# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 128 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #6351–6400 of 7799 published in 2026-10, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 7799-paper 2026-10 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/128 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/127.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/129.md) ### Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Collision-Free Locomotion of an Underactuated Biped Authors: Jagannath Prasad Sahoo, Saurabh Kumar, Surya Prakash S. K., Samiran Datta, Abhay Dwivedi, Amit Shukla Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.HC, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05855v1 A bipedal robot cannot deviate from its path to avoid an obstacle without disturbing its balance, and this coupling is most severe on underactuated platforms such as the biped considered here, which has four actuated joints per leg and no hip or ankle roll. This paper presents a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework in which a High-Level (HL) policy observes the robot pose, 36 raycast proximity measurements, moving-obstacle states, and a receding-horizon local goal, and outputs a body-velocity command $(v_x, v_y, ω_{yaw})$ every ten control steps, while a velocity-conditioned Low-Level (LL) policy tracks each command through PD-controlled joint targets. Both policies are trained jointly with Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). Because the converged gait is task-agnostic, it is frozen and driven by classical planners over the same command interface, yielding three controlled baselines: SAC+A*, SAC+RRT*, and SAC+APF. Across 100 evaluation trials per method in randomized PyBullet environments, the proposed method reaches the goal in 98.0% of static and 88.0% of dynamic trials, against at most 78.0% and 68.0% for the planner hybrids, with path lengths within 4% of the A* reference, and ablations confirm that each observation channel and reward term contributes materially to this performance. --- ### TurboPairFormer: Fast and Stable Protein Folding Model Training with an Optimized Triangle Attention Kernel Authors: Yide Ran, Chelsea Lowman, Jan Domański, David Hartmann, Jenke Scheen, Jennifer Wei, Chuan Li, Jianwen Xie, Zhaozhuo Xu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05854v1 Triangular attention is a core computation in AlphaFold3-style biomolecular models, with cubic cost in token count. Its shared pair bias adds a gradient reduction across attention slices to the usual reductions over queries and keys. The open-source backends we examine handle these reductions through repeated probability recomputation, floating-point atomics, or full score-gradient storage. Separately, computing the softmax backward correction from BF16-rounded forward outputs loses numerical precision. We present TurboPairFormer, a triangular attention implementation for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs that addresses both issues. Our key-tile-parallel backward algorithm recomputes each probability tile once for the query, key, value, and pair-bias gradients, using ordered partial reductions for deterministic accumulation without floating-point atomics or full score-gradient storage. Output-residual compensation retains a BF16 approximation of the output-rounding residual to compute the backward correction more accurately in FP32, without changing the BF16 output. With BF16 inputs at crop sizes 384, 640, and 768 and head dimensions 16 and 32, TurboPairFormer achieves the lowest mean query, key, and pair-bias gradient RMSE against an FP64 reference among the implementations compared in this paper. Residual compensation reduces these RMSE values by 28-47% in controlled ablations. All four gradients are bitwise identical across five repeated calls in all 600 input cases under fixed execution conditions. Integrated into OpenFold3 with our triangle multiplication kernels, TurboPairFormer achieves the lowest GPU computation time per optimizer step among the evaluated backend configurations on 16 H100 GPUs, with speedups of $1.73\times$ over OpenFold3's Triton backend and $1.13\times$ over cuEquivariance at crop size 768. --- ### The Blind Spot Paradox: When Adaptive Classifiers Defeat Drift Detectors Authors: Raphaël Minato, Fabrice Popineau, Arpad Rimmel, Bich-Liên Doan Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05853v1 Monitoring concept drift from an adaptive classifier's error stream creates an operational conflict with the model's own update loop. When internal adaptation outpaces evidence accumulation, accuracy recovers before cumulative detectors (CUSUM, Page-Hinkley) can reach threshold. Instrumenting an Adaptive Random Forest (ARF) shows that surviving trees absorb 98.6% of the post-drift error transient through incremental leaf updates alone. The first background tree swap accounts for just 0.71% of this erased error volume, but drops external detection rates by 31 percentage points. We derive the finite-horizon boundary where cumulative evidence fails to cross threshold and measure a critical magnitude floor ($Δe_c = 0.120$) below which false-alarm budgets preclude detection. This failure manifests as missed shifts on stationary streams and false-alarm flooding triggered by internal tree swaps on noisy baselines. We validate on synthetic shifts, ARMA-GARCH series (ProteuS), and tabular benchmarks (BAF, INSECTS); on the synthetic sweep at a standard threshold, the blind spot appears at $Δe \approx 0.25$, showing why classical benchmarks like SEA ($Δe \le 0.21$) failed to reach it. --- ### RepICL: Reusable In-Context Prediction Across Heterogeneous Representation Spaces Authors: Yu-Hsiang Liu, Kuan-Yu Chen, Chih-Sheng Chen, Meng-Hsuan Chang, Yu-Chen Den, Tien-Hao Chang Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05852v1 Frozen representations are widely reused for downstream classification, yet each new task typically requires fitting a new predictor. We ask whether the few-shot prediction procedure itself can instead be learned once and reused across datasets and representation spaces. To study this question, we introduce RepShiftBench, comprising 1,218 encoder--dataset tasks across text, image, and audio, with separate evaluation of generalization to unseen datasets, unseen encoders, jointly unseen datasets and encoders, and unseen modalities. The benchmark exposes a substantial gap: Logistic Regression fitted independently on each episode outperforms every evaluated in-context learner across all settings. We introduce RepICL, a meta-trained in-context learner that canonicalizes each episode through episodic whitening before prediction. Its inductive variant, RepICL-I, surpasses Logistic Regression in all 12 benchmark settings, while RepICL-T substantially outperforms existing transductive methods. Ablations identify episodic whitening as the primary source of these gains, while showing that it is not a universally beneficial preprocessing step. Across both variants, the gains concentrate on queries for which simple support prototypes favor the wrong class or provide little separation between the true class and competing classes. Transduction provides its largest additional gains when limited support coverage gives a misleading view of class separation. Together, these results demonstrate that a shared few-shot prediction procedure can generalize beyond the representation spaces observed during training. --- ### CACFG: Curvature-Aware Classifier-Free Guidance and Optimal Control Authors: Max Collins, Dasith de Silva Edirimuni, Jordan Vice, Tim French, Ajmal Mian Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05845v1 Diffusion models generate samples by learning to reverse a fixed corruption process, and classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the standard mechanism for conditioning this process on a desired class or prompt. CFG can be applied at varying guidance strengths, and while higher strengths improve image quality and conditional alignment, too high a guidance strength can degrade image quality and diversity. Furthermore, CFG violates principled diffusion sampling dynamics, and existing explanations for why it works despite the violation disagree on the underlying theory or do not extend to deterministic samplers used in practice. We address both these issues. We first frame CFG sampling as a continuous-time optimal control problem, treating the sampling trajectory as a sequence of controls chosen to maximise the probability of the desired condition. Solving the resulting Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equation shows that CFG is recovered under specific path costs when using an unconstrained control set. We argue this lack of constraint is responsible for CFG's failure at high guidance strengths, since it permits the sampling path to move arbitrarily far from the current image estimate. To fix this, we propose curvature-aware CFG (CACFG), which constrains the control set to a hypersphere informed by the Gaussian regularisation used when training variational autoencoders. We show that the control inputs produced by CFG sampling routinely violate this bound, and that across diffusion models, datasets, and guidance schedules, CACFG achieves superior generative quality at mid-to-high guidance strengths with a less severe quality-diversity tradeoff than regular CFG. --- ### PhaseMatcher: Autoregressive Phase-Set Identification with Spectral Decomposition Authors: Zhonglong Peng, Qiuliang Liu, Chang Chen, Geng Zhong, Qi Li, Lihong Wang, Lan Jiang, Shifeng Jin Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CE, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05844v1 Recovering complete phase sets from powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) is challenging when weak-phase peaks overlap stronger signals. A natural strategy is to identify phases iteratively, removing the contribution of each identified phase from the observed pattern before predicting the next. However, even after a phase is correctly identified, misestimating its contribution can distort the residual and cause subsequent errors. We introduce PhaseMatcher, an autoregressive framework for complete phase-set identification with physics-guided spectral decomposition. After each phase prediction, PhaseMatcher re-estimates the contributions of all selected phases and the residual from the original observation and all selected reference patterns, accounting for physically plausible variation between reference patterns and the corresponding phase contributions in the observation. The