# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 127 of 156

> Full-text markdown of papers #6301–6350 of 7799 published in 2026-10, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 7799-paper 2026-10 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Fast Last-Iterate Convergence in Zero-Sum Markov Games with Bandit Feedback

Authors: Yuheng Zhang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05968v1

We study last-iterate convergence in unknown two-player zero-sum discounted Markov games with bandit feedback. The players learn independently along a single trajectory without observing each other's actions. We develop Adaptive Regularized TD Learning (ARTD), which achieves a $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/4})$ duality gap bound for the current policies under a uniform hitting time assumption, with high probability simultaneously over all rounds and starting states. This improves the $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/(9+ν)})$ rate of Cai et al. (2023), for any fixed $ν>0$, under the same feedback model and hitting time assumption. Our algorithm requires no knowledge of the hitting time bound, the time horizon, or the confidence level. To stabilize policy learning as value estimates change, we separate fast temporal difference averaging from bounded value updates. We adapt log-barrier regularization to the progress of value estimation, controlling both policy and value errors throughout learning. Together, these mechanisms enable fast convergence of the policies actually played, even when the players learn independently from bandit feedback.

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### JLD: Perceptual Distance Through A Jacobian Lens

Authors: Shreshth Saini, Balu Adsumilli, Alan C. Bovik
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05967v1

Image compression, restoration, and generation all require a way to measure how different two images look to a person. Pixel error ignores how people see, while the most accurate perceptual distances are typically fitted to human judgments, tying them to a fixed data and resolution. For example, when image resolution is doubled, the correlation of DISTS with human scores on TID2013 drops from 0.815 to 0.717. We introduce the Jacobian Lens Distance (JLD), which derives its perceptual geometry from a frozen vision encoder rather than from human labels. JLD combines the locality of early patch features with the perceptual sensitivity captured by later encoder representations. Specifically, we use the encoder Jacobian to identify directions in the early feature space that most strongly affect the encoder output, producing a fixed metric tensor, $E(J^\top J)$, which we call the Jacobian lens. The lens is fitted only once from 100 unlabeled images, taking about 35 seconds. Locally, this construction defines a pullback metric in pixel space, giving JLD a clear geometric interpretation that can be directly analyzed on real images. Across four standard perceptual databases, JLD achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently outperforms LPIPS, DISTS, PieAPP, and DreamSim. JLD is also robust to changes in image resolution, on TID2013, its lens-term correlation remains nearly unchanged when the resolution is doubled, decreasing only from 0.850 to 0.845. We further introduce JLD-fast, which is $4\times$ faster than LPIPS-VGG while achieving a mean correlation of 0.911. Finally, JLD naturally extends to video, reaching a correlation of 0.786 on Waterloo IVC 4K compared with 0.611 for VMAF.

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### HuatuoGPT-3: RL-Only Domain Adaptation from Base Models

Authors: Junying Chen, Xinyuan Xie, Ziniu Li, Wenyuan Gu, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Guangjun Yu, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05966v1

Domain adaptation aims to turn a general-purpose large language model (LLM) into an expert for a target domain. While the dominant SFT+RL pipeline offers a convenient cold start, it may reduce exploration diversity and introduces additional complexity through multi-stage optimization. These limitations motivate RL-only adaptation. However, pure on-policy RL suffers from a cold-start problem, while mixed-policy RL still falls short: informative tokens in teacher outputs are learned too slowly in early training, and stale teacher outputs can hinder later improvement. We identify these two failure modes as Gradient Starvation and Teacher-Distribution Anchoring. To address them, we propose One-stage Policy Optimization (OnePO), which treats teacher outputs as transient guidance for policy improvement. OnePO combines Adaptive Objective Evolution to strengthen learning on informative low-probability teacher tokens and Teacher Retirement to discard teacher outputs once the current policy can surpass them. On medical adaptation, OnePO achieves 67.2 on HealthBench (Total) with only 20K training samples, outperforming SFT+RL and pure RL by 2.7 and 7.4 points, respectively. We further scale OnePO to produce HuatuoGPT-3, an open-source medical LLM series whose 27B variant reaches 70.1 on HealthBench (Total) and 71.4 on HealthBench Professional, surpassing frontier models such as GPT-6 Astra. Models and code are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/HuatuoGPT-3.

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### Strategic Multi-Agent Learning for Interpretable Action Valuation of All Players in Football

Authors: Kenjiro Ide, Taiga Someya, Kohei Kawaguchi, Keisuke Fujii
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05961v1

Valuing player actions in football requires accounting for strategic interactions among 22 players, including off-ball movements and defensive positioning. Existing reinforcement-learning-based methods commonly aggregate decisions at the team level or estimate player values independently, leaving strategic interdependence among players insufficiently represented. This study proposes an action valuation framework inspired by Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) for all players. Each possession is modeled as a finite-horizon dynamic game, with each player represented as an autonomous agent whose policy depends on the current game state. MPE is used as a motivating solution concept rather than an exact equilibrium. To improve interpretability, we use Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS) and decompose the Q-value into a successor-feature basis and a linear reward-weight vector. The value basis is estimated by linear TD initialization followed by nonlinear refinement. Using tracking and event data from 95 J1 League matches, we compare the proposed formulation with an independent reinforcement learning baseline. Because the two formulations define TD errors in different target spaces, TD MSE is used only for within-formulation consistency. With EDMS fixed, the independent baseline assigns the highest value to forward movement in 99.21% of evaluated off-ball states, whereas the most frequent direction under the proposed formulation accounts for 17.63%. Team-level average Q-values show a negative association with season-level expected goals for the baseline and a weakly positive association for the proposed formulation. Qualitative analyses illustrate context-dependent valuations of off-ball movements and defensive positioning. Overall, the proposed formulation produces more context-sensitive action rankings, although the comparison does not isolate the MPE-inspired component.

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### Physics-Informed but Not Physics-Consistent: Error Geometry and Subspace Projection for Neural AC Power Flow

Authors: Changhun Kim, Timon Conrad, Redwanul Karim, Karan Pahlajani, Julian Oelhaf, David Riebesel, Tomás Arias-Vergara, Andreas Maier, Johann Jäger, Siming Bayer
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05959v1

Recent neural power-flow solvers, including emerging foundation models, achieve accurate voltage predictions, yet such accuracy does not necessarily imply physically consistent solutions. Even small complex voltage errors can yield large AC power-balance residuals. We study this accuracy-consistency gap across PIGNN-GC, GridSFM, gridfm-graphkit, and LUMINA on realistic 2224-bus Great Britain network (GBnetwork) scenarios, with cross-grid evaluation of GridSFM over 31 systems. Using a singular value decomposition (SVD) basis fitted to training AC power-flow solutions, we find that neural prediction errors contain substantial components outside the dominant solution subspace. To address this mismatch, calibrated solution-subspace projection (CSP) suppresses off-subspace prediction components after train-only bias calibration, reducing Mean PB by 67.0%, 37.8%, 40.5%, and 68.9% for PIGNN-GC, GridSFM, gridfm-graphkit, and LUMINA, respectively, relative to calibrated predictions, while improving voltage-magnitude accuracy in all four models. These results identify output-error geometry as an important factor in physics-consistent neural AC power flow. Code: https://github.com/Kimchangheon/neural-acpf-error-geometry

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### MEND: RL For Flow Models via Proximal Velocity Matching

Authors: Shreshth Saini, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang, Balu Adsumilli, Alan C. Bovik
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05954v1

Reward post-training of flow models either reweights the model's own samples under a KL penalty or a frozen reference, often for thousands of updates, or backpropagates the reward and moves every sample without checking that the move is worth its size. We introduce MEND, a reinforcement learning method built on proximal velocity matching. MEND caps rewards within each prompt group, so samples that already score well receive no move. Below the cap, it proposes moves along the reward gradient and accepts one only when its capped reward gain exceeds a quadratic displacement price. The model then regresses onto the resulting velocity targets, with no KL term, frozen reference model, or advantage weights. In 100 updates, MEND outperforms Flow-GRPO (about 4k updates) on five of six evaluators at the same distance to base-model images. Under an equal-budget protocol, it surpasses ReFL and DiffusionNFT at every evaluated update across four training rewards, reaching PickScore 24.03 versus 23.92 and 23.43, respectively. A 300-update three-reward run also surpasses the five-reward DiffusionNFT model on all three rewards it trains on. MEND is general and easy to adopt: it applies to any flow backbone with a differentiable reward.

