# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 254 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #12651–12700 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/254 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/253.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/255.md) ### CC-4DGS: Computational Deformation and Point-Cloud Compression for Storage-Efficient Dynamic Gaussian Splatting Authors: Kyungdae Park, Chae Eun Rhee Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02184v1 Dynamic four-dimensional (4D) Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a powerful explicit representation for high-quality view synthesis, yet existing methods still require tens to hundreds of megabytes per scene due to their heavy reliance on large multi-resolution hash tables and high-dimensional Gaussian attributes. This paper presents CC-4DGS, a storage-efficient and scalable framework that rethinks both deformation modeling and canonical attribute storage. First, we introduce a computational deformation field (CDF) that replaces large multi-resolution learnable hash tables with deterministic dense hash encoding and compact neural decoders, enabling on-the-fly synthesis of deformation features while reducing deformation storage to only 1--3 MB per scene. Second, we propose a compression of canonical point-cloud attributes (CCA) pipeline that compresses high-dimensional spherical harmonic appearance terms and auxiliary Gaussian attributes via conditional autoencoding, selective quantization, and residual codebooks, achieving 3--5$\times$ point-cloud reduction with negligible quality loss. Together, these components yield a unified representation that preserves real-time rendering performance while reducing total storage to 20--30 MB. Extensive experiments across the N3DV and Technicolor Light Field datasets demonstrate that CC-4DGS achieves reconstruction accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods such as Swift4D, while offering significantly improved storage efficiency and favorable runtime-memory trade-offs. --- ### Neural Logic, Invariance, and the Retina---McCulloch and Pitts Authors: Nima Dehghani Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: q-bio.NC, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.FL, cs.NE, physics.bio-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02183v1 This chapter reconstructs the McCulloch-Pitts program as a physics of neural computation rather than the familiar cartoon of a binary neuron. The 1943 logical calculus is developed in both directions: given a net, characterize the propositions realized by its activity; given an admissible logical expression, construct a net that realizes it. We recover the original distinction between thresholded excitatory summation and absolute inhibitory veto-one the weighted-threshold form cannot preserve for arbitrarily large excitatory inputs-and read unit-time delay as the physical realization of logical depth. Recurrence is treated exactly: an autonomous, deterministic network of finitely many binary units has a finite state space, so every trajectory eventually enters a periodic orbit-a fact about finite-state dynamics, not unbounded Turing computation. A single threshold element realizes only linearly separable Boolean functions, whereas finite feedforward networks of them synthesize any Boolean function on a finite domain. We then follows McCulloch and Pitts beyond threshold logic. The 1945 heterarchy paper turns cyclic preference into an obstruction to representation by a scalar utility. The 1947 work on universals asks how a physical network can identify inputs related by nuisance transformations, developed here via group averaging and feedback canonicalization. The 1959 frog-retina study makes the adequate-stimulus question experimental, revealing parallel invariant operations before the brain proper. Spike-triggered analysis shows how a nonlinearly driven neuron can have a vanishing first-order average while second-order statistics recover its hidden selectivity: methodological failure can masquerade as physiological absence. Modern mathematical tools are used without projecting their notation onto the historical papers, and limitations of the idealization are stated explicitly. --- ### WeaveMark: Robust and Scalable Multi-bit LLM Watermarking via Coded Payload Spreading Authors: Gang-Hyun Park, Ju-Hyeong Lee, Hee-Youl Kwak, Dae-Young Yun Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02177v2 Multi-bit watermarking for large language models enables content source tracing by embedding user-identifiable messages into generated text. Existing methods face a fundamental trade-off among extraction accuracy, text quality, and payload capacity. We propose WeaveMark, a robust and scalable multi-bit LLM watermarking scheme based on coded payload spreading. WeaveMark shifts this trade-off frontier by improving payload capacity through multi-bit-per-token spreading (weaving), improving extraction accuracy through soft-decision error-correcting codes, and preserving text quality through unbiased multilayer reweighting. It further introduces dedicated zero-bit layers for reliable watermark presence detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial gains in extraction performance, especially for long messages and edited text, without degrading text quality. WeaveMark achieves an 89.8% match rate for 32-bit messages at 200 tokens, compared with 20.8% for BiMark. Under 10% substitution attacks on 16-bit messages at 200 tokens, it maintains 86.0% versus 30.7%. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WeaveMark-ED6F. --- ### Breadth Beats Depth: Improving GCG-Based Jailbreak Optimization with Breadth-Oriented Suffix Search Authors: Shiliang Xiao, Jingsong Wei, Yuzhi Liang, Yufan Zheng, Xia Li, Qiliang Lin Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02172v1 Optimization-based jailbreak attacks such as Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) achieve strong effectiveness and transferability by optimizing adversarial suffixes on white-box source models. However, existing GCG-based methods rely on averaged adversarial loss and deep greedy search, which can over-emphasize easy-to-jailbreak behaviors and overlook promising regions of the suffix space. We propose BOSS, a plug-and-play framework that improves GCG-based jailbreak optimization through breadth-oriented suffix search. BOSS uses Tail-Focused Adversarial Loss (TFAL), standard source loss, and behavior coverage to select terminal suffixes, then explores multiple short trajectories and selectively continues promising suffixes. Experiments on public benchmarks show that BOSS improves attack success rates across multiple GCG-based methods while reducing optimization time. --- ### Progressive Pseudo-Label Optimization for Point-Supervised Change Detection Authors: Hailong Ning, Hao Wang, Yimeng Wang, Tao Lei, Renwei Dian, Asoke K. Nandi Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02171v1 Point-supervised change detection (PS-CD) aims to identify pixel-level changes between bi-temporal images using only sparsely annotated points. Although point annotations substantially reduce labeling costs, their limited spatial coverage often results in incomplete and noisy pseudo-labels. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage framework that introduces SAM2 priors into PS-CD and progressively adapts them to the target task. In Stage I, SAM2 generates object-aware candidate masks from point annotations on the bi-temporal images, and a bi-temporal mask selection strategy is designed to convert generic segmentation responses into more reliable change pseudo-labels. Subsequently, a lightweight CNN refinement module with an uncertainty-aware loss is employed to improve boundary quality and local structural consistency. In Stage II, we construct a teacher-student self-training framework in which the teacher is updated by exponential moving average and periodically refreshes the pseudo-labels. This design establishes a closed-loop optimization process that alternates between pseudo-label refinement and model re-optimization. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, including WHU-CD, LEVIR-CD, and SYSU-CD, demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous weakly supervised approaches on most benchmarks and remains competitive with several fully supervised methods. --- ### DMRL: Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning for Skill Optimization in Advertising Recommendation Authors: Wei Zhang, Hongji Li, Song Sun, Peng Yu, Xue Yang, Lei Zhao, Peng Jiang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02170v1 Advertising recommendation requires continuously tuning complex system parameters while balancing commercial returns and user experience. Recent work has introduced large language models (LLMs) with skill documents to assist this labor-intensive process, but skill optimization remains largely prompt-driven, lacking a principled mechanism to attribute rewards to specific document edits. To address this limitation, we propose Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning (DMRL), a skill self-evolution framework that models skill document optimization as a sequence of structured editing actions. In DMRL, an upper-level agent performs controlled document edits, while a frozen lower-level task agent evaluates their effects through A/B testing. To address credit assignment and long-term outcomes, we introduce two key components: (1) Dual-Relative Policy Optimization (DRPO), a post-training policy optimization method for robust and risk-aware advantage estimation; and (2) Long-term Reward Predictor (LRP), which estimates long-term outcomes by modeling population heterogeneity with disentangled representation learning and cross-attention transfer. DMRL was deployed on a large-scale short-video ads platform and extensive empirical evaluation shows that DMRL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across key advertising metrics --- ### FUSE: An Evaluating Framework for Dangerous Capabilities of LLMs Authors: Zhengyi Jin, Ru Zhang, Xiao Chen, Xinbo Liu, Jiaxuan Lin, Jia Huang, Jianyi Liu, Zhen Yang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02168v1 Fragmented safety evaluation undermines the governance of dangerous AI capabilities. We present a modular framework that evaluates each model through three orthogonal pipelines---Knowledge ($K$), Defense ($D$), and Harm ($H$)---under a