resulting residual guides subsequent phase identification, while a separate stopping module determines when the phase set is complete. On synthetic mixtures and controlled mixtures constructed from measured single-phase patterns, PhaseMatcher improves complete-set identification over the evaluated baselines. On PhaseMix-135K, it also estimates contributions and residuals more accurately than scalar subtraction. --- ### AnchorPose for Geometry-Aware MOF Assembly through Meso-Grained Pose Generation Authors: Zhonglong Peng, Rui Jiao, Chang Chen, Geng Zhong, Qiuliang Liu, Shifeng Jin Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CE, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05843v1 Predicting metal-organic framework (MOF) structures from given building blocks requires recovering their positions and orientations in a periodic crystal. The spatial effects of rotation errors are geometry-dependent and anisotropic. The same angular error can produce different atomic displacements depending on block size, shape, and rotation axis. Angular error alone, without reference to the specific block geometry, therefore cannot fully describe the spatial consequences of a pose error. We introduce AnchorPose, a meso-grained pose generation framework that incorporates this geometric dependence into its generative representation. It represents each block through a small set of representative atoms, combines their local geometry with the current spatial state, and generates their coordinates with Bayesian Flow Networks. Known atom correspondences enable rigid alignment to recover complete building-block poses and return geometrically consistent points to the generation process. This design connects point-level spatial prediction with block-level structural constraints. Geometry participates in the pose state and its prediction, while rigid reconstruction preserves intra-block structure without treating all atomic coordinates as assembly variables. On the MOF benchmark, AnchorPose improves single-candidate match rates over the compared block-level and all-atom baselines. --- ### HLA: Expressive Hybrid Linear Attention via Chunk-Wise Dynamic Mixing Authors: Zhuokun Chen, Xi Lin, Xiyu Wu, Jiahao He, Jianfei Cai, Bohan Zhuang Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05842v1 Linear attention enables efficient long-context autoregressive decoding by compressing history into recurrent states, but this compression can make selective access to sparse and distant information difficult. Existing chunk-based extensions increase memory capacity, yet learned chunk-mixing coefficients may remain fixed with respect to input content and therefore cannot adapt historical access to each query. We introduce \emph{Hybrid Linear Attention} (HLA), a query-dependent chunk-level attention mechanism for Gated DeltaNet (GDN). HLA represents each completed chunk as an exact affine state transition and computes content-dependent routing gates from compact, self-attentively pooled representatives. Each gate interpolates the corresponding historical transition with the identity map, controlling both the chunk's additive memory and its transformation of earlier states. Effective-support regularization further encourages concentrated routing for sparse inference. We evaluate HLA under both pretrained adaptation and from-scratch training. Across Qwen3.5 models from 0.8B to 9B, HLA consistently improves over native GDN and fixed chunk mixing, with gains of up to 5.57 percentage points on LongBench-V2 and 3.97 points on RULER. In a controlled from-scratch 1.3B setting trained for 100B tokens with a 4K context, HLA also improves RULER performance from 4K to 32K, with gains increasing from 0.83 points at 4K to 4.22 points at 32K. These results demonstrate that query-dependent composition of recurrent memory improves long-context modeling and remains effective beyond the training context while using compact per-chunk affine summaries. Project page: https://caesarhhh.github.io/hla/ --- ### Dual-Rate Force-Image Control with Model-Based Orientation Limits for Robotic Ultrasound Authors: Tyler Foster, Qiang Zhang, A B M Tahidul Haque, Anh Thu Nguyen Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05839v1 Robotic ultrasound couples a high-rate contact-force loop with slower, delayed image feedback, so image-guided ultrasound probe rotation can perturb contact force before the resulting image response is observed. We derive a closed-form orientation-rate limit that bounds the modeled rotation-induced estimated-force excursion over a finite horizon while accounting for disturbance rejection by the fast force loop. The limit depends on local contact stiffness, force-loop gains, a conservative rotation-to-force gain bound, the excursion budget, and the prediction horizon. We implement this model in a dual-rate controller with timestamp-based delay reconstruction and joint-torque-based force estimation, and evaluate it on a curved gelatin phantom using paired controller comparisons and component ablations. Relative to unconstrained image guidance, the proposed rate-limited controller reduced first-second root-mean-square (RMS) estimated-force error by 0.40 N while increasing cue-convergence time by 0.94 s. A fixed rate cap near the analytically predicted ceiling produced no resolvable difference in force error and converged 0.32 s faster, indicating that the principal practical value of the model is the rate-design rule rather than online prediction. Delay reconstruction had no resolvable effect at the tested latency. A single-subject popliteal scan demonstrated feasibility, although the image cue was noise-limited on heterogeneous tissue. --- ### Adaptive-Shot Hybrid Quantum Anomaly Detection for Tactile Internet Security: Reliability-Aware Measurement Allocation Under Resource Constraints Authors: Mubassir Serneabat Sudipto, Shakil Ahmed, Ashfaq Khokhar, Samir M. Iqbal Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05835v1 Tactile Internet (TI) security analytics must balance reliable thresholded decisions with constrained computational and measurement resources. We study this tension for finite-shot hybrid quantum anomaly inference and introduce the Adaptive-Shot Variational Quantum Circuit (AS-VQC) policy. This validation-calibrated policy begins each record at 128 shots and cumulatively escalates through 256, 512, and 1024 shots only when the finite-shot anomaly score remains close to a validation-selected security threshold. The quantum scorer is evaluated as an off-path security analytics component rather than part of the haptic critical path. Using a 4,875-record CESNET-TimeSeries24-derived aggregate-flow benchmark, leakage-safe random, entity-group-disjoint, and temporal holdouts, and five trained quantum neural network (QNN) checkpoints per holdout, the primary AS-VQC-95 (beta = 0.95) policy averages 129.2, 276.9, and 131.2 shots per record, saving 87.4%, 73.0%, and 87.2% of the uniform 1024-shot baseline (Fixed-1024), respectively. The decision disagreement with analytic (exact-expectation) inference is 0.771%, 0.409%, and 0.635%, lower than both the uniform 128-shot baseline (Fixed-128) and a matched-budget shuffled-allocation control. Fixed-1024 remains more decision-stable, establishing a measurable reliability-resource trade-off rather than cost-free equivalence. A more conservative AS-VQC-99 (beta = 0.99) further reduces disagreement while using fewer than 512 average shots across all holdouts. These results show that finite quantum measurements can be treated as an inference resource and concentrated on boundary-sensitive TI-security decisions while exposing checkpoint-dependent escalation under unseen-entity conditions. --- ### HiER-BLS: A Hierarchy-Guided and Error-Correcting Robust Incremental Broad Learning System Authors: Gongli Zhang, C. L. Philip Chen, Zhulin Liu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05834v1 Broad Learning System (BLS) supports analytical training and incremental expansion, but its growth needs guidance on which inputs new blocks should learn from. Weight errors pose a further challenge by displacing learned outputs across class boundaries. We propose HiER-BLS to couple hierarchy-guided representation growth with error-correcting learning. Successive blocks focus on inputs selected by feature importance and correlation while preserving earlier representations. The evolving branch guides encoded learners through subspace size and sample confidence, so its learning experience informs both their feature views and supervision. For finite broad readouts, we show how codeword correlations transform fitted class scores. Prediction preservation depends on the distance from the actual output to the nearest decoding boundary relative to the model's sensitivity to weight errors. Experiments on five image and five tabular datasets demonstrate improved classification performance over representative BLS variants. Component studies show that hierarchy guidance benefits the encoded branch even when the guiding branch has lower standalone accuracy, with further gains from combining their scores. Longer codes continue to improve accuracy under stronger Gaussian weight errors after clean accuracy has largely saturated. --- ### Request Order Matters: Cache-History Sensitivity in Selective KV-Cache Reuse for Rolling Agents Authors: Tiffany Gu, Annie Guan, Manshu Huang, Nitin Rao, Siddhant Shah, Margaret Capetz Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05833v1 Long-running agents repeatedly call an LLM while retaining most of their document window, evicting old documents, and appending new ones. These rolling updates break exact prefix caching and motivate non-prefix KV-cache reuse with selective recomputation. We show that persistent KV-cache reuse with selective recomputation can be history-dependent: in our rolling-agent workload, an unchanged prompt can produce different answers depending on the requests processed before it. At a matched 5% recomputation budget, document-aligned recomputation reduces answer variation across request orders from 69.0% with CacheBlend's token top-$k$ policy to 26.1%. When each prompt is evaluated after a different sequence of preceding requests, document-aligned recomputation improves fidelity to full prefill by 34.5-52.5 percentage points over token top-$k$, while both policies achieve approximately 5.7$\times$ median TTFT speedup. Our ablation study shows that, in our rolling-agent workload, contiguity is the main factor associated with robust selective recomputation. --- ### Selecting Long-Horizon Trajectories for Reliable and Efficient Terminal-Agent Training Authors: Cuong Dang, Hoang Anh Just, Ruoxi Jia Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05831v1 Terminal agents are commonly trained by imitating long teacher trajectories, yet how much of each trajectory to supervise remains unexplored. We study the \emph{supervision horizon}, the number of trajectory tokens retained for training, and show that it is a key design axis for reliability and cost. Reliability improves with longer horizons but saturates: on Terminal-Bench, a 12K-token horizon solves more tasks than 16K ($29\pm0.7$ vs.