIDIA L20 48 GB GPUs, and the causal model streams in real time on one. It scores 73.5 on WBench Navi and 70.0 on WBench Full. On Full, this 5B model is above the 13.6B LongCat-Video and the 14B Helios, within one point of the 22B LTX-2.3, and above YUME 1.5, which is post-trained from the same 5B prior on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The reserved action input and output interfaces allow post-training for embodied intelligence and autonomous driving. --- ### Can Data Attribution Filter Out Subliminal Learning? Not Reliably Authors: Moritz Weckbecker, Sweta Jena, Jonas Müller, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, Louis Jaburi, Gonçalo Paulo Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20027v1 Subliminal learning allows language models to transmit behavioral traits through training data with no obvious semantic relationship to those traits, undermining content-based data filtering as a safety intervention. Training data attribution offers an alternative: it identifies the training examples responsible for a given model behavior, independent of their semantic content, and so may apply in exactly the cases where semantic inspection fails. We evaluate three gradient-based attribution methods (GradCos, a contrastive GradCos variant, and EK-FAC) across three models, comparing them against divergence tokens, a strong baseline previously shown to localize subliminal learning (albeit one that requires access to counterfactual teacher models). Filtering at the token level, EK-FAC mitigates a significant part of the effect, the other methods provide little benefit, and all mostly fall short of divergence tokens. Filtering entire samples is less effective for every method, though EK-FAC often gives a stronger signal than divergence tokens in this setting. Success is inconsistent across methods and settings: variants that work well for some model-preference combinations fail for others, and we do not identify a consistent explanation for these differences. Our results suggest that gradient-based attribution can identify data responsible for subliminal learning in some settings, but that some approximations are more reliable than others. --- ### FedeRICo: Federated Region-Influenced Coupling for Traffic Flow Prediction Authors: Fermin Orozco, Man Luo, Johan Wahlström Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20026v1 Urban traffic forecasting often relies on information distributed across stakeholders who may be unable to share raw data due to privacy or commercial constraints, motivating federated spatial-temporal approaches. In such federated settings, each client observes traffic over a distinct sensor subgraph with its own spatial topology and temporal dynamics, leading to significant heterogeneity across clients. Existing federated spatial-temporal methods typically rely on model parameter aggregation and provide limited mechanisms for recovering spatial dependencies across client boundaries. This introduces two key limitations. Specifically, parameter aggregation across heterogeneous graph domains tends to dilute client-specific representations, while road network partitioning breaks the propagation of traffic dynamics across client boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose FedeRICo, a federated traffic forecasting framework that combines gradient-level collaboration with boundary-aware residual communication. FedeRICo employs a dual-branch forecasting architecture in which a globally guided branch captures transferable forecasting structure, while a private residual branch preserves client-specific corrections and incorporates boundary residual signals. The global branch is coordinated through gradient alignment across all clients, enabling collaborative optimisation without destructive parameter interference. To recover cross-client spatial dependencies, boundary messages are extracted through a trend-residual decomposition that suppresses periodic structure and communicates only transient spatial-temporal residual signals between physically adjacent clients. Experiments across four real-world traffic forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that FedeRICo consistently outperforms state-of-the-art federated spatial-temporal baselines while maintaining competitive training runtime. --- ### Governance-as-Code: Translating EU AI Act Technical Requirements into Executable Compliance Pipelines for Generative AI Systems Authors: Rudrendu Kumar Paul, Sourav Nandy Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20016v1 The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) imposes technical obligations on high-risk AI providers, yet Articles 8-15 were drafted for predictive AI and leave seven technical gaps when applied to generative systems, spanning non-deterministic data governance, training-data provenance, continuous conformity, human oversight, open-ended robustness, emergent risk, and generative fairness. We deliver Governance-as-Code (GaC), a framework of 43 machine-checkable acceptance criteria across six compliance modules that run in a CI/CD pipeline and emit Article-indexed audit evidence, and we show the actual Rego policy code rather than merely describing it. Our central commitment is that the Act's open-textured standards ("appropriate levels," "possible biases") become declared, auditable numbers: robustness thresholds are derived from the provider's documented baseline