# Research Papers — 2026-09 · bundle page 81 of 266 > Full-text markdown of papers #4001–4050 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/81 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/80.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-09/page/82.md) ### FeatMark: Feature-level Watermark Protection against Mimicry Attacks with Diffusion Models Authors: Haoyang Li, Ruoxi Sun, Qingqing Ye, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Yaxin Xiao, Jason Xue, Haibo Hu Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30980v1 Text-to-image diffusion models enable data-efficient "mimicry" attacks, wherein adversaries fine-tune the model on a handful of public photos to synthesize convincing forgeries of a target individual. A common countermeasure is to embed imperceptible, low-energy watermarks, yet recent studies show these signatures are brittle: modest post-processing or lightweight adversarial perturbations readily suppress detection, exposing a fundamental tension between imperceptibility and robustness. We introduce FeatMark, a watermarking framework that shifts from pixel-level, energy-starved perturbations to inconspicuous semantic features: small, scene-consistent micro-features that remain natural to humans while providing a stronger, machine-verifiable provenance signal. FeatMark builds domain-specific feature banks that encode each watermark as a compact concept program, pairing open-vocabulary semantic cues with reliable edit regions and instruction templates. It then automatically selects features that are both feasible and executable and injects them through modular, mask-guided concept editing, yielding highly localized, scene-consistent micro-edits that are difficult to perceive. We conduct extensive experiments across VGGFace2, CelebA-HQ, and WikiArt, evaluating against 10 strong watermark removal/purification attacks (including regeneration-style purification) and several bespoke adaptive attacks tailored to FeatMark, to assess perceptual fidelity, watermark detection accuracy, and robustness. We further demonstrate FeatMark's extensibility to video mimicry attacks. The results show FeatMark remains virtually impervious, withstanding all evaluated attacks with negligible bit-accuracy and fidelity degradation. --- ### CCRV-Bench: Constraint-Based Evaluation of Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models Authors: Linyuan Gao, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30979v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in visual tasks, but their visual causal reasoning capabilities still lack reliable evaluation. Existing evaluations struggle to distinguish whether a model is performing causal reasoning based on visual evidence or relying on statistical correlations for shortcut learning, thereby potentially overestimating their actual capabilities. This paper proposes CCRV-Bench, a constraint-driven visual causal reasoning benchmark for single-image physical scenarios. We construct an orthogonal framework that evaluates four causal task dimensions: causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention. We further introduce entity symbolization, spatial grounding, the factual adversarial constraint, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut cues while preserving the physical commonsense required by the task. Experiments across 15 multimodal models show that constraint sensitivity is task- and model-dependent: intervention has the largest average effective degradation among the four causal tasks, spatial grounding is the most damaging constraint on average, and the factual adversarial constraint improves DCR for all evaluated models. These results show that unconstrained performance does not determine constrained robustness and that a single aggregate score can obscure distinct failures in causal identification, spatial grounding, and constraint-compliant expression. CCRV-Bench provides a standardized framework for diagnosing image-grounded causal reasoning under controlled constraints. The code is available at https://github.com/0815linyuan/CCRV-Bench-Constraint-Based-Evaluation-of-Causal-Reasoning-in-Vision-Language-Models --- ### Does Uniform Discrete Diffusion Need Time? Authors: Chunsan Hong, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Satoshi Hayakawa, Yuhta Takida, Jong Chul Ye, Yuki Mitsufuji Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30977v1 Uniform discrete diffusion models (UDMs) commonly use explicit time conditioning, but we find that it can often be unnecessary in practice. In this paper, we first show that the population-optimal UDM predictor generally depends on time: time controls how much the model should trust the observed context. We then show that this dependence can become negligible in finite-data settings relevant to language. When a corrupted training sequence remains much closer to its original clean sequence than to competing training sequences, the empirical-optimal predictor is nearly insensitive to time over most of the diffusion trajectory, where the guarantee weakens toward the high-noise endpoint. Empirically, trained language UDMs exhibit limited time sensitivity over most of the trajectory, while time-agnostic predictors remain competitive with, and often outperform, time-conditioned models across datasets and training objectives. These results challenge the use of explicit time conditioning in UDMs: although the population optimum depends on time, explicitly conditioning on it may often be unnecessary in practice. --- ### A Comprehensive Study of Content Representations for Speech Synthesis Authors: Diego Torres, Axel Roebel, Nicolas Obin Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: eess.AS, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30975v1 Speech content representations are central to voice conversion, speech-to-speech translation, and multimodal language models, yet they are rarely compared under a common generative framework that directly measures what each representation contains. We address this by training a generative model conditioned solely on each representation and evaluating the generated audio along the content, speaker identity, and prosody axes. Across SSL features, supervised tokens, posteriorgrams, and neural audio codecs, we find two distinct regimes: representations that nearly reconstruct the original audio, and representations that effectively disentangle speaker identity. These results show that disentanglement depends not on supervision alone, but on the interaction between the training objective and the representation's information capacity: supervised representations only disentangle speaker identity when their capacity is sufficiently constrained. --- ### Coupled Usage-Sense Processes: Temporal and Attributable Lexical Semantic Change Authors: Haruka Ezoe, Ryohei Hisano Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30974v1 Lexical semantic change is usually summarized by a scalar distance between independently sampled period distributions. This measures how much a word changed, but does not reveal when it changed, which mechanisms and component movements carried the change, or which usages support the attribution. We introduce Coupled Usage--Sense Processes (CUSP), which derives these answers from a single marginal preserving temporal process. A hierarchical coupling relates contextual distributions through latent usage components, while Markov composition makes adjacent and longer span correspondences compatible. Displacement operators quantify change magnitude and timing, split variation exactly between movement of component centers and reorganization within components, and attribute it to transported component pairs. Word-local modes resolve distinct directions of change and their activity over time, while representative passages from attributed components ground the analysis in text. Under a Gaussian mixture specialization, we prove parametric recovery of the operators and squared distances. Synthetic experiments support the predicted rate. CUSP remains competitive on English and German DWUG and recovers controlled Janus profiles while maintaining compositionally coherent transport. A large corpus of US court opinions demonstrates transition, mode, and passage attribution in unlabeled natural text. CUSP thus makes magnitude, timing, mechanism, movement, modes, and textual evidence compatible views of one lexical history. --- ### LipSSM: Structurally Lipschitz-Bounded Cascaded State-Space Model via Metric Transfer between Consecutive SSM Layers Authors: Natsuki Yoshino, Ren Uchida, Kazuki Matsumoto, Kohei Yatabe Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30973v1 Lipschitz continuity is a fundamental principle in the design of certifiably robust deep neural networks (DNNs), wherein adjusting the Lipschitz constant, which quantifies network robustness, is of central theoretical importance. A standard approach to enforcing Lipschitz continuity requires each layer of a DNN to be Lipschitz continuous, thereby guaranteeing overall Lipschitz continuity. However, this layer-wise approach typically imposes overly conservative restrictions by producing a loose estimate of the overall Lipschitz constant, which limits the expressive capacity of the DNN and degrades empirical performance at a prescribed level of robustness. To overcome this loose estimation, the recently proposed LipKernel transfers information across layers to yield a much tighter overall Lipschitz bound than conventional layer-wise construction. In this paper, we extend this concept to cascaded state-space models (SSMs) to construct Lipschitz-continuous DNNs capable of modeling longer-term dependencies. The proposed architecture, named LipSSM, is theoretically justified and empirically evaluated. --- ### Factorized axis convolutional gated recurrent unit with dynamic adaptive pooling for remaining useful life prediction of rolling bearings Authors: Hanbyeol Park, Jungho Choo, Hyerim Bae Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30972v1 Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings from time-frequency representations (TFRs) of vibration signals. However, during degradation, characteristic structures in TFRs align predominantly along the frequency or time axis, making it challenging for conventional CNN isotropic kernels to capture directional structure. Furthermore, global average pooling (GAP) averages across