\ $26\pm0.8$) while requiring 30\% less training time. The horizon also shapes agent behavior: short horizons cause premature termination, intermediate horizons yield productive error recovery, and long horizons induce over-persistence. We analyze this saturation through a bias--complexity bound, in which longer supervision reduces temporal supervision bias but increases finite-sample estimation error from more heterogeneous late-stage histories. Guided by this analysis, we propose \emph{selective long-horizon refinement}, which first trains on short prefixes and then refines only on continuations that are most likely under the warm-start model. It consistently outperforms full long-horizon training. At 16K, it raises successful attempts from $110\pm2.7$ to $126\pm2.1$ and tasks solved in at least six of eight attempts from $9\pm0.7$ to $14\pm0.6$; with half of the long-horizon data, it still reaches $122\pm2.4$ while cutting training time by 23\%. The gains transfer across benchmarks, from $64\pm2.6$ to $73\pm2.1$ on Terminal-Bench v2.0 and from $137\pm2.7$ to $155\pm2.2$ on OpenThoughts-TBLite. For long-horizon supervision, selecting the right trajectories matters more than training on all of them. --- ### Measurement-First Auditing of Agentic Leaderboards: Contamination Susceptibility, Matched-Control Re-evaluation, and Scorer Validation Authors: Dishu Yang, Qi Su, Hongbo Qin, Hansong Zhang Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05830v1 Agentic leaderboards increasingly evaluate systems on public benchmarks whose task statements and solution-bearing artifacts can remain accessible. We propose a measurement-first audit framework that distinguishes contamination claims according to the evidence required to support them. It separates three channels that require different evidence: training-time exposure, evaluation-time retrieval, and pipeline/scaffold leakage. Each channel is coded as open, partial, closed, or unknown under a fail-closed rule. Across nine Holistic Agent Leaderboard (HAL) configurations, none of the 27 channel assessments was coded closed, but incidents were confirmed in four configurations. We then apply the behavioral component of the framework to a reported file-localization gap on SWE-bench Verified, using an outcome-blind, same-repository matched-control design with symmetric prompt-leakage screening, paired and repository-aware uncertainty analyses, and scorer validation, evaluated on GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Among the 100 pairs retained after symmetric screening and the pair-integrity exclusion, GPT-4.1 showed a $+10.0$-point pair-weighted Top-3 benchmark-associated gap, but the 95\% intervals from both the prespecified paired-bootstrap procedure and the post-hoc repository-balanced analysis included zero, leaving the benchmark-associated gap inconclusive. The reproduction scorer did not pass its validation gate: against consensus human labels, sufficient scorer sensitivity could not be established for either model, and both DeepSeek-V4-Flash firings on correct-gold comparisons were false positives. Without provenance evidence, appropriate controls, symmetric leakage screening, and validated scorers, stronger contamination claims are not warranted. The results do not establish training-data membership, contamination prevalence, or benchmark-induced score inflation. --- ### Data-Driven Personas for Survey Simulation: Insights into Simulation Alignment Across Data-Access Regimes Authors: Dongryeol Lee, Weronika Łajewska, Leonardo Perelli, Saab Mansour Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05828v2 Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for public opinion research by enabling early prediction of survey responses, potentially reducing the cost and time of traditional surveys. However, many existing steering approaches rely on target-domain human data for fine-tuning or prompting that is costly to collect and raises privacy concerns. In this paper, we study demographic group-level survey simulation, where personas induced from heterogeneous, anonymized public behavioral data condition agents that simulate responses of individuals from specific demographic groups. We examine whether representative personas can be induced from diverse sources and analyze how the domain, scale, and granularity of the source data affect survey simulation alignment. We find that personas induced from out-of-domain sources rarely outperform simulations conditioned only on basic demographic information, largely due to population mismatch. However, when personas are accurately assigned to the target demographic groups, alignment improves substantially. Finally, personas induced from target-domain survey data generalize better as more survey question history becomes available, suggesting that richer behavioral evidence enables more stable persona trait inference that transfers to better unseen questions simulation alignment. --- ### Usefulness of Quantile-Aware Diffusion Modeling for Highly Imbalanced Tabular Data Authors: Abu Talha, Peng Liu, Souradyuti Paul Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05825v1 Classification problem in the context of highly imbalanced data is a major challenge in many real-world applications (e.g., FinTech, healthcare, etc.). In these cases, the vast majority of instances belong to a single class and a small fraction represent the minority class (often the most critical class). Recently, diffusion models have emerged as powerful approaches to reduce the degree of ``imbalanced-ness'' in the dataset; they work by generating synthetic data by capturing complex data distributions using iterative transformations. However, standard diffusion models are not inherently suited to highly skewed or heavy-tailed data, due to inbuilt quadratic error loss, which lacks the structural sensitivity to capture rare, extreme values, and minority-class nuances. We propose a novel approach, namely, Quantile-TabDDPM, based on a quantile-regularized denoising objective that combines the standard quadratic error loss with a quantile loss term to explicitly capture rare events while preserving the theoretical grounding of the original denoising objective. We extensively evaluated our approach on a real-world credit card transaction dataset characterized by extreme class imbalance. The results demonstrate that the integration of diffusion-based synthetic data generation with a quantile-regularized denoising objective provides a robust and effective framework for fraud detection in highly imbalanced datasets. --- ### Who Keeps the Gains from Personal AI Assistants? Seller Adaptation and the Unassisted in a Language-Model Market Simulation Authors: Haonan Huang, Joey Xiao Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05823v1 Personal AI assistants are beginning to transact for consumers, and early adopters capture real savings. Whether those savings survive, and what happens to consumers who have no assistant, depends on how sellers respond -- a question single-user evidence cannot answer. We build an agent-based rental market in which language models play consumers, assistants, and six adaptive sellers guided by an algorithmic pricing tool. Half the population receives an assistant under an advisory or an executing mandate; the contract pairs a fee only the renter's physical action avoids with a pre-selected add-on an authorised assistant can cancel online. An analytical benchmark and a behaviourally calibrated rule market supply ex-ante predictions, and paired branches with frozen versus adaptive sellers separate adoption effects from market feedback. Across thirty simulated markets, executing assistants cut adopters' spending by 13.7 USD per renter-day when sellers are frozen; adaptation claws back about a third, leaving 8.7, with the gains arriving both as lower bills and as rentals completed at all. Sellers raise headline rates while cutting fees, and the calibrated forecast of the burden on unassisted consumers (+3.6) does not transfer: their mean spending change is +0.4, confidence interval -0.6 to +1.3. Seller-model swaps and a within-market transfer of fee-setting to the pricing tool show that fee conduct, and with it the division of the gains, is decided on the seller side. Assistants, we conclude, should be evaluated at market level -- completion, total spending, and non-users included -- and the comparison layers locate exactly where a calibrated behavioural forecast fails in a language-model market. --- ### Transporting Unsecured Stacked Payloads with a Quadrupedal Robot via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Authors: Nobuo Namura, Masayuki Hiromoto, Kento Uemura, Hironobu Sasaki, Kanata Suzuki Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05819v1 Transporting unsecured payloads with legged robots over uneven terrain requires balancing locomotion performance and payload stability, since aggressive motion can destabilize the payload even when the robot remains stable. We study quadrupedal transportation of unsecured stacked boxes on an edgeless torso-mounted board without dedicated payload sensors or active carrier mechanisms. To address this trade-off, we propose Payload-Adaptive Multi-Objective Reinforcement learning for Transportation (PAMORT). PAMORT trains a multi-objective base policy conditioned on a preference vector that weights locomotion and payload-stability reward groups, then trains a weight adjuster on the frozen policy to adapt this preference online from proprioception. In simulation, PAMORT achieves comparable or better overall transportation success than a corresponding single-objective baseline across different payload configurations, including an unseen three-box stack, despite training only with two boxes. Real-world experiments on a Unitree Go2 demonstrate zero-shot transfer to slopes and steps at or beyond the training difficulty, with mean success rates of 0.850 for PAMORT and 0.675 for the baseline across eight tasks. These results demonstrate robust unsecured-payload transportation with