# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 138 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #6851–6900 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/138 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/137.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/139.md) ### MOXIE: Discovering Alternative Explanations for Biomedical Image Classifiers Authors: Abiha Tahsin Chowdhury, Rahul Dubey Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04814v1 Segment-based explanation methods such as LIME return a single explanation for each prediction, computed from one fixed image segmentation. This hides two important facts: a prediction can be supported by many different sets of image segments, and the segmentation itself shapes which explanations can be found. We introduce MOXIE (Multi-Objective eXplanation Imaging Engine), an evolutionary framework that searches for segment subsets that preserve the classifier's confidence while keeping as little of the image as possible. Instead of one explanation, MOXIE returns a Pareto front of alternative explanations that range from compact to highly faithful. We evaluate MOXIE with NSGA-II and four segmentation methods (SLIC, Felzenszwalb, Watershed and Voronoi) on BloodMNIST and HAM10000 datasets, using the same evaluation budget as LIME. Results show that MOXIE achieves a higher hypervolume than LIME on every image. LIME's explanations often appear convincing, yet the classifier's confidence collapses when only the highlighted segments are shown. MOXIE's fronts reveal how much of the image is needed to preserve the model's confidence and which contextual regions influence it. We also find that segmentation strongly affects evaluation: methods with unequal segment sizes appear most compact when segments are counted. These results show that alternative explanations provide a more complete view of a model's decision than a single explanation. --- ### Separating Decision Time from Decision Quality in the Real-Time Gap of Distilled Deciders: Evidence from a Game and a Conveyor Simulator Authors: Chihoon Shin, Junyeong Lee, Kihyeok Jeong, Wonok Kwon Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04810v1 Real-time agents are often evaluated with the world paused, or with decision time rounded to whole ticks (tick conversion). Tick conversion predicts almost no loss for a learned decider whose hit accuracy falls by 14.8 percentage points (pp) on the same games in asynchronous play. We instead split the decider's gap to a zero-latency teacher into time and quality components. In ViZDoom, we train a small decider by imitating a scripted teacher, run the game on wall-clock time, and add a control in which the teacher waits for a call to the decider's server before deciding. On a Windows host, three preregistered studies put the time component at 6.5-8.7 pp and the quality component at 6.3-8.6 pp. On a Linux host that skips 0.08-0.09% of ticks, the time component disappeared (-0.1 pp; paired 95% bootstrap interval (-0.4, 0.0)) while the quality component remained (5.6 pp (3.7, 7.5)). Retraining on teacher-labelled states from the decider's own play (DAgger) improved it on new games on both hosts (2.6 pp (0.4, 4.9) and 3.1 pp (1.1, 5.2)), a preregistered partial success. Imposing one delay schedule on every arm in live play left a quality component of 5.8 pp (4.0, 7.5) on 100 new games, and retraining cut the decider's disagreement with the teacher on its own states from 22.7% to 14.9%. In a conveyor simulator with a 400 ms deadline, delay past it erased the quality component. A latency-matched control whose delays match the decider's shows which remedy to try. --- ### Efficient Mass Matrix Estimation with Gaussian Cooling Authors: Jake Hofgard, Michael Lindsey Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: stat.CO, math.PR, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04806v1 We introduce an algorithm for efficiently preconditioning log-concave and log-smooth distributions that scales logarithmically with the condition number of the underlying distribution. Based on Gaussian cooling, our multistage method approximately samples from a sequence of well-conditioned distributions to construct a preconditioner for each subsequent stage of the cooling schedule. This method is motivated by existing practical approaches for mass matrix estimation in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), in which an effective preconditioner for the target distribution is estimated from samples produced during a warm-up period. However, our approach is conceptually distinct from existing approaches and moreover permits theoretical analysis. Our algorithmic framework is flexible, allowing essentially any log-concave sampling algorithm to act as the subroutine within each cooling stage. For instance, using first-order rejection sampling (FORS) as the sampler, the first-order query complexity of our method is $\tilde{O}(d^{4/3} \log κ)$ for a large class of log-concave and log-smooth distributions with condition number $κ$ and $\tilde{O}(d^{1/3} \log κ)$ for translation-invariant distributions. In the translation-invariant setting, we provide numerical experiments for the lattice $φ^4$ model, a simple lattice field theory. --- ### ExStereo: Lifting 2D Vision-Language-Action Models to 3D with Explicit Stereo Representations Authors: I-Chun Arthur Liu, Jason Chen, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Daniel Seita Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04805v1 Three-dimensional perception is critical for robotic manipulation, particularly for high-precision tasks, as recovering metric depth and precise 3D object positions from monocular RGB observations is inherently ill-posed. However, many Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely solely on RGB observations for perception. Leveraging recent advances in foundation models for stereo matching, we introduce ExStereo, a stereo module that augments pre-trained 2D VLAs with 3D perception. ExStereo reconstructs scene geometry from stereo image pairs and renders multi-view observations as an explicit stereo representation for stereo feature extraction. The action tokens from the action expert selectively attend to the resulting stereo tokens through our proposed action-stereo cross-attention mechanism, enabling the policy to generate robot actions conditioned on 3D scene information. To learn robust 3D representations, we introduce a mid-training stage before task-specific post-training, using a self-supervised learning objective on large-scale stereo data. We validate our approach by fine-tuning two publicly available VLAs, $π_{0.5}$ and SmolVLA, and evaluate them in simulation and on a real-world bimanual PiPER platform. Across both settings, VLAs fine-tuned with ExStereo consistently outperform baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of stereo perception for robotic manipulation. Our project website is at: https://exstereo-vla.github.io/ExStereo/. --- ### How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection Across Reddit Communities Authors: Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Jimin Mun, Maarten Sap, Maria Antoniak Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04803v1 Counter-storytelling is a powerful mechanism people use to challenge dominant narratives. Unlike other forms of counterspeech that have been widely studied in computational social science, counter-storytelling has largely been overlooked. Counter-stories are difficult to detect automatically; they are relational (defined with respect to expressions of racial stereotypes) and structurally diverse (drawing on stories that describe lived experiences, witnessed events, exemplars, and hypotheticals). We introduce a first framework for detecting and characterizing counter-storytelling against racial stereotypes at scale. This includes (1) a three-dimensional taxonomy grounded in narratology and Critical Race Theory and (2) a multi-stage pipeline that identifies relational pairs of stereotypes and counter-stories in noisy Reddit discourse. Using this pipeline, we annotate 25,549 Reddit posts across 615 communities and identify 1,312 counter-stories. Our analysis shows that speaker identity and post context shape how counter-stories are told. For example, in-group writers favor first-person testimony, often adopting the role of self-reflective insiders. Our work shows how computational methods can scale qualitative approaches to identify and characterize counter-storytelling as a contextual narrative practice, with implications for content moderation, narratology, and racial discourse analysis. --- ### Multi-Agent Spectrum Sharing Authors: Job Elliott, Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Justin G. Metcalf, Golnaz Habibi Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04802v1 This project explores how multiple cognitive radars can learn to share limited wireless spectrum with other radio users without interfering with one another. Using machine learning (ML), each device independently decides where and how widely to transmit within a fixed 100 MHz band. The system analyzes real or simulated signal activity to detect which parts of the spectrum are currently in use and which are open. Based on this information, the devices adapt their transmission choices to avoid crowded frequencies while making efficient use of available space. The goal is to develop a flexible, scalable approach to spectrum sharing that could support future wireless communication systems. Experimental results using both over-the-air software-defined radio (SDR) recordings and simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed meta-learning approach consistently balances competing objectives better than conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods in multi-agent spectrum-sharing scenarios. Across five multi-agent benchmark environments, our proposed method achieved the highest average reward among the primary baseline algorithms while simultaneously maintaining low collision rates and stable transmission behavior. --- ### AID: A Framework for AI Infrastructure Dynamics Authors: Abi Aryan Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG, cs.PF, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04801v2 