unified protocol, aggregating results into a standardized dangerous-capability profile $φ$. Pluggable modules supply scenario seeds, knowledge banks, hazard queries, and judge rubrics, while the core evaluation engine remains unchanged across domains; the CB evaluation is complemented by a cyber pilot demonstrating protocol transfer. Instantiating the framework with a chemical-biological (CB) module, we evaluate 12 commercial LLMs from four families. Our first contribution is a horizontal comparison of dangerous capability across models and model families: the three dimensions expose sharply divergent profiles---models with comparable knowledge differ in refusal resilience, and strong defenders do not generate less harmful content when they do comply---while family-level patterns further separate Claude, DeepSeek, and GPT models. The second is a temporal analysis of capability evolution: tracking $K$, $D$, and $H$ against model release dates reveals that dangerous capability has not monotonically declined; newer models deepen knowledge while only partially improving defense, showing that scaling and alignment progress do not uniformly translate into safety. Reliability is established via cross-judge consistency (bootstrap $ρ> 0.79$, 4 of 5 judges) and pipeline orthogonality ($K$--$D$--$H$ inter-correlations $ρ\in (0.32, 0.52)$). --- ### Do Cantonese-Adapted Language Models Better Predict Cantonese Reading? A Cross-Model Eye-Tracking Evaluation Authors: Ziqi Zhang, Emmanuele Chersoni, Mohammad Momenian Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02163v2 Information-theoretic measures derived from autoregressive language models are widely used to characterize the expectations that shape human reading, but whether language-variety-specific training improves such psycholinguistic alignment remains unclear. This question is still open for Cantonese, where recent NLP evaluations reported mixed benefits from Cantonese-specific training relative to Mandarin-oriented or general-purpose models. Using naturalistic Cantonese eye-tracking data, we compare two within-family adaptation contrasts: CKIP GPT-2 Tiny versus its lightly Cantonese-adapted JED351 derivative, and Qwen2.5-7B versus CantoneseLLM-7B, which underwent substantially more extensive Cantonese continued pretraining and instruction tuning. From each model, we derive lexical surprisal, POS surprisal, entropy before the target, and entropy reduction. Lexical surprisal and the joint four-metric model consistently favor CantoneseLLM-7B, followed by Qwen2.5-7B, CKIP, and JED351, whereas entropy reduction favors CKIP. These results suggest that more extensive Cantonese-specific training can be associated with stronger predictive fit, while model rankings also depend on the information-theoretic measure being evaluated. --- ### GenCAR: Generative Counterfactual Alignment with Risk-Controlled Selection for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation Authors: Qianqian Wang, Yunshan Li, Jiawen Zeng, Wenwu Gong, Lili Yang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02162v1 Serving useful recommendations under distribution shift is crucial for balancing utility and risk in out-of-distribution (OOD) recommendation. However, most existing OOD methods improve ranking or construct counterfactual candidates without controlling the proxy-label false discovery rate (FDR) of the served set. In this work, we formulate OOD serving as the $α$-Valid Counterfactual Recommendation ($α$-VCR) problem to retain candidate support learned from counterfactual supervision while controlling proxy-label FDR, and propose GenCAR, which couples preference-grounded counterfactual supervision with calibrated set selection. In particular, GenCAR fixes the stable-preference representation while intervening on the environmental factor, grounds offline large language model proposals through preference anchors and trust-radius filtering, and uses conformal $p$-values for Benjamini--Hochberg selection. We theoretically bound conditional counterfactual approximation error and prove finite-sample, distribution-free control of proxy-label FDR under exchangeability and positive regression dependence, with a Benjamini--Yekutieli guarantee under arbitrary dependence. Extensive experiments audit realized proxy false discovery proportions and demonstrate that GenCAR consistently enhances OOD candidate recovery across diverse benchmarks. --- ### GeoSPRINT: Geometric Redundancy-Aware Step Pruning for Inference in Diffusion Trajectories Authors: Arpita Joshi Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02160v1 Diffusion models achieve high sample quality but remain expensive at inference time because sampling requires many sequential neural function evaluations (NFEs). Existing acceleration methods either use fixed step-skipping schedules, adapt step sizes based on local numerical error, or require additional training. We introduce GeoSPRINT (Geometric Step Pruning for Inference in Trajectories), a training-free framework for constructing non-uniform sampling schedules from the geometry of denoising trajectories. GeoSPRINT detects geometrically redundant steps using a hyperplanarity test in latent space, implemented efficiently via QR factorization, and converts the resulting redundancy profile into a sampling schedule that allocates more steps to high-curvature regions of the trajectory. In addition, we introduce the trajectory projection score $α_{\mathrm{traj}}$, a residual-variance metric that quantifies trajectory straightness and serves as a model-free diagnostic for rectified flow quality. Across CIFAR-10 ($32{\times}32$), LSUN Church ($256{\times}256$), and Stable Diffusion v1.5 ($512{\times}512$ latent), GeoSPRINT consistently improves over uniform DDIM (Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models) schedules at matched NFE budgets. On CIFAR-10, GeoSPRINT improves FID (Fréchet Inception Distance) by 0.7-1.1 over DDIM across 49-89 NFEs and surpasses DPM-Solver++ at NFE${\geq}30$ despite using a first-order DDIM solver. On LSUN Church, it reduces FID from 1.48 to 1.26 at 52 steps, and on Stable Diffusion v1.5 it achieves up to 1.93 FID improvement over DDIM. These results show that trajectory geometry provides a useful global signal for allocating inference steps and that schedule quality can substantially improve diffusion sampling efficiency without retraining. --- ### World-Coherent Decoding: Self-Verifying Test-Time Planning for World Action Models Authors: Chuhan Zhang, Seiji Ito, Kenta Hoshino, Satoshi Ikehata, Ikuro Sato Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02159v1 World Action Models (WAMs) aim to control robots by stochastically generating visual futures and then decoding actions, but empirical observations indicate that the results can strongly depend on which future is selected. We propose World-Coherent-Decoding (WCD), a self-verifying test-time planning framework that treats WAM rollouts as falsifiable future--action hypotheses. At each decision step, WCD samples multiple candidates from a frozen WAM and ranks them using internal generative signals: flow-based video surprisal for visual plausibility and action path effort for action-generation stability. After execution, the realized observation audits the selected imagination, yielding an imagination--reality mismatch that trains a lightweight online predictor for future candidate selection. Thus, WCD converts delayed self-verification into pre-execution reliability estimation without updating the backbone model. On RoboTwin 2.0, WCD improves Hard success under limited randomized-scene supervision from $55.80\%$ to $60.90\%$, with a $+16.43$ gains on Horizon-3 tasks, and shows qualitative robustness on real Franka visual-shift tests. These results highlight a simple principle: test-time scaling for WAMs depends less on sampling more futures than on selecting reliable ones. --- ### OBJECTION! Lawyer Agents Mitigate Guilty Bias in Legal Judgment Prediction Authors: Jaehoon Jeong, Jay-Yoon Lee Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02158v1 Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) models are typically trained on documents that describe facts from a prosecutorial perspective. Existing datasets further exhibit severe label imbalance toward guilty outcomes. Consequently, these models suffer from "Guilty Bias", blindly accepting the prosecution's narrative as objective truth. Previous studies employing three-step reasoning structures or training on synthetically generated innocence data improve overall accuracy, but they still fail to mitigate bias at inference time. In this paper, we introduce OBJECTION, an inference-time pipeline that integrates an Adversarial Lawyer Agent into each 3-step reasoning of offense, unlawfulness, and culpability. Unlike generic critics, our agent actively challenges the model's presumptions of guilt by injecting legal defense arguments at each reasoning stage. To thoroughly evaluate this, we present a new "Natural Innocent" dataset including 3.4k real-world cases, overcoming the limitations of synthetic innocence benchmarks. Test results show that OBJECTION drastically reduces the False Guilty Rate (FGR) from 82.93% (SOTA baseline) to 16.69%, proving its capability to perform substantive legal reasoning. This work denotes a key progress toward aligning Legal AI with the presumption of innocence. --- ### Exact Limits of Random Projections for Preserving Geometry: Distance Recovery, Nearest-Neighbor Rankings, and Covariance Shape in Gaussian Models Authors: Piyush Sao Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, math.NA, math.PR, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02155v1 The Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) lemma guarantees that a random projection of $n$ points to $m=O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log n)$ dimensions preserves pairwise squared distances within relative error $\varepsilon$ with high probability, and this dimension order is asymptotically optimal. In high dimensions, however, distances concentrate around a baseline while key geometric information lies in much smaller fluctuations. We show that the JL bound can therefore be uninformative about retained geometry: an independent Gaussian replacement map can satisfy it even though the replacement cloud is independent of the original data. We then ask how well any decoder can recover a feature $f(D)$ of a squared distance $D$ from a linear