# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 193 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #9601–9650 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/193 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/192.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/194.md) ### Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs Authors: Zhiqi Li, Yuxuan Liao, Bo Zhu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11499v2 Code world models represent worlds as executable programs, but this representation alone does not determine how to construct a complex world. We introduce Recursive Code World Models (RCWM), a framework for reconstructing complex 3D worlds in code from a single reference image. RCWM couples a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. An RSP represents the executable world as compositional scene code, while each solver call follows the same complete process: establish the whole, recursively reconstruct unresolved parts, and revisit the whole to refine their composition. This global-local-global recursion gives fine-scale structures their own perception-and-editing loops while preserving scene-wide geometry and relationships. Reference-aligned views propagate a shared camera projection across levels, while parent revisitation addresses boundaries, spatial relations, and shared errors that emerge after local refinement. A vision-language coding agent directly compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement, recursive descent, and return. Across complex scenes, RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods. Ablation studies further support the benefits of recursive construction and suggest that deeper calls can improve finer-scale reconstruction. RCWM provides a recursive construction principle for building complex executable worlds from visual evidence. --- ### ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Maps Authors: Jacopo Dardini, Roberta Calegari Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11498v2 Practical uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models must decide, from a single generation, whether a specific answer should be trusted. Existing methods either sample multiple generations, read only output-token probabilities, or reduce the model's internal computation to a single hidden state. We introduce ActMap, a white-box representation that compresses the generation-time hidden-state trajectory (every layer, every generated token) into a fixed $12\times32\times128$ tensor of temporal-statistic channels that preserves structure across transformer depth and pooled hidden coordinates. The map is captured during the generation pass with no measurable overhead, has a fixed shape across model depths and hidden sizes, and occupies 96 KiB: a compact artifact that can be retained for audit-relevant generations and probed directly, with occlusion analysis localizing the classifier's signal to mid-depth regions of the map. A lightweight classifier, instantiated as a compact Vision Transformer, reads an estimated correctness probability from each map in a fraction of a millisecond; capacity-matched MLPs perform comparably, indicating the representation itself carries the result. Trained and evaluated in-domain on short-answer QA, direct-answer math, and summarization factuality with three instruction-tuned 7-8B models, ActMap consistently outperforms sampling, token-probability, attention, and embedding baselines, and matches ACT-ViT, a detector trained on dense activation tensors $67\times$ larger, at essentially the same mean AUROC with lower calibration error on ten of twelve pairs. The resulting score supports abstention, routing, and selective verification from a single generation, making it a practical primitive for scalable oversight of deployed models. --- ### Combining Synthetic and Real Data for Low-Resource Historical OCR: A Manchu Case Study Authors: Yan Hon Michael Chung, Hanlin Wang Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11495v1 Manchu, now critically endangered, was one of the principal languages of the Qing empire (1636-1912), and its extensive archival record is increasingly digitized but remains difficult to search and analyze at scale. Previous work showed that vision-language models (VLMs) trained only on synthetic Manchu word images can reach 87.4% word accuracy on real Qing manuscripts and prints, leaving a substantial synthetic-to-real gap. This study examines how synthetic and real historical training data should be combined for low-resource OCR. Using 60,000 synthetic and 20,306 real historical word images, we evaluate three pretrained VLMs and a compact convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) under four regimes: synthetic-only, real-only, joint synthetic-real, and sequential synthetic-to-real training, following a common checkpoint-selection and archival evaluation protocol. Introducing real training images raises the leading configurations to between 95.09% and 96.28% word accuracy, while no synthetic-only configuration exceeds 87.92%. Synthetic supplementation substantially improves all three VLMs, whereas its marginal effect for the CRNN is sensitive to the training objective. Joint and sequential training yield broadly similar archival accuracy under the tested practical pipelines. A compact CRNN also reaches the leading performance range once real images are available, showing that model scale alone does not determine recognition accuracy. Finally, complementary errors among strong recognizers allow voting to raise accuracy to 98.27% without additional training, while an eighteenth-century Manchu dictionary provides a principled rule for adjudicating disagreements. --- ### From Document Silos to Process Intelligence: A Multi-Layer Knowledge Graph for CMC Process Development Authors: Reza Amirmoshiri, Faryad Sahneh, Yasser Jangjou Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11493v2 Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) process development generates an enormous body of technical information across a multi-stage, knowledge-intensive continuum from drug discovery to commercial manufacturing. This knowledge is traditionally fragmented across functions and heterogeneous formats, causing traceability gaps and significant knowledge-management costs during technology transfer and regulatory filing. We present a modular agentic-AI platform that converts a heterogeneous corpus of process-development documents into a queryable, dual-layer knowledge graph. A base knowledge layer builds a lexical graph with a Document-Section-Chunk hierarchy through lossless ingestion of digital, scanned, handwritten, and multilingual documents, while an intelligence layer extracts ontology-aligned entities and bridges cross-document concepts through a provenance-anchored domain graph. LLM agents operate across both layers, selecting the retrieval path best suited to each question. We evaluate the lexical layer with a novel three-tier protocol measuring the deployment-fidelity of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system on proprietary data, demonstrated on 505 questions curated from 38 development reports of a Sanofi small-molecule program. Tier-1 multiple-choice accuracy of 95% signals strong platform reliability; the stricter Tier-2 LLM-judge pass rate of 85%, which degrades on comparative and corpus-wide questions, reveals a failure taxonomy that Tier-1 accuracy alone fails to capture. A router agent selects between layers according to question type. We anticipate this protocol will enable future designers of agentic platforms to assess their systems against nonpublic databases, and that graph-based architectures will see broader adoption in pharma as a means of transforming fragmented document repositories into structured process intelligence. --- ### Published Unlearning Numbers Move Per Checkpoint, and Not Because the Removed Data Survives: An Audit of 263 Released Batch-Normalized Checkpoints Authors: Junlong Shen Xingyu Li Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11490v1 An unlearning audit reads its verdict off numbers that an unlearned model and its retrained reference each publish, and both also ship batch-normalization statistics that no gradient step wrote and no release records. Refitting them on kept data at bit-identical weights moves 47 of 221 released checkpoints past the spread their own release's seeds show, several inside a method whose average does not move: what moves is the checkpoint's property, not its method's. What does the moving is not the removed data surviving in the state: exchanging kept records for removed ones inside a fixed fitting pool moves a published cell by almost nothing, while how far a checkpoint's shipped state has drifted from any refit does track it. The consequence for a published decision is real but narrow: twelve verdicts cross, four clear a measured recalibration budget, two clear it on every replicate, and a population we trained and sited near its own criterion yields none. A release should therefore name the fitting convention beside the number, on the batch-normalized vision models where this channel exists. --- ### The Convention Gap: Towards Measuring Implicit Communication in Cooperative AI Evaluation Authors: Makoto Fukushima, Hua-Dong Xiong, Ehsan Moradi Pari Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11489v3 Cooperative AI agents are evaluated against other AIs, yet human cooperation relies on implicit conventions -- shared protocols for reading meaning beyond the literal message -- which AI-AI benchmarks may not capture. We propose the convention gap, the difference between the failure probability predicted from