# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 225 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #11201–11250 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/225 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/224.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/226.md) ### Building Trustworthy Graph-Agentic RAG for Social Good: Architectures, Failure Propagation, and Assurance by Construction Authors: Vijay Bommireddy, Raviteja Bommireddy Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06391v1 Graph-agentic retrieval-augmented generation combines structured evidence with adaptive controllers that can plan retrieval, traverse relations, verify intermediate claims, delegate subtasks, and use tools. This combination is useful when answers depend on relations across documents, entities, time, or institutions, but it also creates coupled failure paths: a defect in graph construction can become retrieved evidence, alter later control decisions, and propagate toward a consequential outcome. We examine how such systems should be designed and evaluated for social-good settings in which freshness, authorization, traceability, oversight, and recourse matter alongside answer quality. We organize the literature by graph substrate, graph lifecycle, agent function, coordination pattern, and authority boundary, and distinguish graph-based retrieval from observation-dependent graph control. We then synthesize reported risks as an evidence-to-action failure chain and propose an assurance-by-construction blueprint comprising five interface contracts for evidence, retrieval, reasoning, capability and delegation, and outcome. These contracts make provenance, temporal validity, authorization, uncertainty, and recoverability explicit at system boundaries. An illustrative public-benefit information design shows how the framework constrains graph structure, permissions, abstention, and operating authority. Finally, we derive an evaluation agenda spanning graph assertions, trajectories, claims, coordination, and outcomes. --- ### Are Verifier Errors Independent Within a GRPO Group? Evidence from Qwen2.5 Rollouts Authors: Esther Xin Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06386v1 Group-based reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scoresmultiple completions per prompt using automatic verifiers. Analysesbased on independent verifier errors may overlook dependence associatedwith shared answer formats. We investigate this dependence in24,998 groups of eight completions generated by Qwen2.5-1.5B onMATH, GSM8K, and DeepMath-103K. We estimate a pooled within-groupverifier-error correlation of 0.530 (95% confidence interval:0.500--0.560). Under an exchangeable-error model, this correspondsto a design-effect-adjusted effective sample size of 1.70 for aneight-completion group. Dependence varies substantially across answerforms: fractions, radicals, symbolic expressions, and intervals exhibitstronger clustering than unit annotations and percent signs. Replayinggroup-relative advantages across four rule-based verifier configurationsidentifies at least one advantage-sign disagreement in up to 0.83% ofgroups. Because a group is repeated sampling for one prompt, thiswithin-group clustering may reflect shared prompt difficulty as well asshared answer form, and we do not attempt to separate the two here.Unlike studies of correlated judgments across multiple evaluators, ouranalysis examines dependence across completions scored by the sameverifier. These findings motivate prompt- and answer-form-aware analysesof verifier noise rather than characterizations based solely onaggregate error rates. --- ### Scaling 3D Generative Priors to Large-Scale Scene Meshes from Multi-View Images Authors: SangEun Lee, Wonseok Chae, Hoyoung Yoo, Geunyong Kim, NackWoo Kim, Hyeonjin Kim Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06385v1 Pretrained 3D generative models produce detailed geometry and appearance but are primarily designed for object-centric generation within a limited spatial extent. Recent approaches address this limitation by partitioning large scenes into smaller spatial regions and applying pretrained 3D generative priors to each region. However, scaling tiled generation to large multi-view scenes makes it challenging to maintain local geometric continuity and global appearance consistency. We present a training-free framework for large-scale textured mesh generation from multi-view images. Our key idea is to scale tiled generation to large scenes with increased spatial detail while coordinating generation both locally and globally. We introduce local context tiled generation to improve geometric continuity between neighboring regions and global appearance alignment to reduce appearance discrepancies across distant regions. An adaptive scene decomposition further determines the number of tiles according to the input scene geometry. Experiments demonstrate improved geometric and appearance fidelity over existing approaches while enabling fine-grained generation of large-scale scenes. --- ### Parameterized and Streaming Algorithms for Euclidean Fair $k$-Center Clustering Authors: Zeyu Lin, Chaoqi Jia, Longkun Guo, Chao Chen Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06384v1 Motivated by the growing importance of fairness in machine learning, fair $k$-center clustering has attracted considerable research attention as a fundamental problem. In this problem, a dataset is partitioned into $m$ disjoint groups, and the objective is to select $k$ data points as centers, subject to upper bounds on the number of centers chosen from each group, aiming to minimize the maximum distance between any data point and its assigned center. Focusing on Euclidean spaces, which are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, we first develop a parameterized approximation algorithm for Euclidean fair $k$-center with an approximation ratio of $2.732$. By incorporating this algorithm as a post-processing stage into a one-pass streaming framework for large-scale data, we obtain an approximation ratio of $4.464$. These ratios can be further respectively improved to $2.414$ and $3.828$ with a runtime exponential on $k$. To ensure polynomial-time complexity, we further design a one-pass streaming algorithm with an approximation ratio of $4.732$, which can be further improved to $4.42$, outperforming the state-of-the-art ratio. Finally, extensive experiments show that our methods significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches in terms of clustering accuracy. --- ### From Reading Code to Reading Spec: A Verified Layer for LLM-Driven Codebase Maintenance Authors: Xinhao Zhang, Jingjie Lu, Kunpeng Liu, Fei Xie Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06383v1 The rapid growth of LLM-generated code increases software complexity and the maintenance burden on engineers. While LLMs offer a potential automated alternative, this structural complexity hinders their ability to manage codebases directly. We introduce the Provable Representation Of Original Functionality (PROOF), which manages codebases indirectly via structured specifications. To enable full-lifecycle codebase management strictly through these specifications, PROOF abstracts codebase topology into a hierarchical natural-language representation. To establish absolute trust, the system proves semantic equivalence by reconstructing source code exclusively from this specification. This verified foundation drives maintenance requests, executing code modifications while synchronously updating itself to prevent semantic drift. Experiments on real-world repositories confirm the effectiveness of these specifications. --- ### Recovering Weak Signals with Normalizing Flows Authors: Sarod Yatawatta Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: stat.ML, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.IM, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06382v1 In many scientific disciplines, weak signals of interest are obscured by dominant nuisance signals that are several orders of magnitude stronger. Recovering these weak signals requires subtracting the dominant ones; however, this calibration process inherently distorts or partially suppresses the underlying signal of interest. To address this problem, we propose the use of normalizing flow models to reconstruct calibration-affected weak signals. By leveraging the statistical invariance of the target signals and assuming minimal initial suppression, our framework effectively recovers the lost signal components. We provide a comprehensive theoretical overview of this normalizing flow-based recovery method and demonstrate its efficacy using simulated data. --- ### Cross-Lingual Representation Alignment by Token-Level Optimal Transport in a Language-Agnostic Space Authors: Taisei Yamamoto, Ryoma Kumon, Danushka Bollegala, Hitomi Yanaka Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06381v1 Cross-lingual alignment (CLA) aims to align the representations of large language models (LLMs) across languages, enabling cross-lingual transfer to improve multilingual capabilities. Previous CLA methods often ignore language-specific information encoded in representations and only consider sentence-level alignment, which may lead to suboptimal performance and input-output language mismatch. We propose CAROT (Cross-Lingual Alignment of Representations in a Language-Agnostic Space via Optimal Transport), which consists of two steps: identifying language-specific representations in LLMs' internal states and aligning language-agnostic representations across languages at the token level by optimal transport, while explicitly preserving language-specific representations. Inference-time steering experiments show that the representations computed by CAROT are effective alignment targets, improving multilingual performance by up to 11.2 points in accuracy while maintaining input-output language consistency. We further use the representations obtained by CAROT as training targets, internalizing the aligned representations. The trained models outperform existing CLA methods in 11 of 18 evaluation settings (3 models $\times$ 3 tasks $\times$ ID/OOD