# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 235 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #11701–11750 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/235 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/234.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/236.md) ### When Genomic Masking Priors Fail to Transfer: Strong Variant Prediction, Weak Functional Generation Authors: Susu Hu, Preetam Gattogi, Jens Lehmann, Sahar Vahdati, Stefanie Speidel, Julien Vibert Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04861v1 Bidirectional discrete diffusion model appears naturally suited to genomic modeling because it can reconstruct missing sequence from both flanks. We developed GenDA (Genomic Density-optimized Absorbing Diffusion) under the additional hypothesis that entropy-guided span placement would concentrate reconstruction pressure on compositionally complex regions, improving both downstream variant-effect prediction and functional sequence generation. Our results only partially support this premise. After supervised fine-tuning, the 202M-parameter GenDA model reaches a pooled ClinVar SNV AUROC of 0.774, exceeding a similarly scaled autoregressive model by 0.103. However, a matched random-span variant reaches 0.777, providing no evidence that entropy guidance causes the ClinVar improvement. More unexpectedly, GenDA fails a zero-shot functional inpainting stress test: across promoters, enhancers, exon boundaries, and intron boundaries, it does not consistently outperform a control that shuffles the native gap while exactly preserving 3-mer composition. Failure is already present for 50--500-bp gaps, although enhancer degradation worsens at longer gaps. Diagnostics identify several boundary conditions: entropy measures local sequence complexity rather than functional importance; 1-mer tokenization limits physical context; training spans are capped at 300 bp; and high absolute AlphaGenome fidelity can coexist with negative control-normalized restoration. These results show that strong fine-tuned variant prediction, a plausible corruption prior, and functional generation are distinct claims that require separate validation. --- ### Mitigating Performance Discrepancy in Cross-Domain 3D Class-Incremental Learning Authors: Jinge Ma, Gautham Vinod, Bruce Coburn, Jui-Feng Chi, Siddeshwar Raghavan, Fengqing Zhu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04860v1 3D perception plays a crucial role in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and AR/VR. In practical scenarios, 3D perception models need to continually adapt to newly emerging 3D object categories, making class-incremental learning (CIL) particularly important. However, unlike 2D images, 3D point clouds are inherently heterogeneous: objects from the same class may not only come from the clean CAD domain, but also from RGB-D camera scans of varying quality, video reconstructions, or even corrupted observations. We discover that such heterogeneity introduces a new challenge beyond catastrophic forgetting: the degree of performance degradation can vary substantially across domains, a phenomenon we term performance discrepancy. To investigate this problem, we establish the Domain3D-CIL training and evaluation protocol, which contains point cloud categories from heterogeneous domains. We further adapt a wide range of mainstream CIL methods to the 3D modality. The results demonstrate that this performance discrepancy consistently appears across these baselines. To mitigate this issue, we introduce PolyMem, an exemplar-free approach that implicitly models rich high-order statistics of the feature distribution to enhance cross-domain robustness. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively alleviates the performance discrepancy while improving the model's performance across domains. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance. --- ### MM-IFEval-Pro: A Multilingual and Attack-Resistant Benchmark for Instruction-Following in Vision-Language Models Authors: Changming Xiao, Zhenliang Ni, Jinhui He, Han Shu, Jie Hu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04859v2 As vision-language models (VLMs) rapidly advance in image understanding, cross-modal reasoning, and complex instruction execution, instruction-following capability has become a key indicator of their reliability and practicality. However, existing multimodal instruction-following benchmarks still suffer from limited language coverage and insufficient adversarial safety scenarios, making them inadequate for evaluating real-world multilingual and safety-sensitive settings. To address these gaps, we present MM-IFEval-Pro, a multimodal instruction-following benchmark covering Chinese and English tasks as well as diverse instruction hijacking cases. MM-IFEval-Pro includes 4 major task categories and 24 subcategories and 8 instruction categories with 52 subcategories, with each sample containing an average of 3.0 constraints to realistically simulate complex instruction scenarios. We further construct a reinforcement-learning training set enriched with Chinese and adversarial instructions, which significantly improves model performance on MM-IFEval-Pro and transfers effectively to other mainstream multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating strong cross-task and cross-language generalization. --- ### CC-Mediation: Evaluating Large Language Models for Cross-Cultural Conflict Mediation Authors: Suhyun Lee, Wenxuan Zhang, W. Quin Yow, Yang Deng Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04855v1 Cross-cultural mediation by large language models (LLMs) requires deciding both when to intervene and how to respond in culturally grounded conflicts. Progress on this problem has been limited by the lack of (1) mediation datasets with measurable downstream effects and (2) principled metrics for evaluating intercultural stance change. To address these gaps, we introduce CC-Mediation, a cross-cultural mediation benchmark of $1{,}661$ ten-turn dialogues grounded in the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), containing culturally grounded conflicts, mediation interventions, and post-intervention trajectories. We further propose two DMIS-based evaluation metrics: Trajectory AUC, which measures the persistence of intercultural improvement over time, and a signed Wasserstein-1 distance, which measures the magnitude and direction of shifts in intercultural stance. Both metrics show strong agreement with human judgment of DMIS-grounded stance shift. Using CC-Mediation, we find that current LLMs have limitations on both axes: intervention timing (when) failure stems from a positional prior that ignores dialogue content, while mediation strategy (how) failure arises from a late-layer elicitation collapse rather than a knowledge deficit. --- ### KVMem: Virtualizing Million-Token Agent Workspaces on a Consumer GPU Authors: Di Chai, Leye Wang, Zeshen Su, Zhiguo Xia, Zhihang Yu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04852v1 Modern LLM agents operate in persistent workspaces whose accumulated history can exceed both GPU KV capacity and the model's native context window. Existing systems typically compact older context into summaries or retrieve it later as text, either losing fine-grained execution evidence or repeatedly prefilling content that the model has already processed. We present KVMem, a KV-context virtualization system that preserves overflowed workspace history as paged KV state across GPU memory, host memory, and NVMe. KVMem uses lightweight, model-native attention-space indexes to select relevant historical blocks and materializes a query-dependent execution view bounded by the model's native context window. Extensive evaluations on long-context agent benchmarks spanning histories up to one million tokens, including LongMemEval, MemoryAgentBench, and AgentLongBench, show that KVMem generally achieves higher task utility and greater inference efficiency than compaction-based approaches, the de facto standard for handling context overflow. In the DeepSWE long-context test with Qwen3.8-27B, KVMem improves task success from 43.8% with compaction-only context management to 48.4%. In our local-deployment evaluation, KVMem runs Qwen3.6/3.8-27B NVFP4 with MTP on an off-the-shelf laptop equipped with a 24\,GB RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, virtualizing agent workspaces of up to 1M tokens-four times the model's native 256K-token context window. In a single-session setting, KVMem generates $\sim$50 tokens/s, providing interactive responsiveness for local agent execution. More broadly, by decoupling addressable workspace size from the LLM's native context window, KVMem provides a practical path toward long-running agents whose workspaces can grow beyond that window. --- ### Coupled Control and Wireless World Models for Resilient Remote Robotic Control Authors: H. P. Madushanka, Sumudu Samarakoon, Mehdi Bennis Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04851v1 Remote robotic systems operating over wireless networks must maintain reliable control despite limited communication resources, changing channel conditions, and environmental disturbances.However, continuously transmitting high-dimensional sensory observations, such as camera images, increases communication overhead and energy consumption while reducing robustness under unreliable connectivity.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a resilient communication-aware remote robotic control framework based on coupled control and wireless Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models that jointly capture robot dynamics and wireless channel evolution from visual observations and a combination of raw and structured radio frequency (RF) representations based on spectrograms and Persistence Images(PIs).The learned latent representations enable predictive communication scheduling by jointly forecasting future robot states and wireless conditions, thereby reducing unnecessary uplink transmissions while maintaining reliable control performance.Furthermore, an adaptive resilience mechanism detects latent prediction discrepancies and efficiently adapts perception embeddings to accommodate wireless and visual environmental changes without retraining the complete control policy.The proposed framework is evaluated in a synchronized Gazebo-Robot Operating System (ROS)-Sionna robot-wireless simulation environment under diverse wireless propagation and perception perturbations.Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in communication efficiency, robustness, and resilience while maintaining navigation performance compared with conventional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID), model-free Deep Q-Network (DQN), and predictive approaches based on Vision Transformers(ViTs). --- ### ElderBench: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents for Older Adults Authors: Weide Zhan, Qumu Shaqu, Yuanqing Liu, Peng Zhang, Jiahao Liu, Kam Him Lam, Ning Gu, Zhan Hu, Tun Lu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04850v1 While autonomous mobile agents hold great potential for assisting older adults with smartphone usage, existing GUI benchmarks mainly rely on explicit, goal-oriented instructions and rarely capture the naturally occurring language patterns of older users, such as indirect speech, referential ambiguity, and under-specified requests. This mismatch between benchmark instructions and real-world elderly interactions may hinder reliable agent deployment. To address this gap, we present ElderBench, the first benchmark for evaluating mobile GUI agents in authentic elderly-oriented scenarios. ElderBench is constructed from 249 naturally elicited smartphone tasks collected from older adults across 20 applications. We first characterize the linguistic divergence between elderly instructions and existing GUI benchmark instructions from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives. We then evaluate mainstream GUI agents and Vision-Language Models under both online and offline settings, revealing substantial performance degradation when handling elderly-oriented instructions. Through controlled instruction normalization, failure analysis, and fine-grained linguistic feature analysis, we further identify how elderly-specific language patterns contribute to agent failures. Our findings provide actionable design insights toward more adaptive, interpretable, and age-inclusive GUI agents for older adults. --- ### LetOccVote: Learning Weakly Supervised 3D Occupancy through Consensus Authors: Chi Zhang, Qi Song, Feifei Li, Jie Li, Rui Huang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04846v2 Weakly supervised 3D occupancy prediction reduces the reliance on costly 3D annotations by learning from 2D pseudo-labels generated by vision foundation models. However, existing methods typically use these imperfect pseudo-labels directly as supervision, making occupancy learning vulnerable to erroneous geometric and semantic targets. We observe that agreement across repeated observations provides an inexpensive and reliable cue for assessing pseudo-label reliability. Based on this observation, we propose \textbf{LetOccVote}, a weakly supervised Gaussian-based occupancy framework that leverages cross-frame voting to improve both geometric and semantic supervision. For geometry, Depth Vote exploits cross-frame geometric agreement to refine supported pseudo depth and reject contradictory estimates before volumetric lifting and depth supervision. For semantics, Semantic Vote aggregates pseudo-semantic observations in a shared 3D space to identify reliable and contested evidence, strengthening reliable semantic supervision while filtering unreliable pseudo-label segments. The entire framework is trained solely with 2D pseudo-label supervision without requiring 3D occupancy annotations. On Occ3D-nuScenes, LetOccVote achieves 53.27 IoU and 20.39 mIoU, establishing state-of-the-art performance among methods with 2D pseudo-label supervision. --- ### MMTClinic: Multimodal, Multilingual Time Series Question Answering and Reasoning Benchmark for Clinical Domain Authors: Sourav Malakar, Harshit Nigam, Akash Ghosh, Sriparna Saha, Amlan Chakrabarti, Saptarsi Goswami, Priti Singh Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04842v1 Time-series data in clinical settings is crucial for capturing dynamic changes in a patient's health over time, enabling timely diagnosis, personalized treatment, and early detection of critical events. However, the development of clinically reliable and linguistically inclusive medical AI systems remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the lack of multimodal, multilingual, and time-series-grounded benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world clinical scenarios. To fill this gap, we present MMTClinic, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning and question-answering tasks involving clinical time-series. MMTClinic combines text, medical images, and multivariate physiological signals and includes 30,000 QA pairs (15,000 multiple choice questions (MCQs) and 15,000 open-ended questions) across five languages: English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil. These questions cover three important clinical tasks---mortality prediction, heart rate forecasting, and SOFA score estimation. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art LLMs in zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought settings. Our evaluation reveals notable differences in model performance across tasks, languages, and modalities, highlighting current limitations in clinical reasoning capabilities. MMTClinic provides a valuable resource for advancing multilingual, multimodal, and time-series-aware medical AI research. The dataset will be made publicly available on successful acceptance of the work. --- ### MABPD: Multi-Agent Bias Probing & Detection via Structured Argument Debate Authors: Garvit Joshi, Stavya Dhyani, Jasmine, Arun Chauhan Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04841v1 Media bias in news articles operates through subtle linguistic cues---loaded language, selective framing, and strategic omission---that resist single-model detection and have traditionally required large annotated corpora for supervised training. We ask whether structured multi-agent deliberation can serve as a principled, training-free alternative to supervised classification for this task. We introduce MABPD (Multi-Agent Bias Probing & Detection), a pipeline in which three specialized LLM agents analyze an article from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements through a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD implements a domain-motivated asymmetric burden of proof---biased claims without grounded textual evidence carry zero weight---combined with role-weighted voting and post-consensus verification, replacing task-specific supervised decision boundaries with explicit deliberative structure. Ablation confirms that this structured deliberation, not mere agent parallelism, drives performance: removing the debate module reduces F1 by up to 10.6 points. On the BABE benchmark (4,121 expert-annotated sentences), MABPD achieves 83.4% macro F1 on the held-out test split---within 0.7 percentage points (pp) of the supervised SOTA (MAGPIE, 84.1% macro F1; Horych et al., 2024)---without any task-specific training or threshold tuning on annotated data. Cross-dataset evaluation on the SemEval 2019 HyperPartisan corpus (644 articles) yields 75.0% zero-shot accuracy, within 7.2 pp of the supervised SOTA accuracy (82.2%; Kiesel et al. 2019), confirming transfer across annotation regimes. We release the full pipeline and evaluation code. --- ### Long Horizon Transformer Quantile Fault Prediction for Multi Site Industrial Predictive Maintenance Authors: David J Poland, Daniele Ravi, Na Helian Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04840v1 Long-horizon predictive maintenance requires models to distinguish slowly evolving degradation from normal operating-regime variation over planning windows measured in days rather than hours. This paper evaluates whether an explicit conditional-quantile representation provides an informative classifier interface for this problem. The proposed TQRNN30d framework combines a dual-stage quantile regression neural network (QRNN) feature extractor with a multi-stream temporal fusion classifier. Each hourly word of 81-channel machine behaviour is mapped to a 324-dimensional quantile-state representation, and 720 ordered hourly words form the 30-day document supplied to the long-horizon model. The classifier fuses quantile states with dynamic covariates, channel-level static metadata, and a 168-hour latent-history stream using gated residual processing, causal recurrent encoding, and metadata-conditioned cross-modal attention. A bounded instability-aware signal derived from sustained one-word-ahead prediction-error divergence provides auxiliary memory modulation at the longest horizon. Evaluation uses a machine-disjoint 43/14/15 train/validation/test allocation across 72 machines in nine manufacturing facilities. At 30 days, TQRNN30d achieves 79.97% F1, 80.18% recall, 81.82% precision, 82.39% accuracy, and 0.820 ROC-AUC. It leads all 18 evaluated baselines at the 7-, 14-, and 30-day fixed-threshold comparisons, with the largest F1 advantage at 14 days. The results support held-out-machine performance within the observed homogeneous nine-facility fleet, but do not establish unseen-site, cross-equipment, or cross-sector generalisation. --- ### PAPT++: Risk-Aware Adversarial Tuning and Generation for Single Domain Generalization Authors: Zhipeng Xu, De Cheng, Xinyang Jiang, Lingfeng He, Huaijie Wang, Dongsheng Li, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04837v1 Single domain generalization (SDG) aims to learn a model from one labeled source domain that generalizes to unseen target domains. A common strategy is to enrich the source distribution with augmented or generated samples, and recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models provide a strong generative prior for this purpose. However, diversity alone is insufficient for robust generalization, because useful generated samples should also capture variations that the current classifier finds difficult. Motivated by distributionally robust optimization (DRO), we define a semantic ambiguity set in the class-conditional generative space of a pretrained T2I model and search it for samples with high classification loss under the current classifier. To this end, we introduce PAPT++, a risk-aware adversarial generation-training framework for SDG. PAPT++ first learns diverse semantic reference images for each class through image-text alignment and intra-class diversity regularization. These references then serve as denoising targets during classifier-guided diffusion synthesis, reducing semantic drift while guiding generation toward challenging variations. The generated samples are combined with the source data to update the classifier, and the updated classifier guides the next synthesis round in return. In