# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 209 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #10401–10450 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/209 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/208.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/210.md) ### Compensating for Scarce Historical Images in Cross-Domain Cultural Heritage Retrieval Using Synthetic Aging Authors: Marcin Iwanowski, Adam Mazgaj, Ferdynand Gorski, Sabina Szymoniak Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08766v1 Cultural heritage collections often contain contemporary and historical visual records of the same physical object. Linking these records is difficult because corresponding images may differ in viewpoint, acquisition conditions, color reproduction, framing, resolution, and degradation, while genuine historical images are frequently scarce. This study investigates whether synthetically aged contemporary images can replace or complement missing historical training data in bidirectional instance-level retrieval. Synthetic old-domain images are generated using degradation-oriented transformations. An EfficientNetV2-M model is evaluated on identity-disjoint training, validation, and test sets across three dataset partitions and three training seeds. Mixed real-synthetic training is compared with real-only baselines using proportionally scaled and fixed 300-batch-per-epoch schedules. Complete replacement of genuine historical images reduced bidirectional mean R@1 from 86.56% to 81.27%, showing that synthetic aging does not reproduce the full genuine old-domain variability. Increasing the number of independently generated synthetic variants provided no consistent improvement. Under controlled scarcity, however, synthetic completion improved mean R@1 by 3.69 percentage points at 25% genuine historical coverage and by 2.92 points at 50%, relative to the proportionally scaled real-only baselines. At 75%, the gain decreased to 2.00 points, while performance remained comparable to the complete-real-data reference. Fixed-schedule real-only controls did not reproduce these improvements. The results indicate that genuine and synthetic observations are complementary. Synthetic completion primarily benefits retrieval by extending cross-domain identity coverage rather than by increasing training exposure, with its contribution gradually decreasing as genuine historical coverage increases. --- ### Benchmark Scores Are Pipeline-Dependent: A Reliability Audit of Cybersecurity LLM Benchmarks Authors: Aymene Berriche, Cathrine Shalby, Mohannad Alhanahnah, Yazan Boshmaf Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08765v1 Large language model (LLM) benchmarks are often treated as fixed datasets with stable scores, yet their outcomes depend on configurable evaluation pipelines. We audit eight cybersecurity benchmarks across 10 proprietary, open-weight, and cybersecurity-specialized LLMs. By modeling benchmarks as measurement pipelines, we identify 15 systematic failure modes and show that a single pipeline choice can change a model's score by more than 80 percentage points and substantially alter model rankings. At the cross-benchmark level, two semantically similar task pairs rank the same models differently because of incompatible evaluation conventions. Under an evaluation harness that standardizes pipeline choices while preserving task semantics, nine of 10 models shift by at least three ranks on at least one benchmark. These results show that cybersecurity LLM benchmark scores are pipeline-dependent and motivate pipeline-aware auditing as a core requirement for reliable model evaluation. --- ### ZK-Trace: Certified Collusion Tracing with Zero-Knowledge Credentials for Federated GNSS Interference Monitoring Authors: Redwanul Karim, Nisha L. Raichur, Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl, Christopher Mutschler, Felix Ott Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08763v1 Federated global navigation satellite system (GNSS) monitoring distributes a proprietary classifier to partly trusted stations, any of which may leak its copy. ZK-Trace combines public identity marks, recipient-specific Tardos fingerprints, and zero-knowledge credential verification. The registry supports offline tracing without the leaker's cooperation. We establish conditional false-accusation bounds for arbitrary recovered bit patterns, a finite completeness bound under a hidden-bias residual channel, and a deterministic tracing-score bound for correlated feature-distillation errors. An interval-arithmetic checker makes the conditional bound executable and allocates a common budget across accusation and tamper decisions. Under innocent-row independence, the certificate-based evaluation uses a false-naming budget of 0.001 per investigation. It isolates all 160 single-owner copies and traces 712 of 720 two-owner mixtures without naming an innocent. Experiments use a simulated GNSS federation and CIFAR-10. Feature matching preserves the feature mark in 20/20 runs and cross-architecture transfer in 19/20, at copy-accuracy costs of 4.8 and 6.1 percentage points on GNSS and CIFAR-10. Function-only distillation erases the feature mark, and distillation also removes weight-space marks. These results support verifiable tracing under explicit statistical and cryptographic assumptions. Credential knowledge and recipient evidence serve distinct roles. --- ### A Note on Scaling in Randomly Rotated Quantization and Its Connection to the CDEF +1 Pythagorean Relation Authors: Uri Erez Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08759v1 Quantization schemes based on randomized rotations have recently received renewed attention, including the roles of MMSE and unbiased reconstruction scalings. In this note, we point out the connection to classical results in statistical signal processing and communication theory. Specifically, the two reconstruction scales used in the EDEN line of work admit a natural interpretation as finite-dimensional, realization-dependent counterparts of the Wiener and unbiased coefficients in the classical CDEF formulation. At finite blocklength, the CDEF +1 relation holds pointwise for each rotation realization as an exact geometric (Pythagorean) identity, but does not hold after averaging the distortions over the rotation. The classical SNR relation $\sf{SNR}_{\rm MMSE}=\sf{SNR}_{\rm MMSE,U}+1$ is recovered as $d\to\infty$: once the overall scale is handled separately, the empirical coordinate statistics of a randomly rotated vector approach their i.i.d. Gaussian counterparts, and the rotation-dependent quantities concentrate. Importantly, EDEN goes beyond this classical correspondence: for every finite $d$, its Haar-rotation formulation guarantees exact conditional unbiasedness, a stronger property than the second-order notion of unbiasedness in CDEF. We further comment on two distinct roles random rotations play in quantization: one is approximate Gaussianization of the coordinates; the other is decorrelation of reconstruction errors across quantization branches. --- ### Kairos: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Video-Language Modeling over Space, Time, and Dynamics Authors: Ruibo Ming, Lei Sun, Deheng Zhang, He Zhang, Jialu Li, Jian Wang, Zhendong Li, Mengshun Hu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Jinjin Gu Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08755v1 Many emerging video language modeling tasks require systems to move beyond clip-level abstraction and model visual content as it unfolds over extended time horizons. However, most existing video datasets rely on coarse or sparsely aligned supervision, which compresses temporal variation and limits the ability of models to learn reusable representations of continuous visual dynamics. We introduce Kairos, a video dataset for video-language modeling with time-resolved annotations. Kairos consists of long-duration videos, ranging from ten minutes to half an hour, annotated with fine-grained temporal alignment. The annotations capture ongoing actions, entity appearances and attributes, interactions, and evolving contextual cues along the video timeline. This time-resolved structure supports fine-grained evaluation, long-range modeling and reasoning, instruction data construction, representation learning, and video generation. Kairos provides a general-purpose foundation for modeling visual experiences over time. --- ### PAC-Bayesian Bounds for Learning Partially Observed Stochastic Linear Time-Invariant State-Space Systems with Inputs and Sub-Gaussian Noise Authors: Mihaly Petreczky, Mohamad Al Ahdab, John Leth Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08740v1 In this paper we derive a Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayesian error bound for partially observed linear time-invariant (LTI) stochastic dynamical systems in state-space form with inputs and sub-Gaussian noise. Such bounds are widespread in machine learning, and they are useful for characterizing the predictive power of models learned from finitely many data points. The bound derived in this paper relates the expectation of prediction errors with the prediction error generated by the model on the data used for learning. In addition, we show that it can also be used to derive bounds for the parameter estimation error. In turn, this allows us to provide finite-sample error bounds for the prediction error and parameter estimation error for a wide class of system identification algorithms. Furthermore, as LTI systems are a sub-class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), these error bounds could be a first step towards PAC-Bayesian bounds for RNNs. --- ### When Can One Obtain Certificates of Optimality Using Positivstellensaetze? Authors: Nayoon Kim, Allen Gehret, Shenyuan Ma, Jakub Marecek Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08736v1 We study