languages). Our work provides insights into what constitutes effective alignment targets for CLA in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/ynklab/CAROT --- ### An Integrated Video-AI Platform for Action-Level Microanastomosis Training and Performance Feedback Authors: Yan Meng, Daniel A. Donoho Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06380v1 Developing microanastomosis skill requires repeated practice with timely, action-specific feedback, yet expert review of lengthy microscope videos does not scale to frequent or distributed training. We present an integrated video-AI platform that turns a complete simulated procedure into inspectable, interactive feedback through three connected modules. First, a proposed transformer segments the video into six surgical actions. Second, object detection and tracking localize instrument tips within each action; the resulting kinematic features and action statistics drive supervised classification of five NOMAT-aligned performance dimensions. Third, a grounded large language model (LLM) uses these structured outputs to answer user questions about the current scene, actions, motion, and predicted performance through a unified interface. In a two-site study, 17 participants completed 72 procedures comprising 576 suture placements. The action-segmentation module achieved 87.66\% accuracy and 82.86\% F1, increasing to 93.62\% and 88.32\% after workflow-aware refinement. The five performance classifiers achieved 76.0\% mean accuracy, with Cohen's $κ$ from 0.63 to 0.93. Although the language interface and educational benefit require prospective evaluation, these results establish the technical basis for an expert-supervised platform that can shorten review, expose the evidence behind performance estimates, and support scalable formative microsurgical training. --- ### Multi-Grid Post-Training for Long-Form Multi-Shot Video Generation Authors: Jiawei Mao, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen, Yuhan Wang, Keyang Xu, Jieru Mei, Hongliang Fei, Ruogu Fang, Wei Shao, Cihang Xie, Yuyin Zhou Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06373v1 Generating long-form multi-shot videos requires coherent within-shot motion and visually consistent narratives across shots. Existing video generators favor continuous motion and struggle to present complete shot sets when an entire narrative is packed along one temporal axis. We propose MovieGrid, a Multi-Grid Post-Training paradigm that decomposes a long video into shorter, temporally ordered chunks and arranges them on a spatial grid for joint modeling. This design reduces the number of shots handled by each temporal axis while enabling global information exchange across chunks. We construct the Multi-Grid Long Video (MGLV) dataset from 1,000 long-form videos using source video collection, hierarchical segmentation, grid video construction, and character-aware story annotation, producing 54K grid videos paired with story prompts. Our Noise-Free Random-Grid Training retains a random subset of chunks as clean visual context for denoising the remaining chunks. Grid Embedding encodes grid structure, character-aware Story Prompts link recurring entities, and Grid Boundary Loss stabilizes layouts. Under the same token budget, MovieGrid generates 6.05 times more shots than Temporal Packing in a 1,616-frame video. On a benchmark spanning five real-world categories, it achieves state-of-the-art intra-shot consistency (0.9131 versus 0.8086 for HoloCine) and inter-shot consistency (0.5914 versus 0.5384 for StoryMem). MovieGrid can further scale video length with minimal compromise through single or multiple generations. --- ### DualPathOcc: Dual-Resolution BEV Encoder for 3D Occupancy Prediction Authors: Lihao Qiu, Jian Chen, Ruihao Wang, Ramu Gautam, Mei Yang, Yingtao Jiang Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06370v1 Predicting 3D occupancy from multi-view images requires preserving geometric detail during 2D-to-3D lifting while reasoning over sparse, volumetric scene representations. We present DualPathOcc, a camera-based framework that combines a Spatial Enhancer for high-resolution feature aggregation before BEV compression, a SENet-augmented dual-path BEV encoder for local-global context modeling, and height-aware weighted cross-entropy for near-ground occupancy. The final model is optimized with occupancy supervision and no explicit depth loss. On single-frame Occ3D-nuScenes, DualPathOcc achieves 37.37 mIoU. We further analyze how surface-centered depth targets interact with volumetric occupancy learning. --- ### Robust Conformal Consensus: Multi-Agent LLM-as-a-Judge Interval Evaluation with Conformal Prediction Authors: Lihui Liu Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06367v1 LLM-as-a-Judge has emerged as a promising paradigm for evaluating natural language generation. However, the uncertainty associated with such evaluations remains largely unexplored, which limits their reliability in real-world applications. Although conformal prediction offers a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, existing approaches typically apply it to a single LLM judge, overlooking the variability introduced by using different LLM evaluators. In this work, we propose a robust uncertainty estimation framework for multi-agent LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our approach constructs conformal prediction intervals for LLM-based scores from multiple LLMs. By considering intervals from different LLM judges, we obtain more stable and reliable uncertainty estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces valid prediction intervals with coverage guarantees, and that interval-based aggregation across multiple judges leads to more stable evaluation outcomes. --- ### AutoKD: Autonomous Knowledge Discovery Authors: Qinwen Ge, Bo Ni, Haowei Fu, Ngoc N. Tran, Erik Blasch, Tyler Derr Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06366v1 Scientific discovery in data-rich domains is currently constrained by human bandwidth: the growth in the volume and complexity of real-world data far outpaces the rate at which researchers can read, reason, and synthesize. Recent LLM-based multi-agent systems have begun to automate portions of the research cycle, but they target hypothesis generation in settings where validation cannot itself be automated, and each run is one-shot, with no mechanism for findings to accumulate or steer subsequent inquiry. This paper introduces AutoKD, a multi-agent framework for autonomous knowledge discovery that is both computational and cumulative, allowing validated findings to persist and inform subsequent inquiry. Six coordinated LLM agents collaborate in an open-ended discovery loop, where accepted findings are stored in a persistent insight graph that serves as both long-term memory and an exploration-steering mechanism. We evaluate AutoKD on three diverse datasets from two perspectives: Open-ended Quality against published findings, and Conditioned Quality via literature-derived queries. Across both evaluation perspectives, AutoKD covers known findings and surfaces substantive discoveries that complement human-driven research. Our code is available at https://github.com/GeQinwen/AutoKD. --- ### NOVA: Normal-Side Modeling for Training-Free Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection Authors: Wei-Chih Yin, Yun-Ching Kao, Cheng-Kuan Lin, Yu-Chee Tseng Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06360v1 Training-free zero-shot video anomaly detection (ZS-VAD) leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to localize anomaly instances from a predefined anomaly vocabulary, without providing any video. Existing CLIP-based methods often emphasize anomaly-side semantics, while the competing normality side remains less carefully formulated. We identify two key limitations in existing solutions: (i) blurred decision boundary: normal prompts may contain ambiguous verbs, such as running, that are semantically close to anomalies, reducing normal and abnormal separation in the VLM embedding space; and (ii) modality gap: poor alignment between features of textual normal anchors and visual frames. We propose NOVA, a training-free ZS-VAD framework that strengthens the normal side at both linguistic and visual levels. NOVA introduces Normality-Aware Prompt Construction (NA), which excludes anomaly-adjacent verbs and biases normal descriptions toward static, low-motion scenes. To overcome the text-vision modality gap, NOVA constructs a Visual Normality Anchor (VNA), which creates a weighted visual normal anchor from the initial frames of each test video, providing a video-specific normal reference without task-specific training or annotations. NOVA achieves 89.86 percent AUC on UCF-Crime and 95.07 percent AUC and 84.82 percent AP on XD-Violence, reaching state-of-the-art performance among comparable training-free zero-shot methods. --- ### AGSA-Net: Abundance-Guided Self-Attention Network for Spectral Unmixing-Aware Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification Authors: Nafisa Anjum, Satavisa Dey Borno, Ananna Saha, Mir Faiyaz Hossain, Sifat Momen, Nabeel Mohammed, Shafin Rahman Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06359v1 Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification plays a vital role in remote sensing applications, including agriculture, environmental monitoring, and urban analysis. However, its performance remains challenged by high spectral redundancy, noise sensitivity, and the difficulty of jointly modeling local material composition and long-range spectral dependencies. To address this, we propose AGSA-Net, an abundance-guided self-attention network that explicitly integrates spectral unmixing priors into the classification process. AGSA Net first estimates physically meaningful subpixel abundance maps subject to non-negativity and sum-to-one constraints, regularized by hybrid linear-nonlinear reconstruction decoder. The learned abundances are then used to construct an abundance affinity prior that guides a spectral transformer to emphasize class-discriminative interactions, and the resulting transformer features are fused with compact abundance descriptors