sketch. Under squared-error loss, the optimal decoder is conditional expectation, so recovery defines a linear operator whose singular values quantify feature recovery. For isotropic Gaussian data ($Σ=σ^2 I_d$), we diagonalize this operator in closed form. For fixed $k$ with $m,d-m\to\infty$, its $k$th singular value satisfies $\ell_k\approx(m/ d)^{k/2}$. This yields three sharp consequences. A rank-$m$ sketch retains at most an $m/d$ fraction of the variance of any feature of one squared distance. If $m\to\infty$ and $m/d\to0$, the expected Kendall correlation is $\frac{2}π\sqrt{m/d}(1+o(1))$; for fixed $q$, nearest- neighbor agreement tends to $1/q$. Yet one projection can satisfy the JL bound while mean Kendall correlation vanishes when $\log n\ll m\ll d$. After removing scale, Haar-averaged retained covariance-shape information is $(m/d)^2$. Thus JL distance preservation does not quantify the geometry available for comparison or inference. --- ### A Layered Taxonomy for Chinese Learner Grammatical Error Annotation Authors: Mengyang Qiu, Jungyeul Park Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02153v1 Grammatical error annotation in Chinese learner writing requires labels that are both consistent and linguistically meaningful. This paper proposes a layered scheme linking computational Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) with pedagogical error analysis. The scheme first identifies character- and punctuation-level orthographic errors, labeling them by edit operation and subtype. Other errors receive a three-layer core label combining edit operation, linguistic domain, and part of speech, with optional Chinese-specific extensions for aspect, modality, comparison, argument structure, and complements. Drawing on CGEC resources, learner-error taxonomies, and Mandarin grammar, the taxonomy is evaluated through a coverage analysis of automatically extracted MuCGEC edits and a preliminary consistency study in which five large language models apply it to a sample. The results support the layered approach while identifying category boundaries requiring further refinement. --- ### Beyond Modality Harmony: Orthogonal Purification and Topology-Guided MoE for Conflict-Aware Multimodal Recommendation Authors: Jialin Liu, Zhaorui Zhang, Ray C. C. Cheung Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02152v1 Multimodal Recommender Systems (MRSs) typically rely on a flawed "modality harmony" assumption, presuming that multimodal features are inherently beneficial and strictly aligned with users' collaborative interaction patterns. However, modality-topology conflicts are ubiquitous in real-world scenarios due to deceptive visual clickbaits and mismatched semantics. Blindly integrating these noisy modalities inevitably pollutes the pristine collaborative space, causing severe representation distortion. To address this, we propose Orthogonal purification and topology-guided MoE for conflict-aware multimodal Recommendation (OrthoRec). At its core, OrthoRec introduces Collaborative-Guided Orthogonal Purification (CGOP), which geometrically decouples multimodal features into directions parallel and orthogonal to a pure collaborative anchor. By adaptively truncating the orthogonal noise with an energy-preserving normalization, CGOP rectifies deceptive semantic directions while preserving the modality's intrinsic representation capacity. Furthermore, we design a Topology-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Experts (TAR-MoE). Guided by the collaborative topology, TAR-MoE employs decoupled sigmoid gating to break the zero-sum bottleneck of traditional softmax attention, autonomously determining the injection scale for each purified modality. Finally, a safe-SSL objective is introduced to dynamically penalize the forced contrastive alignment of contradictory pairs. Experiments on three real-world Amazon datasets show that OrthoRec consistently outperforms competitive recent baselines and exhibits improved robustness under modality noise and item sparsity. --- ### OmegaUse-SOP: SOP Engineering for Professional Computer Use from Human Demonstrations Authors: Yixiong Xiao, Lang An, Hucheng Yang, Pinxue Ma, Yongquan Chen, Jingjia Cao, Yusai Zhao, Ting Wang, Ting Liu, Siqi Bao, Jingbo Zhou, Hua Wu Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02149v3 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evolving from conversational assistants into agents capable of operating external digital environments. Graphical user interface (GUI) agents play an important role in this transition, as many real-world workflows remain accessible only through user-facing software interfaces. However, despite recent progress on general computer-use benchmarks, domain-specific professional standard operating procedures (SOPs) remain challenging for GUI agents because they often involve implicit domain knowledge, software-specific conventions, and task-level verification requirements. We introduce OmegaUse-SOP, a human-in-the-loop SOP Engineering system for transforming human demonstrations of professional computer use into reusable SOP skills for GUI agents. Analogous to prompt engineering, SOP Engineering iteratively refines demonstrations, execution rules, and domain knowledge to convert professional SOPs into reusable GUI-agent skills. OmegaUse-SOP consists of four modules: Observe, Reason, Configure, and Execute. Together, these modules record expert operations as multimodal GUI traces, abstract low-level events into semantic step-level instructions, incorporate domain rules and task-specific parameters, and execute the resulting skills in live GUI environments through step-wise grounding, action generation, and verification. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we collaborate with a power-sector client and test OmegaUse-SOP on photovoltaic simulation workflows in PVsyst 7.2. The results suggest that OmegaUse-SOP can improve GUI-agent reliability on professional SOP tasks, highlighting a practical path toward deploying GUI agents in domain-specific professional software environments. --- ### Online Non-Monotone DR-Submodular Maximization Matching the Offline $0.401$ Factor Authors: Vaneet Aggarwal, Yiyang Lu Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02145v1 We study online maximization of nonnegative, non-monotone DR-submodular functions over compact convex down-closed subsets of the $d$-dimensional unit cube. The best known constructive offline approximation factor is $0.401$ under the corresponding meta-solvability assumptions, whereas comparable adversarial online guarantees had remained at $1/e$. We show that this factor is also achievable online. In the post-decision full-information value-oracle model, our algorithm attains factor $0.401$ with sublinear approximate regret when oracle feedback is conditionally unbiased and bounded. The online algorithm does not run the offline construction on a changing objective. Instead, it replaces the offline objective-dependent box step by a weighted online learner that controls the required residual terms cumulatively. An exact asymmetric balance theorem preserves the offline coefficients despite adversarial variation. The direct implementation has $O(T^{3/4})$ regret and uses $O(dT^{1/4})$ oracle calls per round. More generally, for every $δ\in(0,1/4)$, batching gives $O(T^δ)$ calls per round and $O(T^{4/5-δ/5})$ regret, including a one-call $O(T^{4/5})$ endpoint. Under a positive-anchor condition, randomized blocking retains factor $0.401$ with $O(T^{5/6})$ one-point bandit regret. --- ### A Power Law in Logarithm's Clothing: On the Scalability of Graph-Based Vector Search Authors: Sajad Faghfoor Maghrebi, Navid Eslami, Niv Dayan Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02143v1 Most vector databases rely on graph-based indexes, notably HNSW and Vamana, for approximate nearest neighbor search. With embedding models widely adopted, the datasets these databases store grow rapidly. At a fixed accuracy, how does search cost scale with dataset size? The prevailing answer is poly-logarithmic growth. Yet the claim is proven only under special conditions and asserted without proof for the indexes used in practice. It is also largely untested: standard benchmarks measure cost at one dataset size, not across sizes. We put the claim to the test. The answer depends on the scale itself. While the dataset size $N$ is small relative to the data's intrinsic dimensionality, search cost grows as $N^c$ for a constant $0<c<1$. We call this scaling the Sublinear Power Law. Once $N$ is large enough, growth slows to subpolynomial, consistent with the poly-logarithmic claim. The Sublinear Power Law appears on every dataset, mostly up to its full size, at every recall target, query hardness level, and index configuration we test. The transition to subpolynomial growth appears on the two datasets that grow large enough relative to their intrinsic dimensionality. One mechanism underlies both behaviors: a dataset's intrinsic dimensionality grows with its size until the data resolves its underlying distribution. Higher intrinsic dimensionality packs more vectors into the query neighborhood the search must examine. We present a unifying theory of beam-search cost that explains our observations. For exact and bounded-degree constructions, we prove the Sublinear Power Law and the eventual transition to poly-logarithmic scaling, and derive the scale at which it occurs. We also develop models that predict the power-law exponents for any recall target and index configuration. These models give a principled way to navigate trade-offs among search cost, insertion cost, and recall as data grows. --- ### SoK: Where Do Flow Labels Come From? Auditing Label Provenance in Encrypted Traffic Benchmarks Authors: Sizhe Huang, Shujie Yang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02140v1 Encrypted traffic classification infers semantics beyond the flow record from transport-layer observables, and supervised training rests on labels that hold for the individual flow they are attached to. Recent systematizations scrutinize model in- puts and data splits; we systematize the complementary label side. Across 14 audited benchmark entries, we identify two recurring label-side strategies: coarse inheritance, which risks labelling flows the evidence does not cover, and overstrict filtering, which keeps only self-attesting flows and risks dis- carding relevant ones. No audited entry exposes a countable pre-selection