and a state-of-the-art floor, and framing bias is collapsed into eight measurable proxies tested by counterfactual demographic probing. We also correct who owes what, since under Article 25 and Chapter V a downstream deployer relies on the upstream provider's Article 53 training-data summary and documents only the layers it controls, so GaC verifies that summary rather than demanding per-sample documentation the deployer never had. We validate on two enterprise deployments, a high-risk advisory chatbot and a limited-risk content generator, benchmarking against a manual expert audit rather than documentation artifacts that were never designed to enforce compliance. GaC reproduces all of the manual audit's findings, including three penalty-triggering violations, while cutting audit labor by roughly 75%. --- ### GRF-Recon: Global Ray-Field Optimization for Long-Sequence Feed-forward Reconstruction Authors: Enpeng Li, Yunzhou Zhang, Zhiyao Zhang, Dexuan Lyu, Chenyu Wang, Chiyuan Cui, Cheng Cheng Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20012v1 Feed-forward 3D reconstruction provides an efficient paradigm for scene modeling from image sequences. Scaling these models to large monocular scenarios are constrained by excessive GPU memory footprint, degraded local geometry, and long-term trajectory drift. Existing chunk-based optimization strategies provide limited geometric constraints and fail to maintain global consistency over extended trajectories. We present a unified framework for stable and scalable feed-forward 3D reconstruction from long monocular sequences. Our approach builds on coarse-to-fine trajectory alignment augmented by lightweight geometric prior injection. Distilling monocular geometric cues into the feed-forward backbone via LoRA adaptation improves depth accuracy on fine structures while preserving inference efficiency. We introduce a hybrid-weight sparse ray-field optimization that leverages high-frequency geometric features to guide local point-cloud refinement and enforce consistent inter-frame ray constraints. Unlike prior chunk-based methods, this establishes strong cross-frame geometric coupling while maintaining scalability. Finally, an efficient trajectory stitching strategy with joint ray-error optimization explicitly reduces accumulated drift. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves competitive trajectory accuracy compared with representative SLAM systems, while maintaining globally consistent 3D reconstruction in large-scale scenarios. --- ### Dynamic Generalized Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport Authors: Junda Ying, Zhiwei Zeng, Peijie Zhou, Lei Zhang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20008v2 Gromov--Wasserstein optimal transport (GW-OT) extends classical optimal transport by introducing structure-aware transport cost. This is particularly relevant for spatial transcriptomics, where dynamical reconstruction should preserve tissue structure in addition to matching expression patterns. While static formulations have been widely used for such structure-aware alignment, a general dynamic formulation for reconstructing continuous trajectories is still missing. We introduce Travelling Pair Dynamical Alignment and Trajectory Estimation (TP-DATE), a theoretical and computational framework to generalize GW-OT dynamically in a simulation-free manner. We formulate a broad class of static and dynamic Quadratic-form OT (QOT) through path actions and prove the static dynamic equivalence. We further develop travelling-pair flow matching, which allows interacting conditional paths and marginalizes their interactions into a single vector field. On synthetic and real spatial transcriptomics data, TP-DATE better preserves spatial structure and improves continuous 3D dynamics reconstruction. --- ### Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models Authors: Maxim Chupilkin Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20005v1 People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for news and explanations of world events. But do they receive the same political answers when they ask in different languages? Here we show that the language of a question can change how the same AI systems assess the war in Ukraine. We ask GPT, Claude and Gemini to evaluate twenty statements about the war in 112 languages, collecting 67,200 responses. The balance between Russia-leaning and Ukraine-leaning responses differs across languages. When we group responses by countries' official languages, they follow a pattern resembling worldwide political divisions: relatively more Russia-leaning answers correspond to more favourable public views of Russia, less support for Ukraine in United Nations votes, and less aid to Ukraine. The broad pattern recurs across all three models and remains when individual statement pairs are removed. Our findings suggest a possible route through which information warfare may shape the text used to train AI models, which may in turn spread geopolitical biases. --- ### EPIG-Tree: Compute-Optimal Branching for Gradient-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Authors: Nikita Khomich, Leopold Hermansson, Ido Hakimi Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20004v1 Reward-based reinforcement learning for language models, exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), collapses an entire stochastic trajectory into a single scalar reward. This