for final prediction; in contrast to existing approaches that use abundance as auxiliary or concatenated features. Experiments on Indian Pines, Augsburg, and Berlin demonstrate the benefit of incorporating abundance- guided contextual modeling, particularly in heterogeneous urban scenes. The source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/nnuvi/AGSA-Net --- ### MSCA-UNet: Multi-Scale Context and Attention U-Net for Image Segmentation Authors: Sheng-Wei Chan Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06356v1 U-Net remains a practical baseline for image segmentation because of its simple encoder-decoder structure and skip connections. However, the bottleneck representation is still dominated by a limited set of receptive fields, while decoder features are propagated without explicitly emphasizing the most informative channels and spatial locations. This paper presents MSCA-UNet, a U-Net-based segmentation architecture that combines multi-scale contextual aggregation at the bottleneck with channel-spatial attention refinement in the decoder. The multi-scale module uses parallel atrous convolutions to capture contextual features at different receptive fields, while Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAMs) progressively recalibrate decoder features. Under identical experimental settings, the baseline U-Net achieves 96.9% mIoU on a held-out test set. Adding multi-scale context improves mIoU to 97.5%, while attention alone reaches 98.4%. Combining both mechanisms yields 99.1% mIoU, a 2.2 percentage-point improvement over the baseline. Parameter analysis further shows that the attention-only variant adds approximately 0.044M parameters, whereas the multi-scale module contributes most of the additional model capacity. The results support the view that multi-scale context enrichment and attention-based feature refinement provide complementary benefits within a U-Net framework. --- ### ChildGaze: A Benchmark Dataset for Collaborative Behavior Understanding in Children Authors: Sindhuja Penchala, Saketh Reddy Kontham, Prachi Bhattacharjee, S. Nima Mahmoodi, Daniel Fonseca, Sareh Karami, Mehdi Garemani, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06353v1 Understanding collaborative behavior in children is important for analyzing social participation, peer interaction, shared attention, and engagement during play and learning activities. Reliable recognition of these cues can support research in child development, educational analysis, and human-centered computer vision. However, estimating where a child is looking does not necessarily reveal whether the child is actively participating in a shared activity. To support this higher-level analysis, we introduce ChildGaze, a child-centered behavioral annotation dataset built on the ChildPlay video collection (1). ChildGaze introduces two behavioral labels, collaborative and non-collaborative, assigned independently to each child within a frame. The dataset provides face, left-hand, and right-hand bounding boxes for children and adults and organizes the annotations at the row, person, and frame levels. The current release contains 27 annotated video files, 10,641 frames, and 73,268 body-part annotation rows. Annotation reliability was evaluated on 1,187 frames using independent annotations from two annotators. The collaboration labels achieved 93.16% raw agreement and a Cohen's kappa of 0.8631, while bounding-box annotations achieved an overall mean IoU of 0.808. Baseline experiments with pretrained ViT and Swin Transformer models achieved up to 97.44% child-person-level accuracy and 96.80% frame-level accuracy, respectively. These results show that ChildGaze provides a reliable benchmark for studying collaborative behavior in naturalistic child-adult and peer interactions. --- ### Robust Dynamic Expansion for Continual Learning under Backdoor Attacks via Purification and Selective Recovery Authors: Keyu Lin, Fei Ye, Qihe Liu, Shijie Zhou, Jiguo Yu Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06346v1 Continual learning (CL) enables models to acquire new knowledge from sequentially arriving tasks while retaining previously learned knowledge. However, in practical scenarios, task streams collected from untrusted sources may contain backdoor-poisoned samples, posing a critical challenge to the stability, plasticity, and security of continual learners. In this work, we investigate a challenging setting termed Continual Learning Under Backdoor Attack (CLUBA), where each incremental task may involve a small proportion of maliciously manipulated training samples. Unlike conventional continual learning or backdoor defense scenarios, CLUBA requires models to simultaneously mitigate catastrophic forgetting, preserve adaptation capability, and prevent the absorption of malicious supervision during sequential updates. To address this challenge, we propose a robust dynamic-expansion framework that integrates sample purification, selective recovery, and robust expert routing into a unified continual learning paradigm. Specifically, we introduce Bi-Prototype Purification (BPP) to identify suspicious samples by exploiting semantic discrepancies in feature space. Based on purified data, Gradient Discrepancy-based Robustness Optimization (GDBRO) selectively recovers informative poisoned samples through pseudo-label correction and gradient consistency evaluation, improving robustness while maintaining model plasticity. Furthermore, Robust Feature Consistency-based Expert Selection (RFCBES) constructs perturbation-aware class prototypes to enable reliable expert routing under corrupted or shifted inputs. --- ### Radiation, Rotation and Scale Invariant Feature Descriptor for Multimodal Image Matching Authors: Yuanxin Ye, Tengfeng Tang, Tao Peng, Zhiqiang Han, Jiayuan Li, Mi Wang Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06343v1 Multimodal image matching is a fundamental task for multi-source information fusion. However, geometric distortions and nonlinear radiometric differences (NRD) severely limit performance, especially under radiometric, rotation, and scale variations. To address this issue, we propose a radiation, rotation, and scale invariant (RRSI) feature descriptor. First, a dual-head regional sampling (DHRS) module simultaneously performs Cartesian and Log-Polar sampling on keypoint neighborhoods, retaining spatial structural properties while enhancing robustness to rotation and scale variations. We then jointly encode geometric and radiometric relations between multimodal images in a unified deep feature space, enabling feature encoding, interaction, and fusion across intra-modal, dual-head sampled, and inter-modal regions. Furthermore, we introduce a bidirectional cross-modal generative reconstruction constraint during training. By decoding implicit features into structural patches of the counterpart modality, this mechanism anchors modality-invariant geometric topologies without additional inference overhead. Experiments on optical-infrared and optical-SAR datasets demonstrate highly competitive matching performance and strong robustness to rotation and scale variations. RRSI supports the full rotation range from 0 to 360 degrees and scale factors up to four. Its generalization ability is further validated on multimodal images from computer vision, remote sensing, and medical imaging. The implementation will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yeyuanxin110/RRSI . --- ### Linear Algebra Foundations of Efficient Attention: A Phase Reversal in Rank Collapse Under SVD Compression Authors: Anjaneya Teja Sarma Kalvakolanu Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06341v1 Linear algebra provides the framework of concepts (matrix rank, singular value decomposition (SVD), and eigendecomposition) that modern artificial intelligence employs to encode, compress, and propagate information through neural networks. This paper unifies fourteen separate peer-reviewed works analyzing the usage of these techniques in the context of transformer-based foundation model research, focusing on three areas of the topic: derivations and properties of self-attention matrices' output rank, compression methods that purposefully utilize this phenomenon, and the low-rank key-value (KV) cache projection and its semiseparable-matrix duality to linear attention and state-space structured models. We were motivated to conduct this work after observing an open problem in this literature: the interplay of the mentioned compression methods with natural rank collapse of the network. With this paper, we report an original finding that using SVD compression of attention projections actually has the opposite effect on the rank collapse of the network: while it strongly suppresses it at initialization, it accelerates on pretrained models (for GPT-2 124M, GPT-2 Medium 355M, and Pythia-160M) with minimal risk of object aliasing artifacts appearing (verified on all compression ratios) and is consistent across four rank estimation methods. A controlled causal decomposition of the effect in both settings showed that the reason for this behavior can be explained by the choice of the subspace SVD makes when compressing the matrix better than the reduction of the operator norm it achieves, explaining roughly 76% of the effect at initialization and 83% on the pretrained weights, providing a refinement to the calibration-aware compression viewpoint and an explanation of why it outperformed naive SVD truncation. --- ### One Shared LoRA Weight for MRI Reconstruction across Acceleration Factors Authors: Zhiwei Zhao, Weikang Gong, Zhongnian Li, Xinzheng Xu Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06338v1 Accelerated MRI reconstruction recovers images from undersampled k-space. However, different acceleration factors produce distinct artifact patterns. Existing methods often train separate models for each factor, leading to poor cross-factor generalization and high training and storage costs. We propose Shared LoRA, a parameter-efficient framework that freezes the pretrained SHFormer backbone and trains a single shared set of LoRA adapters together with a lightweight gating network. During training, undersampled inputs