population, and the task objects downstream papers attach to the same labels disagree with the recovered record in 8 of 23 referenced cells. Under strict side-channel features we derive a representation-relative ceiling on bal- anced accuracy for any classifier restricted to those features: on the public benchmarks that inherit, it ranges from 0.56 to 0.76. On the filtering side, only 24.95% of connections in our fully captured corpus carry an observable SNI of their own; yet the discarded connections raise macro accuracy from 0.44 to 0.65 through same-run co-occurrence features. We end with recommendations for benchmark builders and users. --- ### HyperMC: Multi-Fidelity Hyperparameter Tuning for Stochastic Gradient MCMC Authors: Ming Tan, Xiyun Jiao Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02138v1 Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) methods enable scalable Bayesian inference, but their performance depends strongly on hyperparameters such as the step size, mini-batch size, and number of leapfrog steps. Since most SGMCMC algorithms lack a Metropolis-Hastings acceptance rate, standard acceptance-based tuning methods are not directly applicable. We propose HyperMC, a multi-fidelity tuning framework that combines Hyperband-style resource allocation with kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) evaluation. By running multiple successive-halving brackets, HyperMC balances broad exploration of a continuous hyperparameter space with increasingly accurate evaluation of promising configurations under a fixed computational budget. We further introduce Robust HyperMC, which uses global grid initialization followed by elite-guided local refinement to reduce sensitivity to random candidate generation and noisy finite-budget evaluations. Under suitable approximation and concentration conditions for the estimated KSD, we establish that the successive-halving component selects a near-optimal configuration among the sampled candidates with high probability and derive a sufficient computational budget for successful selection. Experiments on logistic regression, probabilistic matrix factorization, and Bayesian neural networks show that HyperMC improves posterior approximation or predictive calibration relative to MAMBA, grid search, and heuristic baselines, while Robust HyperMC yields more stable and reproducible tuning results. --- ### EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision Authors: Ziyuan Jin, Yuxuan Ge, Zheng Tian Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02133v1 Empathetic response generation requires models to decide not only what to say, but also how to respond to the previous speaker's affective situation. We formulate this as response-side affective-orientation control and use multi-annotator emoji distributions as weak affective--attitudinal evidence, rather than as output symbols or gold labels, to induce a latent control space that operationally approximates listener stance. We construct EmojiDialogue, an utterance-level extension of EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and propose EmoStance, which models source-side affective expression, predicts a soft response-side orientation from dialogue context and speaker roles, and steers a frozen instruction-tuned LLM through continuous prefix embeddings. In blind pairwise evaluation with 20 annotators and 800 judgments, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, with the clearest gains in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness, while remaining complementary to external-knowledge methods. Code, annotation metadata, and reconstruction scripts are available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/18277390221/EmoStance. --- ### C$^{3}$T: Counterfactual Causal Reasoning for Sentiment Shifts in Social-Media Conversation Trees Authors: S M Rafiuddin, Atriya Sen Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02131v1 Sentiment in social-media threads does not only vary across posts; it shifts as users react to claims, corrections, evidence, and hostility within a branching reply tree. We study why sentiment changes in rumor-centric conversation trees by treating discourse moves (e.g., denial/correction, evidence/link, toxicity/attack) as candidate interventions and asking (i) what sentiment a reply expresses, (ii) whether the sentiment shifts relative to its parent, and (iii) which prior message most plausibly drove the reply's sentiment. To support this setting, we introduce CaSiRe, a causal sentiment reasoning layer over public rumor conversation datasets that adds post-level sentiment labels, induced parent-child shift labels, calibrated multi-label intervention tags, and explicitly annotated causal-source labels. We then propose C$^{3}$T (Counterfactual Causal Conversation Transformer), a thread-structured temporal model that jointly predicts node sentiment and shifts, learns sparse ancestor attribution, and supports counterfactual queries by forcing conversational intervention embeddings on or off to estimate potential outcomes. Under an event-level split, C$^{3}$T improves out-of-event robustness and attribution over text-only, graph-based, and temporal baselines, and yields interpretable model-based effects: denials/corrections and evidence reduce downstream negativity, while toxicity increases it. We also benchmark open-weight LLM prompting baselines and find that added conversational context helps, but attribution remains less reliable, motivating structure-aware counterfactual modeling for social-media analysis. --- ### Beyond Context Windows: Persistent Discovery Context for Data-Centric Agents Authors: Jalal Mahmud Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02129v1 Data-centric agents repeatedly perform a discovery step before planning or execution: identifying the data objects relevant to a task. Yet successful discovery outcomes are typically discarded rather than reused. We introduce persistent discovery context, a lightweight memory layer that stores prior intent-to-object mappings and reuses them to augment future retrieval. Across three structured data environments, persistent discovery context consistently improves retrieval quality over metadata-only search, remains effective with automatically generated memories, and exposes a reproducible interference failure mode. In lexically sparse domains, memory-only retrieval can even outperform metadata-based retrieval. These findings suggest that discovery outcomes constitute a useful form of reusable context for data-centric agents. --- ### Scalable Bayesian Optimization of Composite Functions for Image-Based Inverse Problems in Materials Characterization Authors: Dasol Yoon, Poompol Buathong, Chia-Hao Lee, Yujia Zhang, David A. Muller, Peter I. Frazier Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.mtrl-sci arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02126v1 Estimating physical parameters from scientific images is a common inverse problem in materials characterization that often relies on expensive physics-based simulations. In electron microscopy, specimen thickness and crystal mistilt are critical parameters that govern how electrons scatter through the sample, and therefore the accuracy of any atomic-scale structure recovered from it. They are commonly inferred by matching experimental position-averaged convergent-beam electron diffraction (PACBED) patterns to simulated ones, but grid searches scale poorly and neural-network methods require extensive pretraining that may not transfer to new conditions. Here, we propose scalable Bayesian optimization of composite functions (SBOCF), a simulation-efficient method that exploits the known composite structure of the image-matching objective and the intermediate information contained in simulated images. By representing PACBED images with patch-level summaries and two correction terms, SBOCF preserves the original pixel-wise objective while reducing the number of modeled outputs from 24,649 to 11. Under a budget of 50 simulator evaluations, SBOCF outperformed standard Bayesian optimization with expected improvement on synthetic SrTiO3 benchmarks with thick and thin specimens, reducing the median final SSE by up to 290x in the thick-sample case. On experimental data, SBOCF produced parameter estimates consistent with previously reported values without task-specific pretraining. For a simulated mistilted specimen, using the SBOCF estimates in a downstream ptychographic reconstruction recovered sharp atoms that were otherwise blurred. These results establish SBOCF as a promising approach for inverse problems involving expensive simulators and high-dimensional structured outputs. --- ### AI agents reshape consensus formation in human groups Authors: Lin Chen, Ziyi Liu, Xia Hu, Yong Li Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02122v1 As large language model (LLM) agents shift from tools to participants in human groups, a fundamental question for collective behavior is how their growing presence reshapes consensus formation. Here we study mixed human-AI groups in a collaborative description game, in which shared conventions emerge through repeated rounds of random pairwise communication. Varying the proportions of LLM agents, we identify three distinct regimes of consensus formation: low agent proportions facilitate human-led consensus, intermediate proportions disrupt convergence, and high proportions restore strong consensus while shifting it toward agent-led conventions. Crucially, these regimes differ not only in the strength of convergence, but also in the semantic grounding and communicative form of the resulting consensus: human-led consensus is more concrete, holistic, and grounded in shared real-world analogies, whereas agent-led consensus is more abstract, less information-dense, and more geometrically segmented. Mechanistically, agent influence arises from a shared linguistic prior that places agents near one another in the expression space, combined with relatively stable expression choices across rounds; humans initially resist adopting expressions from partners perceived as AI but gradually yield to conformity pressure. These findings provide evidence that AI composition can shape the emergence, content, and perceived legitimacy of group norms, making agent proportion and transparency important design variables for human-AI systems. --- ### Synergistic Information Disentanglement for Omni-modal Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathology Authors: Mingxin Liu, Chengfei Cai, Anwen Lu, Pengbo Xu, Jun Li, Jinze Li, Depin Chen, Jun Xu Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02118v2 In computational pathology (CPath), developing omni-modal self-supervised learning (SSL) models that integrate histology, genomics, and clinical reports enables transferable representation learning for whole slide images (WSIs). Existing approaches implicitly force heterogeneous modalities into a uniform latent space by contrastive alignment, causing modality collapse where unique, synergistic diagnostic signals (termed as $\mathrmΦ$) are discarded in favor of trivial redundancy. We hypothesize that the strongest task-agnostic SSL training signal stems from distilling the synergistic interactions over merely aligning shared redundancy. To this end, we introduce \textsc{$\mathrmΦ$-Omni}, a synergistic information disentanglement framework grounded in Partial Information Decomposition (PID) theory for slide representation learning. Unlike standard contrastive approaches, \textsc{$\mathrmΦ$-Omni} employs a Synergistic Information Bottleneck (SIB) regulated by the proposed $\mathrmΦ\text{ID}$ objective, which explicitly suppresses marginal redundancy while maximizing irreducible synergy, thereby distilling high-order cross-modal interactions. Following pretraining on breast ($n$=1031) and lung ($n$=919) cohorts, \textsc{$\mathrmΦ$-Omni} demonstrates superior few-shot performance across five independent external datasets spanning eight tasks compared to supervised and SSL baselines. Source code is available here. --- ### Semantic Signal-Assisted Inspection and Recovery Allocation in Reverse Logistics Authors: Jiani He, Dingyan Shang, Yihua Xu, Shiqi Huang, Yan Lyu, Jize Li, Shangjing Tang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02116v1 Reverse-logistics operators often decide how to inspect and route returned assets before their condition is fully observed, while full inspection consumes scarce labor. Semantic Signal-Assisted Decision Support converts return notes into a condition factor and a signal-quality score that guide inspection depth and recovery allocation under shared labor capacity. We evaluate the framework in three synthetic benchmark scenarios spanning information technology decommissioning, aircraft maintenance, and consumer-electronics returns. Across 30 paired simulation seeds, the keyword implementation improves net recovery value relative to a structured-feature comparator with noisy full inspection while reducing inspection cost in all three scenarios. A risk-blind comparator that skips inspection altogether still records higher value under the benchmark's purely economic objective. At matched inspection cost, score-guided targeting adds 53.9 thousand United States dollars per batch in the aircraft scenario but has little economic effect in the other two configurations; phrase and large language model extractors provide further gains in the aircraft scenario. These results show how narrative evidence can support inspection allocation before recovery decisions are made. --- ### text2ql: Multi-Target Natural Language Querying via a Language-Agnostic Intermediate Representation Authors: Ritesh Kumar Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02115v1 Natural language interfaces to databases have traditionally suffered from three structural limitations: exclusive targeting of relational SQL, unconditional dependence on large language model (LLM) inference at query time, and absence of any runtime signal when generated queries are semantically incorrect. This paper presents text2ql, an open-source Python framework that addresses all three limitations through a language-agnostic Intermediate Representation (QueryIR) and a pluggable renderer architecture. A single seven-stage detection pipeline serves both SQL and GraphQL targets; a zero-LLM deterministic mode delivers 100% execution accuracy at a median latency of 3.2 ms with no API cost; and every generated query carries a runtime confidence score in (0.15, 0.97) computed from an additive signal model. Evaluated on 50-query random samples from the Spider and BIRD benchmarks (indicative results; full-set evaluation is planned), the LLM-backed mode achieves 62-70% exact match and 84-91% execution accuracy; the deterministic mode achieves 100% execution accuracy with zero parse errors across all 100 test cases. An ablation study isolates schema-aware prompting as the dominant accuracy lever, contributing +18.4 percentage points of exact-match gain over the schema-free baseline on both benchmarks. text2ql is publicly available at https://pypi.org/project/text2ql/ under the Apache 2.0 license. --- ### Disease Burden over Skin Tone: Decomposing the Dermatology-AI Generalization Gap Authors: Nirajan Kunwor, Sanjaya Poudel, Quoc-Huy Trinh, Jahidul Arafat, Sunil Kumar Gaire Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02111v1 Dermatology artificial intelligence (AI) models are predominantly trained on light-skinned, cancer-focused image collections, yet they are increasingly proposed for deployment in resource-constrained settings where patients differ from training populations along two confounded axes: skin tone and disease distribution. We investigate whether poor generalization is primarily caused by skin-tone underrepresentation or disease-distribution shift. We evaluate a cancer-trained baseline (ResNet-50 fine-tuned on HAM10000 and ISIC 2019), two dermatology foundation models (DermLIP and MONET), and a general-purpose vision model (DINOv3) as frozen feature extractors. Models are evaluated on a tone-stratified disease-matched dataset (Diverse Dermatology Images, DDI) and a disease-shifted tone-diverse dataset (Skin Condition Image Network, SCIN). Our results show that disease-distribution shift contributes more than skin tone in the evaluated settings. The cancer baseline decreases from 0.62 to 0.21 balanced accuracy when transferred to unfamiliar clinical conditions, while the within-disease skin-tone gap is smaller (0.10-0.18) and inconsistent. Label-free representation analysis shows that this failure reflects a representational limitation rather than only missing output labels: cancer-specialized features poorly cluster unfamiliar conditions (kNN purity lift +0.06 over chance), whereas dermatology-pretrained features retain stronger transferable structure (+0.23). Finally, we show that representation quality predicts recoverable performance under lightweight adaptation. Starting from dermatology foundation models, approximately ten labeled examples per clinical category recover most attainable performance. We release the evaluation protocol and code to support reproducible auditing of dermatology AI generalization. --- ### A Computational Comparison of Fourier Spectral Differentiation and Spatial Automatic Differentiation in Periodic Physics-Informed Neural Networks Authors: Xilai Liang, Zhao Zhang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02110v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) commonly evaluate the spatial derivatives appearing in partial differential equation residuals using automatic differentiation (AD), whose computational and memory costs can become substantial when multiple or high-order derivatives are required. We perform a controlled comparison of spatial AD and Fourier spectral differentiation in periodic physical-space PINNs. Within each paired experiment, the neural representation, temporal differentiation, optimizer, sampling procedure, and training schedule are held fixed, so that the two cases differ only in the spatial differentiation procedure. For the Fourier variant, network outputs are evaluated on a uniform periodic grid and transformed to Fourier space, where spatial derivatives are obtained through spectral multiplication and the same Fourier coefficients are reused across derivative orders. We compare the two procedures in standard PINNs for the Allen--Cahn and Korteweg--de Vries equations and in Causal PINNs for the Allen--Cahn, Korteweg--de Vries, and Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equations. Across these five equation--framework settings, Fourier differentiation yields mean paired end-to-end training speedups ranging from $2.90\times$ to $18.52\times$ and reduces peak allocated graphics processing unit (GPU) memory by $68.7\%$--$94.1\%$. The final relative $L_2$ errors remain of the same order, with neither differentiation procedure showing a consistent accuracy advantage. For the one-dimensional periodic benchmarks considered here, Fourier spectral differentiation therefore provides substantially lower training time and memory usage than spatial AD while retaining comparable solution error, at the cost of requiring a uniform structured spatial grid. --- ### MeanField Surrogate Modeling for Scalable Runtime Scheduling of Concurrent Heterogeneous AI Inference on Shared GPUs Authors: Youssef Ennouri, Soonhoi Ha Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02109v1 Deploying heterogeneous AI models concurrently on a shared GPU introduces resource contention that complicates runtime scheduling. While surrogate models avoid costly online benchmarking, their profiling requirements typically grow combinatorially with the number of co-running models, limiting scalability. We propose a MeanField surrogate that predicts per-model performance from local configuration and aggregate GPU state rather than explicitly modeling all joint interactions. Experiments on concurrent LLM and vision workloads across $N \in \{2,3,4,5,6\}$ show high predictive accuracy ($R^2 \approx 0.96$) with an empirical sample budget that grows approximately linearly in $N$, in contrast to the combinatorial cost of fully joint profiling. Integrated into a genetic algorithm scheduler, the surrogate scales to an $N=5$ problem with 78,732 feasible joint configurations, remaining within 0.10% of the exhaustive search with zero SLA violations across eight dynamic workload scenarios, while complete online GA decisions take 26 ms median, about $5\times$ faster than exhaustive surrogate search. --- ### Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models Authors: Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02108v1 Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the auto-regressive paradigm. With bidirectional attention and any-order generation, DLMs naturally fit infilling tasks, which require generating a middle span conditioned on