the literal content of communication and the observed failure rate, as a metric of implicit communication. In the card game Hanabi, the finite deck and deterministic hint constraints make this posterior exactly computable. We replayed about 101,000 play actions from three public datasets of human-human (an online Hanabi platform), AI-AI (HOAD), and human-AI (HanabiData) games. The gap was +26.2 percentage points (pp) in human pairs, -0.7 pp in AI pairs, and +16.4 pp in human-AI pairs, and was concentrated on plays of cards that had received no hints (+46 pp in human pairs). Within human-AI play, the literal information available to humans was similar across the three AI partners (mean predicted failure 38-41%), but human failure rates ranged from 14.4% to 34.4% and the gap from +24.1 to +6.2 pp; the partner eliciting the largest gap produced the fewest human failures. Game score carried different information: it depended on each corpus's roster composition, whereas the gap separated human from AI play at the agent level. As a known-answer check, Off-Belief Learning agents, whose convention content is controlled by construction, gave a gap of +1.6 pp at the convention-free level, rising monotonically to +21.7 pp. These results suggest that convention compatibility, rather than AI-AI performance, may predict an AI's effectiveness with human partners. --- ### FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation Authors: Vladislav Bargatin, Alexander Yakovenko, Khaled Abud, Dmitriy Vatolin Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11486v1 Optical flow methods typically rely on task-specific inductive biases, such as correlation volumes, feature warping, and iterative refinement, among others, to reach high accuracy. While effective, such biases constrain the model to predefined heuristics, which can limit its expressivity and lead to more complex pipelines and additional computational cost. We present FreeFlow, a hierarchical transformer built without any flow-specific components, using instead a single feed-forward encoder--decoder. FreeFlow combines three attention variants: window attention for local processing, shifted-window attention for cross-window information exchange, and a global attention operating at a reduced resolution. The resulting architecture scales naturally with model capacity, enabling a consistent accuracy gain from small to large variants. Despite the absence of standard inductive biases, FreeFlow achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks, including Sintel (0.68/1.48 EPE on Clean/Final), KITTI-2015 (3.23 Fl-all), and Spring (3.192 1px), while remaining memory efficient at 1080p inference. --- ### Pre- and Post-Treatment Brain Metastases Segmentation Using nnU-Net with Post-Processing for BraTS 2026 Authors: Haobin Liu, Xin Wang Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11477v1 Brain metastases exhibit high inter-lesion variability in size, enhancement pattern, and post-treatment appearance, making volumetric segmentation of both pre- and post-treatment cases the central challenge of the BraTS 2026 Task 1 (Brain Metastases). We build a pragmatic pipeline on a 5-fold nnU-Net ResEnc-L ensemble, in which each fold is trained independently for 1,000 epochs with the standard Dice + cross-entropy loss on 1,296 four-modality training cases. This ensemble is followed by a rule-based post-processing cascade tuned for the lesion-wise Dice similarity coefficient (LW-DSC), a detection-oriented metric that behaves very differently from the traditional global Dice. The final pipeline reaches an LW-DSC of 0.733 / 0.751 / 0.713 / 0.549 on the enhancing tumour (ET), tumour core (TC), whole tumour (WT), and resection cavity (RC) sub-regions on the official validation leaderboard. Rather than trusting these leaderboard gains, we audit every post-processing stage with a five-fold out-of-fold (OOF) analysis with no model-training leakage over all 1,296 training cases, scored with the official BraTS evaluation code (BraTS_evaluation): it confirms two stages as robust, per-fold-consistent improvements while the third improves only the leaderboard and does not reproduce out-of-fold. We further provide a mechanistic analysis of the LW-DSC metric that explains why recall-recovering post-processing carries low risk whereas component deletion does not, and we report thirteen negative results spanning loss engineering, alternative backbones, and inference-time settings, several of which run counter to widely held intuitions. Source code is released under Apache-2.0 at https://github.com/hornbeamliu/brats2026-met. --- ### BridgeMatch: Conditional Transport Bridges in Matching Matrix Space for 3D Deformable Registration Authors: Qianliang Wu, Haobo Jiang, Guangwei Gao, Shuo Chen, Weiping Ding, Jin Xie, Jian Yang, Yaqing Ding Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11472v2 Reliable matching between partially observed, deforming point clouds requires global context and fine geometric detail. Coarse candidate selection can exclude correct fine-level correspondences. We present \paper, a unified conditional transport framework with the matching matrix itself as the evolving state. Coarse diffusion establishes global matching hypotheses; hierarchy-preserving lifting expands them into a structured high-resolution source. Geometry-conditioned ODE and SDE bridges continue refinement in the complete fine-level candidate space, allowing coarse errors to be corrected. The deterministic endpoint-parameterized conditional flow matching (CFM) design improves matching through iteration, while the SDE forward drift enables effective few-step refinement. Experiments on 4DMatch and 4DLoMatch demonstrate competitive matching and non-rigid registration, with transfer to CAPE and DeepDeform without target-domain training. --- ### BruNet: A Cross-Domain Transfer Framework for Bruise Segmentation Authors: Qiming Wang, Richard J. Motley, Ebube E. Obi, Xianfang Sun, Paul L. Rosin Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11463v1 Segmenting bruises is a challenging task in medical imaging due to limited data and annotations, diffuse boundaries, and highly variable appearance. In this work, we propose BruNet, a segmentation framework that combines a ViT-based visual encoder (a self-supervised DINOv3 or a pretrained LingBot-Vision backbone) with a SAM-based mask decoder. BruNet is trained on the HAM10000 skin lesion dataset and evaluated on a separate bruise dataset without additional fine-tuning. Although a small number of prior studies have explored machine learning and computer vision for bruise analysis, existing work has primarily focused on detection, classification, or colour analysis rather than pixel-level localisation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to address automatic bruise segmentation. Our results show that BruNet outperforms CNN-based models, state-of-the-art segmentation models, ChatGPT-4o/5-assisted SAM2 zero-shot baselines, and the medical-oriented MedSAM model, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalisation to bruise segmentation. --- ### ReGround: Grounding Reviewer Comments in Multimodal Evidence Authors: Serwar Basch, Lizhen Qu, Iryna Gurevych Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11460v1 Reviewer comments naturally relate to specific parts of the reviewed paper, yet grounding these comments to the underlying evidence is difficult due to long multimodal documents. Existing benchmarks do not capture this setting and largely focus on explicit, information-seeking queries. We introduce ReGround, a large-scale dataset for reviewer comment grounding that links 10,267 reviewer comments to 16,274 evidence in the original anonymous submission of 3,656 papers. We build on a simple observation: author rebuttals often include explicit references to content of the submission used to address reviewer comments, providing a high-precision annotation source. We cast grounding as a retrieval task and evaluate a wide range of retrieval methods. Results show that retrieval over the entire paper content performs poorly, evidence-type inference is a major bottleneck, and multimodal evidence provides complementary signals that text alone misses. Our dataset exposes grounding reviewer comments as a difficult and practically important problem for scientific document understanding. --- ### Flexible and Interpretable Accent Distance Measurements Authors: Charles McGhee, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11458v1 Determining the differences between two speakers' accents is a fundamental task in linguistics and speech technology research. The methodology used to measure these differences depends on the specific research area. A phonetics researcher may demonstrate accent variation by comparing vowel formants in paired recordings of individual words. These results will be interpretable, but the recordings will be time-consuming to collect and may not be representative of connected speech. Accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) research has pushed towards using accent embeddings derived from accent classification tasks. These embeddings can be produced from any speech recording, but are not readily interpretable. In this paper, we demonstrate that articulatory representations created through articulatory inversion can be used as an interpretable basis for accent comparison and that optimal transport provides a framework for accent comparison across arbitrary recording types. --- ### RouteRepair: Instance-Level Failure Diagnosis and Targeted Repair in LLM-Based Automated Heuristic Design for Routing Optimization Authors: Binghao Ji, Di Huang, Jiahui Fang, Zhiyuan