A useful model of AI inference infrastructure must specify the system state, the information available to an observer, and the decisions the model is intended to support. We introduce AID (AI Infrastructure Dynamics), a framework for describing this learning problem across coupled physical, computational, networking, and serving processes. The formulation allows structured and variable-size state, asynchronous observations, multiple physical timescales, and demand that responds to service. We distinguish representations that support prediction under an existing policy from those that preserve service outcomes under changed actions, and separate both from identifying intervention responses. Two analytical results describe a lower bound on prediction error when available observations cannot distinguish models and a sufficient condition for exact controlled state reduction. These results apply established information and state-abstraction principles to AI infrastructure. We then describe a validation protocol for cache representations, workload histories, measurement availability, and imposed actions. --- ### MedImageOSWorld: Benchmarking GUI Agents for Medical Image Consoles Authors: Ziyang Long, Xinqi Li, Lujing Xing, Hsin-Jung Yang Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04800v1 Graphical consoles offer a practical interface for medical acquisition assistance, allowing agents to work through the controls and visual feedback used by human operators. Reliable assistance requires linking on-screen anatomy to acquisition decisions that determine what image evidence becomes available next. We introduce MedImageOSWorld, a benchmark for evaluating this capability in simulated CT, MR, and ultrasound consoles. Using screenshots and mouse-and-keyboard actions, agents configure protocols, plan acquisitions, inspect the resulting images, and make corrective adjustments across seven capability levels, from console operation to feedback-driven control. Evaluation combines task-specific workflow checks with hidden anatomical ground truth to assess procedural completion and acquisition outcomes separately. A common evaluation protocol specifies episode conditions and interaction budgets, while recorded trajectories support analysis of how agents observe, act, and respond to acquisition feedback. Across eleven open-weight agents, success rates range from 3.0 to 25.0 on a 0-100 scale while workflow-progress rates reach 21.5-74.5: agents complete much of the console workflow but rarely acquire the intended anatomy. Success collapses between perception and planning, from 79-90% at the lowest three levels for the best agent to at most 12% for millimetre-level planning and 0% for closed-loop control among open-weight agents. Two proprietary agents reach success rates of about 34 and exceed the best open-weight agent mainly in acquisition quality (61 versus 42). MedImageOSWorld provides a controlled setting for studying whether general-purpose GUI agents can translate visual observations into effective medical acquisition decisions. --- ### TIMBRE: Teaching Time Series Forecasters to Read, Remember, and Reconcile Authors: Xinyu Guan, Zhirong Zhang, Hongyuan Liu, Pengcheng Xu, Yu Sun, Chen Song, Qianyang Zhao Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04795v1 Event-informed forecasting requires translating reports and historical responses into changes to a numerical forecast. We propose TIMBRE (Temporal Integration of Memory-Based Responses and Evidence), which combines source-aware representation, state-conditioned response transfer, and reliability-guided fusion before a frozen forecast head. A separate readout adjusts interval widths while preserving the median. In a single-seed, one-epoch development study of 13 tasks, TIMBRE improves MAE over ordinary fusion on eight tasks but over native Chronos-2 on only two. Disabling response transfer in the trained model reduces BTC and AULF MAE by 47.04% and 6.81%, respectively. These findings identify sensitivity to learned response transfer rather than a general forecasting advantage. Missing development-set scores and the absence of retrained ablations limit attribution to individual evidence mechanisms. --- ### Knowing the Store: What a Memory Backend Must Write Down Before an Agent Can Read It Authors: Ansuman Mullick, Eray Tüzün Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04794v1 An agent with long-term memory can answer from a record it should no longer use, such as a plan the user later cancelled. We ask what a memory store must expose for an agent to know this before retrieving anything, and we score that judgment on its own, as metamemory monitoring. Readers see only a value-free summary: record counts by lifecycle state and a list of attribute names. Each of 148 questions is asked against three versions of one store that differ in one attribute, so wording cannot give the answer away. What a model adds depends on the length of that list. On the short lists the benchmark's ground truth produces (2.6 names on average), none of five language models reliably beats a cosine-similarity lookup over the names, and the three stronger ones are equivalent to it within 0.05. Under a control that fixes counts and list length, none is reliably above it and none is shown equivalent. On lists longer than the stores we tested write, padded to 60 names, the lookup loses 0.18; GPT-5.6 Luna and Sol lose 0.06 to 0.07 and lead it by 0.13 to 0.14, while the other three fall with it. The lead holds for Sol against a sibling padded to the same length and counts. Reworded to share no word with the names, the lookup loses 0.02 and one stronger reader edges 0.04 ahead. On the short lists the three stronger readers lead only where the summary counts a state without naming it, and one count feature closes that lead within a question, though not when items are pooled. The backends we tested omit or misstate this information: under FR-Bank's own metadata, GPT-4.1 mini, Haiku 4.5 and the lookup fall from 0.73, 0.82 and 0.75 to 0.60, 0.71 and 0.59. In these tests, what the store wrote down limited every reader we gave it to. All stores are synthetic; control, whether a better judgment yields a better answer, is left to a later study. --- ### Pressure, Context, and Machine Self-Control: A Criminological Test of Reward Hacking in Generative AI Models Authors: Murat Ozer, Isaac Kofi Nti Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04793v1 Recent incidents show that AI agents sometimes reach measured goals through unsanctioned means. This study applies self-control, general strain, anomie, neutralization and routine activity theory to reward hacking in generative AI models, and it treats the measures as behavioral analogues. Study 1 (2,310 conversations, seven models) measured delay discounting with the Kirby Monetary Choice Questionnaire and stated willingness to take shortcuts. Pressure raised the discount rate k 2.8-fold in fresh conversations but 12.6-fold when the same sentence followed a baseline answer, which indicates a response to conversational cues rather than a stable trait. Models chose a shortcut in 1 of 700 dilemmas when answering as themselves and in 64 of 700 when asked to assume human impulses, each step of pressure raised the odds by 40%, and shortcut answers contained far more techniques of neutralization (rate ratio = 146). In the preregistered Study 2, five models worked on 20 coding tasks whose tests contradicted their specifications. Two Claude models never cheated. GPT-5.6, Qwen and DeepSeek cheated in 86%, 69% and 65% of episodes and clearly disclosed the conflict in 27%, although their reasoning recognized it in 95%. GPT-5.6 had never endorsed a shortcut in Study 1. The registered effects of pressure and of an auditor cue did not survive correction for multiple testing. In exploratory analyses, two further models cheated in 69% and 100% of episodes, and one sentence stating that the specification takes priority eliminated cheating in all 280 episodes. Therefore, stated refusal does not guarantee compliant agent behavior. --- ### Do More Modalities Always Help? A Geometric Perspective on Missing-Modality Robustness Authors: Songyuan Sui, Zhen Tan, Mohan Zhang, Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04792v2 Missing modality remains a longstanding challenge in multimodal learning. Existing methods typically address this issue through modality recovery or adaptive strategies. However, they overlook models' internal cross-modal dependencies formed during multimodal training, which later impair robustness. We systematically characterize a counterintuitive deployment-time failure mode: models trained on full modalities can underperform unimodal models when one modality is missing at inference time. This pattern appears across diverse architectures, such as fusion models, CLIP-style two-tower models, and vision-language models. We show that such degradation is closely associated with learned cross-modal dependencies in the principal parameter subspaces. Multimodal training induces structured rotations of these subspaces, particularly in cross-modal interaction layers. These rotations are associated with reduced task-aligned margins and larger task-aware representation harm under missing-modality inputs. We propose Geodesic Unlearning (GU), a lightweight parameter-editing method that leverages Grassmannian subspace geometry for structured subspace correction to improve missing-modality robustness. It rotates the principal input subspace toward a unimodal reference along a geodesic path. We prove that this correction minimizes the distance to the reference within a fixed subspace-distance budget. Experiments across architectures and datasets show that GU improves performance under missing-modality inference while preserving full-modality accuracy, outperforming strong missing-modality robustness baselines. These findings support a geometric view of deployment-time missing-modality degradation and suggest localized subspace editing as a practical route for robustness correction. --- ### Not All Answers Are Contextually Persuadable: Inference Dynamics in Large Language Models under Contextual Influence Authors: Zongye Hu, Weiqing Luo, Yanjie Fu, Yu Gan, Haofeng Zhang, Ziyi