are generated by randomly sampling acceleration factors and their corresponding sampling masks, enabling the shared adapters to learn reconstruction knowledge across factors. Given the acceleration factor, GateNet generates layer-wise coefficients to dynamically modulate the residual strength of each adapter. Experiments show that Shared LoRA achieves the best or competitive PSNR and SSIM across acceleration factors, while its trainable parameters account for only about 5.3% of the total model parameters. Its performance at lower acceleration factors remains largely unaffected as the jointly trained factor set expands, and it generalizes stably to unseen neighboring factors. --- ### Query-Oblivious Coresets for Softmax Attention: Improved Bounds and Efficient Constructions Authors: Ofek I. Cohen Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.DS, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06327v2 A query-oblivious coreset for a softmax-attention head is a subset of the key-value pairs whose attention output is within $\varepsilon$ of the full one for every query in a ball. Liberty, Andoni and Kleiner proved that unweighted coresets of size $O(\sqrt d e^{ρ+\frac12\logρ+o(\log\logρ)}/\varepsilon)$ exist, $ρ$ the query radius times the centred key radius, against a lower bound $Ω(\sqrt d e^ρ/\varepsilon)$, and conjectured that closing the gap needs new techniques. It does not: a spherical lift of both balls into one exponential-kernel instance lets the Bozzai-Rothvoss chaining bound apply, and Chevet's inequality splits key from value dimension, giving coresets of size $O(e^ρ(\sqrt{d_v}+\sqrt{d_k\log(1+ρ)})/\varepsilon)$ in randomised polynomial time, the first constructive whole-ball guarantee within $\sqrt{\log(1+ρ)}$ of the lower bound. A sampling cap $O(e^{2ρ}/\varepsilon^{2})$ completes the envelope; in fixed dimension Tai's diameter-free bound removes the logarithm, settling the Gaussian-restriction case of a Bozzai-Rothvoss question for the kernels. We give theLiberty-Andoni-Kleiner lower boud transfer the one-waycommunication bounds of Chen et r is the price of one signing forall queries. A census of every head of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama-3-8B-Instruct finds $ρ$ at least 23.877, so everyactor $e^ρ/\varepsilon$prescribes a coreset larger than the cache: the algorithmic contribution is asymptotic on these models. --- ### A Ticket from Marginals to Joints: Coupled-Noise Distillation for One-Step Block Generation in Diffusion Language Models Authors: Lin Yao Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06324v3 Diffusion language models (dLLMs) predict all tokens of a block in parallel, but a single forward pass samples each position from its own marginal distribution, so the tokens need not form a coherent block. We ask whether a discrete masked model can commit an entire block in one pass when its mask embeddings are perturbed by a sampled Gaussian noise field: the same noise should give the same coherent continuation, and different noise should give different ones. We propose CONDOR (Coupled-Noise Distillation for One-Step Readout), which trains such a model from scratch without a target-side encoder or an autoregressive teacher. Training combines two signals. On real text, the model predicts masked tokens under several noise samples and is supervised only through the sample that fits the ground truth best, so different noise can specialize to different continuations. For the remaining samples, the model refines its own one-pass prediction over several decoding steps under the same fixed noise and then distills that refined block back into a single pass. On a controlled TinyStories setting, this recipe yields coherent one-pass continuations that vary with the noise, both for a single block and, with a block-causal variant, when blocks are generated one after another. --- ### FrankenReport: Early Exiting in Long-Form Generation Using Expected Value of Computation Authors: Zhengping Jiang, Gonzalo Ramos, Jina Suh, Shiqian Rachel Ng, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Justin Svegliato, Benjamin Van Durme, Andy Huntington, Sam Thomson Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06320v1 While deep research systems address interactive information-seeking needs impressively, their real-world deployments face latency and resource-consumption challenges. We present FrankenReport, an interface for long-form knowledge-seeking report generation that supports adaptive early exiting per section: it evaluates intermediate outputs during generation and predicts whether further targeted computation will yield significant quality gains. In a simulation study, FrankenReport outperforms random allocation baselines by a large margin (up to 4x) under low budgets and smoothly recovers full-pipeline quality as the budget grows, showing that future quality gains are predictable from intermediate drafts. Through experiments and user studies, we further show that despite varying preferences across users and topics, FrankenReport adapts to simple, natural user feedback as efficiently as methods requiring much costlier supervision such as generated drafts and explicit rationales. --- ### Deep learning from the crowd Fundamentals of morphological galaxy classification Authors: Luis Enrique Sucar, Carlos del Burgo, Jonathan Serrano-Pérez Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: astro-ph.GA, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06316v1 Aims. The objective of this work is to adapt a deep neural network model to perform galaxy morphological classification trained from crowd annotations, considering the training scheme, the agreement between the annotators, and the hierarchy. Methods. We use Galaxy Zoo 1 as our experimental testbed and trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the automatic classification of galaxies' morphologies. We analyze the impact of the following aspects on the classification accuracy and training efficiency: (i) Training only the last layer vs. training all the network; (ii) Classification with only the CNN vs. considering the hierarchy; (iii) Comparing the models trained with different amounts of data and levels of agreement between the annotators; (iv) Training by stages, transferring knowledge from one model to another; and (v) Combining several models as an ensemble. Results From the experiments, we derive the following results: (i) Training all the layers in the network significantly improves the accuracy (10% increase in exact match), compared to training only the last layer; (ii) There is a tradeoff between the amount of data and the level of agreement between the annotators used for training; (iii) Using the hierarchy can improve accuracy when the amount of training data is reduced; (iv) Training by stages through transfer learning (curriculum learning) produces higher accuracy for limited data; (v) Ensembles can improve accuracy; (vi) Models achieve a low accuracy for the most difficult cases, but, if we consider hierarchical measures, we can derive useful results for upper levels in the hierarchy. An accuracy above 99% is achieved when training all layers of the network and considering a high agreement between the annotators. Conclusions. Training deep learning models from crowd annotations involves additional challenges than learning from hard annotations. --- ### Reliability, validity, and diagnostic evidence for multi-model LLM short-answer scoring Authors: Chunyi Zhao, Chao Li Published: 2026-09-06 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06315v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used or proposed for educational scoring, but single-model and single-run evaluations provide limited evidence for assessment use. Short-answer scoring requires evidence about reliability, validity, severity, diagnostic value, and failure cases. This study evaluated repeated multi-model OCG-PRES guided LLM scoring for short-answer assessment. The analysis used 996 SciEntsBank responses. GPT, DeepSeek, and Qianwen each scored every response across three independent runs using five OCG-PRES dimensions: concept coverage, relation accuracy, reasoning completeness, contradiction control, and domain relevance. Scores were evaluated against official binary and five-category labels and compared with non-LLM baselines based on answer length, Jaccard keyword overlap, TF-IDF cosine similarity, and a combined traditional logistic model. Repeated-run reliability was high for all models, with ICC(3,k) = .977 for GPT, .992 for DeepSeek, and .981 for Qianwen. DeepSeek was the most stable across runs. GPT showed the strongest official-label alignment by AUC (.909), while Qianwen was stricter, with higher precision but lower recall under the fixed threshold = 3.0 rule. OCG-PRES scores followed expected diagnostic patterns across five official categories and outperformed all non-LLM baselines in AUC and F1. Repeated multi-model OCG-PRES scoring provides reliability, validity, and diagnostic evidence for LLM-assisted short-answer scoring. The findings support cautious, evidence-based use as a scoring support tool rather than a replacement for human judgement. --- ### A Tutorial on Prompt Engineering: From Messy Thoughts to AI Workflows Authors: Erfan Loweimi, Hadi Daneshvar, Samira Loveymi, Samir Ouelha, Zhengjun Yue, Hajar Mozaffar, Saturnino Luz Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22249v1 This paper treats prompt engineering as a discipline for turning informal human intent into structured AI work specifications. It develops the practice as a sequence of reusable design moves: define the work, construct only the context the answer depends on, choose a role, or a moderated panel of roles, as an attention lens, and state affirmative quality targets, reserving prohibitions for hard boundaries. To keep prompts lean, it adapts two classical principles, Occam's razor and Chekhov's gun, so that every instruction earns its place. For consequential tasks, it adds structured critique through steelmanning and premortems, followed by verification and, where tools or multi-step actions are involved, agentic operating loops with explicit boundaries and escalation. Aimed at a