both the prefix and the suffix. However, infilling is sensitive to the length of the span, while DLMs require the length to be fixed before generation. Although prior studies extend DLMs to dynamic lengths, they still suffer from two limitations. (i) Sensitivity to initial length. These methods require a preset length to initialize the search and are highly sensitive to this initial length, often yielding suboptimal results. (ii) Inference inefficiency. They either insert length-changing operations during generation or repeatedly search for an appropriate length using multi-step denoising confidence, both of which introduce substantial extra forward passes and computational cost. Therefore, we propose PILL (Probing-based InfiLling with preset-Length-free decoding), an efficient infilling method for DLMs that requires no preset initial length and adds far fewer extra forward passes than baselines, substantially reducing inference time. Experiments show that, across five DLMs spanning different families, architectures, and training recipes on eight infilling benchmarks, PILL improves over the strongest baseline by +4.8 average pass rate on code and +6.0 BLEU-2 on text, while running 1.82x faster than that baseline. The code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/PILL. --- ### A Unified Rate-Distortion Perspective on Vector, Product, and Scalar Quantization Authors: Xianghong Fang, Wenlong Mou, Yuan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Tim G. J. Rudner Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02107v1 Discrete visual tokenization, predominantly driven by vector, scalar, and product quantization, lacks a unified conceptual framework for understanding quantization tradeoffs. In this paper, we propose a unified rate--distortion perspective on modern discrete visual tokenization. By viewing quantization as lossy compression, we characterize the nominal fixed-length coding rate through token count and codebook size, and quantization error as the distortion. Within this framework, we resolve three central questions. First, we theoretically and empirically show that minimizing distortion, rather than maximizing codebook utilization, is the primary intrinsic objective for reconstruction fidelity, with a direct connection to the STE-induced gradient discrepancy. Second, we establish two critical fairness conditions for intrinsic quantization comparison: controlling latent feature statistics and enforcing identical coding rates. Third, under these conditions, we recover the VQ--PQ--SQ distortion hierarchy in modern visual tokenization and show empirically that modern VQ methods achieve the lowest distortion. This work provides a foundational rate--distortion reframing of modern discrete visual tokenization, resolves ambiguities in quantizer evaluation, and provides a controlled framework for isolating intrinsic quantization effectiveness under fixed-rate constraints. --- ### Git4Data: Database-Native Version Control for AI Agents Authors: Hongshen Gou, Zuyu Zhang, Yuze Sun, Peng Xu, Feng Tian, Long Wang, Jianguo Wang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02106v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly explore many candidate states of relational data in parallel, each of which should remain isolated, reproducible, and auditable, preferably through the same SQL interface used for ordinary data work. Existing tools support this requirement only partially: source-code version control does not scale to large datasets, whereas relational databases manage large data efficiently but rarely expose native branching, comparison, and merging. We present Git4Data, a database-native version-control layer for agentic workflows. Git4Data treats a database as a repository and a table as a versioned object, exposing Git-style operations (snapshot/tag, branch, diff, and merge with explicit conflict-resolution policies) through SQL extensions. Implemented in MatrixOne, a cloud-native relational database, Git4Data leverages immutable object storage and MVCC to make the cost of these operations proportional to the size of the change rather than the size of the data. On the BranchBench agentic branching workloads, Git4Data outperforms DoltDB by up to an order of magnitude. Overall, we believe this work sheds light on how relational databases can better support AI agents through efficient versioning. --- ### Federated LoRA Adaptation of BiomedCLIP Across Four International Chest X-Ray Cohorts Authors: Sanjaya Poudel, Nirajan Kunwor, Manish Dhakal, Debesh Jha, Sunil Kumar Gaire Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02101v1 Federated learning (FL) lets institutions train a shared model without exchanging data, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) makes this practical at scale by communicating only compact low-rank updates. Biomedical imaging is a compelling setting for this combination: patient data are archived behind privacy regulations, and institutions differ widely in scanners, protocols, and compute. Such heterogeneity raises the question of how federated LoRA updates should be aggregated, increasingly pressing as multimodal vision-language models become central to medical image analysis. We benchmark federated Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of BiomedCLIP for chest radiograph classification across four public cohorts on three continents (USA, Vietnam, Spain). Federated LoRA adaptation improves shared-class AUC on all four cohorts over the unadapted BiomedCLIP backbone (mean 0.687 to 0.802), showing that the gains come from federated adaptation rather than from the pretrained model's zero-shot ability. Relative to isolated single-cohort training, federation improves the weaker cohorts while largely preserving the strongest and approaches a centralized reference (0.812) that pools all data. The singular value decomposition (SVD)-based product-space aggregation introduced by FlexLoRA is essential to this gain (naive factor averaging drops mean AUC by 0.097), whereas a drift-correcting optimizer (FedProx) shows no benefit over FedAvg in our single-seed runs, consistent with LoRA's low-rank updates already limiting client drift. Biomedical vision-language models can thus be adapted collaboratively across heterogeneous, geographically distributed institutions without centralizing data. --- ### Evidence-Guided Detection, Localization and Explanation for Text-Centric Image Forensics Authors: Peifeng Liu, Bin Li, Qingsong Zhang, Yangxin Yu, Leqing Chen, Xiaoye Qiu Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02097v1 The rapid progress of AIGC has made text-centric image manipulation increasingly accessible, creating new forensic challenges that require not only authenticity detection but also spatial grounding and evidence-based explanation. This paper presents our solution to the GenText-Forensics Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2026. We propose an evidence-guided detector-localizer-reasoner system, where an image-level detector provides a global authenticity prior, a dedicated localizer extracts tampered regions as spatial grounding evidence, and an MLLM-based reasoner generates structured forensic reports grounded in this expert forensic evidence. These modules are connected through a cascaded evidence flow: the detector gates the subsequent localization and prompting process, the localizer converts tamper responses into grounding boxes, and the reasoner is trained to synthesize the detector decision and localized evidence into the final report. As a key part of our method, we introduce iterative difficulty-aware mining to improve localization quality and apply report-mask consistency post-processing to align report grounding with predicted masks. On the official hidden test set, our system achieves a final score of 0.638 and ranks second in the challenge, validating the effectiveness of the proposed evidence-guided system. The code is available at https://github.com/peifengLiu42/ACMMM26-evidence-guided-detector-localizer-reasoner-system. --- ### READY or Not: Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment Authors: Veronica Chatrath, Bryan Zhu, Jingxuan Fan, George Pu, Soham Dinesh Tiwari, Soham Dan, Ryan Young, Yuan, Li, Yuang Yao, Apaar Shanker, Minglai Yang et al. Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02095v1 An AI agent can perform well on benchmarks and still be unsuitable for deployment. Existing AI-agent benchmarks measure whether an agent can complete realistic professional work, whereas enterprise deployment asks a different question: whether an agent can meet a required reliability level, under acceptable human oversight, and at tolerable cost. We introduce Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment (READY), a framework for qualifying AI agents for deployment on enterprise workflows. READY preserves each workflow's own definition of successful execution while applying a common qualification procedure. Given an agent, a workflow, and a class of candidate oversight policies, READY measures the reliability and operating cost of the human-AI system, selects the minimum-cost policy that satisfies a specified reliability target, and statistically qualifies it on held-out cases. The resulting deployment profile characterizes the supported operating point: reliability, human-oversight burden, and cost. READY is implemented as an open testbed that decouples workflow specification, execution, evaluation, and qualification, and runs on existing agent-evaluation infrastructure. In an end-to-end clinical-audit case study spanning 16 agent systems and 750 cases, READY reveals differences hidden by autonomous performance: two systems separated by only 0.3 points in autonomous accuracy (72.8% vs. 72.5%) require 39.2% versus 29.6% human review, respectively, to qualify at the same 76% reliability target under the evaluated oversight policy. READY thus shifts enterprise agent evaluation from how well can the agent perform the work? to under what conditions, and at what cost, can it be reliably deployed? By making those conditions explicit and statistically testable, READY provides a basis for comparing agent systems, setting oversight requirements, and making evidence-based deployment decisions. --- ### MASkills: Continual Skills Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems Authors: Huaiyuan Yao, Xiaoou Liu, Charles Fleming, Tianlong Chen, Hua Wei Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02094v1 