certificates of positivity and optimality for learning problems whose objectives and constraints need not be polynomial. We isolate an axiomatic core of Fischer's constructive strict and weak Positivstellensätze and prove the resulting theorems for abstract function algebras over ordered fields. The framework separates two roles that can otherwise be conflated: objective and constraint functions may be built from broad classes of continuous or definable operations, while the auxiliary primitives used to construct a certificate satisfy explicit scalar and closure axioms. We give instances over continuous and definable function algebras, including ordered fields not closed under square roots, derive lower-bound and global-optimality certificates, and analyze both expanded term length and shared computation-graph complexity. --- ### CVT-GS: Learning to Simplify 3D Gaussian Splatting with Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation Authors: Bingxian Li, Yilong Li, Jingliang Peng, Peng-Shuai Wang, Fei Zhu, Guozheng Li, Chi Harold Liu, Guoping Wang, Bo Pang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08730v1 While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for real-time novel view synthesis, rendering high-fidelity scenes often relies on a massive number of Gaussian primitives, incurring substantial storage and computational overhead. Existing simplification techniques are largely intrusive, requiring training-time pruning, architectural modifications, or computationally expensive per-scene fine-tuning. These drawbacks limit their deployment on off-the-shelf pretrained models. In this paper, we propose CVT-GS, a novel optimization-free post-hoc simplification framework that directly compresses trained 3DGS scenes without sacrificing visual fidelity. Our approach first constructs spatially coherent cells over Gaussian centers via a geometry-aware Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT). Subsequently, a lightweight neural cell merger predicts the geometry and appearance of a single, highly representative Gaussian primitive for each cell under differentiable rendering supervision. By formulating simplification as a rendering-aware many-to-one merging process rather than naive primitive pruning, CVT-GS outputs a standard 3DGS scene that is seamlessly compatible with existing renderers. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. Notably, when achieving a 100-fold reduction in Gaussian points, our method operates 12 times faster than state-of-the-art methods while improving the PSNR by 1.3 dB. --- ### Application of curiosity driven exploration methods for hardware interference identification Authors: Ludovic Matar, Clement Moulin-Frier, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08729v1 The transition from single-core to multi-core architectures in safety-critical embedded systems introduces significant challenges due to inter-core interference caused by contention for shared hardware resources. Such interference affects execution times and complicates the verification of strict temporal requirements, particularly in domains such as avionics where standards require comprehensive identification of interference sources. Existing interference analysis approaches, whether manual or model-based, struggle to capture the full range of behaviors arising from the complex interactions among micro-architectural components. In this paper, we frame multi-core interference analysis as the exploration of a complex system behavior space. We propose the use of curiosity-driven exploration algorithms from artificial intelligence to systematically and efficiently cover the space of possible interference behaviors. Using a simulator-based environment, we show that the proposed approach achieves broader and more uniform behavioral coverage within a limited experimental budget compared to traditional pseudo-random program generation methods. --- ### BAFF: Bid-Aware Filter Family for Mitigating Training Data Interference in RTB A/B Tests Authors: Jeonglyul Oh, Ikkyu Choi, Inseop Youn, Youngjae Kim Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08725v1 In online A/B tests for real-time bidding (RTB), control and treatment models are typically trained on a shared serving log that includes data generated by the counterpart model. This shared-log training biases each model's training data through two channels: the counterpart model may have selected a different ad from the ad-candidate pool (ad-ranking disagreement) and may have bid a different price (bid-pricing disagreement), potentially distorting the A/B test outcome. Log-splitting eliminates the bias but sacrifices training data; log-sharing retains all data but leaves the bias unaddressed. We formalize the Bid-Aware Filter Family (BAFF), a class of (k,l)-parameterized hard filters that controls tolerance to each channel independently, providing a structured search space between these two extremes. We further propose a three-stage online measurement protocol that enables evaluating data-sharing strategies by their deviation from an interference-free reference model in production. In offline simulation, a (k,l) sweep surfaces operating points with smaller deviation from the interference-free reference model than both log-sharing and log-splitting. In a live RTB deployment on a demand-side platform (DSP), filter-based variants preserve the reference model's business metrics (e.g., CPC, CTR) more closely than both baselines. The best operating point is setting-dependent, underscoring the practical value of the search space itself. --- ### TBR: Transport-Based Rendering with Deposition Strokes for Inverse Graphics Authors: Tianqi Liu, Yushan Han, Hang Liu Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08722v2 We present a stroke design in which strokes are transport-coupled: each stroke deposits material of its own area and moves every earlier mark without changing its area, so later strokes deform earlier ones. We then solve the inverse problem under this design: given a target image, we optimise an ordered program of such strokes whose replay approximates it, with digital marbling as the motivating medium. The stroke is a capsule that continuously joins circular drops to drawn deposits; its transport is exactly area-preserving, with a closed-form inverse outside the deposit, and a variant with the same inverse differs from line-source potential flow by 8% of the mean displacement. A replay adjoint regenerates intermediate states instead of storing them and uses 8.7x less memory than checkpointed automatic differentiation; a fused implementation fits a 2000-stroke program at 1024x1024 in about four minutes on one GPU. On five marbled sheets the recovered programs are level with a published stroke-based fitter as rasters, replay across a fourfold resolution range, and support edits in program order and palette space that stay valid under transport. --- ### GoAnt: Quality-Diversity Multi-Agent Search for Alpha Factor Discovery in Market Microstructure Data Authors: Stella Zhao, Tommy Sha Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08719v2 Automated alpha factor discovery searches symbolic trading signals from price-volume panels and order-book data under a fixed evaluation budget. Existing single- and multi-agent program-search systems can overfit predictive proxies that fail after execution costs and repeatedly explore redundant factor families, limiting execution robustness and behavioral diversity. We introduce GoAnt, a quality-diversity multi-agent search framework that combines non-communicating Explorer, Exploiter and Connector workers with a shared adaptive Mental Map and a compact Queen dispatcher. The Mental Map organizes candidates by leakage-free execution profiles and retains one elite per niche, while the Queen reallocates the evaluation budget from explicit search-state summaries. We also define a map-independent effective-yield protocol that counts high-quality, mutually nonredundant factors directly from each method's evaluation records, giving archive-based and map-free systems the same ruler. On real A-share microstructure data spanning 2023--2026, GoAnt reaches quality-weighted yields of 41.8 and 47.6 in price-volume and order-book settings, improving the strongest baseline by 57% and 97% under matched budgets. Its locked populations retain 0.64 and 0.67 of in-sample quality out of sample, compared with 0.61 and 0.63 for a static map. --- ### Chimaera: A Mixture-of-Graph-Experts Architecture for Cross-Task and Cross-Dataset Graph Learning Authors: Jonathan Frank, David Richerby, Ansgar Scherp Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08709v1 Designing foundation models for graphs is challenging due to the irregular structure of graphs and the different sizes and characteristics of embeddings. Chimaera integrates mixture-of-experts with graph foundation models (GFM). It integrates different GFM architectures, such as graph prompts and linear GNN models. Large language models are used to generate embeddings, and experts can be trained and combined following different strategies, GFMs, embeddings, etc. Furthermore, Chimaera extends existing linear GNNs to support link-level and graph-level tasks in addition to node-level tasks. Empirical analyses are performed on same-task and cross-task experiments with node, link, and graph classification tasks using six benchmark text-attributed graph datasets. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Chimaera and its capabilities for transfer across tasks and datasets. Further insights include the need to use both large and small language models to generate embeddings for the experts, a strong cross-task transferability of simple but effective linear GNNs, and using few samples only to provide strong results. --- ### Enhancing Table Structure Recognition via Bounding Box Guidance Authors: Lei Hu, Shuangping Huang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08705v1 Table Structure Recognition (TSR) aims to extract the bounding boxes of cells and table structure (e.g., HTML) from table images. Although current approaches have made significant progress, the latest image-to-sequence methods overlook the explicit utilization of the bounding box information when predicting HTML sequences, leading to error predictions in complex scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework BGTR (Bounding Box-Guided Table Recognizer). To more effectively utilize bounding box information, we first predict the bounding boxes of cells and then use this information to guide the generation of HTML sequences. While utilizing bounding box information can enhance the accuracy of HTML sequences, for natural scene tables, the data volume is too small to allow for sufficient training of bbox-guided HTML generation. In response, we adopt a progressive training method for natural scene tables and introduce SNSTab, a synthetically generated natural scene table dataset. Our experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate SOTA performance. --- ### TontaubeV1: Streaming Text-to-Speech with Hierarchical Codec Modeling and Bounded Context Authors: Fritz Cremer, Jonathan Cremer Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08703v1 Text-to-speech systems often face a trade-off between natural prosody and efficient inference: higher perceptual quality typically comes at increased computational cost and latency. We present TontaubeV1, a model that preserves natural prosody while enabling streaming from a single consumer GPU. Speech is encoded by the hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, which separates a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements. Our design assumes that prosodic structure is largely established when the semantic stream is generated, and allocates capacity accordingly: a Qwen3-1.7B-derived transformer predicts that stream and thereby the utterance duration, while three progressively smaller Qwen3-0.6B-derived transformers each add one acoustic refinement. Text is tokenized per character rather than by subword. Paired text and audio markers at shared positions support long-form generation with bounded context, and overlapping DualCodec reconstructions are mapped into the VibeVoice acoustic latent space and decoded causally, enabling streaming despite DualCodec's noncausal decoder. The model accepts up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning and is designed primarily for English and German, with additional multilingual support. The four predictors total 2.9B parameters; on a single RTX 5090 the streaming path reaches approximately 200 ms to first audio. In separate non-streaming measurements, the end-to-end real-time factor (RTF) is 0.08 for one input and the aggregate RTF is 0.02 across eight concurrent inputs. On our LLM-as-a-judge audiobook-reading benchmark, TontaubeV1 matches ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 and outperforms Fish Audio S2 Pro, the April 2026 Gradium API, and Cartesia Sonic 3 on prosody. The model weights are released on Hugging Face under the Tontaube Community Model License 1.0. --- ### Record Grouping Controls Evidence Weight in Language Models Authors: Zhongxuan Liu, Sicheng Zhou, Hongzhi Wang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08698v1 Retrieved records are presentation units; a supplied partition determines which records enter a language model as one evidential contribution. We characterize the invariant group-content state that removes within-group copies while retaining complementary canonical content, show that equal group counts can encode different evidence states, and derive a sharp content-aware partition-error bound. Given a supplied partition, our pre-generation representation deduplicates and aggregates content within groups and bounds each group's contribution. Across 104,402 trials and 6 public checkpoints, a central natural-text intervention finds that content-fixed false splits add 10.27-32.66 percentage points and false merges remove 9.13-31.79 points; a matched six-slot control retains the positive direction in all 16 cells. In a new 48-item controlled campaign panel, changing the supplied partition produces measurable, checkpoint-dependent decision shifts across all four models, and the balanced mirror design exposes substantial order interactions. Together, the theory and experiments establish the supplied partition as a controllable pre-generation representation variable and characterize its checkpoint-dependent behavioral effects. --- ### MorphoOrgaAgent: A Foundation-Model-Based Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Organoid Analysis Authors: Hanyi Zhang, Maximilian Hoermann, Lion J. Gleiter, Yiling Xu, Bettina Katalin Budai, Hans-Ulrich Kauczor, Carsten Marr, Tingying Peng Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.MA, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08696v1 Organoids are three-dimensional tissue models whose morphology provides important insights into tumor development, disease progression, and drug testing. Extracting these morphological features relies heavily on manual segmentation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, performing quantitative statistical analysis typically requires custom coding skills and a mathematical background, presenting a major barrier for experimental biologists. To address these challenges, we introduce MorphoOrgaAgent, a multi-agent framework that achieves zero-shot organoid segmentation, automated data analysis, and report generation based on natural language input. The framework consists mainly of three core components: a TaskUnderstandingAgent that identifies requested measurements and visualization types; a hybrid segmentation module that combines Cellpose-derived geometric prompts with text prompts to guide SAM3 for zero-shot organoid instance segmentation; and a ReportAgent that computes quantitative metrics and compiles them alongside generated visualizations into a structured report. We further introduce MorphoOrgaVQA, a benchmark designed for quantitative evaluation of agent systems in organoid morphology analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that MorphoOrgaAgent handles both explicit and descriptive user requests, produces measurements closely matching ground truth, and generates complete analysis reports without requiring manual programming. The complete source code and MorphoOrgaVQA benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/peng-lab/MorphoOrgaAgent. --- ### Global Divergence, Local Convergence: Representation Geometry in SSMs and Transformers Authors: Amit Ben-Artzy, Roy Schwartz Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08692v1 Recent state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba achieve language modeling performance comparable to transformers despite relying on fundamentally different architectures. This raises an important question: how do these structural differences influence the geometry and functional nature of their internal representations? We study this question through a multi-scale analysis of representations in transformers, SSMs, and hybrid architecture. First, we find that SSMs distribute their representational information evenly across all dimensions, whereas transformer representations are heavily dominated by a single principal direction. By evaluating hybrid architectures, we observe that the representation space becomes increasingly skewed toward a single dominant direction after each attention layer. Next, we explore how the different geometric spread of representations impacts representational capacity through compressibility. Surprisingly, we find that despite their contrasting geometric structures, both architectures exhibit tightly matched effective capacities. We further investigate whether this skewed geometry affects how concepts are encoded. Using rank-constrained probes, we demonstrate that both architectures encode concepts in subspaces of surprisingly similar dimensionality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the transformers' dominant principal direction does not inherently encode more conceptual information. Finally, we zoom in and examine the alignment between manifolds, either by analyzing representations of specific topics or by looking at the nearest neighborhoods of tokens, and find that they are highly aligned. Ultimately, our analysis suggests that while transformers and SSMs induce different usage of latent space, they display a striking functional convergence at the level of local semantic manifolds. --- ### Hyperparameter Scaling Laws Across MoE Sparsity Authors: Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen, Jia Liu, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08690v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models expand model capacity without a proportional increase in training compute, but increasing sparsity makes reliable hyperparameter transfer challenging. In this work, we show that conventional hyperparameter scaling laws are insufficient for ultra-sparse MoEs: the optimal learning rate and batch size vary with activation ratio, and these shifts cannot be explained by either total or activated parameter count alone. To characterize this dependence, we conduct 1,800 pre-training runs spanning six activated-parameter scales and models with up to 6B total non-embedding parameters, processing approximately 20 trillion tokens at a cost of 200,000 equivalent H800 GPU-hours. Our results reconcile conflicting findings in prior work by revealing two scaling regimes. At fixed sparsity, the optimal batch size follows a power-law relationship with training tokens $D$, whereas the optimal learning rate scales with training compute $C$ and remains robust to the allocation between model size and data. Across sparsity