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### Discovered, Not Designed: Population Evolution for Collaborative and Compute-Intensive Model Discovery

Authors: Bo Peng, Lizhu Zhang, Yuhang Zhou, Mingyi Wang, Yifan Wu, Serena Li, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05950v1

LLM-driven evolution enables iterative model development, but two practical goals remain underexplored: finding model designs that transfer across related tasks and sustaining improvement when training is expensive. We introduce Population Evolution (PE), a collaborative, hierarchical framework that connects ongoing local searches through shared experimental evidence. PE evaluates code changes across related training instances and shares the results to guide subsequent proposals and promotion to larger training scales. For expensive targets, PE searches small training subsets and screens candidates through peer and intermediate evaluations before full-target training. We introduce RMD-Bench to evaluate both settings across ranking, watch-time prediction, RL algorithm discovery, and LLM/VLM pretraining. Compared with standalone evolution at matched source iterations, PE raises mean best local gains from 7.01% to 8.97% in ranking and from 2.84% to 3.85% in watch-time, while improving the best larger-scale outcome in all three joint-discovery families. In watch-time discovery, PE improves best larger-scale gains with four of five harnesses and all four proposers. On new recommendation datasets under shared target-side calibration, every evaluated PE design improves over the reference in mean performance. Under matched total GPU compute, completed LLM discovery runs yield a best relative accuracy gain of 2.48% and 13 successful candidates for PE, versus 0.92% and none for direct evolution. VLM loss reduction reaches 8.78% versus 5.05% under matched total GPU compute.

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### Technical Report on the Turba Fertilizer Machine Learning Stack in Morocco

Authors: Abdelghani Belgaid, Zakaria Mahmoud, Fahd Chibani, Oumnia Ennaji, Younes Boudoul, Dounia Rachid
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05949v1

Site-specific fertilizer recommendation systems adapt nutrient advice to location, soil properties, crop type, and production targets, but scientific reuse is constrained when recommendation functions remain accessible mainly through interactive interfaces, outputs are not versioned, and trained approximations cannot be independently loaded or benchmarked. This technical report presents the Turba fertilizer machine learning stack, a three-layer open-source implementation for reproducible site-specific fertilizer recommendation in Morocco. \texttt{turba-client} provides programmatic access to publicly accessible site profiles, crop-specific target-yield spaces, and N, P$_2$O$_5$, and K$_2$O recommendation workflows; \texttt{turba-data} distributes analysis-ready snapshots; and \texttt{turba-models} packages crop-specific machine learning surrogates of recommendation outputs. The architecture links upstream retrieval, versioned analytical snapshots, reproducible cross-model benchmarking, and loadable offline surrogates while preserving the distinction between recommendation-system outputs, observed agricultural data, and model-generated predictions. The first dataset was constructed from 44,096 unique ESA WorldCereal locations. Scenario expansion across supported cereal workflows generated 132,017 crop-location recommendation requests under a medium target-yield setting. The resulting 22-variable dataset spans 10 regions, 66 provinces, and 1,149 communes. Nine regression families were evaluated under a fixed deterministic 80/20 protocol, and the current release packages five best-performing crop-specific models. The machine learning task is recommendation-function emulation rather than prediction of observed crop response. The stack provides a reproducible basis for spatial and temporal validation, uncertainty estimation, field-trial comparison, and future integration with additional data.

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### OntoInk: Interactive Ontology Visualization, Validation, and Reasoning

Authors: Ebrahim Norouzi, Jörg Waitelonis, Harald Sack
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05945v1

Ontology documentation, visualization, and validation are usually carried out with separate tools. This split workflow slows down development and makes knowledge transfer harder. We present OntoInk, an open-source MkDocs plugin that brings these activities together. Within a single documentation-as-code pipeline, OntoInk renders interactive ontology diagrams, validates instance data against SHACL shapes, runs OWL\,DL reasoning, and supports inline Turtle editing. General-purpose diagram plugins for MkDocs cannot parse RDF, dereference IRIs, overlay SHACL constraints, or run OWL reasoning. Compared with standalone ontology visualization tools, OntoInk embeds interactive and editable diagrams directly into documentation pages. A live demo and source code are available at \url{https://ise-fizkarlsruhe.github.io/ontoink/}.

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### Runaway Reaction: When Benign Skills Compose into Malicious Behavior

Authors: Zunlong Zhou, Ziyuan Yang, Mengyu Sun, Yi Zhang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05943v1

Agent skills package task-specific knowledge and procedures that can be composed to support complex agent tasks, while public marketplaces provide a growing pool of reusable skills. Existing security vetting, however, largely evaluates skills in isolation, leaving composition-induced risks underexplored. Such risks arise because composing benign skills expands the agent's capability space, enabling behaviors unavailable to any skill alone. Interestingly, we find that directly composing benign skills can already induce malicious behaviors, even when every individual skill passes security vetting. We further find that some target malicious behaviors remain difficult to realize through direct composition, even when the selected skills collectively provide the required capabilities. To systematically instantiate these attacks, we present Compositional Risk Induction via Multi skill Execution (CRIME). CRIME first uses the Malicious Plot Casting (MPC) module to decompose a target malicious behavior into complementary requirements and identify suitable benign skill compositions from public skill repositories. For compositions that cannot directly realize the target behavior, the Runaway Reaction Steering (RRS) module uses execution feedback to iteratively refine the selected skills toward the target while requiring each skill to remain benign under standalone vetting. The resulting composition is then passed to the Skill Reaction Chamber (SRC) module, where the skill pair is executed in a sandbox and the resulting environmental consequences are examined to determine whether the target behavior has occurred. Unsuccessful cases are returned to RRS for further refinement. Furthermore, we construct a benchmark of 4,000 public skills across eight cybersecurity behaviors for systematic evaluation of composition-induced vulnerabilities.

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### Process Constitutions and Process Stewards: Towards the Next Generation of BPM for Agentic Organizations

Authors: Amin Jalali, Majid Rafiei
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05942v1

Business Process Management (BPM) was built on a foundational assumption that organizations are populated primarily by human actors whose work can be made visible, governable, and improvable through process models. That assumption is depreciating. AI agent ecosystems increasingly execute, coordinate, and adapt organizational work with limited human direction, challenging not only BPM's methods but its core conception of what a process is. We argue that BPM faces a constitutive shift from modeling human work to governing autonomous agents, for which we propose two new concepts: the \emph{Process Constitution}, a machine-interpretable, value-laden framework that defines the space of admissible agent behavior, and the \emph{Process Steward}, a governance agent that interprets and enforces it. The central value proposition of this new generation of BPM is not efficiency but \emph{organizational legibility}: the capacity to keep agentic organizations accountable, contestable, and humanly understandable. We outline what this means and sketch the research agenda it opens.

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### ReMem: Streaming Video Understanding With Long Context Retention

Authors: Li Yiheng, He Xu, Wang Shaobo, Shao Ling, Lu Shijian
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05940v1

Despite their impressive performance on a wide range of video understanding tasks, current Vision Language Models (VLMs) are predominantly designed for offline scenarios and struggle to handle online streaming videos that demand low latency response. Several studies have explored memory and token compression strategies in an attempt to adapt offline VLMs for streaming video understanding tasks. However, through our probing experiment, we identify that most existing works tend to progressively lose long context information as length of input stream increases. To address this, we propose ReMem, a novel training-free adaptation technique that enables VLMs to process streaming videos of arbitrary lengths while improving their long context information retention capability. ReMem exploits memory from two perspectives, implemented as two core components. The Streaming Context Memory (SCM) continuously compresses historical context with query-independent attention. The Retrieved Vision Memory (RVM) then retrieves the most salient, query-relevant context from memory to augment the VLM's input. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ReMem achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across a variety of widely used benchmarks, spanning both streaming video and general long video understanding tasks.

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### Structural Foundations of Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Inputs: The UID-Induced Normal Form and Minimal-Sensing Structure-from-Motion

Authors: Agostino Martinelli
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: math.OC, cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05939v1

This paper establishes the first general structural solution to the problem of state estimation for nonlinear systems driven by unknown inputs. Building upon nonlinear unknown-input observability theory, we show that every such system admits a structurally equivalent representation, referred to as the UID-induced normal form. The proposed representation decomposes the information carried by the unknown inputs into two complementary components: unknown-input directions that are structurally decoupled from the observable dynamics and observable quantities that completely represent the unknown-input information affecting the observable dynamics. As a consequence, the UID-induced normal form provides a unified structural solution to unknown-input decoupling and unknown-input reconstruction, without requiring any model or stochastic assumption on the unknown inputs. The practical significance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a previously unexplored minimal Structure-from-Motion configuration. The proposed representation enables recursive state estimation from only three point features and a single-axis gyroscope, allowing the recovery of the three-dimensional structure and camera motion up to an unknown global scale factor. Experiments on real-world data validate the proposed framework and demonstrate the feasibility of this minimal sensing configuration.