Huang Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04791v1 At the core of modern prompting techniques is contextual sensitivity, the ability of large language models to adapt their predictions based on inference-time context. Despite its central role, inference behavior under strong contextual influence remains poorly understood, particularly at the level of internal inference dynamics. We introduce a theoretical framework for analyzing contextual influence through inference dynamics, enabling quantitative characterization of inference behavior beyond output-level answer changes. Our analysis shows that inference dynamics do not exhibit unbounded drift under repeated contextual assertions. Instead, predictive representations converge to stable, query-dependent regimes that fundamentally constrain whether contextual signals can alter a model's prediction. This leads to a surprising finding: Repeated contextual assertions do not act as accumulating evidence during inference and may therefore fail to alter a model's prediction even under unbounded repetition, while in other cases a prediction change becomes inevitable. We empirically validate our theoretical predictions, demonstrating strong alignment between theory and observed inference behavior. These contributions offer a principled pathway toward characterizing the limits of contextual influence during inference, providing practical implications for model development. --- ### Calibration Assessment for Nested Uncertainty Sets Authors: Matthew LeDuc Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04790v1 We present a Bayesian framework for assessing the calibration of nested uncertainty sets from simulation studies. Calibration is typically evaluated by repeatedly simulating data from a known model and comparing empirical coverage probabilities with their nominal values, an approach that often requires hundreds or thousands of independent model evaluations to obtain reliable estimates. Such computational demands can be prohibitive when the forward models are expensive to evaluate, for example in data assimilation using a large Earth-system model, or may not be applicable, for exmaple when the output of the simulation is a single or multiple uncertainty sets rather than a full distribution. We present a method that leverages the nested structure of uncertainty sets across nominal coverage levels to assess the calibration of these models. The method, which is based on a Dirichlet-Multinomial model, allows for testing both exact and region-based notions of model calibration in an efficient manner using Bayes factors. Unlike methods that require a full predictive distribution, this method works for procedures that directly produce prediction or confidence intervals. We demonstrate the method on a data assimilation problem containing model form error and show that it is capable of detecting miscalibration even when there are only a limited number of simulation studies available. --- ### Active-DiNTS: Active Differentiable Network Topology Search Authors: Gean Trindade Pereira, Thierry Urruty, Muriel Visani, André C. P. L. F. de Carvalho Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04787v1 Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has proved to be a strong alternative to manual network design, but applying it to 3D medical image segmentation is limited by two well-known costs, large annotation budgets and multi-GPU clusters. Thus, this paper introduces Active-DiNTS (Active Differentiable Network Topology Search), an approach that embeds pool-based Active Learning (AL) into a bi-level differentiable topology search to perform architecture discovery and label curation jointly. At each query round, unlabeled MRI volumes are ranked by one of three uncertainty signals (Entropy, Variance, or Standard Deviation), and only the top-ranked volumes are sent to an oracle for annotation. The new labels feed two interlocked stages. Network weights are updated in an outer loop, while the macro/micro topology of a U-Net-style backbone is refined in an inner loop. Three AL regimes (weights-only, topology-only, joint) expose the speed-accuracy trade-off. Evaluations on the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) Task01 BrainTumour benchmark showed that Active-DiNTS surpasses DiNTS, C2FNAS, and nnU-Net in Dice, with gains of about 10 percentage points on Edema and 5 points on Non-Enhancing core, on a single GPU and using a fraction of the labeled volumes. The discovered architectures are denser and more FLOP-heavy than prior baselines, but remain competitive in trainable parameters and peak memory; the fastest search variant finishes in under 0.25 GPU-days, over 27x faster than the eight-GPU DiNTS search. Together, these results indicate that pairing differentiable NAS with active data acquisition is a practical recipe for accurate 3D segmentation under realistic constraints. --- ### KALEIDO: Input-Space Adaptation of a Vision Model for Time-Series Forecasting Through Gated Fold Geometries Authors: Xiangyu Shi, Qinghua Liu, Sam Heshmati, Zubin Abraham Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04786v1 Time-series foundation models buy zero-shot forecasting with large temporal corpora; a vision model needs none, since a natural image implicitly embeds the patterns a forecaster must model, and an ImageNet-pretrained masked autoencoder forecasts a series by inpainting a rendering of it. A rendered series is not a natural image, however, and closing that gap takes temporal-aware adaptation. We show that the rendering geometry - how the series is folded and drawn - is a controllable, mixable axis for it. Kaleido detects the dominant periods, renders a rule-generated set of fold geometries, combines the inpaintings with a convex per-position gate fit on validation only, and fuses the result with the zero-shot output at one fixed share, with no per-dataset hyperparameter beyond the baseline's published settings. Training only LayerNorm (0.05%), Kaleido lowers MSE by 13% against the published zero-shot baseline on LTSF and, frozen, by 6.6%; on GIFT-Eval it improves the baseline by 7.4% in MASE and 19.3% in CRPS. --- ### Lollypop: Camera-to-Motion-Capture Calibration Verification with a Reference Target Authors: Tianyi Liu, Kevin Harris, Mihika Dave, Kun He Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04785v1 Camera-to-motion-capture (mocap) calibration is essential for using mocap as ground truth in robotics, AR/VR, and other computer vision tasks. However, the calibration can drift after deployment, while calibration residuals and visual inspection provide limited independent verification. We present Lollypop, a fiducial-mocap reference target for independent calibration verification. The target couples an ArUco fiducial with a mocap marker constellation so the visual center and tracked centroid represent the same physical point. Given a candidate calibration, verification projects the mocap point into the image and measures its disagreement with the detected fiducial center. Experiments show sub-pixel nominal error, sensitivity to controlled extrinsic perturbations, and increasing error during an illustrative mixed-handling sequence. --- ### RepTC: Representation-Aware Optimization for Efficient Traffic Classification on Edge IoT Devices Authors: Adel Chehade, Edoardo Ragusa, Paolo Gastaldo, Rodolfo Zunino Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.NI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04784v1 Traffic classification (TC) is crucial to secure Internet of Things (IoT) networks, whose edge nodes often operate under privacy, bandwidth, and energy constraints. Yet, encrypted payloads and limited computing power make accurate, real-time TC a challenging task. Existing learning-based TC approaches often fix the input configuration a priori, even though it directly influences both predictive performance and computational cost. This paper presents RepTC, a representation-aware hardware-constrained strategy that addresses session-level TC through joint model and input optimization. The method co-optimizes network architecture, session length, and header preprocessing; this enables joint control of model complexity, input scale, and data representation within a unified resource-constrained design space. The proposed approach enforces microcontroller-class constraints on memory, model size, and computation, and yields compact models deployable on low-power edge devices. A gateway monitors traffic by aggregating sessions and either performs inference locally or offloads to a low-power edge node. Both scenarios are validated on heterogeneous embedded hardware, including a Raspberry Pi 3B+, STM32 Nucleo-F401RE, and XIAO ESP32-C3, spanning Cortex-A, Cortex-M, and RISC-V processor architectures; measured inference latency ranges from 0.63 to 18.59 ms, with MCU-side inference energy between 0.50 and 1.41 mJ per session. RepTC yields configurations that achieve high accuracy on a variety of established benchmarks: 96.21% on ISCX VPN-nonVPN, 99.62% on USTC-TFC2016, and 99.97% on Edge-IIoTset; at the same time, model size and computational requirements were reduced by up to three orders of magnitude compared with state-of-the-art methods. The results show that representation-aware optimization can improve efficiency while preserving competitive classification performance. --- ### DASH: Fast, Valid Counterfactuals for Deep Networks via Batched Directional Search Authors: Shraman Pal, Gabriel Medeiros, Clayton Escouper das Chagas, Can Li Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04783v1 Counterfactual explanations are most useful when they can be generated with low latency, remain close to the factual input, and satisfy input-domain, categorical, and actionability constraints. Achieving these objectives simultaneously is challenging for deep neural networks. Heuristic methods are often fast but may return invalid counterfactuals, whereas exact methods can certify global proximity but may not finish within practical time limits. We introduce DASH, a batched heuristic search method for finding close, valid, and actionable counterfactuals for deep neural networks under $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$, and $\ell_\infty$ objectives. DASH uses directional Lipschitz bounds and local affine