levels, the activation ratio $A$ enters both relationships as an additional multiplicative power-law factor. These observations lead to unified hyperparameter scaling laws that transfer across MoE sparsity levels. Large-scale evaluation shows that the scaling form outperforms alternative functional forms. On a held-out ultra-sparse MoE with 12B total parameters and only 1/64 of its experts activated, the predicted hyperparameters remain close to the observed optima, supporting joint extrapolation across model scale and sparsity. Further experiments demonstrate transfer across expert granularities and isolate the effect of activation ratio from that of total expert count. --- ### When Victorian Becomes a Prompt: Literary Periodization as a Generative Constraint in 100 AI-Generated Novels Authors: Mehdy Sedaghat Payam Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08689v1 Generative AI inverts the typical periodization of literary history: the periodizing tag Victorian can now come first and influence what is written. Generative periodization, defined and tested here, describes the use of literary-period designations in generating texts. I test this approach on 100 book-length novels produced under Victorian and Zero-Style conditions using GPT, Qwen, and Llama workflows. The Period Alignment Score (PAS), trained on nineteenth-century literature and benchmarked against human Zero-Style prose, assesses alignment using topic-reduced grammatical features. Victorian prompts produce consistent historical-direction shifts in GPT and Qwen, but not robustly in Llama. Victorian-only recalibration and harder comparison corpora preserve the GPT and Qwen effects. Cross-model transfer also shows a shared direction of grammatical change. The measurable target is the broader nineteenth century rather than the Victorian period per se. --- ### CausalChapter: Improving Long-Video Chaptering with Interventional Dependency Modeling Authors: Xinran Duan, Guozhang Li, Yaoyao Zhong, Mei Wang, Lizhi Wang, Hua Huang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08686v1 Long-form instructional videos require automatic chaptering to support browsing, navigation, and knowledge access. Recent long-context language models can perform chaptering from textualized video inputs, but they remain costly and brittle for content-dense lecture videos with long transcripts, smooth topic transitions, and detailed chapter outputs. A scalable segment-then-caption paradigm reduces this cost, but introduces two new challenges: boundary error propagation and fragmented cross-chapter context. We propose \textbf{CausalChapter}, an intervention-inspired framework for long-video chaptering that estimates prediction-level influence through lightweight masking and removal interventions. For boundary localization, our Local Dependency Shift module detects drops in predictive dependency between adjacent temporal windows; for chapter description generation, our Cross-Segment Support Selection module reranks historical contexts according to their support for the current prediction. Experiments on long-video chaptering benchmarks show that CausalChapter improves boundary localization, chapter description quality, and cross-chapter coherence. --- ### HOPE: Heterophily-Aware Open-Set Node Classification with Pseudo-Extrapolation Authors: Yumeng Dai, Yue Tan, Yixin Liu, Chenxu Wang, Pinghui Wang, Tao Qin Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08685v1 Standard open-set node classification methods rely on the homophily assumption, where connected nodes share labels. However, real-world graphs are often heterophilic, exposing the limitations of current methods and posing new challenges to open-set node classification. On the one hand, cross-class connectivity causes representations from different known or unknown classes to become intertwined after aggregation, undermining their discriminative capacity. On the other hand, structural mixture invalidates threshold-based open-set methods and cross-class feature interpolation, leading to unreliable unknown-class rejection. To address these challenges, we propose HOPE, a Heterophily-aware Open-set node classification method with Pseudo-Extrapolation. To adapt open-set graph neural networks (GNNs) to heterophilic scenarios, HOPE uses a structure-augmented feature initialization layer to capture multi-hop structural patterns. Meanwhile, we design a trustworthy neighborhood aggregation mechanism for standard GNNs to dynamically filter noisy cross-class neighbors. To enhance unknown-class rejection, we introduce a heterophily-guided pseudo-extrapolation strategy. It dynamically maintains known-class centers and extrapolates along cross-class neighborhood displacement directions, synthesizing pseudo-unknown proxies near structurally ambiguous regions. Finally, we optimize the network with joint classification and logit margin regularization, routing synthetic proxies into a dedicated rejection slot without imposing geometric margin constraints in the representation space. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that HOPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, validating its effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency. --- ### Neither Adversarial Training Nor Purification: Emergent Adversarial Robustness from Oscillatory Predictive Learning Authors: Mohammed-Yassine Habibi, Klea Ziu, Martin Takáč, Makoto Yamada Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08683v1 Adversarial robustness in computer vision is still largely achieved through adversarial training or test-time adversarial purification, both of which introduce significant computational overhead by generating adversarial examples during training or performing iterative denoising at test time. We study whether empirical robustness can instead emerge from architectural and representation-learning inductive biases. We introduce Oscillatory Predictive Learning (OPL), a two-stage framework that combines Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) with predictive self-supervised pretraining using X-PhiNet. Because our default checkpoint uses randomized initial oscillator states, we compare it with other randomized adversarial defense methods that provide precise, reproducible, and strong attack protocols. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, with additional corruption evaluation on CIFAR-10-C, demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results under the AutoAttack-rand evaluation protocol. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, OPL attains 76.63$\pm$0.76$\%$ and 50.44$\%$ robust accuracy, respectively, under $\ell_\infty$, $ε=8/255$, AutoAttack-rand with EoT $K=20$. --- ### BIDETA: Brain-Inspired Data-Efficient Tactile Adaptation for Unseen Sensors Authors: Boheng Liu, Lan Wei, Ziyu Li, Chenghua Duan, Qing Li, Dandan Zhang, Xia Wu Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08673v2 Vision-based tactile sensors provide high-resolution contact information for robotic perception and contact-rich manipulation, advancing embodied intelligence through more reliable physical interaction. However, device-specific sensing mechanisms cause tactile foundation models to degrade on unfamiliar hardware. Existing cross-sensor methods often require calibration data, paired observations, or iterative training. To address this problem, we propose Brain-Inspired Data-Efficient Tactile Adaptation (BIDETA), a gradient-free framework that uses a frozen tactile encoder and a few labeled target contacts to jointly predict labels for an unlabeled query batch. Inspired by the brain's rapid sensory adaptation, BIDETA combines rapid support memory, support-conditioned spectral graphs, and reliability-gated recurrence to preserve pretrained representations, repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and integrate reliable cross-query evidence. Experiments on SITR, TacVerse Shape, and TacQuad show that BIDETA substantially improves adaptation to unknown sensors: with only 10\% labeled target data on SITR, it raises mean Sparsh accuracy from 6.86\% for the frozen source classifier to 87.09\%, exceeding the strongest implemented prior comparison by 47.22 percentage points, and these gains generalize across datasets, pretrained backbones, and tactile tasks. In the SITR timing benchmark with TVL, BIDETA also achieves approximately 20x faster target-sensor adaptation than the best baseline. BIDETA thus offers a gradient-free, data-efficient route to deploying tactile models on new hardware. --- ### X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR Authors: Zhiwei Lin, Kaiqi Fu, Rime Wen, Zehan Liu, Shawn Qin, Roy Gan, Hao Wang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08672v2 Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) for real-time voice agents and full-duplex dialogue must provide accurate partial transcripts with low commit latency. Existing systems commonly use a fixed chunk size, look-ahead, or target delay, or encourage emissions near estimated acoustic boundaries. These approaches do not directly optimize how much additional context to use at each output position under a single-pass, hard-commit constraint. We propose X2Streaming-ASR, which decomposes streaming recognition into when to commit and what to commit. Its three-stage training procedure first establishes streaming recognition ability, then warm-starts the commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refines the policy using character-level, segment-assigned group-relative rewards for recognition accuracy and latency. Across AISHELL-1/2/3 and WenetSpeech, X2Streaming-ASR achieves a mean character-level commit latency of 24-97 ms relative to forced-aligned character endpoints, compared with 409-585 ms for the evaluated streaming baselines. It achieves the best streaming CER among the evaluated systems on AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-3 with substantially lower latency. --- ### Optimal estimation for Functional Linear Regression with Noisy Discretized Data Authors: Sixtine Sphabmixay Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08671v1 In this paper, we consider the scalar-on-function linear regression model under a realistic sampling scheme in which the functional covariates are observed on a regular grid and contaminated by additive noise. We propose a two-step estimation procedure: first, the underlying curves are reconstructed from the discrete noisy observations using a Fourier-based projection method; second, the slope function is estimated by a penalized least-squares criterion over finite-dimensional trigonometric spaces, with data-driven selection of the model dimension. We establish oracle-type inequalities for the prediction error, both with respect to the reconstructed curves and to the true latent curves. Under regularity assumptions on the slope function and polynomial decay of the eigenvalues of the covariate, we derive convergence rates for the prediction error and show that our estimator attains the minimax rate when the number of grid points is sufficiently large. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated on simulated data and on a real meteorological dataset. --- ### Learning to build covering structures with continuous adjustments Authors: Gabriel Vallat, Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08669v1 Robotic construction offers the potential to use materials more efficiently and create complex geometries, but current methods rely on rigid, high-precision plans that cannot accommodate the tolerances, inaccuracies, and unexpected changes inherent in physical fabrication. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that forgoes predefined plans entirely, instead generating construction sequences adaptively as the structure is built. Our method operates on graph-structured state representations and a mixed (parameterized) action space, requiring both discrete block selection and continuous placement parameters. Because the stability simulation of a structure is computationally heavy, we develop an efficient exploration strategy by incorporating unilateral edges into graph neural networks, extending soft actor-critic (SAC) to this hybrid setting. We evaluate our algorithm, HSAC, against the prior method hybrid-PPO (HPPO), demonstrating significantly higher asymptotic performance and good sample efficiency. We also demonstrate HSAC's robustness to hyperparameter choices and its exploration capability, handling up to 10 discrete actions without performance degradation. Finally, we validate our approach on a physical two-robot setup, successfully building a spanning arch with 3D-printed blocks in closed-loop execution, confirming that policies trained in simulation transfer to real hardware. --- ### MoEMB: Scaling Universal Multimodal Embeddings with Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Models Authors: Xuanming Cui, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Aashu Singh, Zihao Wang, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Ser-Nam Lim, Jianpeng Cheng Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08663v1 Universal multimodal embedding (UME) increasingly demands encoder's capacity for handling a broad range of tasks and modalities with increased complexity. Prior scaling methods either increase the representation size, retrieval effort, or scales the encoder into a heavy multimodal LLM. Recent works, such as Think-Then-Embed (TTE), explore scaling via reasoning tokens. However, embedding models are hard to scale up: increasing parameters directly tradeoffs for the large training batch size that contrastive learning needs, and retrieval has to be served under tight latency. Moreover, UME tasks are diverse in complexity, where scaling up embedders can bring significant redundant computation. In this work, we propose MOEMB, which instead scales UME along the expert axis through mixture-of-experts (MoE), growing encoder capacity while preserving single-vector, non-autoregressive encoding. Through a systematic study of the design space and training recipes for MoE-based UME, MoEMB sets a new state of the art on both MMEB-V2 and MRMR among models trained on public MMEB-family data: with only 3B active parameters, MoEMB surpasses TTE-based methods with >4x active parameters, using significantly less computes. To further improve the scalability and efficiency, we conduct the first comprehensive study of adaptive computation for MoE-based embedding, spanning diverse strategies across training-based and inference-only methods. Together, these results support expert scaling as an effective and efficient direction for UME, with adaptive computation further improving efficiency for MLLM-based embedding models towards large-scale retrieval and recommendation systems. --- ### CoordFormer: Give Me Any Coordinates and I Will Give You Labels Authors: Iacopo Curti, Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, Alioscia Petrelli, Luigi Di Stefano Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08660v1 Semantic segmentation on very-high-resolution images remains challenging due to the high computational cost and the difficulty of capturing fine-grained details. We propose CoordFormer, a novel coordinate-based architecture for semantic segmentation that predicts labels at arbitrary spatial locations through a Coordinate Decoder equipped with a Localized Cross-Attention mechanism. The decoder combines coordinate embeddings with high-resolution local patch features and interacts with global tokens extracted from a downsampled image processed by a ViT foundation encoder, enabling rich semantic context while preserving pixel-level precision. This design enables flexible inference at arbitrary resolutions while keeping memory low on very-high-resolution inputs, and supports an efficient semantic-edge-focused strategy that concentrates computation along boundaries, maintaining fine-grained accuracy while reducing latency and computational cost. CoordFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on MaSS13K and outperforms comparably sized and higher-parameter methods on DIS5K and KPIs, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-quality, very-high-resolution semantic segmentation. --- ### TriCCOT: Tri-part Convolutional Conformal Transformer for Onboard Space Object Detection Authors: Adrien Dorise, Marjorie Bellizzi, Julia Cohen, Stéphane May Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08659v1 Onboard object detection in Earth observation is constrained by limited computational resources and the absence of fully corrected imagery. While convolutional detectors are hardware-efficient, they often struggle to extract robust representations from raw and noisy data. Conversely, transformer-based models provide stronger global reasoning capabilities but remain difficult to deploy on FPGA accelerators due to quadratic attention complexity and non-compatible operations. We introduce TriCCOT, a tri-part architecture for robust and deployable onboard object detection. TriCCOT combines a convolutional region proposal network, a conformal prediction stage, and Aper-GATES, our hardware-friendly attention-based classifier. The region proposal network generates candidate bounding boxes, which are subsequently enlarged via conformal prediction, providing a distribution-free probabilistic coverage guarantee. The resulting crops are processed by Aper-GATES, which reformulates self-attention through convolutional projections, global channel statistics, and hardware-friendly gating operations, avoiding standard transformer operations that are poorly suited to CNN-oriented accelerators. Experiments on the DIOR and VDVRaw datasets demonstrate competitive detection performance and improved robustness to spatial blur and signal-dependent noise when compared to FPGA-compatible architectures. Finally, we report full deployment on a Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA without modifying the underlying DPU architecture, enabling unified CNN-Transformer inference for spaceborne embedded applications. --- ### Charts Are Beyond Pixels: Probing for Layer-Wise Chart Understanding and Editing Authors: Xiaochuan Zhong, Yifan Hou, Chenxi Pang, Shaobo Cui Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08657v1 Charts are structured visual compositions whose elements have distinct functional roles, semantic correspondences, and visibility relations. This structural view motivates evaluating whether models can understand and manipulate charts at the layer level. Existing chart benchmarks, however, primarily assess the correctness or fidelity of final outputs and do not directly evaluate these layer-wise behaviors. We present LayerWiseBench, a benchmark organized around three core concepts, layer attribution, layer binding, and visibility ordering, that structure its chart-understanding and chart-editing evaluations. Generated from executable chart programs, LayerWiseBench pairs each rendered chart with spatially aligned per-layer RGBA assets and construction-derived labels for functional roles, semantic bindings, and visibility relations. From this layer-wise representation, we derive controlled understanding questions, editing targets, reference images, and evaluation regions. It contains 2,800 source charts across 14 chart paradigms, from which we derive 7,329 layer-wise understanding questions and 53,791 instruction-guided editing variants. Among the evaluated VLMs, Qwen3.5-27B, which achieves the highest QA macro-average, obtains 93.04% accuracy on layer attribution and 97.46% on layer binding, but only 61.46% on visibility ordering. Across the four evaluated image editors, overall mIoU ranges from 1.49% to 4.93%, and visibility-constrained edits have the lowest mIoU for every editor, ranging from 0.37% to 2.00%. Taken together, these results identify tasks involving front-to-back relations between overlapping components as a recurring challenge across understanding and editing, motivating more explicit modeling of component identity and visibility relations. --- ### A Lower Bound for the Heavy-Ball Method on Smooth Convex Functions Authors: Jianhao Ma, Jingzhao Zhang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08656v1 Can the classical Heavy-Ball method, with arbitrary horizon-dependent parameters chosen in advance, achieve Nesterov's $O(T^{-2})$ last-iterate rate on every smooth convex objective? We provide a negative answer. For every horizon $T\ge2$ and every predetermined schedule with nonnegative step sizes and momenta in $(0,1)$, there exists a convex $1$-smooth objective, with initialization distance at most one and zero initial velocity, for which the last iterate of the Heavy-Ball method satisfies \( f(x_T)-f^\star=Ω\!