is clean and scalable, but it explores and allocates reward inefficiently: a trajectory may contain many causal decisions, recovery attempts, and environment-randomness events, yet every token or action inherits one trajectory-level advantage. We study tree-based rollout construction as a compute-allocation problem for policy-gradient estimation. Our central claim is that branches should be placed not where the policy is merely uncertain, but where an additional branch most reduces uncertainty about the policy gradient per unit of compute. From a law-of-total-variance decomposition of the local policy-gradient random variable, we derive two allocation laws: new branches reduce decision uncertainty, while repeated suffix rollouts reduce continuation uncertainty. The resulting EPIG-Tree score allocates branches using the already computed rollouts. It estimates occupancy- and score-weighted value uncertainty, along with a suffix law $n_e \propto w_e \|\nabla_θ\log π(a_e|h_e)\| σ_e / \sqrt{c_e}$. Empirically, EPIG reduces gradient MSE in cloned-state control, winning in all nine dense continuous-control environments of a 13-environment sweep and recovering the reference gradient direction near-perfectly, and it improves frozen-LLM gradient calibration relative to entropy branching. In online single-turn math, tree-local credit beats flat GRPO, while branch placement is secondary to token-level credit assignment. In online multi-turn Wordle, EPIG attains the highest final win rate (0.850), overtaking flat GRPO, which saturates early at 0.790, and entropy branching as training proceeds, confirming that the gradient-estimation advantage transfers to a stateful, large-action setting. --- ### E-AVI: Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Assessment for Automated Video Interviews Authors: Haoshen Wang, Dongbo Che, Zeyi Xie, Yuanjie Du, Shicheng Hua, Xingyu Wang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20001v1 Automated video interview assessment integrates verbal content, acoustic delivery, and visual behavior, yet numerical predictions alone provide limited inspectable support. We present E-AVI, an evidence-grounded framework that extracts timestamped multimodal evidence and integrates dimension-conditioned evidence attention with source-level embeddings for scoring. A shared evidence pool further supports natural-language feedback and follow-up question answering. On RecruitView and a private hospitality dataset, E-AVI consistently outperforms fine-tuned multimodal baselines in rank correlation. Ablation, evidence-deletion, bootstrap, human-audit, and QA analyses characterize the predictive contribution, grounding, and practical utility of the evidence pathway. Together, these results demonstrate that our proposed E-AVI framework improves predictive performance while providing inspectable support for assessment, feedback, and interactive analysis. --- ### Customizable and Jointly Optimized Route Planning: A Deep Architecture Enabling Differentiable Shortest-Path Search Authors: Rui Zhao, Chao Chen, Longfei Xu, Chenguang Ji, Hengbin Cui, Kaikui Liu, Xiaolong Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19996v1 With the widespread use of online navigation and ride-hailing services, achieving optimal route planning for diverse user preferences has recently attracted increasing attention. Classic graph algorithms for pathfinding use heuristic cost functions to define edge weight, thus providing no optimality guarantee of route quality. Prior data-driven approaches equating ground truth of the optimal route with user trajectory, which is however moderately influenced by the navigation service, suffers from the feedback loop problem. To address these issues, we propose a deep architecture that is able to jointly optimize cost functions and route-ranking model towards any route preference. First, we run a multi-objective Dijkstra algorithm offline to collect the set of Pareto optimal routes, deeming it as the complete candidate set. Exploiting the property of such a set, we design a neural network structure that emulates shortest-path search and route ranking in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Second, we define route preference as a task of constrained optimization of route attributes, and propose a novel loss function that optimizes a single-objective variable, with other variables strictly under constraints. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The results show that our architecture significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in route quality and customizability. --- ### AVTrace: Diagnosing Audio-Visual Temporal Reasoning in Omni Models Authors: Longyin Zhang, Parth Sakhare Mahendra, Chengwei Wei, Ning Zhang, Lim Ming Chong, Sirui He, Ai Ti Aw Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19991v1 Omni models can describe video content, but can they locate events in time, preserve event order, and judge audio-visual synchronization? We introduce AVTrace (Audio-Visual Temporal Reasoning Assessment and Capability Evaluation), a silver-standard diagnostic suite spanning onset and span grounding, synchronization, next-step prediction, cross-modal localization, chain parsing, and event-conditioned comprehension. It contains 34,114 training examples and category-balanced development and test splits of 3,500 and 7,000 examples. We evaluate five open omni models under their respective input