axes, potentially obscuring the locations and concentrations of salient activations. This study introduces a factorized-axis convolutional gated recurrent unit (GRU) that employs multiscale anisotropic convolution and dual-axis convolution block attention module to enhance directional features and highlight salient time-frequency regions. Dynamic adaptive pooling (DAP) adaptively aggregates the time-frequency-axis information from the extracted feature maps, whereas a GRU captures temporal dynamics in the latent representations and Monte Carlo dropout enables predictive uncertainty estimation. Experiments on two public bearing datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing RUL prediction methods across operating conditions. Ablation experiments demonstrate that the factorized axis-wise design achieves lower mean errors than convolutional isotropic kernels. DAP yields clear improvements on one dataset while matching GAP on the other, highlighting the importance of anisotropic feature extraction and adaptive feature aggregation for TFR-based RUL prediction. --- ### SciHorizon-eLab: An Agentic Protocol-to-Task Compiler for Scalable Benchmarking of Scientific Embodied Agents Authors: Maokai Qin, Chuan Qin, Qi Zhang, Dianyu Liu, Zirui Liu, Hongting Niu, Yuanchun Zhou, Hengshu Zhu Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30971v1 Embodied agents offer a promising route to automating scientific experimentation, yet their progress is constrained by the lack of reliable and systematic evaluation environments. Existing simulation-based laboratory benchmarks rely heavily on manual task engineering, making it challenging to systematically compile diverse scientific protocols into executable and verifiable embodied tasks at scale. To address this challenge, we introduce SciHorizon-eLab, an agentic protocol-to-task compiler that formulates scientific embodied task construction as a compilation problem. Given a natural-language protocol of scientific experiments, SciHorizon-eLab progressively compiles laboratory protocols into semantic-preserving embodied tasks through semantic grounding, executable task synthesis, and multi-stage simulation-based certification. The system generates semantically grounded environments, executable manipulation programs, and step-level success specifications, while enabling reproducible generation of expert demonstrations and execution traces. Using this pipeline, we further construct \BenchName, a ready-to-use benchmark comprising 300 certified tasks across diverse laboratory operations. It supports HIL task execution, reproducible expert-demonstration generation, and ordered step-level evaluation. Across representative tasks, the strongest policy attains an average success rate of only 49.7%, with further evaluations revealing pronounced weaknesses in human and embodied agent coordination. We publicly release the code, benchmark data, and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/SciHorizon-elab/SciHorizon-elab. --- ### FAVoR: Measuring and Mitigating Author-Style Homogenization in Federated Personalized Generation Authors: Lu Han, Jingyao Zhang, Katy Ilonka Gero, Nguyen H. Tran Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30968v1 Large language models are increasingly used as personalized writing assistants, but adapting a model across many authors can compromise individual writing style by pulling author-specific signals toward a shared register. Federated parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) offers a data-local setting for this multi-author adaptation problem: clients keep author text local while sharing compact adapter updates. However, we show that standard aggregation can preserve continuation utility while making different authors' generations less distinguishable in style space, a failure mode we define as author-style homogenization. We evaluate author-style retention with Angular Style Classification Encoder (ASCE)-based diagnostics on our main BlogText benchmark and ASCE-independent external authorship verification. Using this protocol, we find that common federated PEFT baselines can preserve semantic utility while averaging out author-specific signals. To address this homogenization, we instantiate FAVoR (Federated Authorial Voice Retention), an author-style residual mechanism for federated PEFT. FAVoR uses a shared-private adapter design: clients upload shared-adapter updates while retaining author-specific residual corrections locally. Across BlogText and external Mythos-Reddit validation, FAVoR improves author-style retention over standard and personalized federated PEFT baselines. These gains come with small continuation-utility trade-offs and are supported by component ablations, external verification, and cold-start transfer. --- ### MoMHa: Multi-Objective Optimization of LLM Harnesses over Accuracy, Safety, and Tokens Authors: Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Md Mehrab Tanjim Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30967v1 Most work on improving large language models treats accuracy as the sole objective. We argue that the harness, the Python code surrounding the model that constructs prompts, routes calls, and parses outputs, is a first-class design surface whose quality is inherently multi-objective: an accurate harness that refuses no unsafe request, or that consumes an order of magnitude more tokens, is not a good harness. We present Meta-Harness, a system that casts harness design as search over three per-domain objectives (accuracy, behavioural safety, and token cost) solved by an agentic proposer (Claude Code) with full filesystem access to prior harness source, execution traces, and scoring artifacts. Our central finding is that a singlephase joint-reward proposer (MoMHa) outperforms every alternative, including a two-phase "accuracy then tokens" ablation, scalar-only feedback, and an accuracy-only baseline. We evaluate on seventeen domains: seven synthetic capability suites, seven real-world public benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, Spider, FEVER, MMLU-Pro, LawBench, NuminaMath), and three U-SafeBench-derived user-specific safety domains, using a 12-model fleet spanning four families. On the synthetic track MoMHa achieves a joint mean of 0.482 versus 0.198-0.422 for ten baselines, winning $7 / 10$ per-domain columns; on the real-world track it scores 0.461 versus 0.377 for the strongest baseline (DSPy), winning 5/7 columns, demonstrating that harness strategies transfer to unseen benchmarks without retraining on 8 of 12 target models. MoMHa attains the highest measured behavioral safety composite (U-SafeBench, 0.781) and uses 95 fewer tokens per example than the two-phase alternative. We will release all harness code, evaluation infrastructure, and crossmodel logs. --- ### Gradient Surgery for Physics-Informed Neural Networks Authors: Thomas Borsani, Giuseppe Di Fatta Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30966v1 Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are trained by optimising a composite objective that combines data fitting with physics-based constraints, typically resulting in a highly imbalanced multi-task optimisation problem. Under these conditions, existing optimisation strategies are affected by conflicting task gradients, leading to slow convergence and unstable training, particularly for stiff and high-frequency partial differential equations. We analyse gradient conflicts throughout training of PINNs with standard optimiser and investigate Multi-Task Deep Learning (MTDL) optimisation methods. In our analysis across four benchmark problems we observed that PINN optimisation exhibits three distinct phases in which angle- and magnitude-based gradient conflicts alternate, with only one present at a time. Building on these observations, we propose PAM-GS, a physics-aware gradient surgery method that adaptively mitigates task interference during training according to the observed conflict types. Experiments on four representative PDE benchmarks demonstrate that PAM-GS combines competitive solution accuracy with consistently strong task-balanced performance, outperforming existing methods on most problems. --- ### Where and When to Force: Routed Forcing for Streaming Avatars Authors: Zihan Su, Siwen Lu, Junhao Zhuang, Zeyue Xue, Haoyang Huang, Guanghao Li, Xiaofeng Tan, Chun Yuan, Nan Duan Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30963v1 Audio-driven streaming avatar generation requires real-time synthesis of speech-synchronized videos with dynamic and diverse motion. Self Forcing uses Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) to distill bidirectional video diffusion models into causal, few-step generators for real-time streaming. However, DMD minimizes a reverse KL divergence, which is inherently mode-seeking: it causes the student to discard high-dynamic modes and collapse onto static outputs, compressing both dynamics and diversity of generated videos. We find that this collapse is region-heterogeneous: person regions involving pose and gesture variations suffer the largest diversity loss, the audio-driven mouth region shows a small loss, and the background remains nearly stable. Based on this observation, we propose Routed Forcing, which routes the distillation objective by semantic region and noise stage to improve dynamics and diversity while preserving visual quality. Specifically, (1) Where to Force: Semantic-Region Routing applies Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), which supervises the student with real videos, to the person region where diversity collapse is most severe, while retaining DMD for the mouth and background to preserve lip synchronization and scene stability. (2) When to Force: Noise-Stage Routing activates DFD at high noise stages, where real video serves as effective supervision to inject diverse and dynamic motion patterns. At low noise stages, DMD is used to refine details, avoiding blur and artifacts from spatial differences between real video and student-generated video. Experiments show that Routed Forcing improves dynamics by up to 45% and diversity by 7-25% over Self Forcing, while preserving video quality and lip synchronization. --- ### IDM-Net: A Lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement Authors: Cheng-Yen Hsiao, Jing-Ming Guo Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30962v1 Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) remains