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### Combining Improvements in Uplink AI-RAN

Authors: Petteri Kela, Dani Korpi, Mikko Honkala
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05936v1

One of the major transformative factors in 6G will be the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become a native part of Radio Access Network (RAN). While most physical-layer AI features have so far been evaluated in isolation using link-level simulations, their combined behavior in a realistic multi-cell, multi-UE deployment has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we present system-level performance results when multiple uplink AI features are enabled together, achieved by integrating accurate link-level and system-level simulators. To infer state-of-the-art deep-learning-aided Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) receivers under the dynamic allocations produced by a realistic uplink scheduler, we propose a mirrored data augmentation method that decouples receiver performance from scheduled allocation size. In addition to these Physical Layer (PHY) receiver features, we combine several recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to train uplink power control and link adaptation that outperform a heuristic baseline and further boost the gains obtainable from the AI receiver alone. The system-level results show that the combined AI features improve the mean uplink user throughput by roughly 27% compared to a non-AI baseline, confirming that the individual PHY and Medium Access Control (MAC) AI features provide complementary gains when deployed jointly.

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### ThunderSyncRL: Lossless Acceleration of Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Seil Kang, Hangoo Kang, Tarun Suresh, Youngeun Kim, Shreyas Pimpalgaonkar, Seong Jae Hwang, Azalia Mirhoseini
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05935v1

Language models are moving beyond generating answers to pursuing long-horizon goals in interactive environments. Post-training these agents requires long, heterogeneous trajectories, and synchronous systems leave learner engines idle until rollout and verification finish. To squeeze out these pipeline bubbles, asynchronous training overlaps rollout and learning across updates, but comes at the cost of policy staleness. We introduce ThunderSyncRL, which starts gradient computation as soon as all required inputs are fixed, without policy staleness. For group relative policy optimization (GRPO), ThunderSyncRL computes each trajectory's score gradient as soon as the reward for that trajectory arrives, without waiting for the group. For on-policy distillation (OPD), it computes gradients for each completed agentic turn's teacher-scored actions while tool calls run in the sandbox. We prove that gradient streaming produces the same GRPO and OPD updates as batch-synchronous training, without changing either objective. On SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench 4.0, we train models to the same performance up to $1.9 \times$ faster than synchronous training. With zero policy staleness, ThunderSyncRL also outperforms asynchronous training at a fixed budget by up to $2.47$ percentage points.

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### UltraDub: Towards Authentic Dubbing by Unifying Visually-Steered Flow Learning and Trajectory Guidance

Authors: Gaoxiang Cong, Liang Li, Jianwei Wen, Zhedong Zhang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Qingming Huang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05932v1

Visual voice cloning requires intelligible, speaker-consistent speech synchronized with visible articulation. However, sequential multimodal conditioning can disrupt previously established temporal and speaker cues, while imbalanced inference guidance can improve linguistic accuracy at the expense of lip synchronization. In this paper, we propose UltraDub, a Unifying Visually-Steered Flow learning and trajectory Guidance Dubbing framework that leverages vision in two ways: as continuous motion for multimodal context aggregation, and as structural rhythm for trajectory rectification. Specifically, we introduce the Motion-guided Dual-context Retrieving (MDR) module, which continually recalibrates linguistic and speaker-style retrieval through shared lip-motion query residuals, utilizing independent time-conditioned gates to regulate their contributions. Furthermore, we propose Rhythm-anchored Trajectory Guidance (RTG), a training-free mechanism that evaluates hierarchical multimodal corrections at a visual-only predictive midpoint, safely strengthening semantic conditioning while better preserving temporal alignment. Finally, we construct DiverseDub, a multi-scenario benchmark to evaluate video dubbing in the wild. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UltraDub achieves state-of-the-art performance across four datasets.

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### The Arbitrary-Placement Problem in Entropy-Minimizing Selection, and a Residual-Entropy Formulation

Authors: Alyssa H. Shin, Claire H. Shin
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05925v1

Entropy-based selection objectives suffer from a fundamental degeneracy: minimizing Shannon entropy $H(p_A)$ rewards confident selection regardless of whether the selected candidate is informative. We address this limitation with the residual entropy $D = H(p_A) - H(p_β)$, where $p_β$ is induced by candidate trust weights. We prove the exact identity $D = -\mathrm{KL}(p_A\Vert p_β) - Δ$, where $Δ$ measures whether the score-induced distribution and trust profile favor the same candidates. Boundary cases establish basic safety: under uniform trust, $D\leq0$ automatically, so an equal-trust, non-starving state is never penalized, while at any one-hot limit, $D\to0$ regardless of the selected candidate. For the intermediate regime where selection occurs, we prove that $D\leq0$ when candidate ordering by trust agrees pairwise with ordering by informativeness, and derive a tighter certificate based on the leading candidate's margin over its competitors. These results are independent of the candidate-scoring function and apply to both stationary and dynamically changing information. Experiments with a gradient-based mixture-of-experts router confirm that the ordering conditions can hold during real optimization and show that correct ordering improves downstream performance when candidates are non-interchangeable and selections are used directly rather than averaged. Beyond routing, margin-based reweighting matches or outperforms fixed-strength baselines in a class-imbalance task, while informative selection in a production video-prediction system reduces MSE by approximately 20$\%$ and transfers to a related species. Residual entropy, therefore, provides a safety criterion for selection and a usable signal for deciding when that selection is informative.

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### VERA: Scaling Verifiable Environments for Agentic co-Evolution

Authors: Junqi Liu, Yongyang Pan, Zhuosong Jiang, Dongbai Li, Bo Zhang, Xitong Ling, Sheng Wang, Hanrong Ye, Yufan He, Can Zhao, Pengfei Guo, Dong Yang et al.
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05923v1

Competent agents need precise and verifiable environments, such as sandboxes that are resumable at any stage and evolve from observable evidence. However, most long-horizon work exposes how rare these are: for example, an agent in medical research must ground a finding, classify it, and write a report over dozens of dependent steps, yet recent environments score only the outcome. To address the challenges in stable training, we present VERA, which builds such environments at scale and lets agents evolve on them. VERA builds these environments from initial trajectories: an agent writes rubrics, executable checks, a judge verifies each sandbox, and only those that pass enter the training bank. On these environments, VERA alternates between two updates: train the model with rubric rewards, or edit the harness skills. We also create a verifier which gates model checkpoints and harness edits using explicit development-set acceptance criteria. This attribution distinguishes VERA's co-evolution from single-axis baselines: its updates target not only the cause but the outcome. With an open-source corpus of 9,000+ long-horizon verifiable environments, a 9B model paired with its co-evolved agent beats the strongest baseline by 10.3 and 13.0 points in the two domains. At 27B, it surpasses the baseline on AutoCoWorkBench (71.6) and AutoMedBench (80.7), transfers to unseen workflows, and retains general capabilities.

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### Incentive Alignment in Online Experimentation

Authors: Ermis Soumalias, Richard Mudd, Abbas Zaidi
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05922v2

Evaluating the causal effect of new features is a central goal for online platforms. While recent literature addresses limited testing traffic via centralized portfolio optimization, this perspective abstracts away a critical institutional reality: experimentation is operationally decentralized. The experimenters who develop new features also dictate which hypotheses to test, and they are typically rewarded based on empirical average treatment effects that are prone to upward bias. Left unchecked, this principal-agent conflict can severely erode platform value, a structural failure that conventional centralized levers, such as significance thresholds and traffic budgets, cannot resolve. By reframing experimentation as an incentive design problem, we demonstrate that two practical mechanisms, sample splitting and shrinkage, can effectively bridge this gap. Sample splitting aligns incentives perfectly at a bounded traffic cost, while shrinkage consumes no additional traffic and guarantees that interventions with negative expected effects are strictly unprofitable to field.