\left(\frac{1}{T^α\log T}\right), \qquad α=\frac{1+\sqrt5}{2}. \) Thus even fully nonstationary, horizon-dependent tuning cannot give the classical Heavy-Ball method a Nesterov-rate guarantee on the smooth convex class. --- ### Difficulty-Adaptive Tree-Structured Policy Optimization for Expanding Reasoning Coverage in RLVR Authors: Youngjun Yu, Sanghwan Jang, Hwanjo Yu Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08650v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been central to the recent success of Large Reasoning Models. However, while RLVR significantly improves single-sample accuracy, it often fails to expand the model's intrinsic reasoning coverage (pass@k) due to limited exploration during training. To address this, we optimize the structural design of train-time rollouts to enhance pass@k. Our analysis identifies three key design principles: (1) difficulty-adaptive rollout can play an important role in expanding pass@k, beyond serving as an efficiency heuristic; (2) tree-based rollout outperforms parallel sampling in discovering correct answers; and (3) sentence-entropy-guided forking overcomes the localization phenomenon of token-level branching to maximize semantic diversity. Building on these insights, we propose DATPO (Difficulty-Adaptive Sentence-entropy-guided Tree-structured Policy Optimization). DATPO integrates difficulty-adaptive tree search with a sibling-diversity advantage term, explicitly promoting semantic diversity to expand reasoning coverage during training. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DATPO outperforms baselines especially in pass@k, which directly translates to superior test-time scaling performance. --- ### Combating Instruction Conflict via Energy-Driven Latent Conflict Detection Authors: Mingyu Ma, Yuxin Wu, Jingbo Wang, Tianxiao Huang, Leixin Sun, Xiaochuan Shi Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08646v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instructions, yet they remain vulnerable to conflicts in which user directives override system-level constraints. Existing defense mechanisms predominantly focus on static input inspection and therefore fail to detect Response Drift, a phenomenon in which the model's final response violates system-level constraints despite seemingly compliant inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ELCD, a response-level latent conflict detector for post-generation, pre-delivery verification. Given the full generated output, ELCD constructs a composite hidden-state representation by concatenating the final-token embedding with the mean-pooled response embedding. It then optimizes a pairwise margin ranking objective to separate compliant and drifting responses in latent space. Extensive experiments across five mainstream LLMs ranging from 1.5B to 14B parameters demonstrate that ELCD significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Notably, it improves the PR-AUC on Llama-2-7B by approximately 30 percentage points and reduces the False Positive Rate at 95% TPR (FPR95) on Mistral-7B to 2.67%. These results suggest that ELCD provides a promising approach for latent instruction-conflict detection in open-weight or self-hosted LLM deployments. --- ### SUN: Reaching for Novelty in Reinforcement Learning Authors: Wenyan Yang, Arsenii Mustafin, Dominik Baumann, Joni Pajarinen, Simone Parisi Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08642v1 Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Recent goal-conditioned RL strategies (which select goals to encourage broader state coverage) have shown promising results, but none scores a goal by novelty and reachability jointly: the two signals are traded off by hand, applied in sequence, or one is neglected outright. In this paper, we introduce a reachability-aware goal-selection framework that explicitly integrates these two aspects, and that can be seamlessly incorporated into any off-policy RL algorithm. To this aim, we propose SUccessor-to-Novelty (SUN), an indicator derived from successor value functions to identify goals that are both novel and reachable. We prove that SUN recovers count-based bonuses in the limit, bounds short-horizon hitting probabilities, and provably rejects unreachable goals. We further present an adaptive goal-selection strategy that leverages these properties, and an accurate yet lightweight pseudocount to avoid the overhead of classic methods. We back up all our claims with thorough benchmarks: SUN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in standard and novel environments with unreachable or hard-to-reach states, irreversible transitions, obstacles, mazes, and unbounded spaces. --- ### CASD: Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Multi-StageRobot Manipulation Authors: Tinghe Ding, Jiahao Li, He Wang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08638v1 An action chunk can span several stages of a manipulation task, yet a label for its first step describes only the current stage. We introduce Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation (CASD), which derives semantic targets for entire action chunks. An offline vision--language model segments demonstrations into described stages. Their occupancy within each action chunk determines a weighted semantic target, including transitions between stages. A CASD generator learns to predict this target from the current observation, robot state, and task instruction. We then freeze the generator and train a policy conditioned on its predictions. The semantic branch runs once per policy query, without online VLM calls or reasoning-trace decoding. Teacher matching on annotated LIBERO training episodes is above chance for both single-stage and boundary-crossing chunks. We evaluate three Fast-WAM variants and a DreamZero integration across four benchmarks, including distribution shifts on LIBERO-Plus. Compared with published references, IDM+CASD reaches 98.9\% versus 98.0\% average success on LIBERO, while Uncond falls below its reference. Joint+CASD reaches 93.0\% versus 90.6\% on RoboTwin 2.0, and DreamZero+CASD reaches a 47.9\% four-category MolmoSpaces manipulation average versus 40.7\%. Performance varies across backbone integrations. --- ### Navigating the digital spectrum: Assessing political bias, stability, and downstream fairness in Large Language Models Authors: Luka Debevc, Nishan Chatterjee, Antoine Doucet, Senja Pollak, Matej Martinc Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08637v1 Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as information intermediaries, yet measuring their political behavior remains fragile because questionnaire results mix model dispositions with measurement artifacts and response-elicitation biases. We introduce a robust Political Compass Test evaluation framework that samples 300 configurations across an eight-dimensional perturbation space varying language, framing, instructions, answer format, option order, and persona wording. We evaluate eight Gemma 3 and Qwen 3 models across 14 languages and three quantization levels, obtaining design-averaged political coordinates with quantified uncertainty. Most models lean Libertarian-Left on average, but instruction phrasing, language, and answer format significantly affect recovered coordinates. Cross-lingual differences primarily reflect coordinate drift rather than distinct cultural reasoning. Reverse-engineering the test also exposes axis-weighting imbalances and the collapse of degenerate responses toward the center, so near-origin estimates for the smallest models can reflect weak signal rather than centrism. Free-text reasoning and chat-then-classify elicitation alter recovered coordinates, and larger models show clearer persona separation, with a specific failure of the Authoritarian-Left persona to move most models in the intended social direction. In downstream tasks, persona effects are modest relative to model size and target group for hate-speech detection, while base and centrist prompts give the highest agreement for topic-level sentiment. Political role prompting therefore has measurable but task- and dataset-specific downstream effects. --- ### From Where to How: Continuous 4D Interaction Forecasting from Egocentric Video Authors: Qiaohui Chu, Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Haoxiang Shi, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08636v1 Egocentric 4D interaction forecasting aims to anticipate both where future interactions will occur in 3D and how the human body will move to realize them, providing an important capability for assistive robotics and human-computer interaction. Existing methods struggle to translate semantic understanding into precise continuous 3D localization and to balance motion diversity with structural consistency in pose forecasting. More fundamentally, these tasks are often modeled separately, leaving the continuous geometric and temporal correspondence between interaction locations and body motion