this way, PAPT++ progressively exposes the classifier to challenging yet semantically consistent variations. Extensive experiments on standard SDG benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PAPT++ method and the effectiveness of its main components. --- ### On Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models Authors: Elisabeth Kirsten, Nicole Krämer, Muhammad Bilal Zafar Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04835v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used not only to retrieve information, but to answer questions, explain, teach, and support inquiry. In such settings, evaluation cannot be exhausted by accuracy or alignment alone. A system may give a correct answer while still narrowing users' access %to knowledge. to alternative valid answers, explanations, or reasoning routes. Drawing on the broader notion of epistemic diversity in philosophy and social epistemology, we formalize it in the context of LLMs as the range of valid answers, explanations, and reasoning routes that an LLM exposes to users. We argue that epistemic diversity is a useful evaluation dimension for settings where LLMs are used to support knowledge-intensive tasks. We propose a preliminary framework for conceptualizing and measuring epistemic diversity in LLMs, and operationalize it in two domains. We find that frontier LLMs often exhibit epistemic narrowness, repeatedly collapsing large valid answer spaces onto small canonical subsets. These findings suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond accuracy-oriented paradigms and treat epistemic diversity as an important dimension of model capability. --- ### PACE: Propagation-Aware Collaborative Correction for One-Shot Personalized Federated Graph Learning Authors: Ruizhe Huang, Chengran Li, Xiaochuan Shi Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04832v1 Client heterogeneity creates both an opportunity and a risk in personalized federated graph learning. Knowledge held by other subgraphs may complement a receiver's Local model, but an incompatible transfer can override reliable predictions. One-shot communication sharpens this tension because an unsuitable server return cannot be corrected later. We introduce PACE, which treats collaborative knowledge as a compact correction to a complete Local predictor rather than as its replacement. Each client uploads a rank-r update carrier and a diagonal sketch of propagated message moments. The server uses them to construct a propagation-aware, receiver-anchored correction, while the receiver retains its full Local model. Convex negative-log-likelihood calibration (CNLL) then selects one coefficient between Local and External logits using validation nodes; model parameters remain fixed and no feedback is sent. At Rank-6, personalized returns occupy 9.6-17.6% of dense tensor bytes across the six evaluated datasets. The correction receives nonzero weight and improves both Accuracy and weighted-F1 over Local on five datasets; on ogbn-arxiv, CNLL assigns zero predictive weight to the correction and preserves Local predictions exactly. Applying the same CNLL rule to matched baselines on three citation datasets does not account for these gains. The central result is therefore that a small transported correction can augment a complete Local model when receiver evidence supports it while leaving the Local prediction unchanged otherwise. --- ### Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Layer-Wise Multi-Threshold Random Sketching Authors: Xu Zhang, Xingyu Hou, Jiacheng Cheng, Kaiyuan Feng, Maoguo Gong Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04830v1 Personalized federated learning (PFL) is a promising paradigm for collaborative learning over distributed devices, where edge nodes collaboratively train personalized models without sharing raw data. Although PFL addresses data heterogeneity by learning client-specific models, it still suffers from substantial uplink and downlink communication costs when exchanging high-dimensional parameters in bandwidth-constrained systems. Recent one-bit methods achieve extreme compression, but they usually rely on a single thresholding rule applied to the whole model. This design has two limitations. First, it overlooks layer-wise differences in parameter distributions and quantization sensitivities. Second, a single threshold provides only coarse binary information and cannot capture fine-grained variations in parameter distributions. To address these issues, we propose a communication-efficient PFL framework via layer-wise multi-threshold random sketching. In the proposed method, each layer is assigned its own set of quantization thresholds, so that the compressed representation can adapt to layer-specific statistics while using multiple intervals to provide a finer low-bit description of sketched parameters. The proposed method supports bidirectional communication using compact low-bit sketches and improves the communication-accuracy tradeoff compared with existing one-bit compression approaches. --- ### Weather-Conditioned Depth Anything Authors: Zhaoming Xu, Chan-Wei Hu, Kuan-Ru Huang, Zihao Zhu, Renjie Li, Yang Zhou, Zhengzhong Tu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04827v1 Monocular depth estimation foundation models, such as the Depth Anything series, have achieved remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, they still suffer from critical failures under adverse weather conditions, such as fog, rain, snow, or at night. To address this, we present Weather-Conditioned Depth Anything (DA-W), a framework that explicitly disentangles style from content for weather-robust depth estimation. Specifically, we introduce a Style Filter trained on a curated mix of real and synthetic degradation datasets to extract content-independent, degradation-aware weather embeddings. This style embedding is then injected into the Depth Anything backbone using a parameter-efficient, zero-initialized adapter. Such a lightweight modulation allows a single unified model to robustly adapt to diverse conditions, including fog, rain, snow, and low-light, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of its core generalization abilities in normal conditions. We train the adapter using a pseudo-label distillation and alignment strategy. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DA-W achieves state-of-the-art robust depth estimation, improving AbsRel by an average of 3.7% on our curated weather benchmarks, while matching or slightly outperforming performance on standard clean benchmarks. Our project page is available at https://zhaoming-tamu.github.io/WCDA/. --- ### Generating Constructive Feedback on Stories via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Maja Stahl, Timon Ziegenbein, Henning Wachsmuth Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04824v1 Constructive feedback is crucial for creative writers to refine their storytelling abilities. Since receiving feedback from human experts is often costly and time-intensive, large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable and efficient alternative as automatic writing assistants. Despite their potential, research indicates that LLM-generated feedback is often generic, lacks actionability, and fails to identify which writing issue is most critical. To address these limitations, we present a reinforcement learning approach that steers LLMs to generate constructive feedback without the need for ground-truth feedback. We train our model using group relative policy optimization (GRPO) with a novel multi-component reward function aiming at constructiveness: it prioritizes feedback that is uniquely tailored to the story, helps to improve story quality, and addresses the most critical writing issue. In automatic and human evaluation across three story corpora, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs (including Gemini) and competitive baselines. We find that providing actionable suggestions is the main driver of feedback constructiveness. --- ### Reinforcement Learning for improving Large Language Models' Catalan text simplification capabilities Authors: Arnau Ayguadé Domingo, Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04823v1 Although automatic text simplification (ATS) is critical for accessibility, its progress has not matched the rapid evolution of broader natural language processing techniques. This paper investigates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the quality of ATS for low-resource languages using Large Language Models (LLMs). The paper introduces a novel reward function, designed to guide LLMs toward a targeted simplification style with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that combines the SARI metric with specific penalty components. The effectiveness of GRPO with this reward function is motivated and demonstrated by post-training IberianLLM-7B-Instruct on the ASSET dataset. After post-training on the English ASSET, the model's ATS performance improves on two curated Catalan benchmarks while also successfully suppressing previously observed negative behaviors. Cross-lingual transfer learning is explored by translating ASSET into Catalan and Spanish and post-training the model on each version, but these fail to show a significant improvement on the out-of-domain benchmark. --- ### Minimax Lower Bound for Estimating Diffusion-based Local Intrinsic Dimension Authors: Jaehee Seo, Wontae Jeong, Jisu Kim Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04822v1 While diffusion-based methods have recently emerged as effective tools for probing the intrinsic geometry of high-dimensional data, their statistical difficulty remains largely unexplored. We study estimation of the finite-scale population functional underlying FLIPD (Kamkari et al., 2024; arXiv:2406.03537), a diffusion-based local intrinsic dimension (LID) quantity defined through the logarithmic scale derivative of a Gaussian-smoothed density. Intuitively, Gaussian smoothing turns local dimension into a scale law: near a $d$-dimensional manifold, the kernel mass grows like $σ^d$, so differentiating with respect to the noise scale reveals the intrinsic exponent. Under a regular manifold model, we show uniformly over the model class that the finite-scale field differs from the manifold dimension $d$ by at most $O(σ^2)$. We then establish a minimax lower bound of order $(nσ^d)^{-1}$ for estimating this finite-scale field from $n$ observations, for $n^{-1/(2α+d)}\lesssimσ\leσ_0$. At the smallest scale covered by our lower-bound construction, the bound becomes the nonparametric rate $n^{-2α/(2α+d)}$. --- ### Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent Ransomware Detection and Family Attribution Authors: Mubashar Iqbal, Asifullah Khan Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04820v1 Ransomware detection and family attribution require analysis of different modalities because it can use packing, obfuscation, process manipulation and runtime evasion techniques. However, conventional multimodal usually uses all available modalities for every sample resulting in unnecessary computational cost and increased latency. In this paper, we present a Cost Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent System (HMAS) for adaptive ransomware detection. The proposed architecture organizes specialized agents into hierarchical domain controllers coordinated by a Meta Orchestrator. Static analysis is used as the initial low-cost modality while additional dynamic and memory modality is selectively used when confidence is insufficient or specialist agents exhibit disagreement. A cost model incorporates modality use and processing overhead. It enables the orchestration policy to balance analysis performance against computational cost. A locally deployed large language model provides verification for selected difficult cases without replacing the deterministic pipeline. Experimental evaluation compares adaptive HMAS with static only, static plus dynamic and exhaustive analysis policies across binary ransomware detection and multiclass family attribution. The complete HMAS achieved 96.57% accuracy, 0.96 F1-score and 0.99 ROC-AUC for binary detection. It also achieved 0.90 macro-F1 for family attribution. At the same time, the HMAS reduced average analysis cost by 43.97% relative to exhaustive analysis and substantially reduced average analysis latency except for the case where LLM is used. Routing analysis showed that 56.05% of cases were resolved using static evidence alone. Only 4.33% required the complete evidence pipeline. These findings demonstrate that adaptive HMAS can provide accuracy cost tradeoff for ransomware analysis while retaining support for heterogeneous and incomplete modalities. --- ### A Systematic Comparison of Multilingual Interpretability Methods Reveals Anisotropy-Driven Failures Authors: Oskar Holmström, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04819v1 Multilingual language models develop shared cross-lingual representations, and various interpretability methods claim to quantify this sharing. These methods have been developed largely in isolation, and when they disagree, it is unclear whether the disagreement reflects a property of the model or an artifact of the measurement. We compare four sharing metrics (CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO) across 21 base models from five families (125M-14B parameters) and correlate each with cross-lingual transfer on five downstream tasks. We find that the metrics differ in their quantification of cross-lingual sharing in these models and suggest that the disagreement traces to anisotropy, the tendency of representations to cluster in a narrow cone of the embedding space. Only ILO's correlation with cross-lingual transfer (Spearman's $ρ= 0.90$) survives controls for model size, family, and per-task variation. We therefore recommend ILO as the primary sharing metric, to be reported alongside anisotropy diagnostics. --- ### Federated Attack Campaign Detection via Contrastive Encoding of Threat Indicators in Gradient Updates Authors: Manuel Röder, Bibin Babu, Frank-Michael Schleif Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04815v1 Detecting orchestrated cyberattack campaigns that span multiple organizations traditionally requires sharing sensitive telemetry and threat intelligence across institutional boundaries and country borders, a barrier that Federated Learning removes by training shared threat detectors directly on local data. We propose FedIoC, a modular framework in which clients fold locally available structured threat indicators into their gradient updates; we instantiate the client-side encoder with a supervised contrastive loss over IoC-matched flows. Within each training batch, flows that match any known indicator pattern form the positive set; the contrastive objective pulls their learned embeddings together and pushes non-IoC embeddings away, so that campaign-relevant structure is, by design, expressed in the gradient direction. Clients sharing indicators for the same attack campaign then produce aligned gradient components, which the server clusters by the cosine similarity of their updates to recover global campaign patterns without any direct IoC transmission. We evaluate FedIoC on two public threat-detection benchmarks distributed across FL clients that each observe only a fragment of every active campaign and hold disjoint indicator sets derived from their local telemetry. In this regime the FL server recovers cross-organizational campaign cohorts directly from gradient geometry. We contribute FedIoC as a modular framework for this setting, and use it to pinpoint the non-IID gradient structure as the main driver of recovery and to define the open problem of designing encoders that improve on it. --- ### CPR-IE:A Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency Metric Authors: Xiantao Jiang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04809v1 Comparing intelligent systems under deployment constraints requires more than predictiveaccuracy.This paper develops Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency (CPR-IE) as a protocol-relative ordering by representational economy, predictive quality, and resourceburden. The analysis separates two questions-how raw resource consumption is represented, andhow the resulting attributes are aggregated. Proportional-increment composition uniquely yieldslogarithmic cumulative burden, and context-independent ratio response yields power responsesto compression, prediction, and burden; with reference normalization the representation is I(C,P,T).We prove Pareto consistency, unit invariance, boundary behavior, trade-off identities, ranking-stability regions, and cross-task aggregation. A translog parent model makes interaction restrictions explicit, and further results establish cardinal and ordinal identification, sub-Gaussianfinite-sample ranking guarantees, robust selection under exponent uncertainty, and deterministicregret bounds. Minimum description length, algorithmic complexity, proper scoring rules, varia-tional inference, and Landauer's principle motivate measurement choices but do not entail theformula. CPR-IE is a constructed efficiency representation, not a universal law or a definition ofintelligence itself. --- ### Recurrence Is Not Enough: Causally Validating Multilingual SAE Translation Features in Gemma 2 and 3 Authors: Giang Son Nguyen, Nhi Ngoc-Yen Nguyen, Wray Buntine, Dung D. Le Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04808v1 Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to explain and steer language-model behavior, but it remains unclear whether a feature found in one language context plays the same causal role when processing prompts in another language. We study this question using translation-initiation features (Wu et al., 2026). We reproduce the SAE feature discovery method from Wu et al. in Gemma 2 and extend it to multilingual settings that vary prompt language, source language, and target language. We then test whether features that recur across settings affect translation behavior by amplifying or ablating their activations during inference. We also examine whether the method can be applied to Gemma 3. In both models, we observe an identical finding: although we can find more than 20 features that activate frequently across all discovery settings, causal validation shows that nearly all have small or inconsistent effects. In contrast, one feature -- Gemma 2's (L10, 5717) and Gemma 3's (L20, 2456) -- consistently improves COMET scores when amplified and degrades them when ablated across 23 language settings. These results show that feature recurrence can overstate cross-lingual transfer, while identifying a language-agnostic translation-initiation direction in Gemma 2 and Gemma 3. --- ### CoLMIN: LLM-based Multi-Decision Path Negotiation for Cooperative Autonomous Driving Authors: Zhe Huang, Zhaoxin Fan, Shuo Wang, Wenjun Wu, Xuan Zhao, Min Liu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04807v1 Multi-vehicle cooperative autonomous driving enhances the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems through information sharing among connected vehicles, demonstrating significant potential for improving traffic safety. LLM-based approaches leverage strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enable effective inter-vehicle negotiation and improve cooperative driving performance. However, driving decisions in complex traffic scenarios are inherently multi-solution in nature. As a result, existing negotiation-based methods often converge prematurely to suboptimal solutions, hindering consensus formation and limiting the practical deployment of cooperative autonomous driving systems. To address this challenge, we propose CoLMIN, the LLM-based multi-decision path negotiation framework for cooperative autonomous driving, achieving stable decision consensus through multi-decision path negotiation and reflective reasoning. To achieve stable and high-quality consensus in cooperative autonomous driving, CoLMIN consists of three key components: (i) an LLM-based Multi-Intent Negotiation module (LMin), which adopts a Negotiator-Evaluator paradigm and generates multiple candidate driving intentions for joint evaluation; (ii) an Evaluation-based Shallow Reflection Module (ESRM), which analyzes negotiation outcomes and provides feedback to guide subsequent negotiations, thereby accelerating consensus formation; and (iii) an LLM-based Deep Reflection Module (LDRM), which performs long-term reflection over negotiation histories to mitigate cognitive fixation and prevent the system from converging to suboptimal solutions. Experimental results in the CARLA simulation environment demonstrate that CoLMIN significantly outperforms existing methods in challenging interactive driving scenarios. --- ### When Financial Fine-tuning Fails: A Three-Level Detectability Analysis of Numerical Hallucination in Domain-Adapted Language Models Authors: Xiaodong Li, Peiwei Liu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04806v1 Financial large language models are increasingly deployed for summarization of reports and disclosures, where