online adaptation of the locomotion--payload trade-off from proprioceptive information. --- ### Nash Equilibrium Text: A Game-Theoretic Decoding Framework for Text Generation Authors: Alireza Jafari, Arman Adibi, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Hadi Daneshmand Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05817v1 Text revision has become an integral component of large language models. This paper formulates revision such that it admits a Nash equilibrium: Token positions are players, vocabulary items are actions, and each player's utility is the language model's log conditional probability. We motivate the revision by showing that Nash equilibria can have exponentially higher likelihood than autoregressive outputs as the sequence length grows. We further propose Nash decoding, an algorithm that reaches an $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibrium in $O(1/\varepsilon)$ time given access to the joint probability of tokens conditioned on a prompt. In practice, we run Nash decoding using conditional probability estimates from large language models and evaluate the resulting equilibria on question-answering benchmarks. On CLAPNQ, PubMedQA, and CoQA, Nash equilibria obtained from masked language models achieve higher F1 and ROUGE scores than autoregressive models up to $18\times$ larger, without any fine-tuning or retraining, at the cost of additional test-time computation. --- ### Level-of-Token Diffusion Authors: Kiyohiro Nakayama, Brian Chao, Jan Ackermann, Hansheng Chen, Federico Tombari, Leonidas Guibas, Lior Yariv, Gordon Wetzstein Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05816v1 Image and video diffusion models allocate equal computation to every region, even when the intended scene calls for varying levels of detail. The spatial distribution of detail can often be anticipated before generation, indicating where computation can be reduced. We introduce Level-of-Token (LoT) Diffusion, a framework that turns this knowledge into an explicit multiresolution token layout (Level-of-Token layout) for adaptive and efficient generation. Tokens represent rectangular patches of varying sizes and shapes, allocating finer tokens where detail is needed and coarser tokens elsewhere. We adapt pretrained diffusion transformers to LoT layouts through a patch-wise asymmetric flow parametrization and embeddings for multiresolution tokens, preserving full-resolution flow prediction at every denoising step while processing only a reduced token sequence. LoT Diffusion enables layout-adaptive generation while preserving pretrained generative priors. We demonstrate LoT with layouts derived from semantic masks, bounding boxes, texture variance, and depth-of-field cues, as well as agentic plans. Across image and video generation, LoT offers favorable quality-efficiency tradeoffs, with significant speedups determined by the layout's token budget. Our project website is at https://georgenakayama.github.io/lotdiffusion/. --- ### Plan Canvas: Fixed Reasoning Regions for Continuous Language Flows Authors: Miaohe Niu, Pengxiang Li, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05815v1 Continuous language flows generate text by denoising all positions of a target canvas together. The natural way to add reasoning to such a model is to write a trace ahead of the answer, but the trace length changes from question to question. The answer start is therefore unknown during denoising, and the model has to decide the trace length, the place of every trace token, and the answer at the same time. We propose Plan Canvas to fix the boundary between the trace and the answer. A plan region of fixed capacity holds a compact trace, supervised padding fills its unused positions, and the answer starts at a fixed position. The fixed regions also allow separate denoising clocks for the plan and for the answer. With the trace text, backbone, and canvas length of the free-trace baseline held fixed, Plan Canvas improves accuracy on ProsQA and on Deep ProsQA, a graph benchmark with longer proofs. On Deep ProsQA, accuracy rises from 73.0\% to 87.0\%, the share of questions answered with a valid path rises from 30.8\% to 59.1\%, and the gain is largest on the longest proofs. --- ### Feature identification for parameter extraction and defect detection using machine learning Authors: Yan Guo, Helda Pahlavani, Artem Khachaturiants, Khalid Elsayed, Jakob van de Laar, Erik Simons, Niranjan Saikumar, Hamed Sadeghian Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05812v1 Process control of advanced semiconductor nodes is not only pushing the limits of metrology equipment requirements in terms of resolution and throughput but also in terms of the richness of data to be extracted to enable engineers to finetune the process steps for increased yield. The move towards 3D structures requires extraction of critical dimension parameters from structures which can vary largely from layer to layer. For in-line process control, the necessary automation forces the development of layer and equipment-specific dedicated image processing algorithms. Similarly, with the increase in stochastic defects in the EUV era, detection of defects at the nm scale requires the identification of features captured in low resolution to meet the throughput requirements of HVM fabs, which can again lead to custom algorithm development. With the emergence of ML-based image processing methods, this process of algorithm development for both cases can be accelerated. In this work, we provide the general framework under which the images obtained from high-speed scanning probe microscopy-based systems can be used to train a network for either feature detection for parameter extraction or defect identification. --- ### Online AutoML: Evaluating Poisoning Attacks on Cost-Utility Adversarial Training Defence Strategy for IoT Networks Authors: Chukwunonso Henry Nwokoye, Khalil El-Khatib, Li Yang Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05810v2 Machine learning (ML)-powered poisoning attack vectors are adversarial maneuvers whereby an attacker intentionally inserts, corrupts, or alters training data to distort an ML model's learning process. The objective is to diminish model efficacy, instill biases, induce misclassifications, or include concealed backdoors that may be attacked during implementation. In streaming contexts, poisoning attacks pose significant risks since models perpetually update based on incoming streams of data. An assailant may incrementally introduce harmful samples into this data stream, leading the model to assimilate erroneous features over time without timely identification. Therefore, this study is aimed at evaluating the efficacy of the adversarial training (AT) defense approach against poisoning attacks (label flip and noise injection) using an online AutoML pipeline for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Specifically, poisoning attacks (label flip and noise injection) were applied to streaming-capable AutoML learners (Hoeffding Tree (HT), Leveraging Bagging (LB), Adaptive Random Forest (ARF), Hoeffding Adaptive Tree (HAT), and Streaming Random Patches (SRP)). Under the strongest poisoning rate (PR = 1.0), AT-SRP achieved the highest F1-score against label flip poisoning (0.904), while AT-LB achieved the highest F1-score against noise-injection poisoning (0.933). Finally, several drift detection methods were used for rolling accuracy and prequential evaluation. --- ### Image resolution enhancement for advanced semiconductor nodes Authors: Lucas Rencker, Omid Tajalizadehkhoob, Khalid Elsayed, Artem Khachaturiants, Helda Pahlavani, Yan Guo, Jakob van de Laar, Erik Simons, Niranjan Saikumar, Hamed Sadeghian Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05809v1 Advanced semiconductor nodes are pushing the limits of feature sizes and require metrology with sub-nm resolution without compromising on the throughput as needed for in-line process control. Recently, high-throughput scanning probe microscopy (SPM) based metrology and inspection tools capable of meeting these needs have been introduced to the market and qualified for use in HVM. While innovative measurement methods and tool architecture have allowed for a leap of improvement in throughput, the next step in further reducing imaging time can be obtained through the application of machine learning for enhancing the resolution of measured images for extraction of relevant parameters. In this work, we provide the general framework under which a neural network-based resolution enhancer is designed and used for SPM images. We showcase the effectiveness of this framework using measurements performed on Line/Space structures with a pitch of 200 nm. For the reusability of a pre-developed pre-trained model, we additionally leverage transfer learning and show that a new model for slightly differing structures can be re-trained and calibrated with a smaller data set of measurements performed on Line/Space structures with a pitch of 100 nm. --- ### DiMOS: Doob-Guided Inference-Time Multi-Objective Search for Scientific Design Authors: Ziqing Wang, Qijie Zhu, Weimin Wu, Zeqi Ye, Minshuo Chen, Han Liu, Kaize Ding Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05808v1 Scientific design often requires jointly satisfying multiple objectives and constraints. Pretrained masked diffusion models provide a generative foundation for this task, but fine-tuning them to meet these objectives and constraints incurs additional training costs, motivating inference-time guidance with frozen models. However, such guidance faces two challenges: pass-or-fail constraints and black-box reward models may provide no useful gradients, while jointly satisfying multiple requirements can leave a small feasible region, making feasible designs difficult to find within a limited inference budget. To address these challenges, we introduce DiMOS, a training-free framework for multi-objective scientific design. Using joint rewards from candidate completions, DiMOS performs approximate Doob-guided local resampling without requiring reward gradients. To allocate computation efficiently, it uses budget-efficient trajectory search to focus computation on promising continuations. Across six DNA, protein, and RNA tasks, DiMOS attains the highest joint success rate at comparable generation times, up to $1.98\times$ the strongest baseline on DNA and protein, while maintaining high sequence uniqueness and naturalness. --- ### Protocol-Sensitive Evaluation of Log Anomaly Detection: Component Costs and Target-Access Sensitivity on HDFS and BGL Authors: Hang Xiao, Janet Sung, Zhaoyi