insufficiently captured. To address these challenges, we introduce Coherent4D, a large-scale egocentric dataset for continuous 4D interaction forecasting, comprising approximately 233K samples across three domains. Each sample pairs a sequence of future 3D interaction locations with corresponding full-body poses, aligned in time and expressed in a shared coordinate system. We also provide evaluation metrics in continuous space. Building on this formulation, we propose HIGFlow, a Hand Interaction Guided Residual Flow framework that models forecasting as a cascaded where-to-how process. HIGFlow first forecasts continuous future interaction locations by combining semantic grounding with short-horizon visual dynamics, and then uses the predicted location sequence to condition a deterministic motion anchor and residual Flow Matching for diverse yet structurally consistent full-body motion forecasting. Extensive experiments across all three domains demonstrate consistent improvements over representative baselines on both location and pose forecasting, while ablations validate the contributions of the proposed components. The project page is available at https://corrineqiu.github.io/from-where-to-how/. --- ### Suan: Rectifying Direct Preference Safety Alignment in Large Language Models Authors: Oleksandr Cherednichenko, Roman Klypa Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08634v1 Integrating robust safety guardrails into Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for delivering helpful yet harmless responses. While proprietary systems exhibit reliable safety controls, their underlying methodologies and trade-offs remain largely undisclosed. Achieving comparable security in open-weight models remains a persistent challenge, as post-trained variants frequently suffer from over-refusal and degraded general quality. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce Suan, a novel preference optimization algorithm. Unlike existing methods, we formulate the optimization objective directly at the gradient level, bypassing the standard variational derivation. As a result, we obtain more interpretable and robust training dynamics. Extensive evaluations across a diverse suite of competitive baselines and benchmarks demonstrate that Suan achieves superior safety alignment while fully preserving response utility. --- ### SynthRCT: Scalable Conditional Deformation Synthesis for Synthetic Repeat CT Generation Authors: Tomas Guija-Valiente, Blanca Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Norberto Malpica Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08627v1 In proton therapy, plans are typically optimized on a single planning CT, making robustness evaluation essential under anatomical changes. However, current scenarios often rely on simplified perturbations that poorly capture complex, patient-specific variability. We propose SynthRCT, a scalable conditional generative framework for 3D anatomical deformation synthesis. Based on a conditional variational autoencoder, SynthRCT learns a latent deformation space and decodes sampled latent codes into local stationary velocity fields conditioned on an input anatomy. Local fields are assembled into coherent full-volume transformations, enabling memory-scalable generation for large field-of-view CT data. We validate the approach on respiratory 4DCT data with multiple breathing-phase anatomies per subject. SynthRCT enables patient-specific sampling of plausible anatomical transformations beyond predefined robustness scenarios. Code available at: https://github.com/TomasGuija/SynthRCT. --- ### MFVINS: Multiple Fisheye Camera-Based Visual Inertial System Authors: Eunseong Jang, YuJin Chung, Sang Jun Lee, Jihyun Yoon, HyungGi Jo Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08626v1 A simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method using a monocular camera and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is an effective way to fulfill a low-cost sensor configuration. Using this sensor configuration, visual-inertial system (VINS) focuses on fusing data from a camera and an IMU sensor to estimate the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the sensor pose. Typically, VINS uses only a single camera as visual input, which lead to problems such as error accumulation due to occlusion, various illumination, and textureless environments. In this paper, we propose a new multiple fisheye camera-based visual-inertial system called MFVINS. We present an IMU-aided FAST feature tracker for multiple cameras that enables efficient extraction and robust matching of local features. Then, the proposed method filters out outliers caused by fisheye distortion on the normalized image plane. Subsequently, a new reprojection error with physical validity constraints is proposed for bundle adjustment using learning-based depth estimation. The proposed method is applied to various scenarios, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing previous VINS methods. In particular, MFVINS is implemented in real-time process to leverage the advantages of using multiple cameras -- robustness against occlusion and textureless regions -- while reducing the computational burden. --- ### Leveraging contextual events on structure-aware next activity prediction Authors: Alessandro Mele, Claudia Diamantini, Domenico Potena Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08622v1 Predictive process monitoring aims at forecasting various aspects of running processes. Among the different tasks, next activity prediction represents the most extensively investigated. However, only a limited number of existing approaches explicitly encode contextual information, i.e., the environmental conditions in which the process is executed, typically modeled through event log attributes or aggregated measures. In this paper, an approach based on the concept of Instance Graphs is introduced. To incorporate contextual process instances, several encoding strategies are proposed and evaluated by measuring their impact on prediction performance. For each encoding strategy, a set of prefix-Instance Graphs is generated and subsequently provided as input to a Graph Neural Network for the classification task. The proposed approach is evaluated on multiple real-world event logs, and the experimental results demonstrate that incorporating contextual process instances benefits prediction performance. --- ### Flexible Spectral-Normalized Neural Gaussian Process for Dynamic Aperture Prediction Authors: Yousra El-Bachir, Frederik Van der Veken, Davide di Croce, Carlo Emilio Montanari, Massimo Giovannozzi, Ekaterina Krymova, Tatiana Pieloni Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: physics.acc-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08620v1 We address the challenge of scalable uncertainty quantification in large-scale scientific applications, where complex state-of-the-art machine learning methods are often computationally infeasible. Our primary contribution is a simple yet effective empirical Bayes method for automatically tuning the hyperparameters of a flexible, heteroscedastic Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Process. This approach retains the expressiveness and uncertainty-awareness of semi-Bayesian neural models while significantly reducing the computational burden by integrating hyperparameter learning directly into the training loop. We demonstrate the practical impact of our method on the task of estimating the dynamic aperture in circular particle accelerators, a fundamental problem in high-energy physics colliders and storage rings, using simulation data from the case of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Traditional approaches to DA estimation require extensive particle-tracking simulations, which are prohibitively time-consuming and resource-intensive. Our results show that the proposed method achieves competitive predictive performance and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates at much lower computational cost than state-of-the-art approaches. We stress that, beyond this application, the proposed empirical Bayes framework offers a general solution for training heteroscedastic neural models in situations where manual hyperparameter tuning is impractical. Accordingly, we anticipate that this framework can be applied to other domains that encounter comparable computational limitations. --- ### Target-Independent Micro-Interventions for Predicting Training Response Across Language-Model Families Authors: Zhongxuan Liu, Sicheng Zhou, Hongzhi Wang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08618v1 Benchmark scores describe what a checkpoint can do now, but they do not determine how it will respond to the next training episode. We measure this missing state by branching four short, standardized, target-independent micro-interventions from the same checkpoint and recording their effects in a common capability space. Together with current capability, these responses form L-State; its pulse block supports a flexible direct readout and a structure-preserving operator readout. Under smooth local dynamics, the operator construction admits an end-to-end cross-family bound with explicit source- and target-family coordinate heterogeneity. In three-family leave-one-family-out development, both pulse readouts reduce source-standardized MSE by 39.4% relative to capability alone, while separating the best response and direction estimates. On sealed GLM-4-9B, the direct and operator readouts reduce MSE by 71.8% and 78.3%, respectively, and the operator readout raises sign balanced accuracy from 0.366 to 0.754. On sealed Granite-3.1-8B, the direct readout reaches RMSE 0.544 and a development-fitted action-wise selector reaches 0.554, compared with 1.172 for capability alone. A five-family audit finds that the operator coordinate varies by action and family, and that modeling