numerical hallucination poses significant practical risks. While prior work often attributes such hallucination to insufficient numerical reasoning, this assumption has not been systematically tested under controlled fine-tuning settings. In this paper, we conduct a cost-effective, controlled study of numerical hallucination in financial summarization across three model variants: a base instruction-tuned model, a domain language-adapted model (FT-A), and a numeracy-enhanced domain model (FT-A+B+C). We introduce a three-level detectability taxonomy distinguishing between overt hallucination (currency-denominated fabrication), covert-explicit hallucination (professional-convention numbers), and covert-implicit hallucination (ungrounded quantitative claims). Our results reveal that domain fine-tuning substantially degrades numerical restraint at all detectability levels. While the Base model maintains near-zero hallucination rates (5.4\%), FT-A exhibits 82.5\% overt hallucination and FT-A+B+C reaches 98\%. Contrary to intuition, numeracy supervision amplifies rather than mitigates hallucination across all levels. We identify template injection---the insertion of memorized canonical values regardless of input content---as a primary hallucination mechanism in fine-tuned models. These findings demonstrate that numerical hallucination in financial summarization is driven by the degradation of numerical restraint through domain adaptation, not by insufficient numerical reasoning. We recommend that evaluation protocols assess hallucination across all detectability levels and that deployment practices include explicit mechanisms for grounding-aware generation or abstention. --- ### MedFlow: Class-Aware Multi-Scale Generation for Medical Time-Series Synthesis Authors: Yanhao Huang, Shibo Feng, Wanjin Feng, Peilin Zhao, Chunyan Miao Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04804v1 Synthetic medical time-series generation can alleviate data scarcity and support the development of reliable clinical prediction models. However, existing methods mainly focus on matching the overall distribution and temporal dynamics of real data, which does not necessarily ensure strong downstream utility on imbalanced medical datasets. Clinically informative patterns often occur at heterogeneous temporal scales, while rare minority-class characteristics can be obscured by dominant population patterns. To address these challenges, we propose MedFlow, a class-aware multi-scale flow matching framework for medical time-series synthesis. MedFlow employs a vector-quantized multi-scale tokenizer to represent medical sequences at complementary temporal resolutions, capturing both coarse clinical trends and fine-grained dynamics. We further introduce Token Marginal Guidance, which incorporates class-conditional token statistics directly into the flow matching process to steer generation toward class-specific regions of the learned tokens. This mechanism strengthens minority-class patterns, while preserving the global and tail distributions of real data. Experiments on four public datasets covering electronic health records, EEG, and ECG signals demonstrate that MedFlow consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art diffusion-based baselines across downstream prediction tasks. On average, it improves AUPRC by 5.8%, reduces Context-FID by 88.6%, and achieves 3.8$\times$ higher sampling throughput. --- ### Hierarchical Possession-Aware Graph Pointer Network for Pass Receiver Selection Authors: Jingyi Wang, Da Li, Kaixin Wang, Zhangqin Huang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04803v1 Pass receiver selection is a fundamental task in football analytics, aiming to predict the intended receiver under a given game state. This task is challenging with event-centered freeze-frame observations, a broadcast-like setting that provides only partial and variable player visibility without complete trajectories or stable player identities. The model must therefore reason over anonymous visible candidates, opponent pressure, and recent context under partial observation. To address this setting, we propose a Hierarchical Possession-aware Graph Pointer Network (HPGPN), which formulates pass receiver selection as variable-size candidate prediction over visible teammates. HPGPN jointly models current player interactions, local event context, and possession-level temporal dynamics. It represents the current pass situation with a graph, incorporates fixed event context, and uses dynamic possession history to capture how the attacking sequence evolves. Candidate representations are refined hierarchically by integrating spatial, contextual, and historical evidence, and a glimpse pointer head scores the receiver candidates. Experiments on public football event and freeze-frame data show that HPGPN improves pass receiver selection performance. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of graph-based interaction modeling, fixed event context, and dual-branch dynamic possession-history modeling. --- ### Linguistic Trajectory Encoding for Efficient Long-Horizon Spatial Memory in Embodied Agents Authors: Tianyidan Xie, Shenyi Wang, Qiang Tang, Mingjie Wang, Zhicheng Qiu, Xuanfu Li, Zhan Xu, Jian Yang, Lanjun Wang, Zili Yi Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04802v3 Embodied agents performing long-horizon tasks require a memory representation in which the state transitions of dynamic objects remain queryable in natural language across hours-to-days observation horizons. Existing systems either drop fine-grained motion (clip-level video-language embeddings), keep it only as raw coordinates (geometric SLAM), or organise it around immediate task context (agent working memories). None of them gives the agent a per-object timeline whose state transitions are themselves queryable in language. Our key contribution is \textbf{Linguistic Trajectory Encoding} (LTE), which compresses dynamic object motion histories via a hybrid representation combining natural language descriptions, sparse spatial anchors, and visual anchors. LTE adapts compression to motion complexity by anchoring periods without reliable observations to the last seen location, while representing motion with geometric waypoints and linguistic descriptions to preserve accuracy. To evaluate these capabilities across extended time horizons, we construct the \textbf{Spatial Memory Benchmark} (SMB) from EgoLife multi-day recordings, targeting capabilities absent in existing benchmarks: semantic trajectory retrieval and long-horizon object retrieval. On SMB, the LTE-based system achieves $45.3\%$ success in semantic trajectory retrieval and $48.7\%$ in long-horizon object retrieval, outperforming structured-memory and VLM baselines (best prior: $31.9\%$ and $34.4\%$). LTE achieves trajectory compression by factors of $8.7\times$ to $26.1\times$ with sub-second query latency on $24$\,h video. On Ego4D natural-language queries, the system reaches $28.75\%$ / $55.10\%$ R@1/R@5, $+15.80$ / $+31.30$ pts over EgoVLPv2. --- ### Whose record is this? Diagnosing and authorizing record use in personalized multimodal models Authors: Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Chenyang Liu, Haoji Zhang, Ming Sun Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04801v1 Contextualized visual personalization can retrieve a true record yet apply it to the wrong visual subject. We formalize when a record may condition an answer as \emph{record authorization}: subject presence ($P$), record-edge validity ($E$), and answer support ($S$) must all hold. We call violations visual memory misbinding (VMM). We construct RecordAuth-Diag, a 3,690-case matched diagnostic suite that changes one image--record edge while holding the query, question, record text, and image multiset fixed. Card removal and nonce relabeling attribute these failures to supplied records. Raw-bank failures span Qwen-, Phi-, and Gemma-family interfaces: Gemma-3-4B-IT reaches 63.69\% local unauthorized use at 25.75\% clean recall. CoViP remains at 26.02\%, versus 22.49\% for its Qwen backbone at similar clean recall. Typed pre-generation authorization reduces Qwen card exposure on RecordAuth-Diag from 43.63\% to 3.06\%, while positive recall changes from 86.26\% to 60.90\%. Full $P\wedge E\wedge S$ validation uses 560 localized DAVIS cases: top-1 relevance and typed authorization have comparable release (28.93\% and 28.39\%) but 6.79\% and 0.89\% unsafe release, respectively. Of the 33 additional unsafe cases removed, 27 are support, 4 edge, 2 clean, and 0 boundary cases. Thus the observed increment is an $E\wedge S$ decision dominated by support, not an edge check alone. Appearance supplies $E$ evidence only conditional on $P$; authenticated subject tokens instantiate the missing presence witness as a sufficiency control. The claims concern the evaluated contracts, not natural prevalence, consent, or visual identity --- ### Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation of CLIP for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval Authors: Hyun Seok Seong, Woojin Jun, SuBeen Lee, Jae-Pil Heo Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04800v1 Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos that contain moments relevant to a text query. Since the target moment occupies only a portion of the video, PRVR requires retrieval based on fine-grained understanding beyond coarse video-level matching. However, existing methods often rely on frozen CLIP frame features, which lack temporal understanding. Even with recent progress in parameter-efficient CLIP adaptation, video-level predictions can still be supported by imprecise frame-level evidence. In this paper, we propose an Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation (ITA) framework for PRVR. First, our Backbone-Internal Temporal Adaptation allows the last few visual transformer layers to attend over groups of neighboring frames. This provides temporally aware frame embeddings while keeping CLIP frozen and training only adaptation parameters. Second, we introduce Affinity-Weighted Gradient Propagation to address the weakly supervised nature of PRVR, softly aggregating top-$k$ frames based on text-frame affinities and propagating learning signals to multiple query-relevant frames. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PRVR benchmarks, demonstrates robust cross-dataset transfer, and retrieves substantially more accurate frame-level evidence within ground-truth query-relevant moments. Our code is available at github.com/hynnsk/ITA. --- ### How Faithful Is Attribution for Sales Forecasting? A Counterfactual Study Authors: Glib Kechyn Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04797v1 Deep models for sales forecasting, such as WaveNet-style dilated convolutional networks, are accurate but opaque: when a single model predicts sales for one of many series, it offers no account of why. We add a post-hoc, architecture-agnostic counterfactual interpretability layer to a multi-series WaveNet forecaster trained on the full Corporacion Favorita grocery dataset (174,685 series over 1,688 days). The method decomposes each forecast into contributions that sum exactly to the predicted value, avoiding the allocation artifacts we observed with additive SHAP-style attribution. We evaluate faithfulness with a deletion/insertion protocol and find a statistically significant effect on both tests (deletion gap 0.22, p<0.001; insertion gap 0.27, p<0.01; robust across five background-sampling seeds), establishing that the attributions reflect genuine model behavior rather than plausible-looking artifacts. We then characterize, honestly, where attribution is and is not informative: reliance on the promotion signal is heterogeneous across series (median ratio approximately 1.0, with roughly 20% of series showing a strong effect), and the model captures the shape of the weekly sales cycle (day-of-week r=0.78) while systematically under-predicting its amplitude. Our contribution is not improved accuracy but an interpretability layer with a rigorous faithfulness evaluation and a candid account of its limits. --- ### ProtLingo: Efficient Protein Language Modeling via Conditional Memory and Expert Routing Authors: Mingrui Li, Sixian Shen, Minzhang Li, Ruiyi Zhang, Kexin Zhang, Jiakai Zhang, Jingyi Yu Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04793v1 Proteins perform diverse cellular functions, and even single amino-acid substitutions can alter stability, activity, or molecular interactions. Protein language models (PLMs) provide a scalable approach for modeling such sequence--function relationships from unlabeled sequences, but increasing the size of dense Transformer backbones often brings substantial computational cost without consistently improving mutation-sensitive prediction. We introduce ProtLingo, an efficient PLM framework that augments a pretrained single-sequence backbone with conditional local memory and sparse expert routing. ProtLingo maps contextual residue representations into route-specific discrete codes, composes centered local windows into latent $N$-gram addresses, and retrieves reusable residual signals associated with recurring local sequence contexts. In parallel, selected feed-forward blocks are upcycled into sparse Mixture-of-Experts layers with shared and routed experts, enabling residue-dependent computation while activating only a subset of parameters. Experiments on protein fitness prediction, FLIP benchmarks, and supervised contact prediction show that ProtLingo achieves competitive performance with a 150M-scale backbone, including strong parameter efficiency on mutation-effect prediction and preserved long-range structural representations. --- ### Can Activation Steering Capture Multidimensional Authorship Style? Authors: Hieu Tran, Calvin Bao, Marine Carpuat Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04792v1 Activation steering has shown promise for controlling LLM generation along well-defined attributes, but it remains unclear whether it can handle the multidimensional and hard-to-define nature of authorship style. We ask whether structured contrastive prompting along rhetorically-motivated dimensions can construct rich style representations directly in activation space, bypassing the need for natural language style descriptors or dedicated training. We find that the resulting directions share a common authorship backbone while conflicting on aspect-specific residuals that carry genuine stylistic signal, explaining why naive aggregation fails. We operationalize this in Aspect-Aware Activation Steering (A3S), a training-free framework that merges per-aspect contrastive directions with interference-aware aggregation and tunes steering strength per instance. A3S improves authorship style transfer where it is genuinely multi-aspect, outperforms a trained baseline in preference evaluations on out-of-domain benchmarks, and keeps target-exemplar overlap consistently low. --- ### An Attention-Guided Global and Local Fusion Framework for Lesion-Focused Image Classification Authors: Mst Shafia Tasnima, Md Samaun Elaheea, Tanjim Taharat Aurpab, Md Musfique Anwar Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04791v1 Lesion-focused image classification presents a core analytical challenge, as discriminative signals are often sparse, spatially dispersed, and easily obscured by background noise, while conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) process entire images uniformly and may dilute signal relevance. This study hypothesizes that adaptive fusion of global contextual information and lesion-focused local information can improve classification performance compared with using either representation independently. We propose a three-branch, attention-guided deep learning framework built on Densely Connected Convolutional Network-121 (DenseNet-121) to improve feature attribution, interpretability, and classification reliability. The architecture consists of a global branch that learns representations from full images, followed by Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to generate attention maps that highlight prediction-relevant regions and produce masked inputs, and a local branch enhanced with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to extract refined spatial and channel-wise features from these focused regions. An adaptive fusion branch integrates global and local representations by learning instance-specific weights, allowing dynamic prioritization between contextual and localized information. The framework is evaluated on a synthetic Spot Pattern Dataset (SSPD) and three benchmark datasets, including skin lesion, guava leaf, and grape leaf image datasets, where the fusion branch outperformed the individual global and local branches, reaching 97.75% accuracy on the skin lesion dataset and 99.64% on the guava leaf dataset. The results highlight the value of attention-guided architectures in healthcare analytics by improving model transparency, strengthening feature relevance, and supporting more reliable data-driven decision-making in medical image analysis. --- ### Learning-Augmented Algorithms: Guarantees, Construction Mechanisms, and System-Level Implications Authors: Hailiang Zhao, Xueyan Tang, Peng Chen, Zenong Ye, Tianjun Zhu, Jianwei Yin, Shuiguang Deng Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04787v2 Learning-augmented algorithms use fallible predictions while retaining formal performance guarantees. This survey synthesizes prediction interfaces, error measures, consistency--robustness trade-offs, and five representative construction mechanisms across online optimization, caching, learned data structures, graph problems, and mechanism design. An orthogonal theorem-level axis distinguishes achieved upper bounds from matched asymptotic dependence. Formal guarantees are separated from empirical systems evidence, with explicit treatment of prediction cost, feedback, and composition. The resulting synthesis states sufficient conditions for limited end-to-end reasoning and delineates open problems in cost-aware prediction, endogenous error, semantic predictors, and benchmarking. --- ### CLON: Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding for Zero-Shot 6D Pose Front-Ends Authors: Seojin Ji, Yoojin Kwon, Hyung-Sin Kim Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04784v1 Zero-shot 6D pose estimation pipelines increasingly rely on strong downstream pose solvers, but their performance is often limited by the front-end: object proposals must preserve partially visible true positives while rejecting semantically plausible distractors. We introduce Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding (CLON), a front-end requiring no task-specific training for new objects. Given rendered templates of the onboarded object set, CLON constructs a linguistic semantic memory for top-down proposal generation and object-set cue weights for calibrated proposal scoring. The linguistic memory guides SAM 3 toward high-recall proposals for onboarded objects, while cue weights are computed once from the onboarded object set before scene inference and kept fixed during online scoring. On seven BOP-Classic-Core datasets, CLON improves detection AP by 8.1 percentage points (pp), segmentation AP by 6.2 pp, and downstream 6D pose AR by up to 4.1 pp over CNOS and SAM-6D front-ends. --- ### DODR: Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space Authors: Weicai Huang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04782v1 Autoregressive (AR) large language models formulate reasoning as token-level probabilistic sampling, which induces three fundamental defects in complex logical reasoning: error accumulation, probability substituting necessity, and the linear-chain information bottleneck. This paper proposes the Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space architecture (DODR), which reconstructs reasoning as reasoning-graph computation in a high-dimensional linear-algebraic space. Reasoning states are represented as snapshot vectors whose primitives are semantic units (phrases or sentences) rather than tokens, and each inference step is a deterministic matrix operation with no token sampling. Peirce's three inference types are formalized as three trainable matrix operators: a rank-deficient deduction operator (information collapse), a full-rank induction operator (information expansion), and an abduction operator defined as the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of deduction (information hypothesizing). We prove that the operator set is minimal and complete given Peirce's trichotomy, that no single "super-operator" can realize all three types (a rank obstruction), and that reasoning graphs are Turing-complete with contractive backflow converging by Banach's fixed-point theorem. Experiments on 503 sample records (420 deduplicated samples) across dedicated and end-to-end settings show: deduction loss converges to 1.40e-05; induction achieves 0.9996 generalization coverage with 20/20 hard vetoes on counterexamples; abduction solutions exceed the random baseline by 28x with judgment accuracies of 72.5% (58/80, Wilson 95% CI (61.9%, 81.1%)) and 81.7% (49/60, CI (70.1%, 89.4%)); frozen operators attain 100% (60/60) on unseen cross-domain deduction. The architecture provides a structural zero-hallucination guarantee and a three-layer continual-learning mechanism. All data and code are released. --- ### CoMLP: Cooperatively-Gated MLPs for Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Information Fusion in Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Mingyuan Meng, Shuchang Ye, Mingjian Li, Zhenyu Zhao, Jinman Kim, Lei Bi Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04781v1 Multi-modal medical images and clinical reports provide complementary anatomical, functional, and semantic information for medical image segmentation. Effectively exploiting these heterogeneous sources requires fine-grained cross-modal information fusion that preserves subtle spatial details while capturing semantic dependencies across modalities. Existing fusion approaches frequently rely on cross-attention, whose computational burden increases rapidly with spatial resolution, making dense cross-modal interaction difficult on high-resolution feature maps, particularly for volumetric medical images. In this work, we propose CoMLP, a cooperatively-gated MLP module for fine-grained cross-modal information fusion in medical image segmentation. CoMLP models cross-modal dependencies through cooperative cross-gating, built upon complementary regional and dilated MLP interactions, to capture local and global cross-modal dependencies. We further develop a multi-source fusion architecture in which CoMLP performs both inter-image fusion across imaging modalities and vision-language fusion between visual features and textual reports, enabling heterogeneous information to be integrated without relying on dense cross-attention. Extensive experiments on five medical segmentation benchmarks, covering 2D/3D images, clinical reports, multiple imaging modalities, and diverse anatomical regions, demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art multi-modal and language-guided segmentation methods. Ablation studies further show that fine-grained interaction at high spatial resolutions and complementary local-global fusion are critical to the performance gains. These results demonstrate the potential of MLP-based interaction as an effective alternative for fine-grained cross-modal information fusion in medical image segmentation. --- ### Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning: A Survey Authors: Huan Liu, Pengfei Jiao, Jie Yin, Hongjiang Chen, Zhidong Zhao Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04779v1 Graph representation learning (GRL) serves as a canonical paradigm for modeling complex networks. However, real-world AI systems inherently manifest as evolving heterogeneous entities with complex interactions, posing significant challenges to static or homogeneous modeling. To address these complexities, representation learning for Dynamic Heterogeneous Graphs (DHGs) has emerged as a vital approach for learning low-dimensional representations that simultaneously preserve structural semantics and temporal dynamics. This survey presents the first systematic review of DHG representation learning methods. We first introduce a unified formal definition that encompasses both discrete-time and continuous-time DHGs from the perspective of temporal granularity. Building upon this formulation, we propose a novel algorithm-centric taxonomy that categorizes existing literature, including early embedding-based approaches, graph neural network (GNN)-based models, and relatively recent Transformer-based DHG methods, while explicitly highlighting their intrinsic modeling biases with respect to dynamic granularity. Furthermore, we summarize representative applications of DHG representation learning, along with commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss promising research directions that guide future advances in this rapidly evolving field. --- ### Diffusion Language Models for Mobile Edge Agentic AI: Foundations, Applications, and Challenges Authors: Chenqi Li, Minghui Min, Dusit Niyato, Wei Ni Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04778v1 Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a non-autoregressive alternative for mobile edge agentic artificial intelligence (AI) by refining tokens through iterative denoising rather than left-to-right decoding. Compared with autoregressive Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), DLMs can update multiple uncertain tokens in parallel and exploit bidirectional context throughout the generation process, enabling more flexible quality-latency trade-offs beyond fixed sequential decoding. These properties are particularly attractive for edge agents, where partial refinement, early exit, and constraint-guided correction can reduce response delay and communication overhead while improving robustness under noisy, incomplete, or dynamic contexts. This survey reviews DLM foundations and analyzes their suitability for edge settings under latency, memory, energy, bandwidth, privacy, and reliability constraints. We cover resource-efficient architectures, training and inference acceleration, compression, edge/cloud deployment, communication-aware serving, Internet of Things (IoT)/wireless applications, and evaluation of DLM-based agents. We further discuss open issues in long-context state management, split inference, trustworthy execution, multimodal grounding, and reproducible benchmarking. The goal is to connect DLM modeling properties, including bidirectionality, parallel refinement, controllability, and quality-latency elasticity, with system-level requirements of future mobile edge intelligence. --- ### LUMIN: Lightweight Universal Manufacturing Inspection Network for Anomaly Detection Authors: Pengfei Yang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04775v1 Industrial anomaly detection faces two engineering bottlenecks: memory bank construction latency and inference efficiency. Traditional sampling algorithms (Farthest Point Sampling, K-Means, etc.) rely on numerous backbone forward passes and iterative distance computations, with construction times ranging from minutes to hours; heavy computation components such as multi-scale feature extraction struggle to meet the millisecond-level real-time requirements of production lines. This paper focuses on sampling efficiency and inference optimization for industrial deployment with two core contributions: (1) PSP (Plugin Sampler Pipeline)---a four-stage adaptive memory bank sampling pipeline based on 18-dimensional pixel metadata and five complementary visual plugins. PSP completes all sampling with zero backbone forward passes; coarse filtering is sub-second numerical sorting, and metadata extraction is a one-time offline cost. PSP supports progressive deployment and incremental updates. (2) Two engineering optimization strategies---parallel memory bank similarity computation (reducing inference memory and latency by over 95\%) and stratified pixel sampling for large-scale evaluation (reducing computation time by 20$\times$ while keeping metrics stable). As a vehicle for validation, we introduce LUMIN (Lightweight Universal Manufacturing Inspection Network) with extreme segmentation-head compression, systematically exploring the accuracy-efficiency frontier against strong baselines. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that PSP matches state-of-the-art sampling accuracy at near-random construction cost (341$\times$ faster than FPS), while inference optimizations reduce evaluation time by 20$\times$ with negligible accuracy loss. --- ### Persistent Teacher Anchoring for Tool-Using Agents Authors: Hyun Bin Park, Kyungho Song, Sangmin Lee, Du-Seong Chang Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04773v1 Distillation is common in LLM post-training, where on-policy knowledge distillation (OPKD) uses student-generated trajectories to prepare the student for downstream RL. At each state, the student matches a next-token distribution supplied by the teacher. As the rollout enters states the teacher would not visit, the teacher-student distribution gap can accumulate. In tool use, this gap becomes consequential because student-written calls execute before supervision and their observations shape later prefixes. Proposer-verifier generation addresses this drift by letting the teacher decide which student-proposed text is retained during generation. Existing formulations govern text but leave tool execution outside their scope. We propose Persistent Teacher Anchoring (PTA), a student-induced but teacher-committed rollout construction. PTA retains chunk-level verification and adds turn-level commitment, allowing a call to reach the environment only after the teacher has verified the entire turn. Treating verified chunks as atomic generation units, we introduce persistent lookahead, which fills idle rollout capacity by advancing future samples and carrying unfinished ones across student updates under the fixed verifier. Across Search-R1-style retrieval and DeepEyes-style perception RL, applying PTA before downstream RL improves macro best@4 by 2.5 and 2.8 points over OPKD under the same downstream RL budget, while lookahead improves throughput by 24%. --- ### A Robust Watermark-based Fingerprint Framework for GNNs Ownership Verification Authors: Han Zhang, Yan Wang, Guanfeng Liu, Pengfei Ding, Huaxiong Wang, Kwok-Yan Lam Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04772v1 The high training cost of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has raised growing concerns regarding model ownership infringement, such as model stealing and unauthorized misuse. To verify model ownership and prevent significant economic losses, two groups of GNN Ownership Verification (OV) methods have been proposed: watermark-based methods and fingerprint-based methods. However, these methods typically face three limitations: (1) the performance degradation of protected models caused by out-of-distribution (OOD) watermark graphs with respect to the training set; (2) the unrealistic assumption that surrogate models have been trained on a watermark-containing training set; and (3) over-reliance on specific output levels for fingerprint extraction. In this paper, we propose a Robust watErMArk-based fingeRprint frameworK for GNNs, named REMARK. REMARK first generates carefully crafted in-distribution watermark graphs that maximize output differences between GNN models, thus mitigating OOD-induced performance degradation. REMARK then extracts robust fingerprints from these