Liu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11452v1 Efficient routing optimization is essential to freight transportation, urban logistics, and shared mobility, where high-quality heuristics are often required under limited computational budgets. Recent large language model (LLM)-based automated heuristic design methods can generate effective routing rules, but aggregate evaluation may mask recurrent failures on particular instance structures. To address this limitation, this study develops RouteRepair, which diagnoses parent-specific weaknesses from instance-level performance and applies targeted modifications to the corresponding heuristic components while protecting behavior that already performs well. Routing evidence, solver behavior, and program context are combined to define bounded repair objectives, and each intervention is validated through matched parent-child evaluation of failure recovery and collateral degradation. Experiments on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) span constructive search, guided local search, and ant colony optimization. RouteRepair-GLS reduces the mean TSP optimality gap from 1.7476% to 0.7587%, while the constructive CVRP heuristic lowers average route cost by 1.91% relative to the savings heuristic; the generated ACO priors also outperform matched hand-designed priors. These results show that failure-aware, evidence-constrained refinement can improve routing heuristics on difficult instances while preserving performance on cases they already solve well. --- ### Cross-Lingual Clinical Annotation Projection as Constrained Text Generation: A Six-Language Study Authors: Álvaro Rey-Blanes, Francisco J. Moreno-Barea, Francisco J. Veredas Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11450v1 Background: To determine whether cross-lingual clinical annotation projection can be formulated as a text-preserving, document-level generative task that produces verifiable character-level annotations for multilingual clinical corpus construction, and to characterize its robustness and computational trade-offs relative to candidate-based projection pipelines. Methods: We developed a constrained LLM projection workflow that inserts entity tags directly into immutable target-language text, followed by deterministic validation and character-offset reconstruction. We evaluated it alongside supervised candidate-span projection and hybrid ML-LLM refinement for transferring Spanish Disease, Symptom, and Procedure annotations into six languages. Evaluation used MultiClinAI gold standard with strict span matching and character-overlap F1 Results: Direct LLM projection achieved the strongest and most consistent performance. GLM 5.2 obtained a mean Strict F1 of 0.9201 across 18 language-entity combinations, while locally deployable Gemma4:31B achieved 0.9133. The best LLM configuration improved Strict F1 over the previous state of the art in all 18 settings, by 0.0564-0.1512, yielding 55,416 grounded mentions with reconstructed offsets. Conclusions: Direct LLM-based projection enables high-quality multilingual clinical annotation transfer and provides a practical approach for extending clinical NLP resources to languages with fewer annotated datasets and language-specific tools. Combined with local inference and deterministic validation, it can substantially reduce expert time and cost for multilingual clinical corpus construction. --- ### Prevalence Determines Precision:Silent Contamination in Detector-Defined Datasets Authors: Jia Huang, Yankai Wan, Yangjun Ou Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11449v1 Many ML datasets are constructed by running a detector, heuristic, or model over candidate pools; accepted items become labels. Dataset precision is then governed by true-positive prevalence in each pool via Bayes, not solely by detector quality. Using one instrument and period, we hold a detector-defined event dataset plus an independent official index labeling every detected item as real or phantom. One detector, three pools yield phantom rates 81.7%, 9.0%, and 0.0%. Transferring precision from the two high-rate pools to the low-rate pool predicts 0.955 versus measured 0.183, a +422% error; the Bayes expression predicts all three within 3.3%. The detected response curve is an exact convex combination of a true-event and a phantom component (residual 1.1e-16), with phantoms outnumbering true events 473 to 308, so contamination is a second signal with detector-inherited shape, not additive noise. Contamination direction depends on the estimator: on identical windows one statistic is diluted and another inflated because its denominator is also contaminated. A common normalization turns the estimator into a mean of ratios whose expectation need not exist; on the same 335 events it returns 0.40 where the well-defined estimator returns 0.10. --- ### Investigating catastrophic forgetting in sound event classification Authors: Riccardo Casciotti, Annamaria Mesaros Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11447v1 This work investigates a number of approaches to prevent catastrophic forgetting in class incremental learning scenarios for sound event classification tasks. We analyze the problem using architectural and regularization approaches, using FSD50K and AudioSet datasets. We design incremental stages and solutions that selectively protect the kernels of the network from weight updates to prevent catastrophic forgetting, and a dynamic head solution that expands itself each time a new task is learned. The findings show that catastrophic forgetting mainly happens in deeper layers, in particular in the classifier head. For the studied in-domain sound classification problem, the solution that seems to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and is the most efficient is a full freezing of the feature extractor with a fine-tuning of the dynamic head classifier, showing little to no forgetting and great training stability, and a good balance between memory-stability and learning plasticity. --- ### Calibration-Aware Uncertainty Cascades for Efficient Heterogeneous Model Collaboration Authors: Yilin Zhang, Han Jiang, Cai Xu, Ying Liu, Wei Zhao Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11446v1 Heterogeneous model collaboration seeks to exploit the complementary strengths of different models to balance predictive performance and inference cost. Existing approaches typically rely either on trained routers, which tie routing decisions to a fixed task and model pool, or on raw-confidence cascades, whose thresholds lack consistent reliability semantics across heterogeneous models. Consequently, these approaches adapt poorly to changing model pools and deployment budgets. We propose Calibration-Aware Uncertainty Cascades (CAUC), a simple post-hoc framework that independently calibrates each model's confidence and selects deployment policies using validation data. The resulting calibrated confidence scores establish a common reliability scale for accepting an early prediction, invoking a stronger model, or selectively combining model outputs. This unified decision criterion decouples deployment policies from any particular model pool or operating budget. We further show theoretically that calibration gives confidence thresholds an explicit selective-risk interpretation, whereas uncalibrated scores offer no comparable reliability guarantee. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, across six language benchmarks, CAUC achieves an average relative accuracy improvement of 1.9% over strong-model-only inference while avoiding approximately 47% of strong-model calls. On image classification benchmarks, it maintains or improves predictive performance while reducing measured GFLOPs by up to 57%. --- ### Multi-Modal Controlled Coherent Motion Generation Authors: Yifei Liu, Qiong Cao, Hongwei Yi, Huaiguang Jiang, Changxing Ding Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11439v1 It is natural for humans to walk and talk simultaneously. This paper tackles the challenge of replicating such natural behaviors in 3D avatar motion generation driven by concurrent multimodal inputs, such as a text description of a man walking alongside speech audio. Existing methods, constrained by the scarcity of aligned multimodal data, typically combine motions from individual modalities sequentially or through weighted sums. However, they often result in mismatched or unrealistic movements. To overcome these limitations, we propose MOCO, a novel diffusion-based framework capable of processing multiple simultaneous inputs, including speech audio, text descriptions, and trajectory data, to generate coherent and lifelike motions without requiring aligned multimodal data. Our key innovation lies in decoupling the motion generation process. During each denoising step, the diffusion model independently generates motions for each modality from the input noise and assembles the body parts according to predefined spatial rules. The resulting combined motion is then diffused and serves as the input noise for the subsequent denoising step. This iterative approach enables each modality to refine its contribution within the context of the overall motion, progressively harmonizing movements across modalities. Consequently, the generated motions become increasingly natural and fluid with each iteration, achieving coherent and synchronized behaviors. We evaluate our approach using a purpose-built multimodal benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that MOCO outperforms existing baselines, advancing the field of multimodal motion generation for 3D avatars. --- ### Hologram Representation via Quadratic Phase Gaussian Splatting Authors: Haolong Wang, Yicheng Zhan, Kaan Akşit, Simeng Qiu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11434v1 We introduce Complex-Valued Quadratic Phase Gaussian (CVQPG), a novel hologram representation method that replaces standard 2D Gaussian representations used in 2D Gaussian Splatting with 2D quadratic phase functions. CVQPG incorporates additional learnable parameters to control the curvature of these bases. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the visual quality by +0.19 dB (RGB) and +0.33 dB (grayscale) on average in holographic reconstructions. Specifically, our equal parameter count evaluations show that modulating the primitive's wavefront is an effective and lightweight enhancement for hologram representations. In addition, our frequency domain analysis illustrates that CVQPG has successfully preserved the mid-to-high frequency band of natural images. --- ### LLMs as Post-hoc Auditors of Physiological Plausibility in Symbolic Regression: A Clinician-Evaluated Case Study Authors: Jorge López-Varela, J. Ignacio Hidalgo, José-Manuel Muñoz, Omar Costilla-Reyes, Esther Maqueda, Jesus Moreno-Fernandez, Tomás González-Vidal, J. Manuel Velasco, Oscar Garnica Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11431v1 Genetic Programming and its variants, such as grammatical evolution, are widely used in Symbolic Regression to derive mathematical expressions from multivariate data. In addition to predictive accuracy, models are appreciated for their potential to provide interpretability, offering explicit equations that relate input variables to outcomes. However, achieving interpretability and plausibility remains challenging, as evolved models may be complex or scientifically inconsistent. In this study, we explore whether Large Language Models, can assist in improving the explainability of Symbolic Regression models generated by evolutionary computation methods. Building upon our previous work on estimating body fat percentage using grammar-based Genetic Programming , we investigate the use of LLMs as post-processing tools to analyze and rank evolved expressions according to their interpretability and medical plausibility. Four symbolic expressions are analysed by three LLMs over three repeated runs, and the resulting interpretations and rankings are assessed by a panel of three clinicians. Across the three LLMs, comparative model-ranking outputs received more favorable clinician assessments than isolated term-level interpretations. However, the LLMs also produced physiologically and mathematically questionable explanations, indicating that they are better suited to comparative auditing under expert oversight than to autonomous validation.\blfootnote{The present work is an extended version of a paper submitted into a journal. --- ### SWRouter: Similarity-Contractive Window Routing for Multi-Turn Large Language Model Conversations Authors: Yu Wang, Yuchen Li, Rui Kong, Xinran Chen, Jiamin Chen, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiashu Zhao, Yulun Zhang, Zhonghao Lyu, Haoyi Xiong, Linghe Kong et al. Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11414v1 Large language models exhibit complementary strengths, motivating routing methods that dispatch each query to the most suitable model. Although existing routers are effective in single-turn settings, they do not directly transfer to multi-turn dialogue, where routing performance critically depends on how historical context is segmented, retained, and incorporated into the current prompt. This introduces two fundamental challenges: preventing information loss and information confusion during context construction, and evaluating routing quality without conflating model selection with prompt construction quality. In this paper, we propose SWRouter, a Similarity-Contractive Window Router for multi-turn large language model routing. SWRouter combines a similarity-based context segmentation mechanism for prompt construction with a dual-metric evaluation framework that decouples construction accuracy from router performance. Experiments on multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that SWRouter consistently surpasses strong baselines, achieving a 16.26% improvement in evaluation accuracy over the best individual large language model and an additional 8.22% gain over the Conv-ID Context baseline. Our results highlight that multi-turn large language model routing requires a joint design of context construction and evaluation, rather than a direct extension of single-turn routing methods. --- ### X-AuT: Progressive Audio-Encoder Compression for Speech LLMs with Cross-Scale Distillation Authors: Haojun Zhang, Yi Zou, Min Chen, Qize Yu, Lianrui Fan, Xini Ding, Hao Li, Shuchang Zhou, Xianming Liu, Shiyu Huang Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11412v1 Reducing audio-encoder depth lowers the inference cost of speech large language models, but removing complete blocks perturbs the embeddings consumed by the decoder and can cause deletion and premature end-of-sequence errors. We introduce X-AuT, a progressive framework that selects layer combinations through short behavioral probes and restores the pruned model through representation alignment, cross-scale distillation, scheduled student-policy supervision, and LoRA finetuning. The language-model backbone remains frozen, while attention LoRA adapters and the tied output embedding adapt during distillation. Training uses the highest-agreement tier from a transcript-consistency pipeline, followed by source reweighting during finetuning. On ten public Chinese--English benchmarks, compressing Qwen3-ASR-0.6B from 18 to 16 audio-encoder layers reduces macro-average error from 5.61% to 5.27%. The 14-layer model reaches 5.75% with 20.7% fewer audio-tower parameters. Under the matched recipe, the 1.7B teacher yields 5.55% mean error, compared with 8.45% for self-distillation, and progressive 18$\rightarrow$14 pruning outperforms direct pruning (5.75% vs. 6.73%). These single-run results establish two practical operating points and show that the accuracy effects vary across benchmarks. Project website: https://xpeng-ai.github.io/x-aut --- ### Deep-Fake CAPTCHA: Mitigating Next-Generation Social Engineering Attacks Authors: Guy Frankovits, Lior Yasur, Fred M. Grabovski, Yisroel Mirsky Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11404v1 This paper presents DF-CAPTCHA, an active defense against real-time deepfake impersonation in voice and video calls. Instead of passively searching for artifacts, DF-CAPTCHA prompts the caller to perform simple challenge-response tasks that are easy for humans but difficult for current real-time deepfake systems to generate convincingly. The framework verifies the response using four criteria: realism, identity consistency, task completion, and response time. We evaluate the approach across both audio and video modalities using user studies and experiments with real-time deepfake models. Results show that people often struggle to distinguish real-time deepfakes from authentic media, while DF-CAPTCHA substantially improves detection performance over passive methods, reaching high accuracy in both modalities. These findings suggest that active challenge-based verification is a practical and robust defense against next-generation social engineering attacks based on real-time deepfakes. --- ### From Queries to Narratives: Cultural Heritage Data Stories for Knowledge Graph Exploration and Quality Assessment Authors: Tabea Tietz, Torsten Schrade, Etienne Posthumus, Linnaea Söhn, Jonatan Jalle Steller, Jörg Waitelonis, Harald Sack Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11403v1 Cultural-heritage KGs such as the NFDI4Culture-KG contain millions of triples about artworks, music, inscriptions, historical events, and the people and places connected to them. For many users, however, discovering this knowledge can be difficult. While SPARQL can be learned, writing meaningful queries first requires an in-depth understanding of the graph's data model, an investment many domain researchers and practitioners are unwilling to make. Even with existing user interfaces, a starting point and some guidance are usually needed, because the data contained in the graph is highly specialized, heterogeneous, and constantly growing, making it challenging to know what it contains or which questions it can answer. In this paper, we present data stories as a way not only to lower this barrier, but also to turn exploration into data-quality assessment, and thus combine accessible querying with the discovery of issues that remain hidden in aggregate statistics. In this contribution, a data story is understood as a narrative document that integrates explanatory text and images with executable SPARQL queries and their visualized results. It is described how they are authored against the graph and how they serve several purposes: guiding users through an unfamiliar graph, creating reproducible narratives, and surfacing data-quality issues previously hidden in aggregate statistics. The authoring platform LODEON including its Sparnatural and AI-supported authoring assistants is introduced as a proof-of-concept. Within the authoring environment, every claim made about the data can be backed by an explicit query, making these narratives transparent and reproducible. This paper also reflects on lessons learned from hands-on seminars and workshops. Early experience suggests that such data stories make cultural-heritage knowledge graphs more accessible for both exploration and quality assessment. --- ### Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction Authors: Ann-Kristin Malz, Gregory Ashton, Nicolo