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### Beyond Transport Cost: Routing Differences between Flow Matching and Optimal Transport

Authors: Eungyeol Han, Jong-Seok Lee
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05921v1

In generative models, Optimal Transport (OT) is used to improve Flow Matching (FM) by reducing noise-data coupling cost. However, different noise-to-output assignments can yield nearly equal costs, raising a key question. Is cost alone sufficient to guide coupling design? We address this question by separating transport cost from routing, i.e., the destination reached by each noise sample. We show numerically how FM and OT can differ in routing while remaining close in cost. We examine its consequences in learned neural FM. Using the exact FM routing as an oracle, we further construct a routing-aware training coupling and find that it yields a directionally consistent improvement in generation over a cost-matched, cost-only counterpart. Our findings highlight what cost minimization can overlook and motivate using both cost and routing to evaluate the design of OT-based FM couplings. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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### Non-invasive Seizure Detection Using Wearable Wrist-worn Accelerometry and Deep Learning

Authors: Nilushika Udayangani Hewa Dehigahawattage, Kishor Nandakishor, Marimuthu Palaniswami
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05919v1

Seizure monitoring and detection are crucial for reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with seizures. Current epilepsy care, often involving expensive video-electroencephalography (VEEG) monitoring, requires specialized expertise and is limited to in-hospital settings, and intrusive in nature. Seizure diaries, on the other hand, suffer from unreliability due to under-reporting, leading to incorrect therapeutic decisions. Wearable non-invasive seizure detection may offer a more tolerable and feasible solution for long-term ambulatory monitoring. This study explores a wearable remote monitoring system utilizing a single wrist-worn accelerometer device and capable of detecting multiple types of seizures, including shorter duration events. We enrolled 79 patients under video-electroencephalography monitoring to wear accelerometer devices and collect data. Concurrent VEEG recordings were reviewed by board-certified epileptologists to produce annotations, including seizure onset, offset, and seizure type. Using this data, we constructed a deep neural network based on the time-series ResNet architecture, which could discriminate among seizure and non-seizure events. Our proposed approach achieved a seizure detection sensitivity of 95.65% and an overall false alarm rate of 0.15/24 hours during the evaluation, which spanned 5576 hours of total recording. Additionally, it resulted in an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.98 and an area under the precision-re call curve (AUC-PRC) of 0.67 when averaged over 20 patients who experienced 46 convulsive seizures. These promising results suggest that the proposed seizure detection system can be effectively used for long-term ambulatory seizure monitoring. Future steps include validating our findings in larger datasets and assessing the utility of detection for additional seizure types.

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### Prompt and Refinement: Asymmetric Mutual Learning for Infrared Small Target Detection with Noisy Labels

Authors: Yimin Fu, Songbo Wang, Lizhuo Liu, Baicheng Pan, Zhunga Liu, Michael K. Ng
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05918v1

Existing data-driven infrared small target detection (ISTD) methods typically require large-scale datasets with accurate pixel-level annotations for model training. However, such labor-intensive requirements are difficult to satisfy in real-world applications due to the heavy reliance on expert knowledge and the inherently weak distinctiveness of infrared small targets. Consequently, the presence of noisy labels during model training is inevitable, which can severely mislead the learning of target perception toward spurious patterns. To address this challenge, we propose Prompt and Refinement (PAR), a label-noise-robust asymmetric mutual learning paradigm for ISTD. Specifically, PAR comprises a pretrained Segment Anything Model (SAM) and an ISTD-specific detector trained from scratch, which learn collaboratively through a peer-teaching scheme. Coupled with local contrast regularity, the predictions of the two asymmetric peer models are mutually exploited as rectification cues for the supervisory masks of their counterparts. The interaction between complementary inductive biases effectively prevents the label correction process from degenerating into the self-confirmation loop of a single model, enabling progressive refinement of the annotations toward intrinsic target characteristics. In addition, the detector predictions are utilized as corrective mask prompts to facilitate task-specific adaptation of the vision foundation model. Moreover, an evidential uncertainty estimation strategy is introduced into the optimization process to further alleviate the adverse effects of noisy labels. Extensive experiments under diverse noisy label scenarios on three ISTD datasets demonstrate that PAR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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### Large Stepsizes Federated Learning on Logistic Regression with Linearly Separable Data: The Case of Heterogeneous Devices

Authors: Hok Fong Wong, Hoi-To Wai, Chung-Yiu Yau
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05915v1

This paper revisits the distributed learning problem for training a multinomial logistic regression model with the Federated Averaging ($\texttt{FedAvg}$) algorithm. We concentrate on a scenario with arbitrarily large stepsizes and heterogeneous update rules where the devices may perform a different number of local updates in each round. We show that, with linearly separable data, $\texttt{FedAvg}$ is stable with any stepsizes and the objective values converge to zero at the rate of ${\cal O}(1/R)$, where $R$ is the number of communication rounds. Our result also demonstrates that the effects of device heterogeneity vanish asymptotically. For sufficiently large $R$, the objective values decrease monotonically and is bounded by ${\cal O}( 1 / (R T_{\rm avg}))$, where $T_{\rm avg}$ is the average number of local update steps per communication round across devices. Numerical experiments support our findings.

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### CoHyFuse: Condition-wise Hypergraph Fusion with Global Connectome in Task-fMRI

Authors: Boseong Kim, Haejun Chung, Ikbeom Jang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05913v1

Task-fMRI connectomes reveal state-dependent neural reconfigurations, yet conventional methods marginalize these signals by aggregating distinct conditions into static pairwise graphs, thereby obscuring condition-specific multi-ROI organization. We introduce CoHyFuse, a condition-aware ROI-centered hypergraph framework that constructs a task-state-specific incidence matrix from condition-wise functional connectivity (FC)-profile embeddings, allowing the same ROI to form different multi-ROI hyperedges across task phases. Condition-specific neighborhood sizes $K_q$ further adapt the hyperedge scale to each task state, and the resulting condition embeddings are fused with a complementary whole-session FC branch for prediction. In the AABC cohort (N=1,074), CoHyFuse achieved the best mean out-of-fold predictive performance among evaluated baselines on FACENAME Fluid Cognition Composite (FCC) prediction (7.83$\pm$0.10 MAE, 0.439$\pm$0.026 \(R^2\)) and VISMOTOR age prediction (7.52$\pm$0.37 MAE, 0.592$\pm$0.022 \(R^2\)). In an auxiliary CMI-HBN attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) classification benchmark (N=223), CoHyFuse obtained 72.0$\pm$2.1\% macro-AUC and 74.2$\pm$2.9\% accuracy. Ablation studies support the contributions of condition-wise incidence construction and dual-view fusion, suggesting that state-resolved ROI-set structure provides complementary predictive information beyond whole-session FC alone. Occlusion analysis identifies the Distraction condition as the primary driver of model prediction, pointing toward the Salience/Ventral Attention Network (SAN)--FrontoParietal Network (FPN) and within-SAN hyperedge-defined ROI-set motifs as candidate model-relevant patterns. This framework provides an interpretable, state-resolved view of the connectome for downstream cohort analysis.

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### MiniCorp: The Last Mile to an AI Agent Corporation

Authors: Jingying Zeng, Zhenwei Dai, Jinning Li, Changho Shin, Dylan Zhang, Yuxuan Lu, Qi He, Dakuo Wang, Kai-Wei Chang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05912v2

The last mile toward enterprise AGI is a company that runs itself. Training and adapting such agents require longitudinal enterprise data, which remain scarce, costly to acquire, and often restricted by privacy constraints. Historical archives are also frequently incomplete and record only what actually happened. They cannot show the outcomes of alternative decisions. We introduce MiniCorp, an office simulator for studying how agents can collectively run a company while generating enterprise data at scale. Using an e-commerce company as a demonstration, MiniCorp connects two interacting worlds. The external world models customers, dynamic competitors, and market mechanisms. The internal world consists of agents that observe events, discuss their options, and make strategic decisions. These decisions have lasting effects on the market, and the resulting feedback informs the firm's later decisions. As the firm and market interact, MiniCorp continuously records the agents' communications and decisions. These records preserve the information available at the time and the business results that followed. Checkpointing allows the same situation to be replayed under different decisions, providing comparisons unavailable in static archives. We evaluate end-to-end fidelity against patterns reported in empirical studies of real markets. These evaluations provide agents with realistic market feedback and reduce the risk that they learn to exploit flaws in the simulator. Our experiments show agents coordinating across roles and adapting their decisions to market feedback. With explicit long-term strategic guidance, they also sustain advertising exploration despite weak early returns. MiniCorp thus provides an environment for studying AI-run companies and a scalable source of longitudinal and counterfactual enterprise data for agent training and evaluation.