challenging for lightweight models because illumination restoration and color fidelity are difficult to optimize simultaneously in the RGB color space. Although recent color-decoupled methods separate luminance and chrominance representations, they primarily optimize luminance as an enhancement target, leaving its potential as an explicit guidance prior largely unexplored during feature reconstruction. To address this limitation, we propose IDM-Net, a lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for low-light image enhancement. IDM-Net adopts a dual-encoder architecture consisting of a structure encoder that extracts multi-scale appearance features from the RGB image and a lightweight illumination encoder that learns illumination priors from the decoupled luminance (Y) channel. To effectively exploit these priors, we introduce an Illumination-Guided Modulation (IGM) module that injects multi-scale illumination cues into the decoder through spatially adaptive affine modulation, enabling accurate brightness restoration while preserving natural color consistency. Furthermore, we design a lightweight Feature Refinement Block (FRB) to progressively suppress degradation artifacts and recover fine-grained image details during reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple standard low-light image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate that IDM-Net achieves competitive performance among lightweight LLIE methods while maintaining an excellent balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency. --- ### Towards Understanding Momentum Acceleration in River-Valley Loss Landscape Authors: Miao Lu, Zeyu Bian, Kaiyue Wen, Beining Wu, Siyu Chen, Tianhao Wang, Zhiyuan Li Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30957v1 The empirical success of pretraining large language models has inspired a deeper investigation into the underlying loss landscapes and the optimization dynamics. Recent empirical and theoretical study suggest that the training loss landscape often exhibits a "river-valley" structure, which features a low-loss manifold (river) flanked by sharp orthogonal directions with higher loss (mountains). In the long term, the optimization progress is determined primarily by the progress along the river. Within such a landscape, gradient descent with large learning rates can move faster along the river despite high apparent loss due to vertical oscillations, while a subsequent sharp decay in the learning rate suppresses these oscillations, revealing genuine optimization progress. This explains the recent success of warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler which, unlike cosine scheduling, keeps stable high learning rate and decays before producing intermediate checkpoints. Building on this foundation, in this work we take a step further and study the role of momentum within such a loss landscape. We establish theoretical analysis that characterizes how momentum accelerates optimization by stabilizing large learning rates that can not be tolerated by vanilla GD without deviating significantly from the river. The enabled large learning rate in-turn gives greater speed along the river and makes faster essential progress in the long run. Another intriguing observation from theory is that for a river-valley landscape with very flat and slow-spinning river, the momentum itself does not contribute directly to acceleration in terms of the speed of tracking the river, while the main acceleration comes from the admissible larger learning rate. --- ### FTB Graph: Determining and Validating First-token Broadcasters and Language-Identity Head Circuits in Multilingual Language Models Authors: Arjun Pillai, Christian Hoang, Anjelo Laroza Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30954v1 Large language models operating in multilingual contexts must resolve target response languages early in generation, yet the causal circuitry governing first-token language identity decisions remains poorly mapped. We present an end-to-end structural circuit analysis across six model architectures spanning four families: GPT-2, BLOOM-560M, Pythia-1B/2.8B, and Qwen2.5-1.5B Base/Instruct. Using Edge Attribution Patching (EAP) with FP16 active clamping, followed by exact activation patching verification with a 2,000-candidate-edge search ceiling, we extract directed acyclic graphs driving first-token language broadcasting. Across the standalone models, we observe deep or mid-to-deep broadcasting hubs, though the evidence is strongest for Pythia-2.8B and BLOOM-560M because GPT-2 and Pythia-1B leave few out-of-graph heads for comparison, while both Qwen2.5-1.5B variants invert the necessity check. Scaling from Pythia-1B to 2.8B expands node participation while maintaining a similar verified edge budget, producing sparser topology. The Qwen2.5-1.5B base and instruct circuits retain 84.7% Jaccard similarity, including the Layer 27 hub, indicating that first-token routing is largely established during pretraining and preserved by instruction tuning. Finally, EAP scores correlate weakly with exact patching deltas across most models, showing that linear gradient approximations can diverge from causal interventions in FP16 and motivating exact-patching verification for reliable circuit discovery. --- ### MVVBench: Benchmarking 4D Reasoning in Vision-Language Models Authors: Hyungjin Chung, Byeongjun Park, Joonseok Lee, Hojun Kim, Jaeho Choi, Byung-Hoon Kim Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30952v1 Multi-view video understanding requires integrating spatial and temporal evidence across multiple, often non-overlapping camera streams: tracking entities as they transition between viewpoints, aligning events across time, and reasoning about latent 4D continuity rather than any single visible frame. We introduce MVVBench, a benchmark for multi-view video reasoning built from real world multi camera datasets. Questions are curated to be monocular-ambiguous along both the view and the temporal axis: each question is unanswerable from any single view in the designated input set, and the majority are further unanswerable from any single moment. Each question becomes uniquely solvable only by jointly reasoning across views and across time. MVVBench spans diverse dynamic scenes and probes six capabilities: implicit/explicit attribute identification, implicit/explicit relative distance, relative camera pose, and compositional counting, with human-authored QA and rigorous verification. Beyond benchmarking, we provide an extensive analysis of when and why current vision language models succeed or fail, characterizing errors due to temporal mis-localization, cross-view identity breaks, and brittle multi-hop reasoning. We then study inference-time elicitation strategies that unlock latent multi-view competence---task-specific chain-of-thought scaffolds and structured cross-view evidence aggregation---yielding substantial gains without retraining. Finally, we present preliminary evidence that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can elicit some latent multi-view competence in the base model, pointing to training-time approaches as a promising direction for future work. Together, MVVBench offers a rigorous evaluation of 4D multi-view reasoning and a foundation for future progress toward reliable embodied perception. --- ### Low-Bit Recurrent States in Hybrid Language Models Authors: Hongren Chen, Jiayang He Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30950v1 Hybrid language models maintain fixed-size recurrent states, but existing quantizers typically use eight bits or more. Quantization errors persist according to channel decay rates. We derive distortion weights from the observability Gramian and combine them with normalized state ranges for mixed-precision bit allocation, without calibration data, rotation, or training. We also quantize decay rates logarithmically. With per-token state quantization, a four-bit mean payload reduces excess negative log-likelihood by factors of 3.3--27.9 relative to the best of seven baselines across three hybrid models; metadata costs vary. At six bits, negative log-likelihood differs from the FP32-state baseline by less than 0.005 nats. Ablations separate gains from variable bit widths, decay weighting, and range normalization. With less frequent write-backs, gains diminish and depend on the model and budget. --- ### PORL: Pretrained Offline Reinforcement Learning for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem Authors: Mateo Toro Diz, Jonathan Hoss, Noah Klarmann Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30948v1 The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem in industrial optimization. This work introduces Pretrained Offline Reinforcement Learning (PORL), a hybrid approach that combines simulation-based online pretraining with offline fine-tuning on production-specific data. Reinforcement learning through online interaction enables exploration of general scheduling strategies, but typically relies on simulation environments and may suffer from a simulation-to-reality gap. In contrast, offline RL avoids direct interaction with the environment by learning from historical data, but its performance is strongly influenced by dataset quality and coverage. PORL combines the strengths of both paradigms by first learning a general scheduling policy through online interaction and subsequently adapting it offline to a target distribution. A KL-divergence-based policy constraint is introduced to limit deviations from the pretrained policy during fine-tuning. The approach is evaluated on JSSP instances with distribution shift and datasets generated from heuristic, noisy-expert, and random behavioral policies. The results show that PORL consistently achieves lower optimality gaps than standalone offline RL and the considered general scheduling baselines. Furthermore, its advantage over standalone offline RL increases as dataset quality decreases, indicating reduced sensitivity to the quality and coverage of the available offline data. The results suggest that offline adaptation of pretrained policies is a promising approach for industrial scheduling environments where direct online exploration is impractical. --- ### DAPEVO: Deep Adaptive Patch Frame-Event Visual Odometry Authors: Luca Gandolfi, Simone Nascivera, Roberto Pellerito, Rong Zou, Chiara Plizzari, Davide