Colombo Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: gr-qc, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11401v1 In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed. --- ### TransClean: A Benchmark for Detecting and Extracting Clean Translations from Large Language Model Outputs Authors: Shenbin Qian, Yves Scherrer Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11399v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for machine translation, yet their outputs often contain additional text beyond the translation itself, such as language labels, explanations or bilingual repetitions, which we term translation noise. Despite its prevalence, this problem lacks dedicated benchmarks and systematic study. We analyze over 790,000 translation outputs from 12 LLMs across 22 language pairs (LPs) and identify 12 recurring noise patterns, which we group into formatting and content noise. Building on the observed patterns, we construct TransClean, a controlled benchmark of 9,900 pairs of noisy and clean translation outputs, comprising 8,800 synthetically generated instances and 1,100 manually curated authentic instances. We evaluate two extraction approaches on the TransClean benchmark: 1) a span-based extraction method leveraging translation quality estimation models for span detection, and 2) an LLM-based extraction method that prompts an LLM to isolate the translation. Our benchmark and analysis provide the first systematic framework to evaluate and improve the cleanliness of LLM translation outputs. --- ### Beyond Confidence: Stability-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Reasoning Authors: Bincheng Gu, Min Gao, Zongwei Wang, Yibing Bai, Yulan He, Junliang Yu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11393v1 Test-time adaptation has emerged as a lightweight alternative to costly post-training for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. Predictive entropy provides a model-derived signal for such adaptation, guiding models toward higher-confidence reasoning states without external verifiers or reward models. However, higher confidence does not necessarily imply correctness, as LLMs may remain highly confident along incorrect reasoning trajectories. We observe that high-confidence reasoning is more likely to be correct when confidence remains stable under local perturbations. Based on this observation, we propose Test-Time Adaptation via Stability-Aware Confidence Optimization (TASCO), a framework that incorporates local stability into confidence-based test-time adaptation while keeping the LLM frozen. TASCO operationalizes local stability by optimizing a lightweight task-level prefix under two alternative perturbation strategies: Random Perturbation promotes distributional stability across trajectories induced by nearby perturbed prefixes, whereas Sharpness-Aware Perturbation targets worst-case local sensitivity. Experiments demonstrate that TASCO improves reasoning accuracy and token efficiency across diverse LLMs and reasoning benchmarks, while behavioral analyses show that it maintains stable confidence under local perturbations without prematurely concentrating the model's predictive distribution. --- ### Buyer Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Environmental Governance and Supplier Environmental Controversies: An Organizational Information Processing and Signaling Authors: Yongchao Martin Ma, Xinya Guan Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11391v1 Environmental controversies in global supply chains pose significant risks for global buyers. This study examines whether overseas suppliers' exposure to buyers' artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled environmental governance reduces supplier environmental controversies. Drawing on organizational information processing theory and signaling theory, we investigate how suppliers' exposure to AI-enabled governance influences their environmental controversies and the institutional contingencies under which this effect varies. Using text analysis to measure buyer AI-enabled environmental governance, we analyze panel data on 2,505 suppliers of U.S.-listed firms across 41 countries from 2020 to 2024 with multidimensional fixed-effects models. We find that suppliers' exposure to buyer AI-enabled environmental governance is negatively associated with supplier environmental controversies in the following year. This negative relationship is stronger in supplier countries with higher AI readiness and regulatory quality. The study contributes to research on AI-enabled sustainability governance and sustainable supply chain risk management. --- ### VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents Authors: Peiyuan Gao, Gaoyuan Zhang, Haojie Qin, Yahui Sun, Qianyi Zhang, Yunhao Zhang, Zeyu Wang, Wei Lu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11390v1 State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases. --- ### Agent-Integrated Software: Interaction Contracts and Continuous Assurance Authors: Shengcheng Yu, Chunrong Fang, Zhenyu Chen Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11381v1 Embedding an intelligent agent in an existing application creates a persistent coordination problem: users can revise goals and manipulate shared objects while delegated execution continues. We argue that dependable integration requires an explicit correspondence between task-level interaction and application behavior. We introduce Agent-Integrated Software (AIS) as a software pattern combining a conventional core, direct interaction, and a built-in agent, and Intent-Level Interaction Abstraction (IIA) as the task semantics through which users inspect and control delegated work. An open transition-system model relates AIS execution to IIA states and events. Interaction contracts constrain this relation through task bindings, role-specific authority, control transitions, and outcome evidence; continuous assurance maintains scoped claims as their dependencies change. A compact disclosure contract and conditional propositions illustrate why local component validity is insufficient and how selected admission invariants can be separated from planning. Contrasting software domains expose the framework's assumptions and limits. This perspective develops a research agenda spanning application abstraction, development support, controlled execution, quality assessment, and human supervision, with the aim of making agent integration a maintainable software engineering discipline. --- ### DINO-Med: A Unified Patch-Based Adaptation Framework for Multi-Modal Medical Image Analysis Applied to Liver Fibrosis Staging Authors: Boya Wang, Ruizhe Li, Chao Chen, Xin Chen Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11380v1 Adapting natural-image foundation models like DINOv3 to multi-modal medical imaging is challenging due to the significant domain gap between natural color images and multi-channel medical scans. We present a unified, patch-based framework that processes raw multimodal imaging through training-free registration, automated localization, and mask-filtered patch extraction. This architecture culminates in a hierarchical strategy that aggregates patch-level insights into subject-level diagnostics. Using liver fibrosis staging as a case study, we evaluate four patch-level feature representations: handcrafted Radiomics features, learned ResNet features, pre-trained foundation model SAM-Med2D features, and frozen DINOv3 features. To ensure a controlled comparison, all models utilize the same lightweight MLP head and are evaluated across both rigid and deformable registration settings. Our training protocol focuses on mild fibrosis (S1) and cirrhosis (S4) classes only, enabling a single classifier to address both substantial fibrosis detection and cirrhosis staging. Evaluated via 10 random train (90%)/ test (10%) splits on 360 subjects from the CARE 2025 Liver Track 4 cohort, our DINOv3-based framework significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving the best classification accuracy of 78.4% for S1 and 75.8% for S4. --- ### Brain-PACE: A Deep Siamese MRI Framework for Modelling Longitudinal Brain Acceleration Authors: Samuel Maddox, Jacob Newman, Saber Sami, Michal Mackiewicz, for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, the Australian Imaging Biomarkers, Lifestyle flagship study of ageing Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11378v1 Brain age estimation has become a popular research proxy for assessing brain health and disease, yet longitudinal trajectories of brain ageing are still poorly defined, and clinical use is limited. Building on existing Siamese longitudinal frameworks, we develop Brain-Predicted Age Acceleration (Brain-PACE) to directly estimate the pace of structural brain ageing from paired T1-weighted MRI. Brain-PACE identified accelerated ageing in $42.6$% of participants with mild cognitive impairment. Faster Brain-PACE was associated with greater functional and cognitive impairment (FAQ; $r=0.35$, ADAS13; $r=0.30$, CDR-SB; $r=0.32$) and greater regional tau burden in the posterior cingulate ($r=0.59$), precuneus ($r=0.47$), and entorhinal cortex ($r=0.37$). These associations were stronger than those observed when pace was calculated indirectly from repeated cross-sectional brain age estimates, suggesting that direct longitudinal modelling captures complementary information relevant to ongoing pathological change. Methodologically, Brain-PACE extends the LILAC framework by combining spatial attention with soft label distribution learning and a Cramér distance objective, improving probabilistic performance and reducing prediction bias while providing measures of predictive