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### Every View Counts: View-Consistent Panoptic Quality for Multi-view Panoptic Segmentation

Authors: Youngmin Lee, Byungha Ko, Guhnoo Yun, Dong Hwan Kim
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05911v2

Multi-view panoptic segmentation assigns a semantic class and a scene-level instance ID to every pixel of an unordered set of images, and recent feed-forward 3D models predict these labels for the input views in a single forward pass. Their predictions, however, have been evaluated with the scene-level PQ (PQ^scene) borrowed from per-scene optimization methods, typically on rendered held-out views. PQ^scene tiles all views of a scene into a single image, so that a missed appearance or a change of ID lowers the score of the matched pair only in proportion to its area. We propose View-Consistent Panoptic Quality (VC-PQ), which extends PQ from a single image to a set of input views, counts equally every view in which an instance is visible, and penalizes a prediction that is not visible in the same views as its ground truth. A decomposition of VC-PQ attributes the score a method loses to mask accuracy, view consistency, and the matching threshold. A single additional parameter recovers the area weighting of tiling for comparison. Under a fixed evaluation protocol on ScanNet++ and ScanNetv2, recent feed-forward methods are evaluated with VC-PQ and PQ^scene, and the decomposition shows where each of them loses its score. Controlled perturbations of the ground truth show that VC-PQ responds to the number of views in which an instance is missed or changes ID, whereas PQ^scene responds to their area. The aim of this work is to make view consistency part of the evaluation of multi-view panoptic segmentation, with VC-PQ reported alongside PQ^scene. The evaluation code and the input sets of the protocol are available at https://github.com/Renem24/vcpq.

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### AstraSR: Real-World Thermal Super-Resolution with GPT-6 Astra

Authors: Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Jun Zhang, Ziyu Lu, Yuhang Zhang, Haobo Zuo
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05910v1

Real-world thermal super-resolution (SR) is constrained by limited sensor resolution and the difficulty of obtaining corresponding high-resolution (HR) observations for direct model supervision. Conventional SR methods typically construct training pairs by treating captured thermal images with real-world degradations as HR references and applying predefined degradation to generate synthetic low-resolution (LR) inputs. Such a construction not only introduces a domain gap between synthetic and captured LR observations but also retains acquisition degradations in the supervision. To address this issue, we propose AstraSR, a real-world thermal SR method guided by GPT-6 Astra, a frontier multimodal generative model endowed with emergent and transformative visual capabilities. Specifically, we construct a dataset of image pairs by using captured LR thermal images to condition GPT-based HR reference. We develop a direct generative supervision strategy that learns from captured thermal inputs paired with GPT-generated HR references. Pixel, gradient, and perceptual losses jointly supervise the transfer of intensity patterns, structural boundaries, and visual details from the generated references. Qualitative comparisons with seven existing state-of-the-art real-world SR methods show continuous object contours, distinct structural boundaries, and smooth intensity transitions in the thermal scenes. These results demonstrate that AstraSR outperforms existing real-world SR methods in both thermal clarity and structural coherence.

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### Safe Image Generation via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Eungyeol Han, Jong-Seok Lee
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05908v1

Recent Text-to-Image (T2I) models achieve remarkable visual image generation performance, but they can still generate NSFW (Not-Safe-For-Work) contents, including violent or explicit images. Existing safety checker mechanisms are largely confined to pre-generation filtering (e.g. prompt-level text classifiers) or post-hoc moderation applied after an image is completely synthesized. However, adversarial attack methods operate over a much broader space. This imbalance highlights the need for a safety mechanism that intervenes during the generation process. We propose an in-generation safety framework that monitors the denoising trajectory and detects emerging NSFW signals from intermediate representations. Rather than merely detecting NSFW generations, our method applies reinforcement learning to generate safe images from NSFW prompts. By coupling in-generation detection with controllable steering, our approach mitigates unsafe trajectories even when NSFW signals emerge after generation has already begun. Experiments results show that our method consistently outperforms existing safe image generation methods across both standard and adversarial evaluation sets, while preserving perceptual quality and prompt fidelity. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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### On Hyperparameter Tuning on the Test Set

Authors: Matteo Fregonara, Tom Viering, Jan van Gemert
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05902v1

"Don't tune hyperparameters on the test set" is often stated in machine learning textbooks. Violating it is considered a cardinal sin that produces misleadingly optimistic results, corrupts benchmark integrity, and thus can even be interpreted as scientific fraud. Yet evidence suggests that test set hyperparameter tuning does occur in practice, making it all the more important to understand its actual consequences. So how bad is it, really? In this work we question this dogma and put it to an empirical test. We systematically study the magnitude of the performance inflation caused by tuning the hyperparameters on the test set for MNIST-1D, CIFAR-10, and three tasks from the GLUE benchmark. Our experiments show that while the effect is real and significant, it is frequently small relative to other sources of noise. In many cases, we find that tuning on the test set recovers exactly the same model as when tuning on the validation set. Most importantly, we find that the rankings of models remain essentially preserved after tuning on the test set and therefore that consistent test-set tuning may not invalidate benchmarks or model selection. Our results call for a more nuanced view of tuning hyperparameters on the test set, stimulating researchers to openly report test tuning.

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### End-to-End Autonomous Recursive Arborescence Deformable Flow and Non-Linear Hemodynamics for Patient-Specific Coronary Centerline Extraction

Authors: Zeyu Jia, Xin Ming
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.TO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05900v1

Extracting patient-specific vascular trees from volumetric medical images is fundamental to computational angiography and non-invasive hemodynamic assessment. Conventional voxel segmentation models often sever delicate bifurcations, while heuristic Euclidean Minimum Spanning Trees introduce non-anatomical shortcuts. Moreover, linear Poiseuille flow neglects quadratic kinetic dissipation across arterial narrowings, underestimating ischemia. We formulate an end-to-end framework decoupling continuous geometric arborescence generation from non-linear hemodynamics. First, an autonomous 3D Ostium Landmark Localization Head with dual-sinus query channels and spherical-gated refinement eliminates centerline seeding dependency, achieving cohort mean localization error of 7.63 mm (7.43 mm LCA, 7.83 mm RCA; 71.4% <= 8.0 mm) from raw contrast context. Second, a Spatially-Grounded Deformable Step Flow Architecture queries continuous 3D feature pyramids via trilinear sampling, sequentially generating trajectories with anchor boundary enforcement (X(0) = P_start). Third, a Top-Down Recursive Arborescence State Machine detects bifurcation peaks via Tree-NMS and parameterizes predecessor parent pointers (p_k < k), guaranteeing single connected acyclic tree topology (beta_0 = 1, beta_1 = 0) with differentiable step termination. Fourth, an iterative Picard non-linear Kirchhoff solver with Young-Tsai / Gould quadratic dissipation enforces machine-precision mass conservation (residual 5.82e-11 mL/s). Across 14 development patients under standardized in-silico stenosis stress testing (Q_0 = 4.0 mL/s), linear Poiseuille flow misclassifies 75% diameter lesions as non-ischemic (FFR > 0.80) in 14/14 cases, whereas our non-linear solver captures functional ischemia (FFR = 0.5864, lesion disparity 32.89 mmHg, p = 6.10e-5) with 3.66x collateral shunting. Test set firewall isolation was maintained.

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### LoDEOT: Low-Dimensional and Efficient Offset Tokens for Building Footprint Extraction from Off-Nadir Imagery

Authors: Kai Li, Zigan Zhou, Zhenyang Li, Hui Shan, Zhe Chen, Yupeng Deng, Zhihao Xi, Yu Meng, Yifan Peng, Xiangyu Zhao
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05899v2

Instance-level roof-to-footprint offset (RFO) prediction is central to extracting building footprints from off-nadir imagery. Query-based pipelines commonly use high-dimensional instance tokens to predict signed two-dimensional RFOs. We investigate whether RFO prediction can instead use a compact offset token. Under local pinhole projection and vertical-extrusion assumptions, the idealized RFO map admits a five-parameter sufficient descriptor comprising intrinsic shape, composite amplitude, and relative geometry. This factorization provides a structural prior for a five-dimensional offset token, whose channels learn task-relevant latent representations through end-to-end training. Based on this design, we propose LoDEOT, which retains high-dimensional instance tokens for detection and segmentation but maps instance-token, concentration-gated roof, and box-mask evidence to a five-dimensional offset token followed by an independent two-dimensional readout. Known denoising-query target indices further align each supervised decoder-layer estimate with the same clean instance RFO, organizing successive predictions as target-aligned recovery under perturbed query conditions. Experiments on five real-world building datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LoDEOT for building footprint extraction. Experiments on real-world building datasets demonstrate that a five-dimensional offset token can support accurate RFO prediction. On BONAI, LoDEOT achieves the best roof-detection bAP and bAP50 and leads all five offset-corrected footprint metrics among the evaluated end-to-end methods, with FAP50 of 54.58 and mEPE of 5.23 pixels. Its FAP50 exceeds those of the evaluated end-to-end baselines by 7.56-16.85 percentage points.