general readership, this tutorial is not a benchmarking study; it offers a practical, technically grounded path from casual prompting to disciplined AI workflow design, illustrated by a worked example that carries one task from a weak prompt to a strong specification. The framework is presented as principles and checklists that remain useful as models and tools change. The strongest prompt is rarely the longest prompt; it is the one that makes desired behaviour, required sources and checks, and success criteria unmistakable. --- ### Checkpoints Are Not Enough: Trust Calibration in CoSLR, a Human-AI System for Systematic Literature Reviews Authors: MD Aidul Islam, Malik Abdul Sami, Muhammad Waseem, Zeeshan Rasheed, Kai-kristian Kemell, Zheying Zhang, Pekka Abrahamsson Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22248v1 Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are essential for evidence-based research but remain time-consuming, requiring researchers to manage large volumes of publications across planning, screening, analysis, and reporting. Large language models (LLMs) can now produce fluent, well-structured review text, which makes it difficult to distinguish synthesis that was verified by a researcher from synthesis that merely appears authoritative. This raises the risk that unverified AI-generated synthesis enters the scholarly record carrying the credibility of a systematic review. We present CoSLR, a Human-AI collaborative multi-agent system that supports the SLR workflow through a modular three-phase pipeline using large language models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and that places explicit, mandatory human checkpoints on the path between generated output and its acceptance. In a survey-based study with 63 participants, the system was received positively: 27 of 63 participants (42.9 percent) rated its usability highly, indicating that the mandatory checkpoints did not come at the cost of a workable interface. However, a checkpoint safeguards the review only if researchers use it to verify: 22 of 63 participants (34.9 percent) reported that they would trust AI-generated summaries and reports without additional human checking after only a short interaction with the system. These findings indicate that Human-AI collaboration can support literature review work, but that the effectiveness of human oversight depends on whether users are willing to exercise it. This is a calibration problem that interface design must address directly, not assume. --- ### CHART: A Harness-Rotation Curriculum for Harness-Robust Search Agents Authors: Xinlu Zhang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zhihan Zhang, Besnik Fetahu, Xi Chen Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22247v1 Search agents are usually trained under a single harness. But once an agent is deployed in a real application, its harness is frequently updated (e.g., a rewritten system prompt) to fit production needs. This exposes a fragility of post-trained agents: because a learned behavior is entangled with its training harness, even a harness update that leaves the task unchanged can fail to elicit the behavior. We train a search agent to perform parallel search, a popular strategy for improving both search efficiency and performance. We find that training under a fixed harness makes the behavior harness-local, overfit to that harness's surface form: when the harness changes, the model falls back to serial search. An intuitive fix is harness augmentation, but simply training on more harnesses does not resolve the problem. GRPO learns from the reward gap between parallel and serial rollouts of the same question: a small harness pool saturates that gap early, while a large pool dilutes the per-harness signal too thinly for any harness to consolidate. We therefore propose Curriculum HArness Rotation Training (CHART), a rotating curriculum that lets a search agent gradually consolidate parallel search across harnesses. At each periodic evaluation, CHART "graduates" the harnesses whose expected behavior is learned and replaces them with still-learnable ones, keeping the reward gap alive throughout training. Starting from the same harness pool, CHART makes the model learn parallel search on all harnesses, whereas static augmentation succeeds on at most half of them. The behavior also carries to held-out harnesses: CHART parallelizes on 89% of held-out turns, against at most 5% for the static pools. It further transfers to a new QA task and search environment, improving pass@1 by 5.6pp over the best static pool. Finally, CHART-trained agents benefit more from meta-harness search than baselines. --- ### The Corroboration Illusion: When More News Makes LLM Forecasts Less True Authors: Yuan Lu, Yukuan Zhang Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22246v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to forecast real-world events by retrieving and reasoning over news. We show that this dependence on an open, crawlable news corpus creates a new attack surface: an adversary who can merely publish articles--without access to the retriever, the model, or the user's queries--can systematically move the forecaster's output probabilities. We formalize news-corpus poisoning of probabilistic forecasters, a threat model distinct from prior RAG poisoning, which targets factual answers or opinion polarity rather than calibrated probabilities. We evaluate the attack on 500 resolved ForecastBench questions against a 17.4M-article Common Crawl News corpus with a strict crawl-date cutoff, using three retrieval-augmented forecasters built on open 7-8B models. A single LLM-written article per question flips 56% of forecasts across the 0.5 boundary; five articles flip 69-73% and shift probabilities by +0.13 to +0.22 net of a neutral-article placebo, degrading the Brier score from 0.18 to 0.37. The effect is monotone in the number, retrieval rank, query similarity, and context share of injected articles, transfers across model families, and is unaffected by the claimed publisher. We then evaluate three natural defenses--source allow-lists, isolate-then-aggregate forecasting, and perplexity filtering--and show that each has a cheap bypass: spoofed publishers, majority poisoning, and higher-temperature generation, respectively. Our results indicate that probabilistic LLM judgments inherit the full fragility of the information supply chain they consume. --- ### Do Chess Explanations Reflect Model Decisions? Behavioral and Token-Level Tests of LLM Reasoning Faithfulness Authors: Angelina Parfenova Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22245v1 Large language models can produce fluent explanations for chess moves, but plausible language does not necessarily reflect the reasoning behind a decision. We study this question in chess, where the board state is fully observable, legal actions can be enumerated, and move quality can be evaluated independently. Across 200 Lichess endgame puzzles, we test explanations using move recoverability, decoder-side controls, and token-level scoring of legal candidate moves. Unmasked explanations make generated moves easy to recover, but this advantage drops sharply after explicit move hints are removed. Under strict masking, explanations provide only small and decoder-dependent gains over the board state alone. Token-level scoring shows that explanations can nevertheless alter move preferences: random but plausible explanations from other puzzles reduce the probability of the correct move, indicating that irrelevant reasoning text is not simply ignored. We also find that recognizable endgame motifs can make generated moves easier to recover without reliably improving move correctness. Together, these results show that linguistic plausibility, consistency with a generated action, and solution correctness are distinct properties. Fluent chess explanations can influence action preferences and support a coherent move narrative while providing only limited evidence of faithful reasoning. --- ### Universal Observatory Graphs for Distributed Sky Coverage and Artificial Intelligence Based Interplanetary Routing Authors: Mohammed Abdel Razek Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22244v1 This research proposes the Universal Observatory Graph (UOG), an AI-driven framework for distributed astronomical observation across the Solar System. The proposed architecture models autonomous observatories located at the Sun planet L2 Lagrange points as nodes in a weighted graph, while communication links are represented as graph edges characterized by multi-objective physical and operational metrics, including interplanetary distance, communication latency, transmission power, and link reliability. The resulting graph provides a unified mathematical representation of a cooperative interplanetary observatory network. This proposal examines a six-observatory Solar System configuration comprising Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Instantaneous sky coverage is evaluated independently using a 200,000 direction Fibonacci sphere, a 2,000,000 direction fixed seed Monte Carlo calculation and deterministic spherical integration. All three methods yield complete network union coverage, approximately 0.43% complete six observatory intersection and approximately 24.96% mean pairwise Jaccard similarity under the adopted pointing model. Communication routing is subsequently formulated as a finite horizon Markov decision process and solved using tabular Q-learning. The reward balances node participation and a distance dependent reliability proxy against distance, light time latency and a distance squared transmission power proxy. The learned Earth-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune route is also the highest discounted return route among all 41 feasible simple paths under the four hop constraint. The framework provides a reproducible baseline for sequential coverage assessment and multi objective routing; time dependent ephemerides, mission specific visibility, calibrated link budgets and scalable graph policies remain future work. --- ### Replay-Gated Neural Execution: Decoupling Persistent Behavioral Specifications from Neural