uncertainty. Together, these findings support Brain-PACE as a complementary longitudinal imaging phenotype with sensitivity to relevant clinical and biological changes in early neurodegeneration. --- ### Deep operator learning for efficient sampling from invariant measures of stochastic differential equations Authors: Ling Guo, Lei Li, Jingtong Zhang Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11376v1 We introduce an amortized neural sampler that combines operator learning with flow methods for sampling. It maps SDE coefficient functions to pushforwards from a reference measure to the invariant measures, enabling efficient sampling across families of stochastic differential equations. Our framework shifts traditional sampling cost to an initial training phase, after which new SDE instances require only one encoder pass and a few ODE solver steps, independent of mixing time. To handle problems in high dimensions, we use Lagrangian trajectory sensors for the coefficient functions and cross attention in the architecture. We also theoretically establish the expressivity and resolution invariance of our framework. Experiments on 1D and 2D SDE families show competitive accuracy with substantial speedups over MCMC in regimes with slow mixing, transfer across sensor counts, and demonstration results on a 64D interacting particle SDE where traditional grid approaches are infeasible. --- ### Vision Transformer-Based Multi-Level Feature Fusion for Multi-Label Sewer Defect Classification Authors: Xu Fang, Zhuoran Wang, Qing Li, Shengyu Zhang, Guanzhi Deng, Jianbiao He, Qingquan Li Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11375v1 Automated classification of sewer defects is essential for infrastructure condition assessment and maintenance decision-making, but existing deep learning methods struggle to balance classification accuracy and computational complexity in large-scale multi-label scenarios. This study develops Sewer-Transformer-ML, a hierarchical vision Transformer with multi-level feature fusion, together with two lightweight architectures, Sewer-MobileNet-ML and Sewer-Mobile-TransNet, for resource-constrained inspection scenarios. On the Sewer-ML test set, Sewer-Transformer-ML-Base achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.68% and an $F1_{\text{Normal}}$ of 92.68%, ranking first on the public leaderboard and exceeding the second-ranked method by 7.6 percentage points in $F2_{\text{CIW}}$. Sewer-MobileNet-ML achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.73% with only 17 M parameters, representing an approximately 95% parameter reduction relative to the base model. Under the standard Sewer-Capsule data split, Sewer-Mobile-TransNet achieved 96.43% classification accuracy. When the training set was reduced to 1,177 images, pretraining on Sewer-ML consistently improved model performance. Ablation experiments further showed that direct concatenation was more effective for Transformer features, whereas attention-based fusion better supported multiscale CNN features. These findings provide a computational basis for automated sewer inspection, lightweight model design, and adaptation across civil infrastructure inspection platforms. --- ### Characterizing Bluesky Content Moderation Service: From Automation of Service to Landscape of Harms Authors: Pushpdeep Singh, Sayeh Jarollahi, Ayan Majumdar, Vabuk Pahari, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Krishna P. Gummadi, Ingmar Weber, Abhisek Dash Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11373v1 Empirical research on content moderation is fundamentally constrained by the opaque deployment of moderation systems on major social media platforms. To this end, the recent emergence of decentralized platforms with transparent, public moderation logs presents an unprecedented opportunity for independent audits. In this work, we leverage this architectural transparency to conduct the first large-scale audit of the default moderation system on Bluesky, the Bluesky Moderation Service (BMS). Analyzing its 10.6M moderation labels from 2025, we investigate three foundational aspects: (i) its mechanism (the degree of automation versus human oversight), (ii) its efficacy (accuracy in detecting harms), and (iii) its purpose (the landscape of harms it identifies). Our findings reveal a human-AI collaborative system where labels for sexual and graphic content are applied automatically in seconds, while nuanced and high stakes labels require more human oversight, taking hours or days. Through a manual annotation study, we find the BMS operates with high precision (0.837), but struggles with low recall (0.222), with our annotators identifying 4.5$\times$ more harmful content than the moderation system in a random sample. Finally, unsupervised clustering of the most frequently applied labeled posts uncovers detected harms ranging from hostility in discourse toward protected groups to the spread of sexually explicit and other graphic content. Our work offers a look into the operational realities of a deployed moderation system, providing a concrete data-driven foundation for designing more effective and transparent moderation systems. --- ### RAMamba-Net: A Reliability-Aware and Mamba-Based Multimodal Fusion Network for Auditory Attention Detection Authors: Xingyi He, Ziwei Wang, Dongrui Wu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11372v1 Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the attended speaker from physiological signals, supporting neuro-steered hearing devices and natural human-machine interaction. Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant modality for AAD but provides incomplete evidence in naturalistic audio-visual scenes, motivating EEG and electrooculography (EOG) fusion. Existing approaches remain limited by weak cross-modal interaction, inefficient temporal modeling, and low robustness to sample variations. To address the limitations, we propose RAMamba-Net, a reliability-aware Mamba-based multimodal fusion network for AAD. RAMamba-Net employs a Mamba-enhanced band-aware convolutional Transformer to capture band-specific EEG patterns and long-range temporal dynamics. A dual-branch temporal-spatial encoder models EOG temporal and inter-channel dependencies. Cross-modal attention enables explicit modality interaction. Then, a reliability-aware module is introduced to estimate sample-wise modality weights for feature and prediction consistency, thereby enhancing multimodal fusion. Experiments on two AAD benchmarks demonstrate that RAMamba-Net effectively exploits complementary EEG-EOG information, yielding accuracy gains of 5.76% over unimodal baselines, together with more robust decoding and discriminative representations. Further analyses show that explicit cross-modal interaction improves multimodal alignment, while the reliability-aware module suppresses unreliable modality evidence and is robust to signal perturbation and parameter variation. --- ### Local Robustness Quantification for Naive Bayes Classifiers and Generative Forests: a General Approach Authors: Adrián Detavernier, Jasper De Bock Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11366v1 We provide methods for calculating the robustness of the predictions of two types of generative classifiers whose underlying distribution is a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM): naive Bayes classifiers and generative forests (a probabilistic extension of random forests). Following the paradigm of robustness quantification, we define the robustness of a prediction as the extent to which the distribution of the classifier can be perturbed without changing this prediction. We consider perturbations obtained by varying the local models of the PGMs within general neighborhoods and focus in particular on epsilon-contamination, total variation distance and chi-squared divergence balls. We test our methods on benchmark datasets, demonstrate that the robustness value of a prediction serves as an indicator for its trustworthiness and compare our approach with other such indicators. --- ### Portable Semantics, Private Dialects: Reuse and Negative Transfer in Latent Communication Between Language-Model Cells Authors: Narcis Marincat Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11365v1 In shared-genome language-model societies, restricted evidence visibility favors reusable, value-indexed latent packet interfaces, whereas the sole high-performing globally visible model in the parent study learned an episode-entangled code. This companion study asks whether independently trained societies share one packet language, where strict zero-shot transfer fails, and whether inherited interface state helps or harms later learning. First, a leakage-controlled causal interoperability audit over all 30 ordered pairs of six independently trained restricted societies -- under sealed held-out structure and a preregistered raw/orthogonal/linear/nonlinear alignment ladder -- shows the six semantically similar interfaces do not form one raw language: one same-initialization pair is exactly interoperable in both directions, a second shows asymmetric partial compatibility, and all 26 cross-initialization directions fail every frozen alignment rung. Second, within the tested decomposition and a single sealed source formulation, a source-span control localizes strict zero-shot failure to interpretation and execution of the new operator instructions. Third, in a matched adaptation factorial, the globally trained communication interface acts as a severe negative-transfer prior: reinitializing only the packet reader, writer, and mouth raises final depth-three accuracy from 0.169 to 0.857. Fourth, across two restricted checkpoints and two independently frozen target streams each, inherited interfaces never exceeded fresh-interface controls by the preregistered 0.10 margin. All primary conclusions are bounded to a near-transfer 17-state setting; the negative-transfer factorial concerns one globally visible parent-cohort checkpoint, while an appendix adds a post hoc tagged-global twin case study. --- ### GeoTrussRover: Morphological Computation with Contact-Semantic Control Primitives Authors: Muyuan Ma, Yi Zhang, Yang Yang, Xuanyan Zheng, Ruiqi Hu, Boxuan Ke, Zhenyu Chen, Yicong Lin, Xin Hao Yang, Daliang Xiao, Zhinan Hou, Wanhao Niu et al. Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.RO, cs.GR, cs.NE, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11361v1 Reconfigurable robots can change their contact geometry when a fixed body cannot negotiate an obstacle. A variable-geometry truss (VGT) distributes this shape change through a load-bearing structure, but coupling it to a mobile base creates a high-dimensional coordination problem. GeoTrussRover combines an electrically actuated VGT, a wheeled base, and contact-semantic morphology planning and control. We solve one source traversal and extract four contact-semantic primitives that describe coordination among 21 members. Physics-constrained projection adapts them to unseen step heights with the same contact topology. When every phase remains feasible, adaptation does not recompute the complete motion. If one phase violates the new physical constraints, only that phase is recomputed. A full-space QP then tracks the adapted motion and corrects member and wheel errors. For transfer from 0.10m to 0.075m, the method reduces objective-function evaluations by 63.7% relative to full recomputation. Contact-phase feasibility analysis covers step heights from 0.10 to 0.46m, or 1.08 to 4.97 wheel radii, with the upper value near the theoretical feasible boundary. The electric prototype traverses 2.11 wheel radii. The resulting low-dimensional representation stores task coordination in a hyper-redundant, load-bearing morphology and reuses it during locomotion. --- ### R4Tun: LLM-guided adaptive segmental tunnel lining segmentation in point clouds Authors: Xinghui Tao, Zehao Ye, Guangming Wang, Jelena Ninić, Brian Sheil Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11360v1 Automated inspection of segmental tunnel linings requires adaptive segmentation from 3D point clouds, yet expert-tuned pipelines often degrade when tunnel conditions vary. This paper presents R4Tun, a large language model (LLM)-driven adaptation framework that extends an expert-designed pipeline (SAM4Tun) with bounded parameter tuning informed by structured context: memory ($m$), state ($s$), and knowledge ($k$). Evaluated on 30 selected Seg2Tunnel subsets (13 regular, 17 complex) across three LLMs, the full $m+s+k$ design raised mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) from 0.18 to 0.43--0.48 and overall accuracy (OA) from 0.42 to 0.59--0.65 relative to the static SAM4Tun baseline, with the near-reference regular (staggered) subsets reaching mIoU 0.784--0.796 across LLMs. Across 270 (30 tunnels $\times$ 3 different LLMs $\times$ 3 context settings) runs, the LLMs showed similar parameter-adjustment trends (with overlapping 95\% CIs on mean gains) and consistently adjusted a shared set of critical parameters. These results support R4Tun as a controlled, label-free, cross-LLM adaptation mechanism in the tested SAM4Tun--Seg2Tunnel setting, demonstrating consistent accuracy gains; we position R4Tun as a mechanism contribution rather than a deployable final-inspection system, in which each bounded parameter change is auditable via logged rationales. --- ### SEAR: Segment-Evidence-Aware Routing for Weak-to-Strong Multilingual Speech MCQ Authors: Huy Hoang Le, Long-Bao Nguyen, Minh Tri Dao Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11355v1 This paper describes our system for Task~2 of the second Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model (MLC-SLM) Challenge. We adapt Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct with a segment-evidence-aware data and post-training pipeline. A language model converts timestamped ASR into coherent event spans, which are expanded by a boundary margin and cropped from the original recording. We then synthesize complementary semantic MCQs with Qwen3.6-27B and acoustic MCQs with Gemini~3.1 Flash-Lite, followed by structural, grounding, answer-consistency, and target-model trainability checks, yielding 359,825 verified MCQs across 21 language and accent variants. A text-only probe partitions the data into weak, text-answerable items used for supervised fine-tuning and strong, audio-dependent items used for reinforcement learning with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO), stabilized by debiased advantages, sequence-level importance correction, and dynamic filtering. Our system obtains 90.92% accuracy on the final official evaluation set. --- ### Reification as a Transferable Vocabulary: Zero-Shot Link Prediction with Vanilla GNNs Authors: Camille Pradel Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11347v1 Knowledge graph foundation models such as ULTRA achieve zero-shot link prediction on unseen graphs through dedicated architectures that hard-code a transfer mechanism. In this work we move that mechanism out of the architecture and into the representation, by \emph{reifying} the input graph: every fact becomes a node, connected to its subject, object, and relation type through a fixed vocabulary of six meta-relations, with relation types as anonymous shared nodes rather than model parameters. On this representation, five textbook GNNs (GAT, GINE with sum and with mean+max aggregation, GraphSAGE, R-GCN), each trained on a single knowledge graph of 4,245 triples for 30 minutes on one NVIDIA A100, transfer zero-shot to 40 inductive link-prediction benchmarks. The best of them, an off-the-shelf GAT, matches ULTRA, a dedicated foundation model pretrained on three graphs, across ULTRA's own evaluation suite. The same fixed vocabulary extends to relational databases, a row becoming an entity and a foreign-key column a relation type; a preliminary probe on two unseen databases, with no cell values, schema text or in-context labels, shows a model of this family pretrained on three knowledge graphs ranking foreign-key targets far above random-initialization and degree controls. We release the code, the checkpoints, and the evaluation pipeline for all 40 benchmarks. --- ### Exploring Diffusion Transformers for Cross-Modal Augmentation in Multimodal Brain State Decoding Authors: Ziwei Wang, Xingyi He, Hongbin Wang, Tianwang Jia, Bohan Fang, Dongrui Wu Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11341v1 Multimodal brain state decoding has largely focused on fusing paired modalities for prediction, but has rarely explored how their correspondence can be further exploited to enrich training data and improve multimodal representation learning. To address this gap, we propose CoMA-DiT, a bidirectional cross-modal Diffusion Transformer for latent augmentation that treats paired modalities as sources of mutual generative supervision rather than merely as inputs to be fused. CoMA-DiT conditions velocity prediction on the paired modality through cross-modal attention and adaptively injects the resulting variation via a reliability-gated residual mechanism. Experiments on multimodal auditory attention decoding and emotion recognition showed that CoMA-DiT consistently outperformed 20 representative baselines, achieving absolute gains of 4.28% and 6.70% in accuracy and macro-F1 over the no-augmentation baseline, respectively. Extensive ablation, sensitivity, visualization, and interpretability analyses further demonstrated its robustness, generalizability, and ability to capture functionally relevant cross-modal interactions. These findings support a broader view of multimodal learning: Paired modalities can serve not only as inputs for fusion but also as supervision sources that augment one another. --- ### On the Impact of Anonymization on the Performance of Large Language Models Authors: Tobias Deußer, Max Hahnbück, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Tobias Uelwer, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11335v2 As large language models are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains, anonymizing input data to protect personally identifiable information has become a critical practice. However, the impact of this anonymization on model utility is not well understood. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of the trade-off between privacy and performance. We evaluate five prominent language models across eleven diverse benchmarks, comparing their performance on original versus pseudonymized inputs. Our results reveal that while anonymization generally degrades performance, the effect is highly nuanced. We find that more capable models, such as Qwen2.5-72B and GPT-4o mini, suffer the largest performance drops, suggesting a stronger reliance on specific entity information. The impact is also task-dependent: performance on TruthfulQA improves with anonymization, while retrieval-focused tasks like RGB experience a catastrophic decline. Further experiments show that reversible anonymization techniques that preserve entity uniqueness significantly outperform irreversible ones like redaction, and that explicitly prompting models about anonymization offers no discernible benefit. We conclude that anonymization is not a one-size-fits-all solution and must be co-designed with the model and task in mind to balance privacy and utility effectively. Our findings provide a crucial baseline for developing more robust, privacy-aware AI systems. --- ### E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets Authors: Khloud AL Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11334v1 Natural Language Inference processes pairs of sentences to extract their semantic relations. NLI has been a hot research topic, integrated as a main component in other NLP applications. Despite significant advancements in textual inference across various languages all around the world, Arabic language still suffers from limited resources in this domain. To address this gap, this paper introduces E-CONAN benchmarks that are composed of sentences pairs from various sources: (1) automatically-translated pairs, (2) human-validated machine-translated pairs, (3) hand-crafted pairs from teaching Arabic as foreign language books, and (4) headlines pairs from different news channels containing rumors. E-CONAN contains two benchmark datasets, E-CONAN-2, a 2-way dataset (RTE) and E-CONAN-3, a 3-way dataset (NLI). Additionally, we have used E-CONAN benchmarks to evaluate 9 state-of-the-art multilingual pretrained models using zero-shot classification. Models were evaluated across the ArNLI, XNLI, and E-CONAN datasets. Results show that E-CONAN is a potentially valuable resource for evaluating model generalization and even for fine-tuning pre-trained models. Its diverse composition, derived from a combination of sources, offers a broader and more robust assessment compared to XNLI and ArNLI. In addition, we have evaluated 5 LLMs on E-CONAN-3 dataset. Moreover, we incorporated MARBERT as a representative Arabic-specific baseline and conducted performance evaluation comparison to demonstrate how Arabic-specific models scale against cross-lingual and LLM-based approaches on the E-CONAN benchmarks. Furthermore, we conducted detailed qualitative and quantitative error analysis to analyze frequent error patterns. E-CONAN benchmarks will be publicly available, we hope that it will enrich research community in Arabic textual entailment and natural language inference. --- ### Estimating Inconsistency Response Surfaces under Uncertainty in Cyber-Physical System Development Authors: Johannes Mäkelburg, Tim Schwabe, Maribel Acosta Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SE, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11331v1 Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are commonly represented through multiple interconnected models. During development, CPS consistency requires that shared model elements remain compatible across these models. Uncertainty, for example, due to sensor noise or model abstraction, changes the admissible values of model elements and can introduce inconsistencies, i.e., situations in which models can no longer be jointly satisfied. While existing approaches can determine consistency for a given uncertainty configuration, they provide limited support for systematically exploring, analyzing, and explaining inconsistency across large uncertainty spaces. We address this challenge by reformulating inconsistency as an intervention response modeling problem. Using Saltelli sampling and multi-fidelity Monte Carlo estimation, we generate intervention-response datasets and train a surrogate model that directly predicts inconsistency from the propagated uncertainty geometry. Experiments on 48 scenarios and 10 CPS domains show that the surrogate matches Monte Carlo estimates while reducing evaluation time from milliseconds to microseconds, enabling orders-of-magnitude more response-surface evaluations within fixed computational budgets. Building on the learned response surfaces, we perform sensitivity analysis to identify dominant uncertainty drivers and introduce a gradient-based consistency recourse method to determine minimal uncertainty interventions that restore consistency. The results show that inconsistency under uncertainty can be effectively learned, analyzed, and repaired through response-surface modeling, providing a scalable foundation for uncertainty-aware consistency management in CPS development. --- ### Predictive Multi-Landmark OCT Tracking for Increased Motion Robustness Authors: Konrad Reuter, Suresh Guttikonda, Chaitali Uday Karekar, Christian Betz, Alexander Schlaefer Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11330v1 Optical coherence tomography is a promising modality for markerless motion tracking due to its high spatial resolution and inherent depth perception. However, existing OCT-based tracking approaches are limited in terms of trackable velocity, particularly when multiple landmarks are tracked sequentially for 6D pose estimation. In this work, we present a predictive tracking approach that propagates positional updates between multiple tracked landmarks to obtain a global pose prediction. This enables more robust tracking under high velocities. Our results demonstrate RMSEs below 1 mm for velocities up to 100 mm/s and up to nine consecutively tracked landmarks, highlighting the potential of global motion propagation and prediction for improving the robustness of OCT-based tracking. --- ### Rice's Theorem under Self-Modification: Elevation Operators and a Normal Form Authors: Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI, cs.CL, math.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11326v3 We ask whether it can be certified algorithmically that a self-modifying program keeps a behavioural property, a safety property in the motivating case, after its next rewrite (preservation) and along its whole evolution (persistence). When the rewrite depends only on behaviour, preservation is a behavioural property and Rice's theorem applies. When the rewrite reads the code, preservation is no longer behavioural; yet, under a uniform disruption condition, the s-m-n reduction that proves Rice's theorem works inside a single class of behaviourally identical programs, and preservation inherits the degree of the halting problem. One step never exceeds the degree of the property, while persistence can climb one level of the arithmetical hierarchy. We then isolate the mechanism shared by rewriting, supervision and system comparison, the elevation operator, and prove a normal form: the preserving set is determined by a single finite trigger and a polarity, and the Rice-Shapiro theorem restricts the polarity to the arithmetical class of the property. Runtime monitors, consistency supervision, conformance to a reference and observational equivalence are instances, and no sound theory covers the preserving systems. --- ### MultiHuSE: A Multimodal Dataset for Humour Styles and Emotions Authors: Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11322v1 Computational recognition of verbal humour remains a challenging task, requiring an understanding of language, delivery style, emotions, and cultural context. Most existing approaches focus on binary classification and lack datasets that capture psychological dimensions of humour alongside variations in expression. We introduce MultiHuSE, a multimodal dataset comprising 2,407 high-definition videos of 50 demographically diverse actors performing 1,463 text samples across four psychological humour styles (affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, and self-deprecating), as well as neutral content. A subset is additionally annotated for underlying emotions. The dataset uniquely captures multiple actor interpretations of the same texts, enabling systematic analysis of expressive diversity. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion outperforms unimodal approaches (80.1% vs. 77.4% accuracy) in humour style classification, with particularly strong gains for affiliative humour (66% to 74%). While text provides the strongest individual signal, fusion models deliver meaningful improvements. We hope that MultiHuSE provides empirical support for psychological theories linking humour and emotion, while also opening new avenues for research in human communication, well-being, and AI-driven interaction. The dataset is available for academic use under an End-User Licence Agreement. --- ### AI Exposure and AI Resilience: A Two-Dimensional Assessment Framework for Software and Software-Based Business Model Authors: Paul Darius Mandl, Peter Mandl, Martin Häusl Published: 2026-09-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11321v1 Artificial intelligence is changing both software production and the economics of software-based business models. Classical technology due diligence mainly examines technical properties such as architecture, scalability, and technical debt. These criteria do not fully capture how AI can affect a company's value proposition, competitive position, margins, or access to customers. This paper develops Artificial Intelligence Exposure and Resilience (AI-ER) as a two-dimensional assessment framework. AI exposure describes the pressure for change that AI creates for a business model. AI resilience describes the company's ability to absorb that pressure, adapt to changed conditions, and use AI in an economically viable way. Metrics for both dimensions are derived from current AI capabilities, their deployment conditions, and relevant research on business models and organizational adaptability. The model keeps exposure and resilience separate and adds an explicit assessment of evidence quality and confidence. It can be applied first with public information and later refined with internal evidence. The result is a traceable company profile that supports comparison without concealing uncertainty in the underlying evidence. The paper also specifies an initial score logic and a procedure for empirical validation. ---