LLM-based multi-agent systems have shown strong performance on complex tasks, yet continual improvement from interaction experience remains challenging. Existing self-reflection methods build experience memories, but memories are mostly hard to invoke, refine, or scale, while agent skills offer a more actionable unit: structured procedural knowledge that specifies when to act, how to act, and which resources or tools to use. We introduce MASkills, a continual learning framework that optimizes multi-agent LLM systems through agent skills. MASkills presents a new agent-optimization pipeline that integrates skill-conditioned credit assignment, hierarchical credit aggregation, and momentum-smoothed optimization, enabling agent skill libraries to evolve through refinement, induction, consolidation, and pruning. Experiments on HotpotQA, LoCoMo, and GAIA demonstrate the effectiveness of MASkills across multiple agentic tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/DaRL-GenAI/MASkills --- ### Compositional Spectral Prompts for LLM-based Online Time Series Forecasting Authors: Seungyoon Choi, Hyunchul Kim, Jae-Gil Lee, Chanyoung Park Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02093v1 To address the sequential and evolving nature of time series, the Online Time Series Forecasting (OTSF) task has been extensively studied in multiple domains. Existing research focuses on adapting to non-stationary environments by employing memory buffer-based retrieval strategies. However, we observe that such frameworks struggle with long-term adaptation and fail to generalize to unseen patterns. To this end, we introduce CoSPOT, an LLM-based online time series forecasting framework that leverages a pre-trained LLM as the backbone online forecaster, motivated by its strong few-shot capabilities. For efficient online adaptation, CoSPOT keeps the LLM frozen and employs compositional spectral prompts grounded in frequency-domain bases to guide the model with the overall distribution of the input, thereby substantially reducing the number of parameters updated during the online phase. Specifically, CoSPOT decomposes time series into frequency bases and composes the corresponding spectral basis prompts according to their amplitudes, allowing unseen patterns to be represented as new combinations of learned basis prompts. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and practicality of CoSPOT across challenging online scenarios, including extended online phases and cross-dataset settings with substantial distribution shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/seungyoon-Choi/CoSPOT. --- ### Beyond Outcome Gaps: Process-Aware Fairness Diagnosis for LLM-based Multi-Agent Decision Systems Authors: Yiran Zhao, Lu Zhou, Liming Fang, Yufei Chen, Jiafei Wu, Zhe Liu, Xiaogang Xu Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02092v1 LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly considered for high-stakes decision-making, yet outcome-based fairness audits can miss where risks arise within the decision trajectory. We present SCOPED-Hiring, a process-aware fairness diagnosis pipeline for LLM-based hiring MAS. SCOPED-Hiring constructs controlled resume variants, runs role-based hiring committees, logs over 311K structured decision trajectories, and converts trajectory fields into quantitative fairness signals organized by six diagnostic lenses: final outcome, counterfactual, process, pathway, dynamic, and design effects. SCOPED-Hiring reveals that balanced final hire rates can mask hidden trajectory unfairness in multi-agent decision trajectories: career gaps trigger suspicion, proxy cues shape qualification judgments, and identity cues lead to unequal investigation. Targeted repair guided by these diagnoses reduces total layered burden by 72.3% while shifting the hire rate by only 1.86 pp, showing that process diagnosis can guide effective repair. Project Page: https://scoped-hiring-project-page.vercel.app/ --- ### Selective Knowledge Edit Reversal via Gated Singular Vector Shrinkage Authors: Weifeng Jiang, Ruirui Chen, Qianren Mao, Junnan Liu, Qili Zhang, Kwok-Yan Lam Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02091v1 Knowledge editing provides an efficient way to update factual knowledge in large language models. However, malicious edits may introduce safety risks, making it necessary to reverse undesirable editing effects. Existing reversal methods for parameter-modifying edits mainly focus on global removal, which may also erase beneficial edits that should be preserved. In this paper, we study selective reversal of edited knowledge, where the goal is to reverse targeted edited facts while preserving the remaining edited facts. Based on the hypothesis that each edit is sparsely encoded within the dominant subspace of the edited matrix, we propose a spectral-based reversal framework that locates edit-sensitive components within the dominant singular subspace of edited weights. Experiments across multiple settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reversing selected edits while preserving unrelated edited facts. These results suggest that different edits are sparsely encoded within dominant singular components and can be separable when the number of edits is moderate, making selective spectral reversal a promising direction for locating edit-specific components and repairing edited language models. --- ### IDEEA: training-free Input-Dependent stEEring via Activation cluster matching Authors: Zheng Wang, Muchen Li, Renjie Liao, Yan Leng Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02089v1 Steering aligns large language models (LLMs) by injecting a bias into selected activations at inference time, offering a far cheaper alternative to weight-update methods such as supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. However, most existing training-free steering methods are input-independent: a single direction is fitted once and shared across all inputs. This is fundamentally limiting as different inputs occupy different regions of the activation space and admit different optimal steering directions toward the same target concept, much as the gradient with respect to a fixed loss varies from input to input. We close this gap with IDEEA (Input-Dependent stEEring via Activation cluster matching), a training-free framework for input-dependent steering. IDEEA clusters the positive and negative activation supports per attention head, and solves an optimal-matching problem to construct a set of cluster-conditional directions, all about the target concept. At inference time, it picks from this pool of directions and uses the one that best matches the input's own activation for steering. IDEEA aligns the model toward the target concept while preserving the input's original representation, evidence that activations encoding a concept occupy several distinct sub-regions of the representation space rather than a single one. IDEEA improves the truth $\times$ info rate in TruthfulQA by an average of 9.9% (up to 23.5%) over the best input-independent baseline. --- ### Rendering-in-the-Loop: An Execution-Driven Agent for Interactive Web Development Authors: Yilong Guo, Hanqi Chen, Zixiao Ye, Guanzhong Wang, Chen Yu, Zeyu Chen Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02088v1 Multimodal large language models have achieved remarkable progress in front-end web development, generating interactive webpages from multimodal references such as screenshots and interaction videos. However, existing work largely emphasizes visual metrics such as aesthetics and layout similarity, while overlooking the more critical validation of interactive functionality. We present RILA, an execution-driven agent that puts browser rendering in the loop, iteratively editing generated code from runtime interaction feedback. RILA introduces an Action Interaction Verification (AIV) module that replays the reference interaction trajectory on the generated webpage to collect grounded execution-aware observations, and an Execution-aware Rendering Score (ERS) that jointly measures interaction correctness and visual fidelity to guide iterative optimization. We further build an execution-verified data synthesis pipeline that produces diverse, high-quality training data, offering gains complementary to inference-time optimization. On IWR-Bench, RILA consistently improves both interaction and visual fidelity across foundation models. Notably, with our training pipeline, RILA lifts the compact Qwen3.5-9B backbone from 40.40% to 57.52%, surpassing far larger one-shot generators, including the 1T-parameter Kimi-K2.6 (55.61%) and the proprietary GPT-5.5 (55.74%). --- ### TC-Next: Zero-Shot Multimodal Cyclone Forecasting Authors: Zhe Wang, Sijie Chen, Yiming Luo, Daehyun Kim, Chien-Yi Chang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02085v1 We present TropicalCycloneNext (TC-Next), a multimodal deep learning model that forecasts tropical cyclone track and intensity at $6$-$24$ h leads by leveraging a foundation model's forecast fields of atmospheric kinematic and thermodynamic fields and GridSat infrared satellite imagery. Trained only on GraphCast forecasts over the Western Pacific (WP), yet reliant only on generic atmospheric variables, TC-Next on GraphCast lowers track error by $15$-$44\%$ and intensity error by a factor of $3$-$6$ relative to a conventional, rule-based tracker, TempestExtremes; applied without retraining to the forecast fields of Pangu-Weather and IFS HRES, it stays ahead of TempestExtremes on both. Applied zero-shot to the generic weather fields of WeatherNext Cyclones on the 2025 WP season, TC-Next attains lower intensity error at every lead time, and lower or comparable track error, compared to that model's specialized direct tracker in a deterministic comparison. Our ablation studies show that our multimodal model is able to utilize the additional modality to improve performance in tracking errors at every lead time and in intensity prediction at longer lead times. --- ### XMerge: Cross-Axis Selection and Reconstructive Layer Merging for LLM Depth Compression Authors: Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02083v1 Removing complete transformer layers preserves a standard serving architecture, but existing depth-compression methods can lose substantial quality, and the loss varies unpredictably across models. We introduce XMerge, a post-training method with two components. Cross-axis selection identifies a block with