Scaramuzza Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30947v1 Visual odometry is essential for autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments, yet RGB-based methods remain vulnerable to motion blur, challenging illumination, and dropped frames. Event cameras complement conventional cameras with high temporal resolution and dynamic range, but their asynchronous measurements complicate reliable correspondence estimation. We present DAPEVO, a learned visual odometry system that estimates image and event correspondences independently at shared patch locations and fuses their correlation evidence before motion refinement. Each tracked patch maintains image and event descriptors, and a learned scalar gate combines modality-specific correlation embeddings for each patch--frame edge before a shared recurrent refinement and bundle-adjustment update. DAPEVO also supports event-only observations, enabling continued tracking when RGB frames are sparse or unavailable, while modality-aware keyframe culling preserves scarce frame constraints. On UZH-FPV, when retaining only one in six RGB frames, DAPEVO's mean absolute trajectory error (ATE) increases by only 36%, from 1.00 to 1.36m, whereas the ATE of DPVO and RAMP-VO rises by factors of $3.7\times$ and $3.1\times$, respectively. On TartanEvent, DAPEVO similarly remains below 1m ATE at 3Hz RGB input, while DPVO and RAMP-VO exceed 9m. Under degraded RGB input on TartanEvent, DAPEVO achieves an ATE of 0.60m, compared with more than 4m for both DPVO and RAMP-VO, while also outperforming event-only DEVO at 0.87m. --- ### OneWorld: Learning Consistent Physics Across Actions in World Models Authors: Ke He, Yichen Ding, Bin Yang Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30946v1 Action-conditioned video world models aim to predict scene evolution under different actions, a capability that is essential for reliable planning, decision-making, and interaction in dynamic environments. However, futures generated independently from the same initial scene may each appear plausible while implying incompatible physical properties, such as friction or mass. This inconsistency can lead to contradictory predictions across interventions, making it difficult for the model to maintain a coherent understanding of the underlying world and limiting its reliability for planning and decision-making. To address these issues, we propose OneWorld, a shared-mechanism counterfactual generation framework that jointly models multiple action-conditioned futures under a common latent physical mechanism. A physical mechanism interpreter first infers a distribution over latent mechanisms from each action-outcome branch. These distributions are then aggregated into shared-world evidence, which captures whether the branches admit a common physical explanation while accounting for uncertainty in less informative branches. This evidence constrains flow training and guides sampling, encouraging consistency in the underlying physical mechanism while preserving the distinct outcomes induced by different actions. We further introduce a multi-intervention evaluation protocol in controlled environments, following the interaction settings of ACWM-Phys, to assess whether generated futures can be jointly explained by the same physical parameters, alongside standard measures of single-rollout prediction quality. Experiments in these environments show that OneWorld improves cross-intervention physical consistency while maintaining competitive single-rollout prediction quality. --- ### LogicTree-RAG: Logic Tree-guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-form Patent Drafting Authors: Jiaqi Zhu, Naili Xing, Hexiang Pan, Haotian Gao, Jianwei Yin, Xiaokui Xiao, Beng Chin Ooi Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30943v1 Long-form technical text generation underpins knowledge-intensive workflows, yet remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to the need for globally consistent logical structuring and faithful technical reasoning beyond local coherence. Patent drafting is a canonical instance of this challenge, demanding holistic generation of a legally compliant and technically exhaustive document through sustained multi-expert collaboration. Existing approaches often focus on partial section generation or rely on manually crafted outlines, limiting scalable automation in realistic settings. In this work, we propose LogicTree-RAG, a logic tree-guided retrieval-augmented generation framework that induces a hierarchical logic tree as a global organizational backbone to organize and ground technical disclosures, without relying on expert-defined drafting priors. Each node in the logic tree represents a technical element and is constructed through evidence-guided recursive generation. A hybrid traversal mechanism then maps the logic tree into patent sections, enabling controllable and section-balanced generation. Extensive experiments show that LogicTree-RAG consistently improves content quality and language conformity over strong LLM-based baselines and achieves longer structured generation with high token efficiency, demonstrating the effectiveness of logic-centric generation for complex technical document drafting. --- ### Spackle: Completing Large View Single Image NVS with Adaptive Gaussians Authors: Xuanzhi Liu, Yuhe Zhou, Xinyi Wu, Zhenyao Wu, Jinghao Chen, Ruize Han, Song Wang Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30941v1 Single-image novel view synthesis (NVS) enables photorealistic rendering of un- observed viewpoints from a single input. Practical NVS systems require two key capabilities: robust reconstruction of occluded regions and high inference effi- ciency. While hybrid decoupled frameworks combining feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and diffusion models show promise for large-view-deviation NVS, they suffer from capacity competition: a fixed number of Gaussians forces resource shifts from visible to newly disoccluded areas, degrading original scene fidelity when the target view deviates significantly from the input. To address this, we propose Spackle, a lightweight residual learning framework that mit- igates capacity competition without sacrificing efficiency. Spackle operates in three stages: predicting base 3DGS attributes from given views, automatically identifying poorly reconstructed regions, and learning a residual 3DGS optimized exclusively for these areas. At inference, we combine the baseline and aug- mented Gaussians for NVS. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that Spackle achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-view-deviation cases. --- ### Financial Fragility in Societies of LLM Agents: Coordination Failures and Stabilizing Mechanisms Authors: Zhenhao Fu, Ruipeng Xu, Qibing Ren Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI, q-fin.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30940v1 Individually protective decisions can produce avoidable collective failures. As large language model (LLM) agents take on greater roles in financial decision-making, financial AI safety must therefore be considered not only at the level of individual agents, but also at the level of the systems they jointly create. We study this problem with FRAIL, a controlled experimental framework that places LLM agents in three dynamic financial environments---bank runs, debt rollover, and reward crowdfunding---where agents' decisions reshape the financial conditions faced by others. Across seven leading LLMs, we find widespread collective fragility even when no agent is instructed to destabilize the system: 77\% of baseline bank-run episodes and 83\% of debt-rollover episodes end in failure. We then compare three interaction mechanisms based on compensated commitments, centralized commitment agreements, and participant-led coalitions. All three improve aggregate outcomes, but no single mechanism performs best across all financial structures. Across mechanisms, successful stabilization shares a common temporal pattern: broad commitment forms early, before defensive behavior becomes self-reinforcing. Our findings show that individually capable agents do not automatically form safe financial systems, highlighting system-level evaluation and interaction design as central problems for financial AI safety. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinFrail-CF26. --- ### MACBT: A Multi-Agent Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Decision Support System with Longitudinal Memory Authors: De Jiang, Shuo Zhang, Weiwei Liao, Jianying Zhang, Chuanhui Yu, Hongen Liao, Kehong Yuan Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30939v1 Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based first-line treatment for depression, yet its scale is constrained by the time clinicians spend on pre-session preparation, post-session documentation, and longitudinal cognitive-pathology tracking. We present a clinician-facing AI decision-support system that combines a multi-agent CBT framework (MACBT) with a CBT-specific longitudinal memory module (CD Memory). MACBT encodes the five-stage CBT workflow (assessment, Socratic questioning, cognitive restructuring, behavioral experiments, and treatment monitoring) into five collaborative agents. CD Memory tracks cognitive-distortion type, frequency, severity, and restructuring efficacy across sessions to generate pre-session pathology reports and intervention-priority recommendations. We construct a Chinese CBT dialogue corpus via dual-role large language model simulation and train a Qwen3-14B backbone with supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Evaluation with GPT-4 judges shows MACBT outperforms MeChat, SoulChat, PsyChat, and CPsyCounX in professionalism (2.62) and clinical authenticity (2.25). The full memory-augmented system further improves session quality by 12.6% and achieves a longitudinal mean of 2.29 on cross-session continuity, intervention progression, and personalization. --- ### Landscape Limits of Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Optimization across 256 continuous functions Authors: Rishi Govind, Ferdin Sagai Don Bosco, Kasturi Venkata Srikanth, Aman Mittal, Abhishek Singh, Aditya Singh, Abhishek Chopra Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.NE, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30938v1 Quantum-inspired evolutionary optimization (QIEO) represents