models to generate anchors, then ranks and expands promising regions with batched network evaluations. We compare DASH against nine prior heuristic methods and time-limited exact mixed-integer baselines on four tabular datasets, with network depths from 2 to 32, and evaluate scalability on PBMC3k. Across 9,000 tabular query-norm cases, DASH returns a valid counterfactual within $5\%$ of the best heuristic-observed valid distance in $94.6\%$ of cases, with a median CPU search runtime of $0.061$ s. PGD-bisect, the baseline with the highest pooled within-$5\%$ coverage, meets this criterion in $41.1\%$ of cases, with a median runtime of $0.298$ s. These results show that the proposed search maintains high valid proximity across norms while keeping its search runtime practical. --- ### Super-Resolution in The Right Latent Space: A Frozen Vision-Foundation Substrate Authors: Wanzhou Lei, Cuifeng Shen, Yanjin He, Maohua Li, Hua Yuan, Per-Olof Persson, Tao Lan, Kan Liu, Hanlin Tang Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04781v2 In an image latent space, the embeddings of high-resolution, natural, and sharp images form a manifold. Degradation of high-resolution images pushes their embeddings off this manifold. Real-world super-resolution (SR) then becomes the task of mapping the degraded embedding back onto this manifold --- not anywhere on the manifold, but to the point that preserves what the input still carries, both its semantics and pixel details. Every published method implements this mapping in a reconstruction-oriented latent space or pixel space. We claim these spaces are the wrong substrates for SR. Low-resolution and degraded images are embedded far from the manifold, making the mapping difficult and expensive. The lack of semantic information in these substrates also makes it difficult to navigate to the faithful point on the manifold, causing severe hallucination when degradation is heavy. Thus, restoring in a suitable latent space is crucial to the SR task. We show that the latent space of 23 fused layers of a frozen DINOv3-L is one such space that makes the SR task easier. Degraded images are embedded near the manifold. Moreover, this substrate contains a hierarchy of information, from pixel record to degradation robust semantics, guiding the model to find the faithful point on the manifold. On this substrate, a 415M decoder is trained under reconstruction and adversarial objectives to map the degraded embeddings back and decode to pixel space in one pass. The resulting model, RAESR, attains the best fidelity--perception trade-off among state-of-the-art adversarial and diffusion-based restorers on RealSR, DRealSR, LSDIR and DIV2K-Val, at 37 ms per 512 by 512 image on a single H20 GPU. Swapping the substrate for a VAE latent under an identical recipe loses on every metric. --- ### Repeated-Measure Leakage, Distribution Shift, and Reliability under Partial Observation in Patient World Models Authors: Arjun Subramanian Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04778v1 Patient world models are increasingly proposed for longitudinal prediction, intervention-aware reasoning, and clinical-trial simulation. Causal or clinical intervention validity is distinct from predictive generalization and reliability; before making stronger claims, the underlying predictive state should generalize across patients, survive realistic shifts and missing observations, and expose failure through meaningful reliability signals. We evaluate these prerequisites in a deliberately narrow setting: short-horizon digital-biomarker forecasting from PhysioNet GaitPDB, comprising 165 participants, 306 recordings, and 51,129 context-future pairs. Using persistence, ridge, MLP, GRU, Transformer, and a compact JEPA-style predictor, we build an evaluation ladder that progressively removes raw temporal overlap, same-recording familiarity, and same-patient familiarity before testing unseen-patient generalization. For GRU, NMSE rises from 0.1227 under random-window splitting to 0.1393 after eliminating raw train-test overlap and to 0.1961 under patient holdout. Among 54 participants with repeated recordings, exposure to a different recording from the same patient improves GRU NMSE from 0.2177 to 0.1556, while a recording-excluded identity hypothesis is not supported at the participant level. Under participant-held-out evaluation, MLP and Transformer are statistically indistinguishable. Study shift, a four-times-longer prediction gap, and partial observation further degrade performance; under 50% temporal masking, Transformer NMSE rises to 0.611 while MC-dropout predictive variance falls. We do not claim a longitudinal or intervention-aware simulator. Instead, the results support a prerequisite evaluation stack of patient separation, repeated-measure controls, shift, missingness, and uncertainty validation before stronger patient-world-model claims are trusted. --- ### ARISE: Adaptive Agentic Reasoning with Image-grounded Self-Evaluation for Interpretable IBD Assessment Authors: Pronoma Banerjee, Anuva Shah, Jason Wu, Md. Masudur Rahman, Sanjay Mohanty, Satya Kurada, Juan P. Wachs Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04777v1 Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) requires frequent imaging-based assessment, yet interpretation of modalities such as wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) and intestinal ultrasound remains heavily dependent on specialist expertise. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant potential in multimodal medical image analysis, but their clinical adoption is hindered by their insufficient domain-specific reasoning, susceptibility to hallucination, scarcity of high quality training data in fine-grained diagnostics and limited interpretability. We introduce ARISE (Adaptive Agentic Reasoning with Image-grounded Self-Evaluation), an autonomous planning framework that models few-shot medical image understanding as a sequential agentic workflow. ARISE structures agent execution into a transparent 5-stage workflow: hypothesis generation, image-grounded evidence summarization, evidence-conditioned refinement, symbolic verification, and final diagnosis. We apply ARISE to IBD assessment across two independent patient cohorts: wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images for Crohn's disease and B-mode ultrasound data for ulcerative colitis. ARISE consistently improves diagnostic performance over baseline VLMs while exposing where reasoning succeeds or fails, providing a more interpretable basis for clinical decision support and realistic deployment. --- ### Learning Task and Motion Plans from Real Demonstrations with Hybrid Flow Matching Authors: Zuleika Redondo Garcia, Andreu Matoses Gimenez, Javier Alonso-Mora Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04771v1 Long-horizon mobile manipulation requires a task plan and the motion that executes it. Generative planners trained on demonstration produce both in one pass, requiring neither a symbolic domain nor search. To date, however, they have relied on thousands of scripted demonstrations of fixed-base arms and executed open loop. This paper presents a hybrid flow matching planner: a single network generates the symbolic plan with masked discrete flow matching and the motion trajectory with continuous flow matching. Unlike prior generative planners, we aim to learn from a much smaller set of demonstrations and to execute the plan in closed loop. Two properties of the data compensate for the small dataset. A demonstration resumed from any of its intermediate actions is itself a demonstration, which multiplies the training samples and enables replanning after every action. Objects of the same kind are interchangeable, which turns demonstrations of one goal into demonstrations of every permuted goal. Our base implementation produces valid plans on 68% of held-out scenes; a training and generation scheme for the discrete plan raises this to 76%, and replanning after every action raises the task completion rate from 40% to 53% in a kinematic simulation. The planner matches the task completion rate of motion-only flow matching policies while additionally providing the symbolic plan, and it outperforms previous hybrid diffusion formulations on both task completion and plan validity. We validate the planner on a real mobile manipulator. Videos and project page: https://andreumatoses.github.io/research/hybrid-flow-planning --- ### Flow Policies as Actions of Skill-Level World Models: Learned and Symbolic Abstractions for Long-Horizon Planning Authors: Andreu Matoses Gimenez, Andrei-Carlo Papuc, Chris Pek, Javier Alonso-Mora Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04767v1 Latent world models enable robots to plan by predicting the consequences of actions. Planning long tasks with control-rate actions requires many prediction steps, which enlarges the search space and accumulates error. Skill-level actions shorten these sequences, but a symbolic skill vocabulary requires domain knowledge and labeled demonstrations. We construct skill-level actions from the inputs of a flow-matching policy trained on demonstrations segmented into complete skills. The policy maps a noise seed and an observation, optionally with a code or label, to a complete skill execution, so one execution is one world-model transition. On this mechanism we propose four action abstractions with increasing task knowledge: a compressed seed, two discrete codes learned from the demonstrations, and a symbolic label. We evaluate them with a common world-model training procedure and planning framework on simulated block rearrangement tasks that require up to 14 sequential skills. The symbolic label succeeds in over 90% of the tasks that require up to six skills and degrades beyond. Without any label, an object-centric learned code matches it on single-skill tasks and retains half to three quarters of its success on tasks of two to five skills. Ablations attribute much of the label's advantage to its planner knowing which actions are applicable, rather than to the label itself. Beyond six skills the search, not the world model, limits success. Project page: https://andreumatoses.github.io/research/flow-skill-wm --- ### Variance-Optimal Control Variates for Learning with