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### Collaborative Personalized Preference Alignment for LLMs under Data Deficiency

Authors: Liyan Yang, Yige Yuan, Zhiqin Yang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05898v1

Real-world users often exhibit highly heterogeneous preferences over multiple objectives for LLM responses. A lightweight aligner can tailor these responses to individual preferences, but scarce user-specific feedback makes personalized training difficult. Learning shared initializations across users can support few-shot adaptation. However, heterogeneous preferences and competing objectives cause gradient conflicts across users and within each user, hindering effective initialization learning. This raises a central question: \textbf{how can we collaboratively learn aligner initializations that support few-shot adaptation to diverse user preferences?} To answer this question, we propose \textbf{A}pproximate \textbf{P}areto \textbf{O}ptimality (APO). We first group users whose updates are compatible, so that their information can be combined with less interference. Within each group, we combine gradient descent with controlled ascent to coordinate competing objectives and move towards preference-specific points on the Pareto front. This produces an initialization that is close to the optima of the users in the group. We then iteratively refine it using updates from few-shot local adaptation, making it more effective for personalization. Furthermore, we establish conditional suboptimality bounds for a one-local-step collaborative update and characterize how initialization error affects subsequent stochastic adaptation. Experiments on Fed-ChatbotPA and UltraFeedback show consistent improvements over existing methods using only 20 local examples.

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### Fitting Vision Adapters at Frontier Scales

Authors: Jaehoon Lee, Harry Partridge, Mudith Jayasekara, Charles O'Neill, Max Kirkby, Michael Psenka
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05897v1

Training a small projector between a frozen vision encoder and language model is an established approach to multimodal learning. As the parameter count of language models scales dramatically, we revisit which vision capabilities this approach can add while keeping their pretrained weights fixed. Here we train a 50M parameter projector from the vision encoder of Kimi K2.6 to GLM 5.2 and 5.3, both models without native vision capabilities, and further present a reproducible recipe for training these adapters at scale. We study the following: (a) how vision capabilities of multimodal models scale as purely the language model side scales, and (b) what specific vision capabilities are able to be imbued into a pure language model at scale, and which ones remain limited. We evaluate on MMMU-Pro and BLINK, examining both overall performance and results on individual visual tasks.

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### TasteRoute: Personalized Routing for Video Generation

Authors: Zhi Rui Tam, Chao-Chung Wu, Sin-Han Yang, Peyton Ku, Brendan Kuang, Tzu-Ting Hsieh, Min-Fang Hsu, Fang-Ling Tsai, Yun-Nung Chen, Wei-Chiu Ma, Chieh-Yen Lin
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05896v1

Rapid progress in video generation has led to a plethora of models that differ substantially in capability and generation cost. This raises a natural question: can each request be efficiently routed to an appropriate model? We find that even when the consensus of the other annotators is used as an oracle, it agrees with each annotator's own favorite only 34-55% of the time. Motivated by this observation, we introduce TasteRoute, a personalized video-generation router that selects a generator jointly based on the input request, user preferences, and available generation budget. Across text-to-video and image-to-video settings, TasteRoute is competitive with strong simple baselines on preference routing while reducing average generation cost. The cost saving increases under higher budget caps. Finally, we release TasteRoute-3k, a human-annotated dataset containing multi-model video comparisons, quality judgments, preference rankings, and user-profile signals to facilitate future research on personalized and cost-aware video routing.

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### Noise Out, Bias In: Targeted Bias Injection in Diffusion Language Models via Closed-Loop Activation Steering

Authors: Sarim Hashmi, Mukul Ranjan, Abdelrahman Elsayed, Muhammad Umer Sheikh, Fahad Shamshad, Nils Lukas
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05894v1

Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked positions, re-predicting each token multiple times before it is committed. An autoregressive decoder exposes an answer's distribution once, at the step that commits it; a dLLM exposes it at every denoising step before commitment, and we show that an adversary can exploit this. Since an answer remains open to revision over many denoising steps, an adversary with access to internal activations can watch how likely the model is to produce a chosen answer and adjust the intervention accordingly. Building on this observation, we study targeted bias injection, an attack that steers a frozen dLLM toward a demographic answer selected by the adversary. The attack uses a simple proportional-integral (PI) controller that tracks the target-answer probability during denoising and adapts the strength of a steering vector on the fly. On ambiguous BBQ questions where the correct answer is abstention, our attack raises LLaDA-8B-Instruct's preference for the targeted group from 1.8 to 16.7 percentage points, more than three times the strongest fixed-strength steering baseline, and on SocialStigmaQA it raises the selection of stigmatizing answers from 17.6% to 58.1%. Fitted to other demographic targets, the same attack shifts answers by up to 37 percentage points, and each attack takes about 40 minutes on one GPU. On the primary target, feedback is what makes the attack work: constant steering at the same average strength over the token-committing steps produces a far smaller shift while corrupting nearly three times as many outputs, and a constant strength set separately for each example still falls well short. Our findings identify the denoising trajectory as a new control channel in dLLMs and call for bias audits that examine the serving stack rather than the frozen model alone.

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### Spatial Supervision Without Attribution Optimization: Improving Post-Hoc Class Activation Maps via Box-Guided Evidence Routing

Authors: Wenhao Liang, Liangwei Nathan Zheng, Lin Yue, Wei Emma Zhang, Mingyu Guo, Weitong Chen
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05891v1

Post-hoc class activation maps (CAMs) are a standard tool for inspecting the evidence behind an image classifier's predictions, yet nothing in ordinary training encourages these maps to be spatially appropriate. We study whether inexpensive spatial supervision can improve a classifier's own predicted-class Grad-CAM without ever optimizing an attribution map. Box-Guided Evidence Routing (BGER) trains a lightweight gate on the final feature map under box or mask supervision and routes classification through the gated features, while Grad-CAM is computed separately at the pre-gate representation, so the evaluated map never enters the training objective. With a BCE routing loss, BGER raises MaxBoxAccV2 from $0.584$ to $0.715$ on CUB-200-2011 and from $0.757$ to $0.832$ on Stanford Dogs at comparable accuracy. Matched controls attribute most of the ResNet-50 gain to the spatial supervision reshaping the backbone rather than to routing itself: when classification bypasses the gate, most of the improvement remains, and detaching gradients through the gate leaves the ResNet-50 result nearly unchanged. The same detachment preserves most of the gain in two DenseNet-121 chest X-ray settings but removes the apparent gain on Swin-T, and directly supervising the CAM reaches stronger localization at a larger accuracy cost. Overall, spatial supervision can improve separately evaluated post-hoc CAMs, but both the mechanism and the size of the benefit depend on the architecture and the evaluation setting.

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### The Optimization Landscape of Learning Compacted Context Models

Authors: Thomas Villeneuve, Alex Sandomirsky, Charles O'Neill, Max Kirkby, Michael Psenka
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05885v1

Many works approach continual learning through the lens of infinite context windows. As an agent puts more observation into context (concretely the KV cache), compacting said context is akin to direct memory manipulation, without affecting the base model's weights. Many works pose KV compaction as an optimization problem: learn a smaller set of KV vectors that matches the behavior of the full KV cache. While this preserves base model behavior, optimizing through a frozen base model results in a highly nontrivial optimization problem with a brittle and flat loss landscape. In this paper, we characterize what makes these optimization problems difficult and demonstrate that a heavily simplified Perceiver-based architecture not only matches performance of a full Perceiver transformer in continuous context compaction, but outperforms baselines on compaction utility. Results are presented on MCQ tasks across Finance, Legal, Gutenberg, and Code.

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### Mulligan: Performance-Guided Data Collection for Efficient On-Robot Learning

Authors: Lars Ankile, Perry Dong, Rohan Bhowmik, Aneesh Muppidi, David D. Yuan, Shuran Song, Chelsea Finn
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05882v1

Learning from human demonstrations is a reliable way to teach robots new tasks, but the gains from each additional demonstration shrink as the policy improves. Continued improvement can instead come from supervised deployment, where an operator places the objects and intervenes when the policy fails. We ask how to maximize improvement from a fixed budget of supervised episodes on high-precision manipulation tasks with wide ranges of object placements. We observe that failures can concentrate in a small subset of initial states, so uniform collection spends much of the operator's time on states the policy already handles. Mulligan makes the initial-state distribution a decision, starting each round's episodes at observed failures and untried states. To further improve data efficiency, we augment interactive imitation learning with a value function trained on all data, including failures that imitation discards. Across three real-world tasks evaluated on 2,550 held-out, blinded episodes and two simulated tasks, Mulligan outperforms uniform initial-state sampling at matched collection budgets, and combined with value-based action selection, HiL-IDQL+Mulligan, improves final real-task success by 10-34 percentage points. With operator interventions, the human-robot team completes 98% of collection episodes, remaining productive while the policy learns. Videos, code, and data are available at https://mulligan.page/.