low relative-magnitude and angular hidden-state change, and local boundary reconstruction re-fits the adjacent surviving block to match the original two-block output. XMerge uses no task labels or end-to-end fine-tuning, and it introduces neither architectural changes nor additional inference-time parameters. Across seven Llama and Qwen backbones (0.5B-8B), five published baselines, and three layer-reduction levels, its advantage over baselines is largest at the most aggressive removal: at k=4 it ranks first on six of seven backbones on CORE (a 22-task aggregate) and, separately, on six of seven on MMLU (five of seven on both at once), while avoiding the large perplexity increases of several competing operators. In a task-level bootstrap, the 95% confidence intervals for the three largest CORE margins exclude zero; the remaining margins are consistent with ties. Across the 14 (model, regime) cells it is also the only evaluated operator that never collapses, ranking top-2 in both zero-shot and in-context regimes; on a first calibration probe (one backbone) it is the best-calibrated operator. Ablations show that local reconstruction provides most of the gain, while cross-axis fusion helps when the two selection axes disagree. The additional construction cost is recovered through per-token decode savings after roughly tens of thousands of requests. --- ### Transfer Safety Awareness for Cross-Modal Safety Drift in Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Tianqi Xiao, Shiyao Cui, Minghao Zhang, Junxiao Yang, Renmiao Chen Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02082v2 Visual modality enhances the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) but also introduces a safety concern: a benign textual query may convey harmful intent when grounded in a visual image. We term this cross-modal safety drift and our pilot studies show that the safety response rate for such requests is substantially lower than that for requests containing explicitly unsafe text. This paper aims to systematically study this issue. First, we conduct an empirical analysis to identify representative unsafe response patterns. Building on these, we interpret model representations and attentions, revealing that visually risky cues receive limited attention and weakly trigger refusal. Motivated by the observation that safety signals from unsafe text processing can be transferred, we propose safety-awareness representation transfer (SRT), a lightweight direction-refinement method that mitigates cross-modal safety drift with a frozen MLLM backbone. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models show that SRT effectively improves safety in diverse cross-modal settings while preserving utility. Code is available at https://github.com/cucu220123/safety-awareness. --- ### KSG-Net: Key-Sparse and Global-Context Learning for Maritime 3D Ship Detection Authors: Zhouyuan Huai, Meiqi Wan, Yan Yang, Minshi Chen, Xin Yuan, Wei Wang, Xiao Wang Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02077v1 Accurate 3D ship detection in maritime environments is critical for autonomous navigation, yet remains challenging due to large-scale vessel variations, sparse point clouds of small vessels, and severe sea-clutter interference. Existing methods, primarily based on 2D features or dense representations, struggle to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency, while sparse 3D detectors designed for road scenes generalize poorly to maritime scenarios. This paper focuses on two key challenges in maritime LiDAR perception: weak feature representation for small and sparse vessels, and insufficient global structural modeling for large vessels due to the limited receptive field of local sparse convolutions. To address these issues, we propose KSG-Net, a Key-Sparse and Global-Context learning network for maritime 3D ship detection. The core idea is to jointly enhance local discriminative features and global structural awareness within a unified fully sparse detection framework. Specifically, a Key Sparse Multi-scale Aggregation (KSMA) module is designed to enhance the representation of small and sparse vessels by selecting informative key voxels and aggregating cross-scale neighborhood features. Furthermore, a Global Context Aggregation (GCA) module is introduced to capture long-range geometric dependencies through scene-level context modeling with gated residual interactions, thereby improving the representation of large vessels. Extensive experiments on the Thames River vessel dataset and simulated datasets demonstrate that KSG-Net consistently outperforms existing methods in multi-scale vessel detection and exhibits strong robustness in complex maritime environments. --- ### DPA: Decoupling Product-Agnostic Anomaly Representations for Zero-shot Anomaly Generation Authors: Hang Yao, Yansheng Fu, Ming Liu, Zifei Yan, Yanli Ji, Hongzhi Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02075v1 Industrial anomaly detection benefits from anomaly samples, yet newly deployed products typically provide only normal images, making anomaly samples difficult to collect. Zero-shot anomaly generation offers a promising solution which avoids collection of target-product anomalies. However, existing methods mainly rely on texture images or text descriptions as anomaly sources, which often produce unrealistic anomalies. Observing that similar anomalies can recur across different products, we propose anomaly transfer-based zero-shot generation, which reuses real anomalies from existing source products, making target-product anomalies no longer necessary to generate realistic anomalious samples for unseen target products. Since not every anomaly type suits the target product, an anomaly type filtering mechanism first selects plausible source types. To transfer selected anomaly, we propose DPA, a diffusion-based framework that decouples product-agnostic anomaly representations. Instead of directly extracting anomaly representations, DPA learns product-irrelevant anomaly embeddings through training with the mismatched data pair, enabling transferable anomaly concept learning across products. Furthermore, we design an adaptive mask-guided pipeline that leverages adaptive masks to control the positional and geometric plausibility of generated anomalies during generation. A training-free anomaly labeling module is further introduced to produce pixel-level annotations aligned with generated anomalies. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, and a dedicated anomaly-transfer benchmark demonstrate that the proposed setting and DPA generate more realistic anomalies and significantly improve downstream anomaly detection performance under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Source code and models will be released. --- ### CHIME: Credit-Aware Hierarchical Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agentic Planning Authors: Yongshi Ye, Tian Lan, Feihu Jiang, Muyang Ye, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Xiaodong Shi Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02074v1 Planning is a central capability that enables agents to decompose complex long-horizon tasks into manageable steps. Test-time search and training-based methods improve planning but incur high inference costs or require expensive training data. Self-evolving memory instead accumulates reusable experience from agent interaction outcomes into an external memory bank, so planning capability keeps improving at inference time without parameter updates. However, existing self-evolving memory methods share an inherent credit assignment problem: they rely on final task outcomes as feedback, but such outcomes conflate plan quality with execution errors and environmental factors, so the accumulated planning experience is often biased and noisy. To address this problem, we propose Credit-Aware Hierarchical Memory Evolution (CHIME), a self-evolving memory framework that maintains a separate planning bank and execution bank and follows an attribute-before-memorize principle: CHIME first attributes each task outcome to the plan, the execution, both, or neither, and then updates only the corresponding memory bank. Extensive experiments on four long-horizon agent benchmarks show that CHIME consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-based and self-evolving memory baselines. Further analyses reveal several interesting findings. For example, CHIME accumulates effective memory with far fewer items. In addition, the learned memory values faithfully reflect downstream utility: high-quality planning memories are more valuable than execution memories. Finally, the accumulated memory effectively transfers across backbone models. Code will be released at https://github.com/ATH-MaaS/Marco-DeepResearch. --- ### DynG-Diff: A State-Aware Dynamic Guidance Diffusion Framework for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting Authors: Zhente Zhang, Zhengwei Ni, Wei Fan Published: 2026-09-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02068v1 Probabilistic multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is crucial for modeling complex dynamical systems. However, existing diffusion-based methods rely on task-specific conditional paradigms that lack flexibility and struggle with inherent "information heterogeneity"--the significantly varying noise levels and evolutionary patterns across variables. To address this, we propose DynG-Diff, a variable-sensitive dynamic guidance diffusion framework for probabilistic multivariate time-series forecasting: (1) DynG-Diff adopts a two-stage separated training strategy and uses an unconditional diffusion backbone to model the joint distribution of multivariate time series. (2) DynG-Diff introduces a lightweight state-aware policy network that adaptively infers variable reliability from real-time noisy states and one-step denoising estimates, outputting a dynamic guidance strength matrix. (3) DynG-Diff mathematically formulates this dynamic weight as the local precision of the observation distribution, enabling precise guidance for high-confidence variables during inference while filtering out interference from anomalous noise. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate competitive probabilistic forecasting performance against state-of-the-art conditional diffusion models and improved robustness under severe observation corruption.The implementation code is available at: https://github.com/TT-20011031/DynG-Diff ---