Li, Gangzhen Qian, Chuhong Xu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05807v1 Protocol choices can change the conclusions drawn from log anomaly detection benchmarks even when detector settings are fixed. We present a joint empirical study of split construction, representation visibility, and component costs using six fixed count, sequence, and semantic configurations on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Blue Gene/L (BGL) logs. Random splits place several configurations near the average-precision ceiling, whereas group-disjoint HDFS and chronological BGL evaluation produce lower scores and different observed orderings. At a fixed BGL cutoff, parser choice spans 0.124 in semantic XGBoost mean average precision while preserving its lead over count XGBoost; the earliest rolling period reverses that ordering. A two-factor cross-system ablation contrasts source-only representations with offline transductive access to unlabeled target templates through the representation corpus and inverse document frequency: HDFS-to-BGL mean average precision moves from 0.191 with source-only access to 0.325 with union-corpus, target-IDF access, and the intermediate conditions reveal direction-dependent interactions in average precision and retrieval at fixed review budgets. Component-level profiling separates parsing and representation costs from classifier training, prediction, and storage. Together, these findings connect detector comparisons to the test population, preprocessing state, visible information, and measured pipeline stages, and identify the protocol fields needed alongside a score to support interpretable comparisons of log anomaly detection accuracy and resource use. --- ### Gauss-Map Variation for Image Denoising: Geometric Analysis and an Anderson--Accelerated Majorization--Minimization Method Authors: Haibin Su Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05801v1 We propose a Gauss-map variation (GMV) model for image denoising that measures the spatial variation of the tangent-plane projectors of the scaled image graph. We establish an equivalent representation of the regularizer in terms of the corresponding Gauss map and, using differential geometric tools including tubular coordinates and the Frenet frame, analyze its behavior across general $C^2$ and piecewise $C^2$ boundaries. The resulting estimates provide edge- and corner-contrast preservation properties. To solve the proposed model, we introduce a bilinear decomposition involving a unit normal field and a scalar magnitude field and develop an Anderson-accelerated majorization--minimization algorithm. The normal field subproblem admits an explicit pointwise majorization--minimization update, which is combined with an Anderson acceleration. For both $L^1$ and $L^2$ data fidelity terms, we establish sufficient decrease and boundedness of the iterates and prove that the generated sequence converges to a critical point of the penalized model. Numerical experiments on synthetic and natural images demonstrate the boundary preserving capability of the proposed model and its competitive performance in removing Gaussian and impulsive noise. --- ### Adaptive Utilization of Low-Rank Adaptation via Conditioned Gating Authors: Guang Yang, Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Yufeng Chen, Kaiyu Huang Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05800v1 Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieves parameter-efficient fine-tuning by constraining model updates to a low-rank subspace and has been widely used in practice. However, LoRA typically employs a shared low-rank update across tokens, which limits its ability to fully exploit the adaptation subspace for tokens from different sequences. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive utilization of Low-Rank Adaptation (U-LoRA), which employs conditioned gating to explicitly learn effective token-level utilization of the limited low-rank adaptation subspace. Specifically, U-LoRA generates utilization coefficients along low-rank directions for each token and jointly coordinates and constrains them using sequence-level contextual information, thereby inducing more consistent adaptive patterns within a sentence. To further enhance training stability, we introduce a bias-corrected exponential moving average (EMA) historical prior that calibrates utilization signals across optimization steps, suppressing noise caused by batch-to-batch fluctuations. The effectiveness of our method arises from a better utilization of the existing low-rank subspace via input-conditioned strategies, rather than from expanding the subspace. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and natural language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that U-LoRA achieves competitive performance under comparable parameter budgets when with strong LoRA baselines and recent variants. --- ### A Testable Theory of Atomic Features Authors: Kenny Peng, Jon Kleinberg, Nikhil Garg Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05794v1 We develop and test a theory of language model representations in which there exist atomic features. Our main theoretical insight is that in such a model, sparse dictionaries (e.g., SAEs) of increasing size recover an increasing prefix of the most prevalent atoms in the training data. This "recovery principle" yields three testable predictions: many features in small SAEs are shared by all larger SAEs, SAEs trained on different data share features prevalent in both, and sufficiently large SAEs recover both parent and child features. In contrast to conventional wisdom that SAE features are unstable and "split" as size increases, we find that these predictions hold on SAEs of sizes ranging from 512 to 131,072 trained on two large embedding models. From a theoretical perspective, our results suggest the promise of a scientific theory of representations based on atomic features. Practically, our results suggest the promise of scaling SAEs. --- ### Topology-Conditioned Backdoors: Language Models That Insert Vulnerabilities When They Infer They Are in a Multi-Agent System Authors: Keegan Wang, Anantika Mannby Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05793v1 A language model may behave safely in a single-agent evaluation yet produce vulnerable code when its context suggests that it is part of a multi-agent system. We study this failure mode by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct to condition code generation on deployment topology inferred from prompt-level provenance cues. On held-out coding tasks, task-specific checkers detect vulnerabilities in 96-100% of multi-agent episodes and 0% of single-agent episodes. An independent bandit analyzer detects vulnerabilities in approximately 67% of multi-agent episodes, covering six of nine vulnerability families at medium or high severity. Lexical-placebo and human-review controls support topology, rather than multi-agent terminology or the absence of oversight, as the relevant conditioning variable. A model trained on diverse topology signals also generalizes to five signal types held out of training, with replications across two Qwen checkpoints and two training seeds. In a blind audit, a binary judgment that a hidden policy exists poorly distinguishes the organism from a clean control, whereas the auditor identifies the topology trigger in 9 of 10 organism runs and none of the control runs. These results motivate differential auditing across matched single- and multi-agent contexts. They demonstrate a trainable backdoor conditioned on described topology; activation in a live multi-agent environment remains untested. --- ### FairRSFM: A Biome-Aware Benchmark and Debiasing Framework for Remote Sensing Foundation Models Authors: Md Aminur Hossain, Omkumar Vaghasiya, Rajeev Ranjan Dwivedi, Vinod Kurmi, Biplab Banerjee Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05790v1 Remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) are commonly evaluated using aggregate metrics, which can hide systematic performance disparities across ecological regions. We introduce FairRSFM, a biome-aware benchmark for evaluating ecological group robustness in RSFMs. FairRSFM maps georeferenced samples from 14 terrestrial biome classes into six ecologically meaningful macro-groups and evaluates models under a unified frozen-backbone evaluation protocol. The benchmark covers four downstream datasets: m-EuroSAT, m-BigEarthNet, m-SA-Crop-Type, and MMEarth20K with Dynamic World label maps. Using Prithvi-EO-2.0, SatMAE, and DOFA across three random seeds, we show that aggregate performance consistently masks biome-dependent disparities across architectures and tasks. For example, Prithvi-EO-2.0 reaches 90.98% overall macro-F1 on m-EuroSAT but a mean worst-group score of only 83.72%, while m-SA-Crop-Type drops from 27.30% overall mIoU to 18.47% in the Xeric and Mineralogical group. We further evaluate Biome-Orthogonal Linear Probing (BOLP), Dynamic Biome Reweighting (DBR), and GroupDRO as complementary mitigation baselines. Their effectiveness is model- and task-dependent; for example, BOLP improves Prithvi-EO-2.0 worst-group F1@opt on m-BigEarthNet from 46.12% to 50.27% without updating the RSFM backbone. FairRSFM provides a reusable protocol for diagnosing and mitigating ecological robustness gaps in remote sensing foundation models. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/aminurhossain/FairRSFM. --- ### Dimension-Free Decentralized Nonsmooth Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization Authors: Yuanyu Wan, Lan Xue, Haomin Bai, Tong Wei, Mingli Song Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05789v1 We investigate decentralized nonsmooth nonconvex stochastic optimization over a network of $n$ nodes, with the goal of finding an $(δ,ε)$-Goldstein stationary point. The best existing algorithm achieves $O(δ^{-1}(ε^{-3}+dε^{-1}))$ sample complexity and $\widetilde{O}(γ^{-1/2}δ^{-1}(ε^{-3}+dε^{-1}))$ communication complexity, where $d$ is the problem dimension and $γ$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix. However, the polynomial dependence on $d$ can be a major bottleneck in high-dimensional regimes. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that achieves $O(δ^{-1}ε^{-3})$ sample complexity and $\widetilde{O}(γ^{-1/2}δ^{-1}ε^{-3})$ communication complexity. The primary technique is an elegant decentralized online-to-nonconvex conversion that reduces the original problem to a decentralized online convex optimization (D-OCO) problem. A key property of our conversion is that its consensus requirements can be inherited directly from the consensus of the underlying D-OCO decisions. In particular, this property enables us to establish an explicit connection between the dimension dependence and the consensus error, which in turn shows that the polynomial dependence on $d$ can be removed with only logarithmic additional communication. --- ### CLARA: Can AI Assess Developmental Appropriateness in Children's Stories? Authors: Sijing Yin, Zirui Wang, Qian Liu, Jiamou Liu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05783v1 Assessing the developmental suitability of children's narratives is important for educational recommendation and developmental literacy research, yet such assessment typically relies on subjective and difficult-to-scale human judgment. This raises an important question: Can AI systems approximate human developmental judgments of children's stories? To study this problem, we introduce CLARA, a cognitively grounded framework for developmental narrative understanding through structured annotation across cognitive (COG), language (LAN), and social-emotional (SEL) dimensions, together with a bilingual benchmark resource containing 1107 Chinese--English children's stories with normalized silver developmental references and structured developmental annotations. We evaluate CLARA through benchmark comparison, component analysis, translated bilingual consistency analysis, and blinded human evaluation with educators. Experimental results show that structured developmental annotation achieves substantially stronger alignment with developmental references and human judgments than readability-based methods and direct prompting baselines. Overall, our findings suggest that AI systems can approximate certain aspects of human developmental judgment when guided by structured developmental annotation, while also highlighting the importance of interpretability and human oversight in educational NLP. --- ### Agentic-ZTA: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Autonomous Zero Trust Enforcement Authors: Shovan Roy, Lopamudra Praharaj, Maanak Gupta, Bhavani Thuraisingham Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.ET, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05782v1 Agentic AI is emerging as a promising paradigm for automating complex cybersecurity decisions, yet its use in enforcing zero trust introduces significant challenges in safety, reliability, and policy compliance. This paper presents Agentic AI based zero trust architecture (Agentic-ZTA) that operationalizes the NIST SP 800-207 ZTA architecture control loop through coordinated multi- agent decision pipeline. In the proposed framework, policy knowledge is embedded into a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline and retrieved at inference time as top-k relevant policies. Access requests are intercepted by the Policy Enforcement Point (PEP), enriched with contextual metadata. The request context is routed to a policy engine agent which invokes domain-specialized core agents first followed by supporting agents, if further evaluation needed. AI agents reason over access context, policy constraints and determine trust. The retrieved policies are embedded into agent prompt during inference time and agentic trust scores are aggregated and evaluated by a trust-algorithm, producing the final access decision for enforcement under continuous verification. We implement Agentic-ZTA in a testbed and evaluate it on representative access-control use cases scenarios. Our Agentic-ZTA framework achieves 95.0% accuracy, 93.9% precision, and 96.3% recall, and demonstrate the feasibility of enforcing zero trust using AI agents. --- ### Isotropic Gaussian Processes Improve Vanilla Bayesian Optimization in High Dimensions Authors: Wei-Ting Tang, Madhav Muthyala, Joel A. Paulson Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05780v1 High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) often fits Gaussian process (GP) surrogates from far fewer observations than input dimensions. Modern Vanilla BO can perform well in this regime with dimension-aware priors, initialization, and acquisition optimization, but it typically retains automatic relevance determination (ARD), fitting one lengthscale per input coordinate. We study this modeling choice and propose Iso-BO, a controlled modification that replaces the ARD GP with an isotropic GP using one shared lengthscale while keeping the surrounding BO pipeline matched. For radial kernels, we show that the marginal log likelihood (MLL) depends on the inverse-squared ARD lengthscales only through weighted pairwise distances among the observed inputs. The current design can therefore leave some ARD directions exactly invisible or only weakly constrained by the MLL. Iso-BO removes coordinatewise reweighting and fits a single shared scale instead. Lengthscale-fitting and predictive-density diagnostics show that this finite-data effect appears in practice, including when the data-generating process is anisotropic. Across GP-prior, synthetic, and real-world benchmarks, Iso-BO often improves over matched modern Vanilla BO and remains competitive with the included high-dimensional BO baselines under the tested budgets. Stress tests also show the expected boundary wherein sufficiently strong, learnable anisotropy can favor the more flexible ARD model. --- ### A Spatiotemporal Semantic Importance-Guided Unified Compression and Editing Framework for AI-Generated Videos Authors: Xihua Sheng, Dong Liu, Chang Wen Chen Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05779v1 AI-generated videos are rapidly increasing in volume, duration, and resolution, creating growing demands for efficient storage and transmission. Unlike natural videos captured from the physical world, AI-generated videos are samples from a learned generative distribution, where semantic structures are critical to content consistency, while many local textures and stochastic details can be plausibly regenerated. This distinction suggests that compression should preserve semantically important spatiotemporal information rather than reconstruct every pixel of a particular generative sample. Beyond reconstruction, AI-generated videos also create a practical need for prompt-based editing, where users expect to modify generated content while preserving its original spatiotemporal semantics. Motivated by these observations, we propose a unified compression and editing framework for AI-generated videos that incorporates a frozen video generator as a reusable generative prior. Within this framework, we design three spatiotemporal semantic importance-guided techniques that respectively address what to transmit, how much to transmit, and how to use the transmitted side information. First, an innovation selection method projects the latent discrepancy using spatiotemporal semantic importance, so that the selected innovations prioritize semantic invariants over replaceable generative variations. Second, a frame-adaptive bit allocation method estimates the nonuniform semantic demands of latent frames and allocates more innovations to frames requiring stronger semantic preservation. Third, a unified reconstruction and editing method continuously adjusts the influence of the transmitted side information, enabling the same compressed representation to provide strong guidance for faithful reconstruction or serve as a flexible semantic anchor for structure-preserving prompt-driven editing. --- ### MedicalHarness: A Controlled Evaluation of LLMs and Agent Harnesses on Medical Tasks Authors: Ziqing Wang, Lili Zhao, Kaize Ding Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05778v1 LLM agents are increasingly built for medical work and scored on clinical benchmarks. Each such score, however, comes from a model running inside an agent harness, the system that controls the loop between the model and its environment. An agent's score is therefore a property of a model--harness pair. For medical agents, how much outcomes change with the harness has rarely been measured. Measuring this change, and explaining it, raises two challenges. First, a harness comparison must change nothing but the harness and be repeated across models and kinds of task. Second, comparing whole harnesses leaves their mechanisms bundled together, so it cannot show when an individual mechanism helps. To address these challenges, we present MedicalHarness, a controlled study of models and agent harnesses on medical tasks. We first build MedicalHarnessBench to evaluate agents on $107$ tasks across four domains that each test a different harness capability. Using this benchmark, we run five open-weight models under five agent harnesses, changing only the harness within a comparison, and analyze both outcomes and execution traces. To study individual mechanisms, we build MH-Lab, a controlled harness that switches off context management, planning or tool exposure one at a time within a shared execution loop. We find that the harness and its interaction with the model account for about a quarter of the outcome variance, and that no single harness is best across models and tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/MedicalHarness. --- ### Mining Agent Skills from Production Traces Authors: Yue Ran Kang, Colton Mikolajczyk, Chhaya Methani, Hazel Mak, Sahil Bhatnagar, Susheel Suresh, Alejandro Gutierrez Munoz Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05777v1 Agent skills that record procedural instructions are increasingly mined from execution traces rather than curated by hand. Skill-mining pipelines often use known task outcomes or feedback to guide skill construction. In production, reliable information on whether a run has succeeded may be unavailable. We study how the sampling of execution traces, access to success or failure information, and the form of the mined skills affect downstream task performance. Holding the mining pipeline fixed, we compare six combinations of mining evidence and skill forms. Mining evidence has three levels: successful trajectories only, successes and failures with their outcome labels, or the same mix with labels withheld. Skill form has two types: an ordered workflow plan, or a declarative ontology of entities, states, and policies. We evaluate the mined skills on two enterprise benchmarks, ThinkingBox-Bench and APEX-Agents. Analysis of task-level paired differences shows that the benefits of different configurations of mining evidence and skill forms depend on the enterprise domain. On ThinkingBox-Bench, paired differences show that workflows score better than ontology by 1.7 pp, Goldilocks beats