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### fMRI-TAMCL: Text-Anchored Supervised Multimodal Contrastive Learning for fMRI-Based Brain Disorder Classification

Authors: Juliana Mantebea Danso, Enoch Opanin Gyamfi, Mylene C. Q. Farias
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05880v1

Resting-state fMRI is important in the classification of brain disorders, but highly multimodal and exhibits strong multisite heterogeneity. Existing methods fuse images, BOLD-based functional connectivity, and phenotypic data modalities. Unlike other medical imaging datasets, rs-fMRI datasets rarely include a text modality, so they are generated from phenotypic data or BOLD activations. These text generation methods rely on fixed assumptions for subjects, sites, devices, and protocols, leading to poor generalization across datasets. We propose fMRI-TAMCL, a text-anchored multimodal contrastive learning framework that integrates fMRI images, sparse FC, and generated subject-specific text. Its Subject-Adaptive Threshold Derivation module generates BOLD activation text, while Feature-Value Serialization module generates phenotypic text. All three modalities are encoded as clustered graphs, projected onto a shared unit hypersphere space, aligned using pairwise, text-anchored supervised contrastive learning, and fused with attention. fMRI-TAMCL proves its generalization capability across five datasets outperforming 29 baselines with 78.6%-86.4% accuracy in downstream classification.

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### Learning to Learn a Language

Authors: Lennart Carstens-Behrens, Holger Fröhlich
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05879v1

We present the Prior-Fitted Language Model (PFLM), a 300M-parameter byte-level transformer pretrained only on samples from a synthetic non-linguistic prior. Given a prefix of real text, it learns to predict the language in context with frozen weights, having never seen a word of any real language. Every training sequence is generated by a recurrent structural causal model drawn fresh from a distribution over such models. The model never sees the same language twice during training, so the only way to predict the continuation is to infer the language from the prefix. Samples from this prior share the statistical signatures of natural text: Zipfian frequencies, slow entropy-rate convergence, and long-range dependence. On Wikipedia in six languages, bits per byte fall from the uniform eight to between 0.9 and 2.4 at one million bytes of context. Given numerals instead of text, PFLM learns to count, to compare magnitudes, and to add approximately. It predicts deterministic sequences like Rudin-Shapiro or the prime indicator, and it compresses six non-text domains, from source code to speech, below gzip and PPMd. The model has not learned a language. It has learned to learn one.

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### OGAM: Connecting Systematic Testing to Runtime Assurance through Object-Grounded Attention Monitoring for VLA Policies

Authors: Haki Darwish, Xiangyu Yin, Changwen Li, Rongjie Yan, Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto, Chih-Hong Cheng
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05878v1

Benchmarks expose vision-language-action (VLA) policies to few canonical instructions, while exhaustive deployment testing is impossible. We introduce Object-Grounded Attention Monitoring (OGAM), connecting systematic testing to runtime assurance: testing reveals attention divergence between successful and failed executions, and OGAM uses this signal to stop failures beyond the finite suite. We generate scene-grounded instructions through pairwise combinations of action templates and objects, and separately test meaning-preserving paraphrases. All 87 out-of-benchmark cases reveal problematic behavior across OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT, UniVLA, and $π_{0.5}$: none completes any of the 24 feasible instructions, while infeasible or hazardous requests also trigger behavior substitution. At each action query, we project gradient-weighted visual attention through object masks and group it by instruction role for comparison across tasks and policies. Dynamic time warping aligns this course with a successful reference despite speed differences; conformal calibration on successful episodes sets the early-stopping threshold for sustained deviations, with a nominal false-stop target of $α=0.05$. Across four policies, OGAM stops 87-100% of failed episodes at median times of 5-12s within a 20s budget, with observed false-stop rates of 3-5%, without failure-labeled training. Finite testing thus identifies attention patterns that support online intervention before failure fully unfolds.

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### Global Communication or Graph-Specific Memory?

Authors: Hamed Shirzad, Danica J. Sutherland
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05874v1

Scalable Graph Transformers are commonly trained and evaluated on static large graphs in a transductive setup. Many scalable Graph Transformer components can be formulated as a constant-size shared memory, similar to virtual nodes, providing compressed information about the whole graph. The counterpart of these models in language models and other domains is justified as the input changes, and this mechanism learns to compress some useful information about the input. In transductive learning on a single fixed graph, however, any shared memory can be seen as a constant at test time. This raises the question of what exactly this shared memory does in this static setup. We give preliminary evidence that optimizing a shared memory directly performs similarly to global communication methods, and so normal local message-passing models can embed similar information in their weights. Thus, these settings may be a poor fit for evaluating global communication in graph neural networks.

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### Off-Policy Merging Beats On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continual Learning

Authors: Chen Henry Wu, Thomas Zhang, Aditi Raghunathan
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05872v1

A long-standing goal of AI is a model that can continually learn and improve itself. On post-trained models, supervised finetuning (SFT) on new data often causes poor generalization and catastrophic forgetting. As such, the conventional wisdom is that on-policy training is a prerequisite for continual learning. In practice, however, data containing new knowledge or capabilities are often off-policy. While methods such as on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) try to bridge this gap by converting off-policy data into on-policy signal, they have been shown to cause reasoning collapse. In this paper, we show that off-policy merging beats OPSD for continual learning. We first show that SFT learns a useful signal from new data, but naively applying its update interferes with existing capabilities. We reduce this interference with a simple recipe we term grafting, which changes where the update is learned and how it is applied: (1) learning the update on an earlier donor checkpoint, ideally even before the end of pretraining, and applying the weight update to the post-trained model; (2) scaling the weight update, equivalent to a form of model merging; and (3) optionally, masking the most sensitive update directions when the new data distribution is far from the post-trained model. Across continual learning settings including (1) distilling from expert traces, (2) self-improvement with STaR and Pedagogical RL, and (3) injecting knowledge after pretraining cutoff, grafting Pareto-dominates both SFT and OPSD in new-task and old-task performance, while avoiding expensive on-policy sampling. Therefore, our work challenges on-policy training as a necessity for continual learning on RL-trained models.

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### Certification of Real Images through Calibrated Content Authentication

Authors: Sarim Hashmi, Abdelrahman Elsayed, Mohammed Talha Alam, Samuele Poppi, Nils Lukas
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05870v2

Generative models can synthesize high-quality inauthentic multimedia content that is already being misused at scale. We evaluate twenty deepfake detectors against ten generators released in the last four years and find accuracy decreasing over time, from near-perfect 99.5% to 76%. Adversarial perturbations further reduce every baseline detector to below 2% accuracy, effectively inverting the detector's assigned label. We argue that this unreliability reflects a fundamental ambiguity: generators can reproduce authentic content exactly (e.g., through memorization), so content alone cannot reveal the true provenance label. For this reason, content produced by a generator must admit a faithful reconstruction by that same generator, and finding such a reconstruction makes synthetic provenance plausible and authenticity plausibly deniable. We therefore propose and evaluate a detection paradigm that outputs a calibrated prediction of whether authenticity is plausibly deniable: a faithful reconstruction by any known generator establishes plausible deniability, while calibration bounds how often content from known generators fails to be reproduced. Our evaluation shows that (i) our detector can be calibrated so that at most 1% of generated content is wrongly certified, an operating point at which most baseline detectors reach near-zero recall, including the strongest with 93% accuracy; (ii) calibrating a stricter security threshold on attacked samples preserves this bound against adaptive adversaries within the evaluated bounded-perturbation attack space, whose perturbations break every baseline, but does not cover arbitrary adversarial transformations; and (iii) post-hoc verifiability is eroding, as 1,116 of 3,000 Reddit images resist reproduction by a 2022 generator, but only 55 to 79 resist reproduction by 2024 generators.