configurations using reference-blind response normalization followed by deterministic scoring. All five off-the-shelf systems score below the test split's majority-label baseline of 0.556 on synchronization verification, and obtain low scores on chain parsing and event-conditioned grounding and comprehension. Development-set perturbations reveal task-dependent sensitivity in Qwen3-Omni-30B to modality removal and changes in visual input processing, without isolating their underlying causes. Parameter-efficient temporal post-training improves Gemma4-E4B-it on several benchmark metrics. On three external image benchmarks, task metrics change modestly, including some degradations, while teacher-forcing perplexity decreases. Together, these findings show that semantic reference-text overlap should not be treated as a proxy for temporal localization, and that AVTrace can identify task-specific weaknesses while providing a testbed for temporal post-training. --- ### QCPruner: Query-Conditioned Population Coverage for Visual Token Pruning Authors: Shengli He, Yongchao Liang, Roumeng He, Junjie Zeng, Jiyuan He, Can Wu, Li Zheng Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19990v1 The high visual-token load in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) motivates training-free pruning to reduce later-layer computation, but under a fixed budget, pruning must preserve query-relevant evidence while avoiding redundancy. Existing methods rank tokens, diversify selected subsets, or optimize coverage without using a shared per-visual query utility to weight both visual targets and candidate representatives. We introduce QCPruner, which makes both roles query-conditioned through bilateral utility weighting. Using keyword-matched query anchors, QCPruner fuses two cross-modal cues into utility and applies it to both visual targets and candidate representatives within visual-affinity-based coverage. The resulting nonnegative facility-location objective is monotone and submodular, retains the standard (1-1/e) greedy guarantee, and requires no model training or parameter updates. Across LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, LLaVA-Video, and Qwen2.5-VL, QCPruner achieves the highest average relative performance among evaluated complete-system pruning methods at every reported token budget. At 32 of 576 tokens on LLaVA-1.5-7B, it retains 96.1% of unpruned performance, versus 93.9% for the strongest evaluated baseline. At 256 of 1296 tokens on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, the corresponding values are 96.7% and 92.5%. --- ### Benchmarking LLM Compliance with China AI Generated Content Regulations Authors: Chenrui Cui, Hongye Fang, Lisha Song, Weichao Chen, Yue Zhu, Gang Xu Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19989v1 The widespread adoption of LLMs has led to escalating content compliance risks. Prior works have contributed to addressing these risks in the English context, downplaying the complexity of Chinese language content. This paper follows China's current AI-Generated content compliance requirements and provides evaluation results on 20 notable LLMs, offering insight into China's regulatory landscape. We design a novel framework to assess the compliance and refusal rates with 2303 questions spanning six distinct dimensions, including 203 self-constructed constitutional questions. The framework employs several judges to generate verdicts independently based on their hierarchical alignment memory. Our findings show that international models also exhibit high levels of compliance despite the use of standard Chinese questions, and the main differences may stem from dimensions closely related to ideological alignment. We establish a regulatory benchmark that enables the global AI community to evaluate both Chinese and non-Chinese LLMs under a unified set of legally grounded compliance requirements. --- ### Equivalence Between Nested Gibbs Measures and Log-Linear Combinations of Gibbs Measures Authors: Yaiza Bermudez, Samir M. Perlaza, Iñaki Esnaola Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.IT, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19988v1 In this paper, three operations on Gibbs probability measures are studied. The first operation, often referred to as renormalization, takes one Gibbs probability measure and generates a new Gibbs measure by normalizing a power of its density. This normalization has a twofold effect: it changes the regularization factor and concentrates the support within a subset of the original support. Interestingly, these effects can be independently controlled by different parameters. The second operation consists of a normalized log-linear combination of the densities of Gibbs probability measures. The third operation takes two Gibbs probability measures and changes the reference measure of the latter with the former. Hence, the former is said to be "nested" within the latter, yielding a new Gibbs probability measure. The resulting measures from the second and third operations are also Gibbs probability measures and are shown, respectively, to solve optimization problems involving the expectations of linear combinations of the objective functions of the given measures, subject to a relative entropy regularization. These optimization problems differ exclusively in the coefficients of the linear combinations. This leads to the conclusion that there exists a set of parameters