success-only evidence type by 2.4 pp and Goldilocks blind simulating skills learnt without outcomes is worse by 3.1 pp. APEX-Agents shows a moderate preference for ontologies and no clear preference between evidence regimes. Within each domain, task structure related constraints drive uneven performance with mined skills. These findings motivate tailoring meta-skills to the demands of the target tasks rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach. --- ### InteractionBench: A Real-Time Interaction Benchmark for Streaming Video Systems Authors: Enxin Song, Suhao Yu, Yifei Xu, Barbara Su, Weili Xu, Wenhao Chai, Yao Tang, Jie Deng, Haiyang Xu, Jiatao Gu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05775v1 A video assistant must speak when its instruction warrants a response and stay silent otherwise. We introduce a benchmark that evaluates this decision for the complete system of model, memory, and response controller. InteractionBench covers query responses, event triggers, and ongoing updates in 1,060 interactions over 812 videos, with 69 negative streams and 53 suites that pair counted events with look-alike near misses. It scores content accuracy, timing accuracy, and silence compliance on the video clock. Timely speech costs silence across systems. Polled Qwen3-VL-8B reaches 77.8 timing accuracy but 10.9 silence compliance. A native real-time interaction system reaches 29.2 silence compliance at 66.8 timing accuracy, yet emits on 89.9% of negative streams. No open-weight system clears a third of the near-miss suites. Fewer replies help only when chosen, as random deletion merely trades timing for silence. Offline scores miss these failures and mispredict online behavior. Adding restraint is costly, as the native system's controller adds little by itself and agentic systems add it only at about 30 s per poll.Project page: https://www.enxinsong.com/projects/interactionbench/ Code: https://github.com/Espere-1119-Song/InteractionBench Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/InteractionBench/InteractionBench --- ### AdaSpark: Adaptive DSpark with Online Learning for Tree Verification and N-gram Fill Authors: Liquan Liu, Yifan Zhang, Bowei Xu Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05774v1 Block drafters such as DSpark propose ranked candidates for several positions in one forward pass, and a tree verifier checks them in one pass of the target. The number of rows to verify trades the tokens a wider tree is expected to accept against the time a wider verify takes. Most schedulers that choose this number take the verify time from a table or model measured before serving, corrected online by at most one scale factor, and take acceptance from the drafter's confidence estimates or from a map fitted offline. AdaSpark learns both quantities while it serves, with no profile, calibration or sweep in advance. It learns which verify widths are worth offering and fits each one's verify time as a function of context. It fits each candidate's acceptance probability to the target's verify outcomes, with the drafter's confidence head as one input, and orders and sizes the tree by that fit instead of by the head. The same model prices n-gram continuations of the request's own text, so drafted and text-derived candidates compete for rows in one best-first order. The width is chosen by pricing time at the long-run decode rate. On single- and multi-turn conversations from six public datasets, on three dense targets and one mixture-of-experts target, AdaSpark decodes 1.5-3.1x faster than llama.cpp's DSpark with the same drafters. Our imparo engine with AdaSpark is 1.17-1.52x faster than imparo running with a three-token chain (the default llama.cpp setting); this gain comes from the scheduler alone. Without a width sweep, AdaSpark is never more than 0.3% slower than the best pinned tree width on any dense target or context band. On the mixture-of-experts target it ties the best pinned width, and the other pinned widths from 4 to 16 rows are 5-14% slower. --- ### Controllable Road Marking Generation Authors: Zhiyu, Cai, Yufan Zhang, Ruichen Tan, Zengxiang Lei, Satish Ukkusuri Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05771v1 Lane and road markings provide critical guidance for vehicle navigation and multi-agent coordination, yet authoring them at scale remains a manual workflow that limits quantitative analysis and scenario testing. We introduce Controllable Road Marking Generation, which synthesizes a missing center-region marking layout from a drivable-area mask, optional outer-ring markings, and a textual description. Our benchmark uses deterministic, metadata-derived prompts and three output channels: lane dividers, road dividers, and pedestrian crossings. We develop a conditional bird's-eye-view (BEV) pipeline that combines (i) a text-conditioned latent rectified-flow DiT trained with a topology-aware auxiliary loss, (ii) Gaussian-blurred training targets that stabilize learning of thin, sparse markings, and (iii) Structured Gaussian Render (SGR), a training-free post-process that recovers crisp divider geometry by extracting polylines, fitting cubic Bézier curves, and re-rendering them as anisotropic super-Gaussian primitives. On 4,597 Argoverse~2 test tiles, our system achieves Buffered F1 of 80.8 and clDice of 50.2, compared with 38.8 and 24.6 for an adapted state-of-the-art mask-refinement baseline. On Waymo dataset, it yields 88.0 Buffered F1 and 66.2 clDice. Component ablations show complementary connectivity gains from topology-aware supervision and SGR. Text-editing experiments reveal that stronger guidance improves edit success but also increases changes to non-target structures. We see this framework as a step toward simulation-ready road-marking variation, automated map completion, and early-stage infrastructure design exploration. --- ### Relational Synthesis: Structure-Mediated Concatenative Synthesis for Foley and Retrieval-Augmented Audio Generation Authors: Keren Shao, Ayaka Kawano, Shlomo Dubnov Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05768v1 We ask: given a retrieved source audio $S$ and a separate reference audio $R$, can we synthesize novel audio $Y$ out of this pair $(S,R)$ such that $Y$ remains acoustically consistent with $S$, while not persistently copying segments of $S$ or $R$? The first clause is a well-known goal in Foley audio production, and the second is a well-known issue in neural RAG when $S$ and $R$ are naively injected into neural generators. We show that both clauses can be addressed simultaneously using a method we coin relational synthesis, a variation of concatenative synthesis where target cost is replaced by a relational Gromov-like structural cost. Rather than imitating the content of $R$, relational synthesis exploits it from the "other side of the hill": it transfers the temporal structure and directed amplitude motion of $R$ to reorganize and concatenate the grains of $S$ in a novel manner that protects $S$'s acoustic information. Our experiments show that relational synthesis integrates naturally with neural RAG and produces Foley audio that performs well on metrics measuring temporal agreement, acoustic fidelity, and leakage persistence, while maintaining distribution-level quality and text alignment. --- ### Global error estimators for parametric monotone nonlinearities and neural approximations Authors: Pablo Cortés Castillo, Wolfgang Dahmen, Jay Gopalakrishnan Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: math.NA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05767v1 We construct computable error estimators, which double as loss functions for neural networks, for a class of parametric nonlinear partial differential equations with a monotonicity property, and prove that they are globally reliable and efficient. The value of such a loss function is bounded above and below by the squared error in the natural trial norm, for every trial function, not merely for those near the exact solution; this global property rests on monotonicity. The construction rests on splitting the nonlinear operator into a linear part and a strongly monotone closure, and on measuring the linear residual in a discrete dual norm. Since the closure contributes a dual norm that admits no closed form when the trial norm is stronger than an $L_2$ norm, the estimator is built around a computable surrogate for it, required only to satisfy a pairing bound and a Lipschitz bound. The main theorem then yields two-sided bounds with explicit constants and covers two instances. A first-order system least-squares estimator on conforming trial spaces is the first instance studied: its two-sided bound holds on the whole trial space and therefore applies to arbitrary approximations, including those not in a discrete finite element space. The second instance is a discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin estimator on trial spaces of finite element functions for each parameter value, built with broken test spaces, for which no conformity is required and the dual norm is computed by independent element-local problems. All assumptions are verified for a model class of nonlinear fluxes, with the constants tracked explicitly in terms of the parameter range. Being computable for an arbitrary input, both estimators serve as variationally correct loss functions for neural network approximations of parameter-to-solution maps. --- ### A Three-Dimensional Reverse-Projection Method for Sparse Point Cloud Completion and Its Application to High-Speed Train Nose Reconstruction Authors: Xiaozhen Ma, Zhao Tang, Hanbin Lai, Ruiqi Chen, Jin Jin Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05758v1 Holes in LiDAR scans of environments with glass windows remain an unresolved problem in three-dimensional reconstruction. This study presents a pipeline for point cloud acquisition, filtering, completion, and surface reconstruction to address sparse sampling and missing window regions in scans of a high-speed train nose. FAST-LIVO2 provides the initial point cloud through multisensor odometry and mapping, and moving least squares (MLS) smooths the observations. We then introduce three-axis projection-based subdivision and interpolation with reverse hole boundary identification, referred to as three-axis reverse completion. The method interpolates missing regions from observations around each hole. Greedy projection triangulation, Poisson surface reconstruction, and a Marching Cubes-based pipeline generate meshes from the completed point cloud. Experiments on a proportionally scaled display model of a high-speed train nose show that the proposed method fills missing point cloud regions around the glass windows. Under the evaluation setting used in this study, greedy projection triangulation yields lower geometric distance errors than the other two reconstruction pipelines. The pipeline supports non-contact digital modeling of train nose geometry and provides a practical approach to reconstructing objects with glass windows. --- ### Vision-enabled detection of safety helmet compliance in construction zones Authors: Tri Nhut Do*, Ba Loc Pham Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05756v1 In the rapidly evolving field of construction management, worker safety remains a top priority. This paper introduces an innovative vision-based system for real-time detection of helmet compliance, specifically designed for construction sites, utilizing advanced computer vision techniques and machine learning algorithms within the YOLO (you only look once) framework. Our system leverages high-resolution video feeds from strategically positioned cameras to monitor adherence to safety regulations regarding helmet usage. By employing deep learning methodologies, the system effectively identifies individuals not wearing helmets, thereby significantly mitigating the risk of head injuries among workers. Our training and validation results revealed an impressive precision exceeding 97% at mAP@0.5 for both helmeted and non-helmeted individuals. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate exceptional detection accuracy, demonstrating the system's resilience under varying lighting conditions and diverse worker movements. The consistent decrease in loss and improvement in metrics throughout training validates the effectiveness of the YOLOv8 model in enhancing recognition performance. The implications of this research extend beyond mere regulatory compliance, opening avenues for innovative applications in occupational safety management. This study highlights the critical role of technology in protecting lives and lays the groundwork for future advancements in smart construction environments. --- ### Beyond Semantic Similarity: Performance and Costs of Agentic Retrieval for Complex Tasks Authors: Reza Esfandiarpoor, Radek Osmulski, Yauhen Babakhin, Gabriel de Souza P. Moreira, Oliver Holworthy, Jie He, Ronay Ak, Jiarui Cai, Ryan Chesler, Bo Liu, Even Oldridge Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05750v1 Modern information systems, including many agentic workflows, use dense retrieval to explore large amounts of unstructured data. However, dense retrieval relies on surface-level semantic similarity, which is insufficient for increasingly complex search applications. Here, we investigate agentic retrieval that combines the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the efficient corpus exploration of retrievers in a ReAct agentic loop to solve complex retrieval tasks. In our experiments, we show that agentic retrieval is more effective than standard retrieval, improving nDCG@10 by 8.7 points using the same embedding model. Moreover, while specialized retrieval methods struggle on out-of-domain tasks, agentic retrieval is highly generalizable: the same pipeline achieves competitive results on both the ViDoRe v3 and BRIGHT leaderboards. However, this improvement comes at a cost. On average, agentic retrieval takes 107.4 seconds, compared to 0.67 seconds for standard retrieval, and consumes 764.1K input and 5.8K output tokens per query. In short, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of agentic retrieval in modern data systems and motivates future work on more cost-efficient retrieval agents for large-scale deployment. --- ### A new design of a fall detection system integrating landmark identification and deep learning techniques Authors: Tri Nhut Do, Thi Thuy Le Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05749v1 This article introduces an innovative system that integrates landmark identification with deep learning to enhance fall detection accuracy and reliability. By utilizing advanced computer vision techniques, such as Media Pipe for spatial recognition, the system effectively differentiates between routine movements and actual falls. The integration of landmarks with a deep learning prediction algorithm minimizes false alarms, ensuring timely responses to genuine falls. Comprehensive experimentation underscores the system's versatility across various scenarios, emphasizing its potential to improve safety and independence for older adults. The training process demonstrates a steady increase in accuracy, stabilizing by the 40th cycle, while error rates decline significantly during the initial cycles. Real-time experiments, involving both male and female participants aged 8 to 50, recorded a remarkable 95% detection rate of falls, demonstrating the system's effectiveness and promising future applications in elder care and smart health monitoring environments. --- ### Beyond In-Distribution Preservation: Recovering Generalization in Quantized VLAs via Vulnerability-Oriented Tuning Authors: Shen Ruan, Wenchang Gao, Jin Wang, Siao Liu, Zhaxizhuoma, Dongchun Ren, Xin Zheng Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05745v2 Post-training quantization has been shown to preserve VLA performance under standard evaluation conditions, but whether it preserves the full-precision model's robustness and generalization remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically study the robustness and generalization of post-quantized VLA policies under environmental disturbances. Empirical results show that quantized policies can become fragile to subtle environmental variations despite retaining comparable in-distribution performance. We further observe that action discrepancies are concentrated in a small subset of rollout states, while teacher guidance has opposite effects depending on discrepancy: it improves generalization at high-discrepancy states but can degrade it at low-discrepancy states. These findings reveal that effective post-quantization recovery requires selectively intervening on vulnerable states rather than globally distilling the student. We therefore propose Policy-Induced Vulnerability-Oriented Tuning (PIVOT-Q), a vulnerability-aware On-Policy Distillation (OPD) framework that selectively corrects vulnerable states encountered during quantized-student rollouts using the frozen full-precision policy as a teacher. PIVOT-Q identifies vulnerable states using discounted accumulated discrepancies over a short horizon, applies phase-balanced sparse supervision, and uses a Behavioral Anchor to prevent unnecessary changes. Experiments under seven LIBERO-Plus environmental variations demonstrate consistent recovery across multiple VLA backbones and quantization methods. Notably, PIVOT-Q consistently outperforms full-state distillation across all settings while using only 7.4% of its state-level distillation budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruanruan-andy/PIVOT-Q. --- ### CIPHER-MoE: Balancing Efficiency and Routing Fidelity in Trillion-Scale MoE Training Authors: Jing Li, Jian Meng, Yingmeng Gao, Suming Qiu, Linyuan Qiu, Dongfang Li, Baotian Hu, Binfan Zheng, Rongqian Zhao, Weijian Sun, Xin Chen Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05744v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been widely adopted in recent large language model (LLM) architectures. However, scaling up MoE in LLM training introduces system-level challenges on training, where non-uniform token routing can lead to highly imbalanced workloads across experts and devices, further destabilizing the training process. With trillion-scale LLMs, imbalanced expert workloads further amplify the resource cost of MoE training, resulting in degraded training efficiency and hardware utilization for underloaded experts, while hot experts require additional resources to accommodate excessive workloads. Recent studies address imbalanced MoE training through intricate parallelism strategies or resource reallocation. However, these system-level approaches often introduce additional resource requirements and considerable orchestration complexity, which become increasingly difficult to afford when training trillion-parameter LLMs under constrained computational resources. This work introduces CIPHER-MoE, which mitigates MoE workload imbalance while keeping the router's token-side Top-K selection unchanged. CIPHER-MoE applies affinity-aware Expert-to-Token filtering with explicit capacity control to reduce hotspot expert workloads without additional hardware resources or complex runtime design. The proposed method has been evaluated on large-scale MoE models, including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, showing up to 64.9 percentage points Top-1 expert workload reduction and 1.10$\times$-1.94$\times$ training acceleration, while preserving the training quality. The source code will be released soon. --- ### Robust Local Optimization Done Right Authors: James Pritts, Kevin Köser Published: 2026-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05743v1 RANSAC scoring and local optimization (LO) impose different robustness requirements, motivating the separation of hypothesis selection from refinement. We systematically isolate the effects of robust-loss shape, incorrectly specified inlier scales, and optimization strategy on essential matrix, fundamental matrix, and homography estimation. A profile-marginal score marginalizes the nuisance inlier scale and selects an inlier partition, from which we estimate the scale that sets the LO loss width; this makes LO robust to an inlier scale specified too large, whereas one specified too small degrades selection itself. Refinement needs gradient from correspondences the seed currently rejects: optimizers that reweight from current residuals stay pinned to their seed, whereas methods with broad basins recover strongly perturbed seeds yet degrade accurate score-selected hypotheses, so basin size alone is insufficient to assess RANSAC LO. Joint half-quadratic optimization balances the two and is the most consistent strategy across model classes. An optimizer matched to the profile-marginal score, which never decreases it, does not reach the best accuracy, challenging the prescription that scoring and refinement objectives should match. Composed from these findings, our RANSAC reduces the median essential-matrix pose error of a state-of-the-art RANSAC on PhotoTourism from 2.23 degrees to 1.58 degrees with a correctly specified inlier scale and from 38 degrees to 6.2 degrees when it is grossly misspecified (128x too large). ---