output differences to verify GNN ownership, thereby removing the assumptions that surrogate models must be trained on a watermark-containing dataset or expose specific output levels. Extensive experiments across widely used real-world datasets and GNN architectures demonstrate that REMARK achieves state-of-the-art OV accuracy and robustness while preserving the utility of protected models. --- ### Shadow Queries for Private Retrieval in Vector Databases Authors: Xinguo Feng, Zhongkui Ma, Zihan Wang, Chuan Yan, Guowei Yang, Alsharif Abuadbba, Guangdong Bai Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04767v1 Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on information retrieval (IR) systems, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), to incorporate domain-specific knowledge without costly re-training. These systems often store pre-computed document embeddings in cloud-based vector databases. However, such embeddings are vulnerable to embedding inversion attacks (EIAs), which can reconstruct their underlying text. Existing defenses, such as adding noise or scaling embeddings, often provide limited privacy or significantly reduce retrieval utility. We propose SHAQ (shadow query generation), a semantic-decomposition and embedding-decoupling defense against EIAs. SHAQ is based on the insight that EIAs rely on the strong coupling between an embedding and its original text. Instead of storing document embeddings directly, SHAQ uses a generative language model to create diverse shadow queries that capture different semantic aspects of each document. These queries are then encoded and stored in place of the original document embeddings, thereby decomposing document semantics and decoupling stored embeddings from the source text. Experiments across diverse IR datasets show that SHAQ substantially improves privacy while preserving retrieval utility, achieving a recovery rate as low as 0.2104, defending up to 19.50% more tokens than baseline defenses, and reaching up to 0.7967 MAP@10 with up to 5.53% utility improvement. These results demonstrate that semantic decomposition and embedding decoupling provide an effective alternative to directly modifying embeddings for defending against EIAs. --- ### When Does an Interpretation Count as Established? The Formation, Evaluation, and Responsibility of Interpretation in Generative AI Authors: Deyu Jing Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04766v1 Generative AI research has increasingly evaluated factuality, citation, coverage, and report structure. Yet passing such local checks does not by itself show that a humanistic interpretation has been established. This paper asks how an interpretation comes to be recognized within sociotechnical processes. It introduces three connected concepts. Interpretive appearance names the gap between the finished form of an output and the publicly traceable process through which materials, counterevidence, and revisions constrained the judgment. The evaluation contract names the bounded materials, tasks, criteria, permitted inferences, and failure conditions within which a local judgment is valid. Standing substitution names the unwarranted conversion of a genuine local pass into a stronger claim that an interpretation, result, or research capability has been established, without commensurate new evidence or bridging arguments. The paper then examines responsibility for judgment: a text may acquire recognition while no public structure remains for stating reasons, answering objections, revising, downgrading, or withdrawing the conclusion. Humanistic scholarship provides a revealing test because new materials and conceptual distinctions can alter both the question and the criteria of evaluation. The paper therefore develops delayed closure as a practice of keeping recognized interpretations revisable and proposes five public requirements concerning materials and versions, evidential roles, failure, contract revision, and responsibility. The argument is conceptual and normative: it does not claim to offer a benchmark or to determine whether models possess understanding. It instead explains why local evaluation, finished textual form, and public recognition must not be treated as sufficient evidence that an interpretation has been formed. --- ### Resilience Beyond Stationary Client Unavailability: Unlocking Efficient and Unbiased Federated Learning Authors: Ming Xiang, Stratis Ioannidis, Edmund Yeh, Carlee Joe-Wong, Lili Su Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04763v1 Due to resource constraints or external and internal uncertainties, clients in real-world federated learning systems are often intermittently available edge devices. In highly dynamic environments, the parameter server lacks prior real-time knowledge of clients' availability, making it challenging to adapt traditional federated learning algorithms to be resilient to uncertainties in client availability. If not carefully addressed, complex client availability can introduce significant bias, potentially harming the performance of the trained model. Most prior work either fails to account for non-stationary client availability dynamics or demands significant memory and computational overhead. This paper aims to develop efficient federated learning algorithms that are provably resilient to heterogeneous and non-stationary stochastic client availability. We propose FedSWE, which admits novel algorithmic structures to (i) compensate for missed computations, (ii) stabilize and diffuse the global updates over rounds, and (iii) evenly mix the local updates through implicit gossiping, despite being agnostic to non-stationary dynamics. Compared with the standard FedAvg, FedSWE introduces light additional memory and computation overhead. We show that FedSWE converges to a stationary point of non-convex objectives while achieving the desired linear speedup property in certain special cases. We corroborate our analysis with numerical experiments over diversified client unavailability dynamics on real-world data sets. --- ### Vectorizing Classical Tamil: Representation Learning for Verse-Commentary Pairs Authors: Amrit Gopinath, Sangeetha Sivanesan Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04755v2 We construct a corpus of 1,262 verse--commentary (urai) pairs from five Classical Tamil source sections, ranging from technical grammatical prose to modern paraphrase, and ask what information representation learning can recover. We train recurrent and Transformer encoders, a Siamese-style pair-matching network, an mBART-style encoder--decoder, and a decoder-only language model. Each analysis is interpreted against an appropriate control on the same data. TF-IDF provides a strong no-training lexical retrieval baseline, alongside representation analyses and generation controls for the learned models. A fixed string containing the 25 most frequent commentary words scores higher on generation overlap than the decoder-only model. Canonical correlation reaches 1.000 on Gaussian noise at these sample sizes, token-F1 spans only about 0.02--0.20 on this corpus, and the encoder--decoder continues to lower training loss for sixteen epochs after validation loss has begun to rise. One narrow result remains: the decoder-only model prefers authentic word order in 107 of 112 minimal-pair comparisons (95.5%), but does not reproduce held-out commentary content. We release the extraction and evaluation protocol; redistribution of the source commentaries remains subject to permission. --- ### A Fairness Audit of the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method: Format-Specific and Gender-Differential Bias, with an Interpretable Calibration Layer for Cricket Target Revision Authors: Soumyadeep Roy Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04754v1 The Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method has been the international standard for revising target scores in rain-interrupted limited-overs cricket since 1999. Despite over two decades of operational use, no large-scale empirical audit of its prediction bias has been published. We conduct such an audit on 8,150 international matches (3,095 ODIs, 5,055 T20Is) from Cricsheet, generating 233,550 synthetic interruption scenarios with temporal splits. We document two structured biases. First, DLS prediction error spans a 137-run range across (overs-remaining, wickets-lost) match-state buckets. Second, DLS exhibits a gender-differential bias on ODIs that has not previously been quantified: on the training split, mean over-prediction is +1.51 runs for men but +7.63 runs for women, a gap of +6.13 runs (F = 195.16, p < 10^-43). We benchmark DLS against five modern alternatives: Bi-LSTM, XGBoost, an enriched XGBoost variant, a deep context-aware model, and a stacking ensemble, and propose DLS-Cal, a lightweight interpretable calibration layer (27K parameters) outputting a state-conditioned correction added to DLS. DLS-Cal reduces absolute bias by 31% on ODI and 19% on T20I, and a gender-aware variant reduces women's ODI residual bias from +6.19 to +0.65 runs while leaving men's calibration unchanged. We release code, models, and data. --- ### Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs Authors: Seogyeong Jeong, Jaehui Hwang, Dongyoon Han, Geonmo Gu, Alice Oh, Taekyung Kim Published: 2026-09-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04753v1 Reasoning in large language models unfolds through diverse functional operations, such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction. Although these operations are explicitly distinguished in text, little is known about how they are geometrically organized in representation spaces. To this end, we investigate whether distinct reasoning operations exhibit corresponding geometric structure in hidden representations. We find that operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers, and verify that this structure is not explained by lexical or positional confounds. Across layers, token-wise operation-alignment becomes more distributed over spans, while identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on the operation of its surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions further show that operation-aligned representations at chunk onset depend on preceding reasoning context. Consequently, our work demonstrates that language models maintain representational correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and their internal geometric structures. Code and project materials are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/beneath-cot. ---