design variables as a set of qubits and searches a continuous, multi-dimensional landscape through rotation of the qubit's amplitude pair. Every generation rotates those amplitudes toward a single elite, which corresponds to that generation's best. The update is cheap, almost parameter-free, and well-suited for massive parallel implementation, which has encouraged its adoption in engineering, design, and planning applications. However, there are critical issues with this formulation, principally, the treatment of design variables as independent probability components which make it incapable of exploiting local curvature, anisotropy, or variable coupling. Despite this, QIEO is believed to hold promise, and has been used extensively to solve real-world problems, with significant qualitative and computational advantage over its classical counterpart, Genetic Algorithm (GA). A collection of 256 (actually 508; 256 unshifted + 252 shifted, 4 could not be shifted) continuous function are selected from the prior works, in such a way that they represent eleven landscape characteristics, namely continuity, differentiability, separability, scalability, modality, convexity, conditioning, symmetry, maximum dimensionality, dimension dependency, and the coupling pattern of the design variables. These functions are then solved by three QIEO variants, two GA encodings and Hansen's Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). The results are evaluated in terms of computational cost, solution precision, and specialization across landscape characteristics. They identify the conditions under which QIEO provides competitive performance, clarify where its independent-variable representation becomes limiting, and establish whether particular QIEO variants offer advantages for specific landscape characteristics. --- ### Self-Play Search Distillation for Large Language Model Reasoning Authors: Lorenzo Molfetta, Wai-Chung Kwan, Giacomo Frisoni, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Jeff Z. Pan, Pasquale Minervini Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30936v1 Improving reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) requires high-quality data that exposes difficult decisions, competing alternatives, and their consequences. Data scarcity is driven by the low quality of synthetic data and the cost of human labeling. We introduce Self-Play Search Distillation (SPSD), a framework for generating superhuman synthetic data via self-play of MuZero-like networks trained on board games. SPSD uses executable environments to turn search into structured reasoning problems. At each state, the expert identifies a preferred decision, plausible alternatives, plausible opponent replies, and value estimates. By converting the self-play search records into superhuman chains-of-thought, we train LLMs with environment-grounded supervision. Although trained only on self-play search records, SPSD transfers to unseen mathematics. On Qwen3-4B-Base, it raises the mean over six mathematics benchmarks from 24.1 to 36.6 while increasing the held-out-game win rate from 15% to 45%. SPSD offers an annotation-efficient way to create high-quality synthetic data for improving LLM performance in reasoning tasks. --- ### Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models Authors: Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30935v1 Continual fine-tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to real-world environments, yet it inevitably suffers from catastrophic forgetting, particularly the performance degradation of previous tasks and LLMs' general-purpose knowledge. Although existing methods, such as orthogonal gradient projection, mitigate the forgetting across various fine-tuning tasks, they fundamentally fail to preserve pre-training LLMs' inherent general-purpose knowledge because the original data and gradients of off-the-shelf pre-training LLMs required by these methods are strictly unknown and highly diverse. To bridge this critical gap, we propose EoupCT, a novel framework designed to Estimate and Orthogonalize Unknown Pre-training gradients for Continual LLM fine-Tuning. Specifically, EoupCT estimates pre-training gradients by dynamically generating pseudo data that is most susceptible to forgetting for new tasks through a learnable soft prompt equipped with Gumbel-Softmax relaxation. Furthermore, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem and introduce a first-order efficient Pareto optimizer that jointly optimizes LLM parameters and the soft prompt, rigorously enforcing orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated pre-training gradients. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs demonstrate that EoupCT effectively preserves both task-specific proficiency and inherent general-purpose knowledge, successfully mitigating the catastrophic forgetting. --- ### ManiVid: Unified and Explainable Forensic Analysis of Manipulated Videos Authors: Hengrui Kang, Zhonghao Yan, Yuxuan Yang, Ruoyan Jing, Yuncheng Guo, Hao Chen, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma, Conghui He, Weijia Li Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30934v1 Rapid advances in AI-generated video (AIGV) have increased the risks posed by deceptive video manipulation. Unlike fully synthetic videos, manipulated videos retain most source content and alter only localized regions, making forensic analysis particularly challenging. Existing video forgery research faces two limitations in both data and methodology: (1) High-quality datasets and benchmarks tailored for manipulated videos remain scarce. (2) Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend forgery analysis beyond binary classification but struggle to use low-level forensic cues and provide precise pixel-level grounding. Specifically, we introduce ManiVid, a unified forensic analysis task covering forgery detection, artifact grounding, and anomaly explanation for manipulated videos. We construct ManiVid-38K, the first dataset to combine paired, open-vocabulary localized manipulations of general videos with authenticity labels, forgery masks, and anomaly explanations. It comprises about 19K manually verified real-fake video pairs, mostly at 1080P resolution, generated under 2 paradigms with 15 powerful generation models. We sample 1K pairs for ManiVidBench, balanced across six manipulation types and generation models for fair evaluation. We further propose ManiVidLens, a unified framework for explainable video forgery analysis. Its Forensic Evidence Router supplies shared low-level forensic evidence for multimodal reasoning and video segmentation. Its Prompt Distill Module converts grounding states into semantic and geometric prompts and distills spatial priors for mask decoding and full-video propagation. ManiVidLens achieves relative gains over the strongest comparison methods in artifact grounding (+21.1% mIoU; +21.3% J&F) and anomaly explanation (+131.3% ROUGE-L; +9.9% CSS). Its forgery detection remains comparable to dedicated classifiers (0.914 Acc; 0.913 F1). --- ### EPOC: Endpoint-Preserving Online Correction With Compressed Residual State for Multi-Horizon Time Series Forecasting Authors: Takumi Fujimoto, Hiroaki Nishi Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30929v1 Completed multi-horizon forecasts provide residual feedback for a fixed forecaster, but retaining full residual blocks increases auxiliary state. We propose Endpoint-Preserving Online Correction (EPOC) with a compressed residual state. It stores low-order discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients and the final value of the preceding residual block. Within each channel, the endpoint is shared across component-wise online ridge regressions that also use current-forecast coefficients. The fitted DCT correction is blended with the base forecast. We evaluate eight multivariate series with DLinear and PatchTST, three seeds, and two training variants, yielding 96 matched fixed-base conditions at a 24-step horizon. EPOC achieves mean condition-wise reductions in mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) of 15.40% and 9.35% from the uncorrected base, respectively, with a median of 6,352 B in retained auxiliary arrays. It has lower paired MSE than the $δ$-Adapter, COSA, FAC, and OMPB in a majority of conditions and uses less state than each. Full ELF achieves the largest mean MSE reduction, 19.29%, but its median retained state is 474,048 B ($\times$75 relative to EPOC). Equal-size summary controls favor the endpoint by 1.65--2.20% in paired MSE; a coefficient-reconstructed endpoint yields similar accuracy to the observed endpoint, highlighting its role as a shared input. Increasing the retained DCT component count from 4 to 8 adds 1.00 percentage point of MSE reduction for 5,728 B. On jointly trained bases, EPOC lowers MSE by 16.69--20.15% relative to globally blended TEFL-style adapters applied to the same base. The code and numerical records are available at https://github.com/keiotakmin/endpoint-preserving-residual-correction. --- ### UltraG-Bench: A Multi-task Benchmark for assessing Large Vision-Language Models on Pixel-level Evidence Grounding in Ultrasound Authors: Quanhao Zhu, Bo Xu, Rui Lin, Chenyuan Wang, Yu Shao, Boling Zhu, Jiuyan Sun, Liang Zhao, Hongfei Lin, Feng Xia Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30928v1 Ultrasound is one of the most widely used medical imaging modalities, and recent large vision-language models(VLMs) have shown increasing capabilities in ultrasound image understanding. However, these models fail to provide pixel-level visual evidence aligned with their semantic predictions, and their fine-grained grounding capability in ultrasound remains largely unclear. We introduce UltraG-Bench, a large-scale multi-task benchmark for evaluating pixel-level evidence grounding in ultrasound. UltraG-Bench is built by annotating 40 public ultrasound segmentation datasets spanning 13 anatomical categories, and comprises three progressive tasks: instruction-guided segmentation, evidence-grounded VQA, and evidence-grounded report generation, with 331125, 666779, and 138832 annotations, respectively. Comprehensive evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art models reveals a substantial gap between semantic understanding and fine-grained pixel-level localization. We further propose UltraG-Agent, which combines the semantic reasoning capabilities of a VLM with the ultrasound-specific segmentation capability of UltraSAM3. Experiments show that UltraG-Agent substantially improves both semantic prediction and pixel-level visual grounding. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zhuqh19/UltraG-Bench. --- ### Training-Free Pronunciation Transcription via Text-Constrained Acoustic Rescoring Authors: Hikaru Asano, Yotaro Kubo, So Kuroki Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30924v1 Accurate and efficient pronunciation transcription is essential for preparing text-to-speech training data at scale. Existing approaches have different limitations: grapheme-to-pronunciation (G2P) and speech-to-pronunciation (S2P) methods each capture only partial information, using only text or only speech, while speech-and-text-to-pronunciation (ST2P) methods use both but require costly pronunciation-annotated data. To address this problem, we propose a training-free ST2P pipeline that integrates both lexical and acoustic information at inference time. Lexical resources and G2P tools generate text-constrained candidates, and a left-to-right greedy search selects the best one using whole-sequence negative log-likelihoods from frozen pretrained S2P models. On three Japanese corpora, our method reduces Character Error Rate (CER) from 0.60--1.40\% (text-only baseline) to 0.04--0.17\% with reference transcripts, and 0.64--1.58\% with ASR transcripts. It outperforms all baselines, including a trained ST2P model and commercial multimodal LLMs. Our greedy search method is 3--3.5$\times$ faster than beam search at similar CER, and the cascade is 2$\times$ faster than direct decoding ensuring the efficiency and accuracy. In Spanish, French, and preliminary English, it also surpasses four open multimodal LLMs and the best traditional methods. --- ### JevSoup: System-One Routing for Training-Free LoRA Composition Authors: Xiuying Wang, Jiahua Cheng, Shuotian Li, Yufan Cheng, Bowen Deng, Zhexuan Bai, Yichen Li Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30922v1 Building adaptable AI systems requires effective coordination of specialized capabilities across diverse tasks. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) enables modular expertise, but existing routing approaches may require auxiliary data, additional training, or autoregressive decoding. We propose JevSoup, a training-free framework separating System One expert routing from System Two execution. Using only the input and expert descriptions, Jev selects two experts through structured probabilities. JevSoup retains the leading expert's update, projects the second onto the orthogonal complement of the first update's row space, and combines them with equal weights. Across 14 PorTAL tasks and three Qwen3 scales, JepSoup achieves absolute gains of up to 1.19\% in task-macro and 1.21\% in sample-micro accuracy over the strongest evaluated external baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leowang980/JevSoup. --- ### Robust to Which Model Change? A Unified Evaluation of Robust Counterfactual Explanations Authors: Marcin Kostrzewa, Maciej Zięba Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30918v2 Robust counterfactual explanations promise recourse that still works after the model behind it changes. Whether they keep that promise depends on what the change is. A small perturbation of the parameters, retraining on new data, and a new architecture are different events, and each existing method is evaluated against the one it was built for. Reported robustness scores, therefore, answer different questions and cannot be compared. We propose a unified cross-family evaluation protocol that holds factual instances and generated counterfactuals fixed while testing every method against the same eight types of model change. The benchmark compares six robust methods and two standard baselines on four tabular datasets. It characterizes every changed classifier through its outputs and reports empirical robustness together with coverage, base validity, and proximity. We find that relative performance and failure modes vary across change families. Bounded parameter perturbations change 0.95\% of test predictions on average, compared with 4.9\% for bootstrap retraining. Methods with guarantees for these perturbations do not necessarily transfer to other changes. RobX transfers most consistently in our experiments, although greater stability can require larger interventions. We argue that robust CFE methods should be evaluated through a common protocol that specifies the model changes, measures their realized behavioral magnitude, and keeps generation performance separate from robustness. --- ### Cross-Backend QIEO: Universal Runtime Portability across OpenMP5, CUDA, HIP, and Multi-Language Interfaces Authors: Aman Mittal, Ferdin Sagai Don Bosco, Kasturi Venkata Srikanth, Abhishek Singh, Aditya Singh, Abhishek Chopra Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.DC, cs.CL, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30914v1 Quantum-inspired algorithms emulate quantum mechanical principles, such as, superposition, interference, and probabilistic amplitude evolution, on classical hardware by representing candidate solutions as qubit vectors and evolving them through rotation-gate operators. This approach offers higher optimization performance without physical qubits, and has been shown to achieve order-of-magnitude speedups (10--80$\times$) over traditional solvers on combinatorial, high-dimensional NP-hard problems. A critical barrier to adoption, however, is the lack of a unified execution framework that delivers both algorithmic performance and hardware portability. We present \textbf{Cross-Backend Quantum Inspired Evolutionary Optimizer (QIEO)}, the runtime core of BQP's BQPhy solver, which addresses this gap through a \emph{single-source-of-truth} architecture. One C++ implementation of the QIEO algorithm is compiled once per hardware target and exposed to multiple high-level languages via thin binding layers. The framework dispatches to CPU (sequential), OpenMP~5 (multi-core), CUDA (NVIDIA), and HIP (AMD) backends at runtime, adapting kernels to each device's memory hierarchy and warp/wavefront execution model. The framework's real-world utility is validated through binding demonstrations that share the identical C++ runtime. BQPhy's Python library is demonstrated on a neural network hyperparameter optimisation achieving 88.60\% test accuracy on MNIST. BQPhy's MATLAB's Toolkit is tested on wind farm layout optimisation attaining $365\,399 \pm 4\,552$~MWh/yr, which is statistically indistinguishable from particle swarm optimisation and $+7.6\%$ above genetic algorithms on a 32-variable constrained engineering problem. The Julia package tackles the Lotka--Volterra parameter estimation where BQPhy replaces native Julia solvers on the same residual, cutting mean SSE by $2.1\times$. --- ### ToolSearcher: Optimizing Tool Selection at Scale via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Zhenlong Dai, Xujie Song, Zitong Wang, Tong Niu, Jian liu, Weiqiang Wang, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Chang Yao, Jingyuan Chen Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30906v1 Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language processing but struggle to interact with external environments. Tool learning provides a promising way to extend LLMs into actionable agents, where tool selection is a critical prerequisite for successful tool use. Existing work often assumes a small or predefined set of tools, leaving large-scale tool selection underexplored. Real-world repositories contain a vast and diverse array of tools, making it difficult for LLMs to effectively search, distinguish, and compose tools under context-length constraints. We identify large-scale tool selection as a new challenge for agentic reinforcement learning, highlighting that existing RL methods for knowledge-based question answering are inadequate for selecting tools while considering compatibility. To address this challenge, we propose ToolSearcher, a novel RL framework for effective multi-turn search and fine-grained optimization in large-scale tool selection. Specifically, we introduce category-constrained tool discrimination to improve the model's ability to distinguish functionally similar tools, event-level search modeling to explicitly optimize the discovery of target tools during multi-turn search, and trajectory-aligned credit allocation to provide fine-grained reward signals for different stages of the search-selection process. Extensive experiments on large-scale tool selection benchmarks demonstrate that ToolSearcher consistently outperforms a set of strong baselines in challenging settings involving iterative search and complex tool composition. --- ### From annotation to reasoning: Culture in language models Authors: Daniel Hershcovich, Alexander Conroy, Jens Bjerring-Hansen Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30897v1 How should we evaluate language models when more than one interpretation can be right? Cultural benchmarks often test factual knowledge, agreement with survey responses, or recognition of a predefined meaning. These tasks leave open whether a model can explain how a cultural reference works in a particular text, support a reading with evidence, or revise it after criticism. This is a question of interpretive depth, complementary to the breadth of cultural coverage. We argue that literary interpretation offers a useful setting for studying these capabilities. We focus on cultural referencing and reuse: how texts invoke, repeat, and transform earlier expressions across historical and linguistic contexts. Our central claim is that literary scholars can disagree about an interpretation while recognizing the quality of its support. We propose linking evidence-centered benchmarks, evaluation that preserves scholarly disagreement, and model-development experiments on literary data, contextual resources, and scholarly feedback. Danish literature provides a concrete starting point, with implications for other languages and domains. The aim is to develop alternative evaluation strategies that go beyond conventional benchmark metrics and guide model development toward cultural robustness in AI systems. --- ### Training Graph Foundation Models on The Web Graph Authors: Ryoma Sato Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30894v1 