Black-box Feedback Authors: Zihao Zhao, Shuhan Zhang, Kai Wang Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04766v1 Modern models increasingly learn through black-box oracles such as humans, optimization solvers, and external tools that provide feedback without exposing their internal mechanisms. A common remedy is to learn an (action-)value function as a control variate. In this paper, we first observe that even an exact action-value function can be arbitrarily far from variance-optimal. We show that this gap arises because the value function minimizes the noise in each action's own gradient term, while an action can still affect the rest of the gradient estimator through shared parameters. A simple unbiased correction, at no extra oracle cost, can still reduce its variance by an arbitrarily large factor. Motivated by this, we then prove that the residual variance can be decomposed exactly by actions with no cross terms. This decomposition yields a closed-form variance-minimizing correction for neural-network parameters, which can be computed by a simple projection. Empirically, our correction consistently reduces the variance left by the value function and improves learning across all tasks. The source code for all experiments is available at https://github.com/Zihao-Kevin/black_box_opt. --- ### EasyClassifier: Honest, Reproducible Machine-Learning Classification for Researchers Who Do Not Program Authors: Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Ghada A. Altarawneh Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04758v1 Machine-learning classification is now used across medicine, the social sciences, economics, education and engineering, very often by researchers who do not program. Two errors recur in such work: preprocessing learned on all rows before cross-validation (data leakage), and reporting the cross-validation score of the classifier that won a comparison (selection bias). Both make published scores optimistic. We present EasyClassifier, an open-source Python package that guides a user from a CSV or Excel file to a finished analysis through a sequence of plain-language, multiple-choice questions, with no code. It makes the correct procedure the default rather than an option: every preprocessing step is learned inside each training fold; the selected classifier receives a separate final score from nested cross-validation (up to 2,000 rows), or an untouched 20% test set; classifiers run with fixed default parameters and fixed random seeds; and every run writes a report with a ready-to-adapt Methods paragraph, the references to cite, and figures prepared for publication. On ten public datasets from seven fields and a random-label control, split in half so that one half served as an untouched external test, the common practice overstated balanced accuracy by 2.9 percentage points on average (up to 9.9 on small data), whereas the score EasyClassifier reports had a mean signed bias of +0.7 points and a mean absolute error of 2.3 points (one-sided Wilcoxon p = 3.2 x 10^{-4}, 30 runs). On random labels it reported 48.8% balanced accuracy against a chance level of 50%. EasyClassifier is available under the MIT license from PyPI (pip install easyclassifier), GitHub, and Zenodo. --- ### When Is Enough Enough in Self-Evolving LLM Systems? Authors: Enoch Yin, Bin Liu, Zhengling Qi Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04756v1 Self-evolving large language model (LLM) systems repeatedly propose, evaluate, and incorporate updates to prompts, skills, or other persistent artifacts. Despite their growing effectiveness, these systems typically operate under a predetermined iteration or compute budget, without a principled criterion to determine when further evolution is no longer worthwhile. This can lead to two undesirable consequences: unnecessary computation after performance has saturated and the risk of returning late updates that overfit or exploit the evaluation signal. These issues motivate us to study two fundamental questions: when should a self-evolving system stop, and what should it output once it stops? We address the first by formulating an online sequential testing problem and constructing an anytime-valid restart detector using the per-item paired evaluation outcomes already produced by self-evolving LLM systems. We address the second by formulating a change-point estimation problem and using the estimated transition to select an earlier artifact for output. The resulting procedure is plug-and-play and requires no modification of the underlying self-evolving algorithms. Across two self-evolving frameworks, three LLM model families, and five benchmarks, our method substantially reduces computation costs while maintaining comparable unseen-test performance. For example, on SearchQA with SkillOpt and DeepSeek V4 Flash, our method stops at round 4 rather than the full budget of 40, reducing token usage by 91.6% while achieving 82.43% unseen-test accuracy versus 82.00% under the full-budget run. --- ### FoSeRL: Formal Sequential Robustness Certification for Reinforcement Learning Policies Authors: Sara Taheri, Deep Kumar Ganguly, Jan Křetínský, Majid Zamani Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04754v1 Even a few action perturbations can substantially degrade the performance of a deployed decision policy. Certifying the resulting return loss is challenging in stochastic environments, where returns vary even without an attack. We introduce FoSeRL, a framework for certifying deployed RL policies against precommitted, temporally sparse action attacks. The deployed policy is unchanged, with no smoothing or retraining. Certification requires a resettable simulator supporting shared randomness and independent one-step successor queries, but no analytical dynamics model. FoSeRL certifies that an attacked episode loses no more than a prescribed amount of return relative to the same episode unattacked, with at least a target probability and at a user-specified confidence level. Both runs share the initial state and randomness, so the measured loss reflects the attack, not the episode; carrying the running return gap as a state coordinate makes it the terminal value, reducing trajectory-level certification to terminal safety. Time-dependent barrier conditions on the augmented state bound the terminal failure probability: satisfied exactly, they certify every admissible precommitted attack; learned from sampled trajectories and verified on held-out data, they certify the same guarantee under a specified attack-episode setting. Across six stochastic continuous-control environments and three RL policy families (TD3, SAC, and PPO), FoSeRL certifies non-trivial cardinality--magnitude robustness frontiers, achieves substantially larger certified budgets than policy smoothing, and reveals marked robustness differences among policies with comparable nominal performance. --- ### More Value per Key: Asymmetric Sparse Attention for Faster LLM Decoding Authors: Noam Elata, Itay Lamprecht, Mikey Shechter, Daniel Ohayon, Itay Hubara, Daniel Soudry Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04753v2 Autoregressive generation in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the memory and computational demands of attention mechanisms. Sparse attention methods mitigate this cost by selecting only high-probability entries of the attention matrix. We observe that in many such methods, this renders the probability-value multiplication negligible, shifting the bottleneck to the query-key step. Key heads can therefore be reduced to accelerate inference, while retaining more value heads preserves capacity with limited additional decoding cost. We introduce Sparse Asymmetric Group-Query Attention (SAGA), which decouples key and value head counts to exploit this principle, and pair it with approximate top-N (Atop-N) attention, a simple sparse attention method designed to study the interaction between sparsity and head-count asymmetry. We formalize the benefits of this asymmetry theoretically and validate them empirically through latency measurements and quality evaluations on models up to 1.5B parameters. Together, SAGA and Atop-N achieve end-to-end decoding speedups exceeding $2\times$ over our full-attention GQA baseline at long contexts. Models trained from scratch with SAGA nearly match the quality of comparable GQA variants on the evaluated benchmarks. To facilitate adoption, we introduce an efficient fine-tuning method that converts pretrained models to the SAGA architecture, enabling practitioners to benefit from our approach without costly retraining. --- ### Variance-Aware Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Bounds for Online Reinforcement Learning Authors: Haochen Zhang, Lingzhou Xue, Zhong Zheng Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04752v1 We study model-free online reinforcement learning (RL) for episodic tabular Markov decision processes, focusing on both gap-dependent regret and policy switching cost. While fine-grained gap-dependent analysis has been established for model-free RL algorithms using Hoeffding-type exploration bonuses, such results for model-free algorithms with variance-based exploration bonuses remain unknown, despite their superior worst-case and coarse-grained gap-dependent guarantees. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by establishing the first fine-grained gap-dependent regret upper bound for UCB-Bernstein+, a refined UCB-Bernstein algorithm, in variance-aware model-free online RL. Moreover, by integrating a stage-wise policy update design into our fine-grained framework and using refined variance-based bonuses, we achieve the best-known gap-dependent local switching cost to date. In addition, our analysis yields improved worst-case guarantees for both regret and local switching cost over the original UCB-Bernstein algorithm. Numerical experiments further demonstrate that UCB-Bernstein+ achieves favorable empirical performance in both regret and local switching cost. --- ### Dynamic Routing as a New Dimension for Test-time Versatility of LLMs Authors: Michal Štefánik, Marek Kadlčík, Josef Kuchař, Michal Spiegel Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04751v1 Beyond scaling their parameters and data, large language models currently gain versatility on new problems along a single axis: the tokens they spend on chain-of-thought (CoT). We investigate whether dynamic routing programs, which execute a subset of the model's layers or iterate some of them, can open a second axis of test-time adaptation, complementary to CoT and free of any gradient update. Prior work showed that such programs exist and bring accuracy and efficiency gains on problems similar to those they were trained on; we ask whether they can also be identified rapidly, from a handful of demonstrations (3 or 10), by a strategy that transfers across models and tasks without training. First, we find that strategies that select programs by the probability they assign to the demonstrations' labels, arbitrated by the model's own confidence, bring consistent gains: on average over the 49 tasks of MMLU and substantially on four of seven models, and most of all on far out-of-distribution tasks such as ARC-AGI, where programs double the accuracy of a 7B model whose CoT fails. Second, on MMLU across the seven post-trained models, routing complements CoT in practice: the two succeed on different queries, and their composition exceeds CoT alone. Despite these gains, our analyses show that confidence-based selection leaves much of the potential untapped, in two places in particular: (1) in surfacing the routing potential that is already present early in pre-training but becomes harder to select after post-training, and (2) in making models robust to the refinements routing introduces, since unsuccessful routes tend to drive the residual stream out of the distribution that the following layers expect. Together, our results point to dynamic routing as a paradigm for extending the plasticity of existing and future LLMs in rapid test-time adaptation. --- ### Agentic discovery of blood biomarker from distilled private health records Authors: Seffi Cohen, Liat Antwarg Friedman, Amir Anisman, Ruth Johnson, Michelle M. Li, Ayush Noori, Ben Reis, Ran Balicer, Noa Dagan, Marinka Zitnik Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04749v1 Routine complete blood counts (CBCs) could yield new biomarkers, but the private records needed to evaluate candidates cannot be shared with frontier language model agents that excel at discovery. We distilled the evidence held in the Clalit Health Services panel of over 5.4 million patients into a released scoring tool: for each of 13 immune-mediated diseases, a graph attention network was trained inside the data boundary to predict the case-control AUC of candidate CBC expressions, and only the trained weights were released. The tool grounds an agent's propose-score-refine loop in real-world data without exposing any patient data. In external validation, agent-discovered expressions improved on their literature-seeded starting points by a median of 4.18 AUC percentage points, and across three independent cohorts, reranking the candidates of three frontier research tools improved on their first choices in most comparisons, with gains that varied by cohort. The released scorer supports privacy-preserving biomarker hypothesis generation. --- ### Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas Authors: Benjamin Icard, Gauvain Bourgne, Jeanne Bonnaventure, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04747v1 In life-or-death situations, a benevolent lie may appear more moral than telling the truth. Yet such lies can backfire, producing unintended and sometimes fatal consequences. This tension, famously disputed by Kant and Constant in 1797, applies not only to lying but to assertive speech acts in general, raising the question of which utterance should be chosen when moral stakes are high. We present a logical framework for the ethical evaluation of speech-act utterances based on agents' beliefs. Implemented in Answer Set Programming (ASP), the framework assesses utterances under deontologism, consequentialism, and principialism, and is illustrated on Sartre's The Wall (1939), a reworking of that controversy in which lying leads alternately to rescue and to death. Our setting is general by design: as two variants show, accommodating a new moral situation amounts to adjusting parameters, not rules. --- ### Exact Fast Batch Simulation for Tabular Reinforcement Learning Authors: Haochen Zhang, Lingzhou Xue, Zhong Zheng Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04746v1 Simulation is a fundamental computational primitive in reinforcement learning (RL), yet conventional simulation explicitly generates individual trajectories even when downstream procedures use only aggregate statistics. To address this, we develop an exact fast-simulation framework for finite-horizon tabular Markov decision processes. Our framework has two complementary modes. In direct batch simulation, a batch is represented by its aggregate Markov flow. With sufficient parallel simulation resources, this flow can be obtained by trajectory aggregation; when such simulation is unavailable or costly but the initial state and transition distributions are directly accessible, we instead generate an identically distributed flow through forward Markov-flow sampling without materializing individual trajectories. The latter reduces the simulator-side computational dependence on batch size $m$ from $O(m)$ to $O(1)$. In adaptive batch simulation, when batch length is determined by a data-dependent condition, exact multivariate-hypergeometric splitting recursively refines a candidate Markov flow while preserving the conditional law, reducing the cost dependence on $m$ from $O(m)$ to $O(\log m)$. Together, these modes accelerate simulation by keeping trajectories aggregated whenever possible and refining flows only when required to locate data-dependent boundaries. The framework applies broadly across simulator-based, offline, and online batch or stage-based RL, as illustrated with representative algorithms from each setting. --- ### ThyCLIPNet: A BiomedCLIP-Guided Lightweight Attention-Enhanced DeepLabV3+ Framework for Robust Thyroid Nodule Segmentation Authors: Tasnim Jahan, Md Easin Arafat, Swakkhar Shatabda Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04743v1 Accurate thyroid ultrasound segmentation is often challenged by low contrast, speckle noise, and unclear boundaries. Although recent methods have improved segmentation accuracy, many rely on resource-intensive architectures or lack explicit integration of multiscale features with global biomedical visual guidance. In this paper, we introduce ThyCLIPNet, a lightweight semantic-guided hybrid encoder-decoder framework that integrates BiomedCLIP-derived biomedical semantic guidance into a lightweight multi-scale CNN segmentation pipeline. The encoder integrates MobileNetV2 with efficient channel attention, while atrous spatial pyramid pooling and a custom convolutional block attention module enrich bottleneck features. The decoder combines hierarchical skip connections and lightweight attention refinement with a BiomedCLIP-guided gated fusion pathway that projects vision-only global biomedical embeddings into decoder feature space and selectively integrates them through semantic-local fusion and spatial gating. To the best of our knowledge, ThyCLIPNet is among the first lightweight thyroid ultrasound segmentation frameworks to use BiomedCLIP's vision encoder alone for image-only global semantic guidance without text prompting. Experiments on TG3K, TN3K, DDTI, and PKTN achieve dice similarity coefficients of 96.22%, 87.58%, 84.73%, and 80.70%; intersection over union scores of 92.72%, 77.91%, 73.51%, and 67.64%; and 95th-percentile hausdorff distances of 3.75, 16.38, 18.23, and 10.86, respectively. ThyCLIPNet uses 8.55M parameters and 22.99G FLOPs. Overall, the results support integrating global biomedical semantic guidance with lightweight multi-scale CNN representations for robust and computationally efficient thyroid ultrasound segmentation. Source code: https://github.com/Tasnim-Jahan/ThyCLIPNet. (Abstract shortened for arXiv. See PDF for full abstract.) --- ### Robot Learning with Visual Predicted Force Authors: Haonan Chen, Feiyang Wu, Yuxiang Ma, Mustafa Mete, Pengfei Ye, Junxuan Shen, Cheng Zhu, Aurora Ruggeri, Kelvin Cheung, Jiayuan Mao, Edward Adelson, Jiajun Wu et al. Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04741v1 Force-aware manipulation typically relies on specialized force or tactile sensors. We show that force-aware manipulation can instead be achieved through visual force prediction from the deformation of a compliant Fin Ray gripper. Our approach trains two models. First, we train a visual force estimator on calibration data and use it to annotate task demonstrations with force estimates. Second, we train an action--force proposal policy on these force-augmented demonstrations to jointly generate candidate robot actions and their associated forces. At test time, we sample candidate actions and the forces they are expected to produce, then execute the action whose predicted force is closest to a target from the demonstrations. We evaluate our approach on berry picking, empty-can grasping, in-hand reorientation, and plug insertion. Our results show that visual force prediction can guide inference-time action selection for contact-rich manipulation without requiring force or tactile sensors at deployment. --- ### Toward a Locally Deployable Agentic Co-Scientist: Small-Model Planning for Early-Stage Drug Discovery Authors: Tian Liang, Jiayu Chang, Alejandro F. Frangi, Mobarak I. Hoque, Richard A. Bryce Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04740v1 Early-stage computational drug discovery requires coordinating heterogeneous scientific tools across multi-step workflows. We present a lightweight, tool-augmented framework in which a locally deployable compact language model plans calls to 18 modular tools. A Unified Molecular Schema maintains shared molecular records, while a plug-in interface supports tool replacement and extension. We construct 1,263 manually refined query-plan pairs through workflow-graph path coverage and apply LoRA fine-tuning to three compact model families. Under the query-level split, all fine-tuned models generate fully parseable and schema-compliant plans on 47 held-out cross-group queries. Llama 3.2-3B achieves a tool-selection