these deviations improves retrospective held-trajectory prediction. Target-independent interventions therefore expose training-response information that current capability misses, with direct and structured readouts covering complementary transfer regimes. --- ### Why shared attention vectors fail: a case for outcome-indexed tuning Authors: Lenard Dome Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08615v1 Dimensional attention in learning is often implemented as a globally shared attention vector, where each stimulus dimension corresponds to a single scalar. These scalars are learned by models through gradient-descent on error, where predictive features acquire more salience. We show that under multi-outcome learning, where models predict more than one outcome, this shared vector becomes unstable; it collapses to its bounds and prevents the models from learning meaningful attentional tunings for learning and generalization. We address this by introducing an outcome-indexed attentional matrix that converts globally shared attentional tuning into an outcome-indexed representation. We present an analysis of the unstable shared vectors and derive the conditions under which it holds. Empirically, three synthetic experiments benchmark the proposed attention matrices and show that they converge to meaningful representations, something shared attention vectors fail to do. These results suggest that outcome-indexed attentional matrices are a general fix for gradient-based attentional processes, which improves models of learning under multi-outcome conditions. --- ### Dynamics of meaning: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Change in Sinhala Authors: Nevidu Jayatilleke, Nisansa de Silva Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08609v2 Tracking semantic change in low-resource languages across extensive historical timelines presents significant challenges due to data scarcity and the limitations of static embedding alignments. This study investigates the diachronic evolution of the Sinhala language from the 13th to the 20th century using a multi-stage computational framework. We first align century-specific Word2Vec and FastText embeddings using Similarity Matrix Based Alignment (SMA) and Orthogonal Procrustes (OP) techniques, finding that OP alignment provides more stable neighbourhood tracking for identifying temporal similarity dips. To move beyond aggregate measures, we introduce a Bidirectional Semantic Impact Pruning approach using contextualised embeddings from a fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B. By applying Leave-One-Out (LOO) diagnostics, we attempt to isolate influential sentences to distinguish between systemic semantic shifts and transient polysemic expansion. Our results show that semantic drift in the fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B is not evenly distributed across all usages. Instead, a significant part of the change is driven by a smaller set of high-impact contextual instances, rather than gradual and uniform change across all occurrences. This work provides a preliminary framework for diachronic analysis in low-resource contexts, highlighting the trade-offs between model sensitivity and data availability. --- ### GOLF: Global Observation with Local Focus for Calibration-Aware Stereo Interaction Field Estimation Authors: Minqiang Zou, Riqiang Jin, Zhi Lv, Dong Luo, Lianghai Tian, Zhenyu Zhao, Qi Xu, Tong Wu, Mochen Yu, Yao Tang Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08607v2 We present GOLF, the first-place solution to the SHOW3D Interaction Field Estimation Challenge at HANDS@ECCV 2026. Given synchronized egocentric stereo views, the task is to predict a 3D vector from each of 21 hand joints to the closest point on the manipulated object. GOLF combines dense global context, locally sampled hand/object evidence, and common-frame Plücker-ray geometry. We adapt DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 with LoRA and trainable LayerNorm parameters, then jointly decode both interaction fields. Our primary model achieves an official score of 27.61 and a mean ADE of 27.96 mm on the hidden test set. An equal-weight ensemble with a complementary directly fine-tuned variant improves these results to an official score of 27.47 and a mean ADE of 27.82 mm, securing first place. --- ### Neptune: An AI model for Global Ocean Subseasonal Prediction Authors: Davide Donno, Italo Epicoco, Massimo Cafaro, Gabriele Accarino, Mohammad M. Amirian, Viviana Acquaviva, Paola Nassisi, Doroteaciro Iovino, Annalisa Bracco, Simona Masina, Pierre Gentine Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: physics.ao-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08606v1 Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting is societally critical, supporting decision-making in sectors ranging from water and agricultural management to disaster risk reduction, energy planning, and insurance. Achieving reliable predictions at these timescales requires representing the ocean and its dynamics, but traditional physics-based Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs), are computationally expensive and difficult to develop and improve because of the code complexity. In this work, we propose Neptune, an end-to-end data-driven framework for global ocean and sea-ice components emulation tailored for S2S timescales, up to 60 days. Neptune combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Spherical Fourier Neural Operators (SFNOs) to effectively capture local features and global cross-scale interactions, thereby obtaining a coherent representation of the ocean state. Forced by prescribed daily atmospheric fields, Neptune emulates ocean state variables, from temperature and salinity, to zonal and meridional currents, from sea surface height to sea ice thickness and concentration, with daily outputs at the ocean surface and through the water column. Specifically, we propose two variants of Neptune, Neptune-1 and Neptune-025, capable of emulating the ocean state at 1° and 0.25° resolution, respectively. Evaluated against a suite of metrics, including statistics (RMSE, CRPS and ACC), physical coherency (Ocean Heat Content, Eddy Kinetic Energy and Ice Brier Score) and climate indices (ENSO and Z20 metric, IOD), Neptune successfully reproduces the spatio-temporal evolution of the oceanic fields up to 60 days, and is stable over long timescales. Neptune provides compelling evidence that end-to-end data-driven ocean emulators can become a powerful component of next-generation S2S forecasting systems, emulating ocean state at high spatio-temporal resolution. --- ### CLAMP: Constrained Decoding for Vision-Language Embodied Planning Authors: Tianyi Ma, Parisa Kordjamshidi Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08602v1 Embodied planning increasingly relies on vision-language models (VLMs) to translate instructions and visual observations into executable action sequences. However, fluent plans are not always executable. A VLM may refer to objects that are not visually observed, select actions whose required affordances are unavailable, or violate syntax and action constraints. We introduce CLAMP, a multimodal constraint-grounding framework that turns scene evidence into decoding-time constraints for a frozen VLM planner. CLAMP uses the initial observation to restrict object references to those supported by the scene, while a provided symbolic action model specifies state transitions and goals. During decoding, hard masks eliminate invalid next-token candidates, while a Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based world-state lookahead module reweights the probabilities of the remaining feasible candidates based on action preconditions and goal reachability. This allows the planner to retain the VLM's language prior while preventing visually unsupported, unsafe, or infeasible candidates from entering the plan. For unseen tasks and environments, CLAMP adapts the HMM at test time using label-free continuations sampled from the frozen VLM. Experiments on VLABench, SafeAgentBench, and TaPA show that scene-grounded constraints improve object grounding and safety, while most remaining failures stem from perception errors or misaligned constraint specifications. --- ### Graph-Based Personalized Memory for LLM Agents: Representation, Evolution, Retrieval, and Evaluation Authors: Dac Duy Anh Nguyen, Zhangchi Qiu, Shigeng Chen, Alan Wee-Chung Liew Published: 2026-09-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08599v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents are evolving from single-session tools toward long-term personal assistants that must adapt to individual users across tasks, contexts, and interactions. This shift makes memory a core requirement for personalization, since user preferences, goals, constraints, relationships, and past experiences are accumulated gradually and often change over time. Graph-based personalized memory provides a structured way to model such user information through explicit relations, temporal context, and evidence links. Such representations can model not only what an agent remembers about a user but also how memories are connected, revised, and retrieved to support personalized decisions. However, existing work remains fragmented across personalized agents and generic graph memory frameworks, making it difficult to understand the design space as a whole. This survey develops a lifecycle-oriented view of graph-based personalized memory for LLM agents. We organize existing studies around memory representation, memory evolution, memory retrieval, and memory evaluation. We further compare key design choices, discuss current evaluation practices, and open challenges in building reliable long-term personalized agents. This survey aims to clarify how graph-based memory can support adaptive, controllable, and user-centric LLM agents. ---