We introduce Acacia, a graph foundation model, trained on the web graph. Acacia (i) supports arbitrary feature dimensionalities and semantics without additional training, (ii) supports a wide range of tasks, including node classification, link prediction, node clustering, and graph generation, without additional training, (iii) has in-context learning capabilities, and (iv) does not rely on pretrained LLMs. In particular, existing graph foundation models often require training additional classification heads or feature projectors to accommodate new graphs or new labels, whereas Acacia does not. Moreover, existing graph foundation models often gain their capabilities by being stitched together with pretrained LLMs, whereas Acacia is trained from scratch using only the Common Crawl web graph. This is also an important result because it provides evidence that graph models can acquire emergent capabilities from scratch like LLMs. --- ### Adaptive Pilot Selection for Unified Semantic Communication and Semantic Sensing in ISAC Authors: Muhammad Abubakar Rashid, Muhammad Hannan Akram, Haejoon Jung, Syed Ali Hassan Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30891v1 Semantic communication (SemCom) and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) are promising technologies for future 6G wireless networks. Existing studies have applied semantic technology to either the communication module or the sensing module of ISAC. In this work, we propose SemISAC, which performs both SemCom and semantic sensing within a single dual-function waveform. SemISAC uses a joint semantic encoder that extracts task-specific information for both communication and sensing. We evaluate SemISAC in a vehicular scenario in which vehicles share pixel-wise segmentation of the road environment and, through sensing, classify surrounding objects and estimate their ranges. On the transmitter side, a deep learning encoder converts the input road-scene image into semantic symbols and places them on the data cells of an OFDM grid, while the remaining cells serve as pilots for channel state information estimation and sensing. The pilot configuration is adaptively optimized based on the channel conditions to balance communication and sensing requirements. At the receiver, a deep learning model reconstructs the segmentation from the received waveform, while the transmitting vehicle captures the reflected waveforms from surrounding objects and uses task-specific deep learning decoders for target recognition and range estimation. Simulation results show that SemISAC achieves a segmentation accuracy close to that of the dedicated SemCom module while outperforming both conventional and semantic baselines in target recognition and range estimation. --- ### From Tapping to Hopping: Augmenting Mobile GUI Agents with App-Native Deeplinks Authors: Yuchen Sun, Chenglin Cai, Gongjie Zhang, Tianyu Xia, Quyu Kong, Panrong Tong, Zhengwen Zeng, Long Chen, Steven Hoi, Chongyang Zhang, Yue Wang Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30887v1 Mobile GUI agents complete tasks using GUI actions like taps and swipes. These actions are broadly applicable across applications, but reaching a navigation interface. A single deeplink call can replace a sequence of screen-by-screen GUI actions. We therefore introduce hybrid interaction, using deeplinks for direct navigation and GUI actions for other on-screen operations and fallback. To enable this, we discover candidate deeplinks through static analysis, validate them on real devices, and describe their observed landing screens. This process creates a verified and grounded deeplink catalog that pairs each working deeplink with a description of its landing screen. Using this catalog, we introduce GUI-Hopper, a improves task success in commercial applications on real devices, further demonstrating the benefits of hybrid interaction. --- ### Conformal Prediction under Exponential-Tilt Joint Shift Authors: Seungjin Choi Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30886v1 Conformal prediction can lose coverage when the data distribution changes after deployment. We study adaptation using labeled source data and unlabeled target inputs, allowing both the input distribution and its relationship with outcomes to change. We use Exponential Tilt Reweighting Alignment (ExTRA), introduced for classification by Maity et al. (2023), to estimate structured distribution shifts. We compare using its estimated weights in conformal calibration with additionally tilting the source predictive distribution. Shared learned predictors, estimated weights, calibration samples, and test observations isolate the effect of tilting. Existing theory gives both procedures target coverage with true weights and a common coverage bound with estimated weights. Identification calculations and an analysis of how scoring interacts with weight estimation error help explain why their performance can nevertheless differ. In a synthetic regression setting where the assumed models match the data-generating process and target inputs are informative about the shift, tilting reduces mean set length by about $30\%$ relative to weighting alone, with both methods attaining coverage near nominal. Tilting can instead cause substantial coverage losses in synthetic classification and in regression when target inputs provide little information about the response shift. Real-data experiments also show no consistent benefit. Good coverage from weighted calibration alone does not ensure that adding predictive tilting will preserve coverage. Deciding when to apply this additional adjustment using only source labels and target inputs remains an open problem. --- ### Retraction-Based Gradient Projection Algorithms on Manifolds Authors: Conglong Xu, Hao Wu Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30885v1 We introduce a framework for retraction-based convex optimization on Riemannian manifolds, which includes a notion of retraction-specific convex sets and retraction-based gradient projection algorithms. The standard theory of gradient projection algorithms generalizes easily to this framework. Within this framework, we establish convergence results for retraction-based gradient projection algorithms with various stepsize rules. As an application, we use our framework to study the weighted low-rank approximation. We also provide numerical validation of our convergence results on the image completion task. --- ### CacheReforge: Bounded Recovery for Stale KV Caches under Evolving Adapters Authors: Yuhang Cao, Yanzhou Mu, Chunrong Fang, Zhenyu Chen Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30884v1 Large language models rely on KV caching to reduce repeated prefill computation in long context and interactive applications. As lightweight adapters evolve, cached states reflect earlier versions, so stale reuse distorts current model outputs, while complete affected suffix recomputation restores fidelity at substantial cost. We seek minimal recomputation that recovers current adapter behavior. Existing systems track token, context, or stable adapter identity, but neither represent caches from earlier adapter versions nor distinguish update propagation from the recomputation required for behavioral recovery. To address these gaps, we introduce CacheReforge, which represents stale KV caches as layerwise mixed-version objects. It combines per-layer adapter anchors, calibrated sensitivity, accumulated drift, and executable restart boundaries to select direct reuse, bounded recomputation, or complete affected-suffix recovery. We distinguish dependency depth from the functional recomputation horizon and use cumulative tail influence to characterize when bounded recovery preserves current-model behavior. We evaluate CacheReforge on Qwen2.5-1.5B and Qwen2.5-7B with continual LoRA updates, including 16K HotpotQA and 2WikiMQA workloads. CacheReforge reduces mean KL divergence by 92.4% relative to stale reuse, while recomputing only 5.44% of layers and reducing cache-maintenance time by 93.2% relative to fresh full prefill. These results show that version-aware recovery preserves model fidelity and most KV caching gains. --- ### Warned alike, AI agents avoid the less-crowded road while people take it Authors: Takahiro Ezaki, Naoto Imura, Katsuhiro Nishinari Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: physics.soc-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30883v1 AI agents built on a few shared models increasingly act for many people. A shared forecast about others can align their choices and change how scarce capacity is allocated. We tested this feedback in a two-road congestion game. Adding one sentence warning that others might follow a routing tip made populations of 50 GPT agents crowd one road while avoiding the nearly empty alternative. Average travel time rose from 64 to 95 min, although any crowded-road agent could have saved 69 min by switching alone. The warning discouraged the very move it predicted. The pattern persisted for 100 rounds. Two other model families shifted the same way without locking onto one road. Twelve all-human groups (240 participants) stayed near balance under numerical reports or the tip and warning. In 24 mixed groups with a further 240 participants, imbalance grew with the share of agents in the registered analysis, while people increasingly took the road the agents avoided. Collective costs stayed below the allagent reference, but with 15 agents and 5 humans, agent seats averaged 80 min, compared with 44 min for human seats. Shared forecasts can thus sustain collective inefficiency among similar agents. A better group average can also hide an unequal burden. Evaluations of AI agents that share resources should test populations, treat messages as interventions and report who bears the costs. --- ### Effects of Transcript Compression on LLM-based Medical Misinformation Detection in Japanese YouTube Videos Authors: Yuya Wake, Sho Tsugawa, Toshiyuki Amagasa Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30882v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess long-form medical videos, but their effectiveness may depend on whether transcripts are provided in full or compressed through summarization, retrieval, or claim screening. This study examines how such transcript compression affects LLM-based veracity classification of Japanese medical YouTube videos. We compare four transcript