Realizations in Frozen Language Models Authors: Xianliang Zeng, Zhanzhan Zhao Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22243v1 Input-conditioned neural interventions raise a runtime question: what persists when one behavioral specification admits multiple actions whose validity depends on execution state? We introduce replay-gated neural execution, separating five objects: a persistent behavioral predicate, its state-indexed certified realization set, a transient action witness, a budget-limited finder, and execution authorization. Candidates undergo isolated FP32/BF16 replay of the frozen model; commitment additionally requires a valid run audit. Experiments on Qwen3-0.6B and SmolLM2-360M-Instruct establish distinct failure modes for these objects. Independent initializations yield distinct certified actions in all 24 tested fixed-state cells. Unchanged SmolLM2 witnesses remain certified in all 128 native states but only 66 of 384 off-diagonal transfers. All 767 archived Qwen witnesses replay successfully, yet a budget-limited finder misses one known-realizable cell in all three prespecified runs. Of 1,141 replay-submitted candidates, 174 fail item certification. A frozen three-tier cascade uses these boundaries to reject uncertified proposals and escalate audit-valid search misses. On 256 previously sealed Qwen Fresh requests, 221 first certify at the lowest-cost tier and all 256 receive audited authorization, with no observed bypass. Relative to frozen full search, the median singleton search-and-certification cost ratio is 0.1055 and P95 is 1.3485, including failed tiers. Within the studied behavioral family on two small models, these results support state-indexed, set-valued execution semantics: specifications persist, search proposes witnesses, and replay certification plus run audit grants execution authority. --- ### An Evolutionary Computation Framework for Multi-Agent Q-Learning with Mean-Field Environmental Feedback Authors: Lichen Wang, Shijia Hua, Linjie Liu Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13253v1 Multi-agent reinforcement learning in networked populations is governed by the interaction between individual adaptation, local encounters, and changing environmental conditions. To study this interaction, we formulate a coupled learning--environment model in which agents update stateless $Q$-values on a fixed graph, while their population-average behavior drives an environmental variable that dynamically modifies the payoff matrix. Under a first-order mean-field closure, we derive a deterministic transport equation for the population distribution of $Q$-values and couple it with a projected discrete update for the environmental state. The resulting model is evaluated against finite-network Monte Carlo simulations on random regular, Erdős--Rényi, Barabási--Albert, and random geometric graphs. Across the tested parameter ranges, the mean-field system reproduces the main macroscopic cooperation and environmental trajectories, and the trajectory-level root-mean-square error generally decreases with population size and average degree. The analysis further shows that environmental feedback reshapes the learned action-value ordering, while reinforcing feedback can produce pronounced dependence on the initial learning bias and resource level. The environmental timescale also plays an important role: a rapid response can drive the resource state to a boundary before learning adapts, whereas a slower response preserves the interaction between behavioral learning and environmental recovery. These results provide a population-level description of coupled reinforcement learning and environmental dynamics and characterize the performance of the mean-field approximation within the tested network and parameter ranges. --- ### Preserving Subject-Clarity in Image Outpainting with Multiscale Wavelet Supervision Authors: Abhilash Neog, Taewan Kim, Yi Wu, Xu Chen, Jian Jiao Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13251v1 Commercial and advertising images are frequently affected by poor framing, partially cropped subjects, truncated text or logos, and insufficient context, all of which can reduce subject clarity, i.e., the ability of an image to clearly communicate its primary subject. Image outpainting offers a scalable solution by extending image boundaries and recovering missing content and context. However, existing diffusion-based outpainting methods often produce visually plausible completions while degrading subject fidelity through structural inconsistencies, semantic drift, or loss of fine-grained detail. To address this limitation, we propose a subject clarity outpainting framework that combines vision-language model (VLM)-guided semantic conditioning with multiscale wavelet supervision for subject-localized detail preservation. To support training, we develop a subject-centric data curation pipeline that constructs subject-intersecting outpainting pairs from advertising and natural images. The resulting objective introduces no additional inference cost and is designed to be compatible with diffusion-based backbones. Across four advertising and natural-image benchmarks, our method improves subject clarity, reducing subject-centered DreamSim error and FID on average by 3.0% and 2.4% over matched supervised fine-tuning, and by 10.8% and 7.7% over the strongest state-of-the-art approach per dataset, respectively. --- ### A machine-checked proof of the Dong-Yang classification of optimal (n,4) binary codes for BSCs Authors: Shenghao Yang, Yanyan Dong Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: math.HO, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10579v1 We present a machine-checked Lean~4 formalization of Dong and Yang's classification of optimal finite-length $(n,4)$ binary block codes for binary symmetric channels. The formalization was developed mainly by feeding the paper's proofs to an AI tool. To establish correctness, the authors verified the main theorem statements in Lean and the accepted axioms. This note discusses the corrections and simplifications made to the AI-generated formalization, and records discrepancies found in the paper during the formalization. The Lean code is available at https://github.com/shhyang/n4code_lean. --- ### MLLMs Hallucinate when Information Distribution Drifts in Synergy Heads Authors: Meng'en Qin, Junye Chen, Jucheng Liu, Yinchen Liu, Youlu Xing, Song Wang, Ruize Han Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09206v2 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often struggle with hallucinations, thus hindering their reliable practical applications. Existing attention-based mitigation methods mainly rely on indirect signals (e.g., attention weights) that fail to accurately reflect the actual information shift underlying hallucination generation. In this paper, we propose HEAL, Head-lEvel information disentAnglement and caLibration for identifying and mitigating hallucinations. HEAL first employs causal noise intervention on multi-head outputs to filter out causally redundant heads. Subsequently, it disentangles information distribution within the remaining heads via the counterfactual Difference-in-Differences, categorizing heads into four types. Through analysis, we observe: hallucinations happen when information distribution drifts away from a healthy equilibrium in synergy heads, not strongly correlated with the quantity or strength of modality-specific heads. Motivated by this insight, HEAL injects dynamic information calibration factors into the value vectors of synergy heads and actively regulates visual-language dependencies, steering the output distribution towards factual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HEAL effectively reduces hallucinations across multiple MLLMs, offering a simple and interpretable pathway to enhance model trustworthiness. --- ### OpenDiscoveryTrace: Process Traces for Evaluating AI Scientist Workflows Authors: Aayam Bansal, Keertan Balaji Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09203v1 Existing benchmarks for autonomous AI scientists evaluate only final outputs---generated code, hypotheses, or papers---yet discard the reasoning process by which those outputs were obtained. This makes it impossible to audit scientific methodology, diagnose failure modes, or distinguish systematic reasoning from fortunate guessing. We present \textbf{OpenDiscoveryTrace}, a public dataset of 558 complete AI scientific agent trajectories that captures how models reason, not just what they produce. Each trajectory records a structured 9-field-per-step trace---including thoughts, tool calls, observations, errors, revision triggers, and self-reported confidence---as models execute 124 scientific tasks spanning drug discovery, materials science, genomics, and scientific literature analysis. The dataset covers seven models: three frontier models (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro; 124 trajectories each, fully balanced across domains and difficulty levels) and four open-weight models (Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, Phi-3.5-mini, and Qwen2.5-1.5B; 30 each), plus 60 live-retrieval variant trajectories. Pilot analysis on 363 LLM-judged trajectories reveals that process traces expose behavioral differences invisible to output-only evaluation: all three frontier models achieve comparable success rates (84--89%), yet Claude Opus 4.6 produces 30$\times$ more errors than GPT-5.4 (2.5 vs. 0.08 per trajectory, $p < 0.0001$, Cliff's $δ= 0.613$), with qualitatively different error profiles---66.7% tool misuse for Claude versus 83.6% reasoning errors for GPT-5.4. We define five benchmark tasks with baselines from logistic regression, random forests, LSTMs, and Transformer models. The dataset, trace schema, agent harness, and benchmark definitions are publicly available under CC BY 4.0 to support research on process-level evaluation, scientific agent auditing, and AI governance. --- ### Hierarchical Fourier Approximation for Variational Quantum Distribution Learning Authors: Taha Hoseinpour Asli, Sajjad Hashemian, Ebrahim Ardeshir-Larijani Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06307v1 We study variational