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### Finite-Sample Distribution Theory and Efficient Large-Scale Inference for Online Quantile Regression

Authors: Ziyang Wei, Jiaqi Li, Lan Wang, Wei Biao Wu
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05869v1

This paper studies online quantile regression for large-scale and streaming data using Stochastic SubGradient Descent (SSGD) with constant learning rates. Classical offline inference for quantile regression is computationally and memory intensive. Existing works of online inference for quantile regression provide only asymptotic guarantees and typically require sub-exponential tail conditions for distribution theory. To bridge these gaps, we introduce new techniques to prove a quenched central limit theorem (CLT) and finite-sample Gaussian approximation for SSGD under a finite-moment assumption. We further show that Ruppert-Polyak averaging with a constant learning rate has a non-vanishing bias and fails to satisfy CLT centering at the population target. Hence we propose suffix averaging to address this issue and establish its finite-sample Gaussian approximation. Based on these results, we provide an efficient online inference method for quantile regression that avoids covariance estimation. Numerical experiments show that our method achieves desirable empirical coverage rates and competitive performance compared to other inference methods. We also apply our approach to U.S. wage data to demonstrate its practical effectiveness.

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### Weave Mamba Fusion: Global Cross-Scale Interaction for Lightweight Face Detection

Authors: Dohun Kim, Jinmyung Jung
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05865v1

Feature pyramid methods, from FPN to BiFPN, have achieved strong performance in face detection by fusing multi-scale features. However, detecting faces under unconstrained conditions, such as small scale, occlusion, and extreme pose, remains difficult, as it requires global cross-scale dependencies that local fusion cannot model. State space models such as Mamba provide global context with linear complexity by scanning features as a sequence, and therefore offer a promising direction for this problem. Nevertheless, such a scan needs the two pyramid scales combined into a single feature map, and the way they are combined determines whether cross-scale structure is preserved. Summation collapses the two scales before the scan, so the scan has no cross-scale structure to exploit, while concatenation keeps both scales but at far higher cost. To address this, we propose \textbf{Weave Mamba Fusion (WMF)}, which interleaves two adjacent pyramid scales column by column so that each step of a horizontal bidirectional SS2D scan moves from one scale to the other. With partial-channel processing and parameter-free de-weaving, WMF enables efficient cross-scale interaction while preserving feature structure. Integrating WMF into every fusion node yields \textbf{WeaveBiFPN}, the neck of our \textbf{WeaveFace} detector. On WIDER FACE, WeaveFace achieves 91.41\% mean AP with only 0.34M parameters and 1.16 GFLOPs, outperforming prior detectors under 0.5M parameters. Its largest gains are on the Hard subset, where it reaches 87.14\% AP. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dohun-mat/WeaveMambaFusion}.

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### CCQ: A Multi-State Child Care Quality Dataset to Support AI for Children's Health Research

Authors: Victor Li, Yuzhang Xie, Ziwei Dong, Qingyang Zhu, Wenjing Ma, Carl Yang, Jinbing Bai, Huiwen Xu, Jiaying Lu
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05863v1

High-quality child care in early life is a critical determinant of children's growth and development. Research on child care quality has been constrained by fragmented, non-research-friendly, and privacy-bound datasets. We present CCQ (Child Care Quality), a large-scale, de-identified dataset for applied data science research at the intersection of AI and early childhood health. CCQ integrates 59,372 child care provider records across 12 U.S. states, covering diverse provider types as well as data schemas. To ensure research utility while protecting privacy, we implement an automated, LLM-based curation pipeline that anonymizes, cleans, and standardizes raw state records into two complementary releases: a cleaned textual release and a fully preprocessed tabular release. We also benchmark traditional machine learning models, tabular foundation models, and language models on quality rating prediction and important features analytics. Within a state, tabular classifiers on the preprocessed tables perform best. Across states, zero-shot transfer is near chance, but modest target-state supervision recovers most of the within-state performance, and pretraining on other states benefits finetuned language models. We release both datasets with all code to accelerate AI-driven research on child care quality and ultimately improve children's health and development.

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### Imagine to Act: High-Fidelity Data Synthesis via Image Editing World Model for Scalable GUI Agent Training

Authors: Yongxin Ning, Runliang Niu, Qianli Xing, Zhiyi Duan, Qingzu He, Pan Wang, Qi Wang
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05861v1

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating complex digital workflows across diverse applications. However, training highly capable and generalizable agents fundamentally relies on massive, high-fidelity visual-action trajectories, which are notoriously difficult to acquire. While human demonstrations are unscalable, existing GUI world models rely on text descriptions or HTML rendering, discarding crucial pixel-level visual details like icons and layout styles. To address this issue, we introduce Infinite-Dreamer, a simulation-free data synthesis method powered by a pixel-level Image Editing World Model. By conceptualizing GUI transitions as image editing tasks, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to describe action-induced UI changes as structured delta-text. We then fine-tune an image editing backbone to controllably synthesize realistic screenshot transitions. We utilize this model to generate both single-frame visual robustness data and multi-step imaginary trajectories. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we fine-tune the Qwen3-VL baseline solely on the synthesized data to obtain Infinite-Actor, and evaluate it on AndroidWorld, MobileWorld, and AndroidControl-Curated benchmarks. Infinite-Actor consistently outperforms the Qwen3-VL baselines across scales: Infinite-Actor-8B improves AndroidWorld Pass@1 by +4.45 and nearly doubles the MobileWorld Pass@3 success rate, while Infinite-Actor-2B improves Pass@1 by +9.05. Code is available at https://github.com/swaydy-n/Infinite-Dreamer.

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### Curriculum Brain: Constructing Curriculum Knowledge Graphs as a Substrate for Cognitive Diagnosis

Authors: Shrideep Tamboli, Chiranjeevi Maddala, Eshal Minhaj
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05860v1

Cognitive Diagnostic Models (CDMs) identify which specific skills a student has and has not mastered, the signal a personalized learning path needs and a single aggregate score cannot give. Yet they are rarely deployed. The obstacle is their precondition: the Q-matrix, a mapping from every assessment item to the skills it requires, historically authored by hand. We separate the task into two stages: first construct the curriculum's own knowledge graph, the full space of concepts and skills it contains, independent of any item; then map items against that graph on demand. This paper addresses the first stage only. The item-mapping stage is designed but not implemented here, so the claim that this shifts judgment cost from once per item to once per curriculum is a design rationale rather than a finding. We present Curriculum Brain, a two-repository system pairing a version-controlled knowledge base with an agentic pipeline of eleven single-responsibility agents under a thin deterministic orchestrator. It generates candidate concept-skill mappings from official curriculum documents, checks them against accumulated rules, and compares them with a concept-skill map extracted independently from the textbook, repairing its own failures and escalating to a human only when it cannot resolve a case itself. Across 241 chapter runs (168 distinct chapters), 41.5% produced a Generator output passing both checks without a patch, and 67.6% resolved without escalation. Both are measured against criteria the system itself produced, so both describe internal consistency rather than agreement with an external standard, and both pool two pipeline configurations separated by a single change at run 77; after it the figures are 57.0% and 91.5%. Observed spend was $1.19 per chapter, API spend only, excluding human review. We release both the framework and the resulting curriculum dataset.

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### On the Sequentially Semiseparable Structure of SDE-Induced Kernels and Efficient Algorithms for Kernel-Based Estimation Problems

Authors: Mikkel Paltorp, Luigi Caglio, Tianshi Chen, Evangelos Katsanos, Martin S. Andersen
Published: 2026-10-05
Categories: stat.ML, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05856v1

We study kernel functions induced by a linear time-invariant (LTI) stochastic differential equation (SDE), an approach that embeds prior knowledge about the function to be estimated directly into the state-space description of the SDE. This kernel-design perspective is relevant across the many settings where kernels play a central role, including kernel methods in statistics, Gaussian process (GP) regression in machine learning, and kernel-based regularization methods in system identification. The resulting class of SDE-induced kernels includes several kernels of practical interest, such as Matérn kernels with half-integer smoothness, spline kernels, and related kernels used in system identification. In contrast to existing linear-time GP regression methods for these kernels, which are typically based on Kalman filtering and Rauch--Tung--Striebel smoothing on the latent state, we work directly with the SSS representation of the observed covariance matrix. This yields linear-complexity recursive algorithms for the matrix operations required in GP regression, including factorization, linear solves, log determinants, posterior covariance, log-marginal-likelihood gradients, and posterior sampling; the same generator-level recursions extend, with only minor modifications, to the analogous computations in kernel-based regularization methods for system identification. Compared with previous uses of SSS representations in GP regression, we derive efficient recursive algorithms for analytic marginal-likelihood gradients in three application-relevant cases, and we develop new recursions for posterior computations and Matheron-type sampling. Numerical experiments verify the accuracy of the proposed recursions and illustrate posterior inference and sampling for representative SDE-induced kernels.

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