for which nesting one Gibbs probability measure into another has the same effect as log-linearly combining them. These operations have relevant applications in statistical learning. As an example, a one-shot federated learning system in which clients send their locally trained Gibbs algorithms to the server for log-linear combination is shown to achieve the same performance as a Gibbs algorithm trained upon the aggregation of all local training datasets. --- ### Past, Future, All at Once: Mitigating Stability-Plasticity Dilemma via Post-hoc JANUS Rectification Authors: Zhilong Zheng, Letian Tao, Yang Guan, Yujie Yang, Wei Xiong, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Jingliang Duan, Keqiang Li, Shengbo Eben Li Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19985v1 Fine-tuning foundation models on new tasks inevitably suffer from catastrophic forgetting. While existing works attempt to mitigate this on the basis of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, they adopted an overly restrictive Subspace Orthogonality condition. In this paper, we introduce a purely post-hoc and tuning-agnostic weight rectification framework that achieves Parameter Space Orthogonality, which is the necessary and sufficient condition for preserving historical performance to the first order. By projecting parameter updates into the JAcobian NUll Space (JANUS), our method significantly recovers compromised historical knowledge without interfering with the underlying fine-tuning process. To overcome the local validity of the Jacobian approximation, we further propose a Multi-step Adaptive Rectification mechanism that utilizes the JANUS shift to dynamically verify the valid trust region and adjust step sizes. Coupled with our proposed ghost projection, ghost orientation comparison, and sequence-level singular value decomposition compression techniques, JANUS also achieves great temporal and spatial efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that JANUS seamlessly integrates with various fine-tuning methods, significantly mitigating the stability-plasticity dilemma by recovering historical knowledge while preserving downstream task adaptation. --- ### Quantum Graph Convolutional Networks: Implementation and Trainability Analysis Authors: Paul San Sebastian Sein, Theodor Iosif, Tilen G. Limbäck-Stokin, Kin Ian Lo, Yidong Liao Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19983v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data, but training and inference on large graphs are often bottlenecked by memory constraints and sparse linear-algebra workloads. Quantum computing offers an alternative set of primitives that may improve scalability for graph learning. Building on the quantum graph neural network (QGNN) framework of Liao \textit{et al.}, this work implements two representative architectures --- the Simplified Graph Convolution (SGC) and Linear Graph Convolution (LGC) models --- and evaluates them on open benchmark graph datasets and semi-supervised learning tasks using quantum simulation. We compare predictive performance and optimization behavior against classical baselines, showing that the quantum models achieve competitive performance with fewer parameters. Finally, we present a cost gradient analysis that identifies the tasks for which the models showcased are trainable. This is followed by a classical simulability study to find regimes in which the proposed circuits remain robust during training. --- ### MaskHarness-WAM: Instance-Grounded Harnessing for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Authors: Zitai Huang, Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu, Jianjun Zhang, Chong Ma, Tianbin Liu, Weiyi Lu, Yi Xu, Hanli Wang Published: 2026-09-17 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19974v1 Long-horizon robot manipulation requires not only stable local visuomotor control, but also continuous target tracking and reliable task progress assessment throughout execution. This challenge becomes particularly critical when multiple objects share identical appearances and must be manipulated in a prescribed order. In such scenarios, relying solely on a limited-horizon manipulation policy is often insufficient to determine which instance should be operated on and when the task should transition to the next stage. To address this challenge, we propose MaskHarness-WAM, an instance-grounded harness for long-horizon manipulation. The proposed system connects high-level task planning with low-level manipulation policies through target masks, while leveraging visual feedback for subtask scheduling and continuous execution. Since each subtask corresponds to a different target instance, the low-level policy requires a newly established initial target mask under the updated scene at each subtask transition. The harness continuously re-observes the environment, generates, and verifies the target mask at subtask boundaries, thereby updating the instance-level spatial condition provided to the low-level policy. Furthermore, the system advances the manipulation process by switching target instances according to the verified completion status of each subtask. Experiments on a real robot platform demonstrate that MaskHarness-WAM substantially outperforms limited-horizon policies on sequential multi-object manipulation, showing its effectiveness in extending local manipulation skills to reliable long-horizon execution. ---