quantum distribution learning through a hierarchy of Walsh--Fourier approximations on the Boolean cube. At each level, a selected set of target Fourier coefficients defines a spectral truncation, which is projected onto the probability simplex and used as the target of a quantum circuit Born machine. Parameters learned at one level initialize the next through a warm-start map. We prove an end-to-end expected learning guarantee where the approximation term is determined by the omitted Fourier mass, while a normalized unbiased estimator yields an explicit statistical bound for empirical truncations. We then instantiate the abstract discrepancy conditions for total variation distance and relate the resulting distributional error to quantum-state fidelity. The total-variation specialization incurs the explicit factor $2^{n-1}$ under our normalized $\ell_2$ convention and is therefore informative only for sufficiently concentrated Fourier tails. The framework does not establish global trainability or eliminate barren plateaus; rather, it identifies the conditions under which low-to-high spectral training admits a approximation--estimation--optimization analysis. --- ### CST-WM: A Causally Structured World Model for Embodied Visual Tracking Authors: Junyi Hu, Shuaihang Yuan, Jiazhao Liang, Yi Fang Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06302v2 Embodied visual tracking requires a robot to choose actions that keep a moving target observable at a suitable distance, and to recover it after occlusion, out-of-view drift, or distractor crossings. We cast the task as planning over future target evidence with an action-conditioned world model. In logged tracking data, however, the behavior policy's actions are correlated with where the target is, so a generic predictor can learn a shortcut: it writes the current action directly into its prediction of target evidence, instead of letting the action affect that evidence only by moving the robot and changing what it observes. We call this failure causal hallucination; the resulting rollouts look plausible but rank candidate actions for the wrong reason. We propose CST-WM, a causally structured world model whose state is split into target-evidence, robot, and observation branches. Its transition removes the same-step edge from action to target evidence but keeps the path through robot motion and the resulting views, so candidate actions are still distinguished by their predicted ego-motion. With rollout-based model-predictive control, a single model handles both steady following and re-acquisition after target loss. On EVT-Bench and Habitat 3.0, covering standard tracking, target-loss recovery, and cross-dataset transfer, CST-WM improves following, distance-range control, safety, and re-acquisition over reactive trackers and world-model baselines, and removing the action mask causes the largest drop in re-acquisition among our ablations. Offline, CST-WM has lower multi-step rollout error, and its ranking of candidate actions agrees better with the simulator's. On a Unitree Go2 quadruped, CST-WM succeeds in 20 of 30 real-world trials under occlusion, distractor crossing, and fast motion, against 14 for TrackVLA. --- ### SignDino: Self-Supervised Sign Language Representation Learning via Temporal-Axis Self-Distillation Authors: Junyi Hu, Zhewen He, Haomian Huang, Zhenhua Li, Zhifei Li, Yi Fang Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06296v1 Self-supervised sign language representation learning must model two properties not central to natural-image SSL: signs are produced by a small set of anatomically distinct articulators, and their meaning depends on the temporal organisation of those articulators. We introduce SignDino, a self-supervised sign-video encoder that moves the DINOv3 student--teacher recipe from the spatial domain of image crops to the temporal domain of tracked sign streams. Each video is decomposed into left-hand, right-hand, and face streams by a detector-first YOLOv8n+ByteTrack pipeline. A frozen DINOv3 ViT-B/16 embeds each per-frame anatomical crop, while lightweight temporal Transformers, not the image backbone, form the student and EMA teacher. They are trained by temporal DINO self-distillation, frame-level masked-token prediction in the style of iBOT, KoLeo feature spreading, and Gram anchoring of the frame-to-frame similarity structure. This design keeps strong image-level visual primitives fixed and learns only how articulator states evolve across time. We evaluate on sign-to-English translation, isolated sign recognition, and fingerspelling detection benchmarks. Across these tasks, SignDino provides a strong public self-supervised representation and shows competitive or state-of-the-art performance under matched downstream evaluation. --- ### Representation Learning for Sample-Efficient CATE Estimation by Leveraging Multiple Outcomes Authors: Maitreyi Swaroop, Shikha Bhat, Samantha Rodriguez, Tamar Krishnamurti, Bryan Wilder Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06294v1 Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) enables efficient targeting of interventions, but many applications have limited experimental samples, making it difficult to estimate heterogeneous effects from high-dimensional covariates. In such settings, policymakers and medical practitioners often succumb to the curse of dimensionality or apply off-the-shelf dimension reduction methods that may not preserve treatment heterogeneity. Yet these domains often come with large historical datasets measuring a wide range of outcomes -- a source of supervision that is rarely exploited in practice. Following causal representation learning, we hypothesize that such domains with high-dimensional covariates have lower-dimensional underlying dynamics. We can thus leverage the diverse outcomes measured in historical data to learn a lower-dimensional representation of the covariates. Theoretically, we prove that when the auxiliary outcomes satisfy a set of surrogacy conditions and the representation retains relevant covariate information, the original CATE is identified when the high-dimensional covariates are replaced by the learned representation. Combined with existing dimension-dependent rates for CATE estimation, the result implies greater sample-efficiency on the same experimental sample. Additionally, we characterize the bias-variance tradeoff when the assumptions do not hold perfectly, and show that the representation-based estimator can still achieve lower error when the reduction in estimator variance outweighs the bias due to compression. Empirically, we evaluate the method on synthetic data and semi-synthetic medical data. --- ### Steering Geometry: Validating Human Value Geometry in LLM Steering Space Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Armin Saghafian, Ali Bazshoushtari, Hamid Rezaei, EunJeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz, Parvin Mousavi, Purang Abolmaesumi Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06289v1 As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in alignment-sensitive contexts, activation steering has emerged as a lightweight, inference-time alternative to fine-tuning methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO) for behavioral control. However, existing work typically validates steering on isolated behaviors, leaving it unclear whether steering vectors encode coherent semantic structure or merely exploit behavior-specific shortcuts. We investigate whether the latent geometry of LLM steering vectors reflects theory-specified structure in human values and morality. Using Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values as our primary fine-grained framework, we introduce a 26K-sample benchmark covering 20 human values and analyze distribution-driven methods (e.g., CAA, SphericalSteer, ODESteer) and behavior-centric approaches (e.g., COLD-Steer, BiPO) across diverse model families and sizes. We find that distribution-driven methods recover human value topologies aligned with theoretical predictions (Spearman $ρ$ up to 0.51, $p < 10^{-13}$). In contrast, behavior-centric methods achieve comparable steering performance but show little correlation with the expected value geometry. Geometric fidelity improves with model scale but drops after instruction tuning. Finally, better geometric alignment also leads to more human-consistent transfer across values: steering one value correctly lifts compatible values and suppresses opposing ones. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/DeepRCL/Steering_Geometry. --- ### Object-Aware Background-Controlled Editing via Weighted Velocity Guidance Authors: Wuji Wang, Yue Wu, Chenhao Yi, Shuhui Wang Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06288v1 Training-free image editing steers diffusion or flow-matching generative models at inference time by modifying prompt-conditioned denoising velocities. Existing velocity-based editors often apply prompt-induced residuals globally over the latent space and rely on the model to localize semantic changes implicitly. For object-centric edits, these residuals are rarely zero outside the target object, so small non-target components can accumulate during multi-step integration, causing background drift and unstable object boundaries. We propose Object-Aware Velocity Control (OAVC), a training-free framework that introduces object-level control into the velocity-integration process. OAVC decouples where semantic residuals are allowed to act from how they are injected into the dynamics. It constructs a background-anchored reference interface under the source prompt and then performs object-localized safe semantic injection under the target prompt. A constrained injection operator suppresses drift-inducing velocity components, while time-adaptive spatial weighting stabilizes the transition near object boundaries. OAVC requires no training or modification of pretrained model parameters. Experiments on object-centric image and video benchmarks with image and video rectified-flow backbones show improved background preservation, structural fidelity, boundary stability, and temporal consistency while retaining effective localized editability. --- ### Robust conditional dimension reduction for dissimilarity data Authors: Xiao Ling, Anh Bui Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06284v1 Conditional dimension reduction (cDR) learns low-dimensional latent coordinates while accounting for observed covariates that represent known sources of variation in the data. Conditional Multidimensional Scaling (cMDS) is a cDR technique that works directly with dissimilarity data. Its standard squared-stress formulation, however, is sensitive to contaminated dissimilarity, since outliers can dominate the objective and distort the learned configuration. We proposed Robust Conditional Multidimensional Scaling (rcMDS) by replacing the squared-stress criterion with a Fair M-estimation objective. We developed a reweighted conditional SMACOF algorithm to optimize this objective. The proposed algorithm admits computationally tractable updates, and its stabilized objective values decrease monotonically and converge to a finite limit. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that the pro --- ### IM-ENGINE: Image Editing for Embodied Data Generation Authors: Yian Wang, Junyi Cao, Xiaowen Qiu, Chuang Gan Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06279v1 Learning-based manipulation requires supervision that is both semantically meaningful and physically executable, but current data pipelines often provide only one of these properties. Human demonstrations capture intent but are costly to collect and constrained by the human-robot embodiment gap, while simulation can scale data generation but often under-specifies functional behavior. We present IM-ENGINE, a simulator-grounded pipeline that uses image editing as an intermediate representation for embodied data generation. Given a rendered scene with known geometry, depth, segmentation, and camera parameters, IM-ENGINE edits the image to inject task-relevant semantics, recovers explicit 3D state using simulator priors and an unchanged anchor object, refines the state in physics, and converts it into robot-executable supervision. We instantiate the pipeline for dexterous grasp synthesis and goal-state generation. For grasping, IM-ENGINE generates a human grasp in image space, recovers the hand-object interaction, retargets it to a robot hand, and refines it into physically validated robot grasps. For goal generation, it edits a rendered scene into a desired outcome, recovers the target-object pose, and refines it into physically valid, semantically meaningful goals and trajectories. This combination of generative semantic priors and simulator grounding enables scalable task-relevant supervision for robot learning. --- ### A Comparative Study of GAN-Based Deep Learning Models for Pneumonia Detection in Chest X-Rays Authors: Roshan Paudel, Aashish Ghimire, Pramod Acharya Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06276v1 This study evaluates pneumonia classification in chest X-rays using VGG19, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, and a custom CNN, and explores Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based synthetic data augmentation. MobileNetV2 achieved the highest reported accuracy of 88% with balanced class-wise performance. The custom CNN achieved pneumonia recall of 92.67% and precision of 79.43%, highlighting a precision-recall trade-off. Accuracy, F1-score, precision, recall, confusion matrices, and training curves were used to assess performance. Synthetic pneumonia images were combined with real images to investigate whether augmentation could improve classification performance. In the reported VGG19 comparison, augmented-data training accuracy reached approximately 100%, while validation accuracy remained near 50%, below the real-data validation accuracy. This experiment therefore did not demonstrate a validation-performance benefit from GAN augmentation. The classifier comparison highlights differences in accuracy and pneumonia recall, while the augmentation experiment indicates the need for further evaluation of synthetic-image quality and training settings. --- ### SIDE: Sensor Impersonation Detection at the Edge via Sequence Prediction Authors: Nahom Birhan Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06271v2 Some low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) sensor deployments lack device-level source authentication, leaving them vulnerable to impersonation or injected sensor readings. We present a lightweight approach to sensor impersonation detection in a small proof-of-concept study. We formulate detection as a sequence-prediction problem. A model with three LSTM layers and two fully connected layers is trained only on univariate temperature readings from a genuine sensor, and a window of readings is flagged when its mean absolute prediction error exceeds the mean genuine error by more than six standard deviations. The model is converted to TensorFlow Lite in three variants, non-quantized (554 KB), 16-bit weight quantized (298.5 KB), and 8-bit weight quantized (185 KB), targeting an Arduino Nano 33 BLE aggregator. The variants were evaluated with the TensorFlow Lite interpreter on the local server, since on-device execution of LSTM models was not yet supported by TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers at the time of the study. On a controlled testbed with the impostor sensor placed in a hotter outdoor location, the three variants reached detection accuracies of 99.980%, 99.972%, and 98.206%, and each flagged the change point when a test sequence switched from genuine to impostor data. Quantization made the model smaller but slower in our measurements. The genuine and impostor distributions were well separated, so these results show detection of a controlled distribution shift and should not be read as evidence of general device authentication. --- ### Correction as Annotation: Bootstrapping a Dependency Parser for Documentary Medieval Latin Authors: Gabriel H. Pizzorno Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06266v1 Medieval documentary sources remain inadequately served by existing natural language processing tools. None of the five readily available Latin treebank models attains usable performance on a collection of 160 inventories compiled in Marseille between 1258 and 1446. The best labelled attachment score is 0.62 and the best morphology-aware score is 0.24. Performance does not correlate with either genre or period proximity. To address this shortfall, in-domain training data was generated as a by-product of using these inadequate models. In each of nine iterations, a model pre-annotated 200 sentences; an expert corrected the annotations; and the corrected sentences were used to train the subsequent model, with batches sampled independently of model state, without active-learning selection. Thirty-three hours of annotation effort over 1,804 sentences increased universal part-of-speech accuracy from 0.80 to 0.98 and labelled attachment from 0.48 to 0.92, outperforming all baselines on the reported metrics while using 97% less training data than the largest one of them. Annotator effort declined from 54% of tokens to a plateau of 14-18%, an operational progress metric that requires no separate gold standard and can serve as a stopping criterion. --- ### Beyond the Flag: Clinical Framing Closes the Moderation Gap in Suicide Risk Measurement Authors: Shreyas Krishnan, Gun Ahn, Jungjin Kim Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06263v1 Moderation APIs are built to flag policy-violating content, not to measure graded clinical risk. But a platform's duty does not end at detection: the response owed to passive distress differs sharply from the response owed to active planning with means access, and emerging regulation (e.g., California Senate Bill 243) is turning that distinction into a compliance requirement. We therefore ask how well deployed safety signals recover clinically meaningful severity. We release a benchmark of 516 r/SuicideWatch posts rated by a licensed psychiatrist on a four-level ordinal schema (Indicator, Ideation, Behavior, Attempt) grounded in the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, and evaluate moderation APIs, prompted LLMs, and supervised baselines under seven ordinal-aware metrics. Three findings. Vendor moderation APIs separate low- from high-severity posts well (0.860 high-risk F1) but measure severity poorly (0.395 macro F1), systematically over-predicting the most severe category. Clinically grounded zero-shot prompting recovers much of that gap (0.562 macro F1), and expert-authored framing (not fine-tuning, added reasoning, or naive multi-agent aggregation) is the effective lever. The value of reasoning depends on register: it hurts on long, noisy Reddit posts and helps on short, clinician-authored statements. We argue graded severity, not a binary flag, is what a proportionate duty of care requires, and release our evaluation framework to support that measurement. --- ### Adapting Vision Foundation Models to Acoustics for Pose-Free 3D Sonar Reconstruction Authors: Kevin Zhang, Jingxi Chen, Mohamad Qadri, Russell Shomberg, Michael Kaess, Jia-Bin Huang, Adithya Pediredla, Christopher Metzler Published: 2026-09-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06261v1 Vision foundation models trained on Internet-scale RGB datasets enable remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks, from text-to-video generation to few-shot 3D scene reconstruction. An acoustic foundation model trained on large-scale sonar datasets could enable similar capabilities in the underwater domain, where turbidity and low-visibility conditions make conventional RGB foundation models inapplicable. Unfortunately, a lack of freely available large-scale sonar datasets makes training such a model from scratch impractical. In this work, we demonstrate that vision foundation models can be efficiently adapted to the sonar setting by (1) exploiting the geometric relationship between the two sensing modalities and (2) employing accurate physics-based noise models for synthetic data generation. The resulting sonar adaptation models enable new capabilities: For the first time, we experimentally demonstrate sonar-based pose-free 3D reconstruction. ---