input designs: full transcripts, LLM-generated summaries, RAPTOR-based retrievalaugmented generation (RAG), and Screening, which extracts candidate medical and health-related sentences. Using 74 long-form videos labeled as Real or Fake, we evaluate classification performance and analyze linguistic changes using J-LIWC, hedge expressions, and institutional or technical terms. The full-transcript Baseline achieved the best performance, whereas all compressed inputs increased false negatives, meaning that Fake videos were more likely to be misclassified as Real. Summary caused the largest performance drop, while Screening performed best among the compressed inputs but still omitted many medically relevant sentences. Linguistic analyses showed that these errors were not explained by a simple increase in certainty. Instead, Summary reduced affective, social, temporal, cognitive, and conversational cues, while Summary and RAG made institutional and technical terms more salient. These findings suggest that transcript compression can represent Fake videos as more coherent and authoritative inputs, thereby weakening cues needed for misinformation detection --- ### EXAONE Demand 1.0: A Time Series Foundation Model for Demand Forecasting Authors: Seunghan Lee, Sangjun Han, Jun Seo, Junhyeok Kang, Jaehoon Lee, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Minjae Kim, Sungdong Yoo, Soonyoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30880v1 Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are pretrained on series from diverse domains, where demand series make up only a small fraction. Demand data has properties that such corpora rarely contain: Short histories, frequent zeros, censoring by stock-outs, and exogenous events that the series does not record. To this end, we propose EXAONE Demand, built on 1) a demand-specific corpus and 2) a demand-aware adapter. For the corpus, we assemble 11.3M series and 48.4B observations from 73 sources, and a synthetic generator supplies the behaviour that open demand data under-represents. For the adapter, we attach low-rank branches to a frozen general-domain backbone, one for each of the four demand classes (smooth, intermittent, erratic, and lumpy), and a router that reads eight scale-free statistics of the input series decides how much each branch contributes. We build EXAONE Demand in two versions, one trained on real-world and synthetic demand together and one trained on the synthetic corpus alone. On 22 held-out datasets, both versions outperform 36 TSFMs, and real-world demand adds a gain over synthetic data alone. --- ### TISD: On-Policy Self-Distillation with Trajectory Intervention Authors: Taeckyung Lee, Rinat Amankos, Jeonghye Kim, Hyungjun Yoon, Woogyeol Jin, Sung-Ju Lee Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30878v1 On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense teacher targets, but evaluates them only along student-sampled rollouts. When the privileged teacher favors an alternative action at a visited prefix, OPSD can provide a target for the branch decision but cannot supervise the successor contexts induced by that action unless the student samples it. This creates a training-time data-collection bottleneck and suggests a different role for teacher-student disagreement: proposing a trajectory branch rather than identifying a sufficient local repair. Our diagnostic framework using controlled token interventions reveals that a teacher-preferred token at peak disagreement can improve student continuation success, while its local corrective value is limited. Motivated by this finding, we introduce a simple branch-regenerate-distill algorithm, Trajectory-Intervention Self-Distillation (TISD). TISD forces a teacher-selected branch action, returns suffix generation to the student, and distills the full trajectory under the privileged-context-conditioned teacher. Across the coding models, TISD improves average Avg@4 over SDPO by 1.2 percentage points. Across the science domains, it improves average Avg@128 by 0.8 points under an equal-step budget and by 0.3 points under an equal-time budget. These results support teacher-guided branching as a way to expose useful successor contexts for self-distillation. --- ### Tight Stochastic Condition-Number Dependence in Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Optimization Authors: Qihao Zhou Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30877v1 We study whether the linear condition-number dependence in the stochastic complexity of SAPD+ is necessary for nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization. For jointly $L$-smooth objectives with dual strong-concavity parameter $μ$, we prove a lower bound that matches the SAPD+ upper bound under the same Moreau-envelope stationarity criterion and the same primal-dual initialization gap. Specifically, when $σ\ge\varepsilon$, the worst-case complexity of zero-respecting algorithms is $Θ(κLGσ^2\varepsilon^{-4})$ in the stated accuracy regime, where $κ=L/μ$, $G$ bounds the initial primal-dual gap, and $σ^2$ bounds the variance of a general unbiased first-order oracle. The lower bound is realized on a smooth problem class with a bounded dual box. Our construction routes each link of a nonconvex zero-chain through a dual gradient of magnitude proportional to $\varepsilon/\sqrtκ$, while an undiscovered primal coordinate prevents stationarity. It also yields the primal-gradient lower bound $Ω(LΔ(\sqrtκ\varepsilon^{-2}+κσ^2\varepsilon^{-4}))$ after combination with the known deterministic bound, where $Δ$ bounds the initial primal function gap. --- ### Evidence-Grounded Auditing of Identification Assumptions in Climate-Policy Causal Evaluations Authors: Yonghong Zhang, Yong Xie, Isabel M. Parra, Ricardo Correia Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30867v1 Difference-in-differences (DID) studies are widely used to evaluate climate policy, but assessing the evidence supporting their identification assumptions remains challenging. We introduce ARGUS, a structured language-model pipeline that audits reported evidence against an eleven-dimension assumption-implication-evidence rubric and abstains when relevant evidence cannot be retrieved. We evaluate ARGUS using injected flaws, economics papers, and a small pilot with reconciled labels. On the 11-flaw benchmark, ARGUS detects 73% of planted flaws, compared with 18% for a keyword-based pipeline. Across 26 economics papers, ARGUS abstains on about 40% of paper-dimension assessments for lack of retrievable evidence. In a five-paper pilot with labels reconciled by two annotators, it assigns a higher risk level than the labels on 25 of the 33 assessments it completes. A rule fixed before the labels arrived removes most of this in-sample; weighted agreement stays low. ARGUS provides evidence-linked risk reports that localize potential weaknesses for expert review, without adjudicating causal claims. Code and data: https://github.com/yonghongzhang-io/ARGUS --- ### Universal Drift Correction for Multidimensional Scanning Microscopy Authors: Sangjoon Lee, William Millsaps, Dasol Yoon, Caitlyn Obrero, Guoliang Hu, Corrie Barnes, Cedric Lim, Andrew Barnum, Arthur R. C. McCray, Colin Ophus Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30866v1 In scanning microscopy, drift causes the specimen to be sampled at positions displaced from the nominal probe positions. This displacement alters the spatial assignment of the recorded signals and biases quantitative measurements across two-dimensional imaging, channel-resolved spectroscopic mapping, and scan-position-resolved diffraction analysis. Here, we extend orthogonal-scan drift correction from 2D images to spectrum images and diffraction datasets. We demonstrate how to recover probe positions using either differently oriented multidimensional scans or structural reference images. The recovered positions are used either to resample the multidimensional data onto a regular grid or to assign each recorded signal to its corrected coordinate. Our method combines affine and non-rigid correction, requires no prior structural model, and is implemented as open-source, GPU-accelerated software that reduces processing times by two to three orders of magnitude, enabling routine and automated drift correction for quantitative multidimensional microscopy. --- ### Reliability-Regulated Trajectory Optimization for Progressive COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Zijian Wu, Jinliang Wang, Zidian Lin, Ying Song, Ziqian Lu, Hanjie Ma, Zhen Ye, Mingfeng Jiang Published: 2026-09-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30865v1 COLMAP-free 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) bypasses computationally expensive structure-from-motion (SfM) pipelines, yet progressive camera pose tracking remains fundamentally vulnerable to error compounding---early pairwise tracking inaccuracies both corrupt subsequent frame initializations and remain permanently frozen in the scene representation. Rather than relying on heavyweight external neural priors or treating progressive tracking through isolated heuristic fixes, we propose a unified reliability-regulated trajectory optimization framework for progressive COLMAP-free 3DGS. At its core, our framework establishes an intrinsic, self-supervised bidirectional cycle-consistency mechanism that systematically regulates progressive camera trajectory estimation across two complementary temporal horizons: (1) Forward Motion Propagation, where the online reliability signal adaptively gates first-order kinematic warm-starts of rigid motion into upcoming pairwise registrations, supplying informed directional search priors while safely intercepting untrusted transitions; and (2) Retrospective Trajectory Correction, where the same reliability signal dynamically weights relative-pose consistency constraints within a sliding window of neighboring camera poses. By governing both prospective state initialization and retrospective trajectory consolidation through a unified reliability regulator, our self-contained framework resolves progressive drift without external priors or offline preprocessing. Extensive evaluations on Tanks and Temples and CO3D-V2 benchmarks show that our method substantially improves camera trajectory accuracy and novel-view rendering quality, outperforming existing unposed baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Zijian1026/RRTO-CF3DGS. ---