F1 of 0.998, sequence exact match of 0.979, and argument F1 of 0.960. Under the stricter workflow-grouped split, which excludes identical ordered tool sequences across partitions, sequence exact match reaches 0.452 to 0.548, highlighting the remaining difficulty for compact models in generating complete workflow paths unseen during training. These results demonstrate the feasibility of compact, locally deployable planning while identifying compositional generalization as an important direction for further improvement. --- ### PyINE: A Framework for Scalable Elicitation and Oversight via Code Execution Authors: Pierre-Luc St-Charles, Alessandro Palmas, Damiano Fornasiere, Storm Lei, Mirko Bronzi, Jean-Pierre Falet, Iulian Serban, Yoshua Bengio Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04737v2 Reasoning models can remain capable of solving a task while still defaulting to cheaper but misleading shortcuts. This creates a central oversight problem: when a model gives an answer with plausible but incomplete reasoning, can an overseer determine whether that output should be trusted? To study this problem, we introduce PyINE, a framework for scalable elicitation and oversight using instrumented Python programs as a verifiable execution substrate. In PyINE, programs define task environments, execution traces provide authoritative labels for outcomes and intermediate facts, and task variants can be generated mechanically rather than through static human annotation. We instantiate the framework in PyINE-v1, a first release built from nearly one million deterministic execution traces and over 500,000 matched LLM-generated code variants used for counterfactual evaluation. Using standard RL with verifiable rewards on cue-varied tasks, we train a shortcut-following model that improves substantially at predicting execution outcomes while still making systematic errors when misleading human-facing cues conflict with the program's realized behavior. We then evaluate activation probes, trained text classifiers, prompted judges, and a lightweight debate protocol as overseers of this model. We find that performance pooled at the dataset level can hide weak coverage of the failures that matter most: cheap learned overseers often miss rare shortcut-driven errors, while stronger model-based checks are more balanced but substantially costlier and harder to turn into reliable thresholded decisions. PyINE-v1 turns this failure-mode coverage problem into a reusable experimental setting for developing oversight methods that are verifiable, failure-mode-aware, and cost-sensitive. --- ### Probabilistic Pedestrian Forecasts from a Handheld Phone: World-Frame Heat Maps, Visual-Inertial Height Drift, and Evaluation without Ground Truth Authors: Danial Safaei Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04736v1 A pedestrian with a phone could be shown where nearby people will be in the next few seconds, if the forecast stays on the ground while the phone moves, is calibrated, and needs only a monocular camera and visual-inertial odometry (VIO). We build and evaluate such a system. People are detected, lifted onto the floor by ray-plane intersection, tracked in a gravity-aligned metric frame, and forecast as per-step probability maps by a small U-Net trained with a negative log-likelihood (NLL) loss on bird's-eye (SDD) and first-person (EgoTraj-Bench) trajectories. On handheld ADVIO recordings, vertical VIO drift and the user's own changes of level silently rescale monocular ground positions (by 87% within 90 s on one clip; on another, all tracks are lost for the last 31% of the clip); keeping the camera's height above the floor constant under a low-pass-filtered altitude avoids this, though it lags on escalators. On the SDD and EgoTraj-Bench test splits, the final forecaster lowers the NLL at 4.8 s by 1.51 and 1.37 nats relative to a fitted constant-velocity Gaussian. Lacking ground truth for people in handheld video, we score forecasts against the tracker's own later raw measurements. In an internally pre-registered evaluation on seven held-out clips, the final forecaster's NLL is lower than the benchmark-fitted baseline's at 1.2, 2.4 and 4.8 s (by 0.17, 0.23 and 0.47 nats; 95% intervals over people exclude zero), but by less than half as much as on the development clips. Exploratory analyses cut both ways: resampling clips instead of people widens the intervals to include zero at 1.2 and 2.4 s, and once both forecasters are recalibrated on the development clips the network is significantly better only at 1.2 s; but two clips run with ADVIO's reference poses favour the network much more when re-run with the phone's own poses. We discuss what such self-consistency scores can and cannot show. --- ### Investigating Spatiotemporal Redundancy in Video Transformer for Collision Anticipation Authors: Xiaoshan Zhou Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04727v1 In worker-equipment proximity monitoring, video transformers are widely used for collision anticipation and have demonstrated strong performance. However, their accuracy comes with substantial computational demands, creating a tension with the need for low-latency inference on mobile robots and the pursuit of lower-carbon computation in construction. To address this, this study investigates where computation within an established video transformer is redundant and whether that redundancy can be removed without materially degrading predictive performance. Using VideoMAEv2-Base on the Nexar Collision Prediction dataset, we first examine how collision-relevant information evolves across network depth and then investigate two complementary forms of redundancy: structured capacity redundancy in multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and spatiotemporal redundancy in the token stream. Linear probes show that interpretable motion cues, including flow magnitude, looming, and approach versus retreat, are most accessible at intermediate layers, whereas collision-label discrimination strengthens toward the final layer. Token redundancy is axis-specific: adjacent temporal-token similarity reaches 0.970 in later layers, while spatial similarity falls to 0.297, indicating substantially greater redundancy across time than across space. Exploiting this asymmetry, temporal token merging reduces backbone computation from 356.99 to 178.50 GFLOPs and latency from 12.69 to 7.21 ms per clip, a 1.76x speedup, while mean average precision changes only from 0.7478 to 0.7443. Importance-guided retention of 50% of MLP units preserves an AUC of 0.753, compared with 0.529 under matched random retention, and reveals that pruning alters score calibration before discriminative ranking collapses. These findings establish a new pathway for pursuing faster algorithms through targeted temporal token compression and neuron pruning. --- ### Verb-ICL: Rethinking In-Context Learning for Structured Prediction Authors: Fan Bai, Hengshuo Miao, Sanjit S Batra, Hamid Reza Hassanzadeh, Ardavan Saeedi, Mark Dredze Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04725v1 Structured prediction tasks pose unique challenges for in-context learning (ICL): their compositional outputs require modeling fine-grained, token-level patterns that sentence-level approaches fail to capture, and their task-specific annotation conventions are human-defined artifacts that cannot be acquired through pretraining alone. We propose Verb-ICL, a selective annotation framework for ICL-based structured prediction that addresses both challenges. Verb-ICL first selects representative examples using a token-level coverage strategy that captures local semantic patterns critical for structured prediction, then generates actionable error feedback that codifies task-specific annotation guidelines and incorporates this feedback into ICL demonstrations. We evaluate Verb-ICL on six structured prediction datasets spanning information extraction and semantic parsing. Experiments with recent LLMs show that Verb-ICL consistently outperforms strong selective annotation baselines under low-resource settings and continues to provide gains as the annotation budget increases. Extended analyses demonstrate that the generated feedback is predominantly useful across a four-category quality taxonomy, generalizes as task-level guidance beyond instance-specific corrections, and improves performance regardless of the underlying selection strategy. --- ### Latent-Lagrangian Neural Networks for Reduced Order Modeling of Non-autonomous Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Authors: Anand Kumar Agrawal, Anders Thorin Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04723v1 This work proposes a latent Lagrangian-based framework for reduced-order modelling of forced nonlinear dynamical systems. In contrast with conventional Lagrangian or Hamiltonian neural networks, our approach learns a set of latent coordinates sufficient to capture the dynamics conjointly with two neural networks for the latent kinetic and latent potential energies, and leverages force supervision to eliminate the need for an ODE solver during training. Consistency of physical laws in the latent space is ensured through the principle of virtual work. Results show that the model effectively learns the subtle dynamics induced by the system's nonlinearity and non-convex potential energy, and generalizes well to unseen forces and initial conditions. These observations confirm the physical relevance of the proposed approach, and its interest for model reduction. --- ### NAMVIS: Next-Scale Autoregressive Multi-View Image Synthesis Authors: Ramil Khafizov, Ilya Statsenko, Ruslan Rakhimov, Artem Komarichev, Peter Wonka, Evgeny Burnaev Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04722v1 Sparse-view novel view synthesis is a central problem in 3D content creation, but diffusion-based approaches remain limited by iterative denoising, making multi-view generation expensive at inference time. We introduce NAMVIS, a diffusion-free framework that reformulates multi-view image synthesis as geometry-conditioned next-scale autoregression. Instead of generating target views through repeated denoising, NAMVIS predicts discrete visual tokens through a small number of coarse-to-fine scale steps, while sampling all tokens within each scale and across target views in parallel. To anchor this generation process to explicit camera geometry, we propose Multi-scale Projective Pose Encoding, which injects source and target camera transformations into both target-view self-attention and source-to-target cross-attention at every resolution. NAMVIS further combines global conditioning with dense geometry-aware cross-attention, enabling the model to preserve source-view appearance while maintaining target-view consistency. Across Objaverse, GSO, and OmniObject3D, NAMVIS outperforms diffusion-based baselines in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, while running over 3 times faster than the evaluated diffusion baselines under the same evaluation setting. These results suggest that geometry-conditioned next-scale autoregression is a promising and efficient alternative to diffusion for sparse-view multi-view synthesis. Additional qualitative results, videos, and resources are available at https://corl-team.github.io/namvis/ --- ### Knossos and Ariadne: Benchmarking and Learning Complete Diagram Topology Extraction with Vision-Language Models Authors: Bangwei Guo, Xujiang Zhao, Shengyu Chen, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Xi Zhu, Guoning Zhang, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Haifeng Chen Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04721v1 Structural diagrams are widely used to represent complex systems and relational information across scientific, engineering, procedural, and spatial domains. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have become increasingly capable of recognizing diagram elements and reasoning about their content, while complete diagram topology extraction remains comparatively underexplored. In this paper, we study diagram-to-graph topology extraction: extracting all diagram entities and the complete relations among them. To enable large-scale supervised training and systematic evaluation of this task, we introduce Knossos, a benchmark of 19,200 diagrams across six diverse domains, with 245,179 nodes and 439,740 edges. Its symbolic generation process provides exact alignment between rendered diagrams and annotations of complete topology, relation types, and connector geometry. To address the modeling challenge of complete topology extraction, we also present Ariadne, a structured framework that decomposes the task into node inventory extraction and source-conditioned edge prediction. Extensive experiments show that training on Knossos substantially improves complete topology extraction in smaller open-source VLMs. Ariadne further improves over one-step extraction under matched supervision, demonstrating the additional benefit of structured decomposition. It achieves the highest average Edge F1 among the evaluated methods on Knossos, while both backbone variants also improve over their unadapted counterparts on the real-world external benchmark. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/bangwayne/knossos_Ariadne_Public. --- ### WNet: Discrete Wavelets Transform for Efficient Token Mixing Authors: Rana Aref Salama, Abdou Youssef, Mona Diab Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04720v1 In a Transformer, token mixing is the step that lets each token draw information from other tokens, and it dominates the cost of encoding long sequences. Self-attention does this mixing very well: every token weighs every other token by content, which gives strong contextual modeling. That all-pairs comparison is also why its cost grows quadratically with sequence length. We introduce WNet, a Transformer encoder that replaces self-attention with token mixing based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Three attention-free mixers recombine the scales: by linear fusion, by learned gating, or by letting each token choose its scales. A hybrid adds self-attention in the last layer only. A receptive-field analysis shows that wavelet mixers built from two-tap filters, such as Haar, never relate tokens outside fixed blocks, however deep the network, even when the filters are learned. Longer filters reach the whole sequence within two layers. We pre-train every model with masked language modeling on a fixed-token subset of C4 and fine-tune on GLUE, using one controlled setup with size-matched BERT and FNet baselines and a control that cannot mix tokens. The token-gated mixer trains as fast as attention at 256 tokens and 2.7 times faster at 4,096. --- ### Learning to Clarify Underspecified Intents Under Limited Interaction Authors: Pranav M R, Manuel Cherep, Pattie Maes, Nikhil Singh Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04719v1 AI assistants receive requests that leave out information needed for a good outcome, for example about users' preferences or goals. They must then either speculate or ask for more information before proceeding. We reconceptualize this as a value-of-information problem: the assistant should acquire information whose absence causes the greatest avoidable loss in user utility. This is rarely known ex ante; rather, assistants must predict it in order to optimally allocate limited user interactions. We instantiate this problem in image generation and derive a reinforcement learning framework using multi-turn simulated users to maximize utility recovery under uncertainty. In a preregistered study with 456 interactive sessions across 76 human participants, this helped users significantly better match reference images with significantly fewer questions, less total interaction time, and lower cost. This points toward a simple and scalable framework for training language model assistants to better disambiguate user intent by asking more informative questions. --- ### Towards Automatically Pruning Logging Code with Coding Agents: How Far Are We? Authors: He Yang Yuan, Haonan Zhang, Xin Wang, An Ran Chen, Kisub Kim, Zishuo Ding, Zhenhao Li Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04716v1 Logging code supports debugging, monitoring, and software maintenance, but excessive logging can add noise, impose runtime overhead, and obscure diagnostic information. While prior research has extensively studied logging code generation and modification, logging removal remains comparatively underexplored. In this paper, we study developer logging removal practices and explore the use of coding agents for this task. We extract and manually validate logging removal cases from Python and Java repositories and derive 10 removal patterns and 11 removal reasons that characterize how and why logging code was removed in real-world software changes. We further construct LogRem, a dataset of 387 real-world cases covering direct logging statement removal, logging infrastructure removal, and logging replacement. We evaluate four coding agents with multiple model settings and compare their outputs with accepted real-world changes. Although 95.6% to 100.0% of outputs pass validity checks, only 11.1% to 19.6% remove the same logging code as the corresponding real-world change while preserving unrelated code. Agents differ through missed removals, extra removals, and unrelated code edits, with substantial variation across logging removal categories and trajectories. Execution cost varies widely, but higher cost does not consistently yield closer alignment. Commit messages and developer discussions provide the largest alignment gains, while taxonomy guidance consistently reduces runtime. Overall, our study establishes logging removal as a distinct software maintenance task and shows that reliable automation depends on accurately determining removal scope while preserving necessary code. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine logging code removal from this perspective. --- ### GPU-Accelerated Bregman Douglas-Rachford Splitting for Discrete Optimal Transport Authors: Yifan Xu, Shiqian Ma Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04715v1 We present GPU-accelerated Bregman Douglas--Rachford splitting algorithm (BDRS) for discrete optimal transport problem in three input formats: an explicit cost matrix, a point cloud with a ground cost between them, and a separable cost on a regular grid. For each input format, we propose hardware-aware designs of mathematically equivalent representations for the BDRS iterations to enhance numerical stability and empirical runtime. We benchmark the three proposed implementations against eight GPU baseline solvers from the literature on the same device. We demonstrate that our implementations of BDRS achieve state-of-the-art performance on their respective input formats. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cross-solver study of GPU DOT solvers with a unified measure of optimality. --- ### Organising Trajectory Evidence for Language-Model Agent Assurance: Fragments, Methods, and the Residual Authors: Xiaowei Huang Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04710v1 Methods for assessing language-model agents include rule checkers over logs, analyses of skill coverage and composition, support checkers, prefix monitors, execution gates, and rare-event estimators. Each observes a different part of a run and makes a claim of a different strength, and no common account says how these claims combine or what they leave unchecked. We give one, built from a logic, information fragments, and an assurance ledger. Requirements are formulas of a two-tier logic: an outer finite-trace temporal logic over recorded events, and an inner logic of standing over the argument structure that the agent's recorded context supports at a decision. A rule violation and an action taken on withdrawn support are thus formulas of one language. The information available to an assessor, to the agent, and to an execution gate defines fragments of that language; each checking method decides one fragment and returns a typed claim: exact, on a named test suite, a risk bound, or descriptive. The ledger merges the evidence and classifies every obligation as established, addressed but not established, or unaddressed. On 456 released $τ^2$-bench telecom trajectories, the benchmark oracle flags 231 runs; adding a rule checker, a support stand-in, and a prefix-monitor baseline raises the union to 391, 401, and 407, each contributing flags the others miss, and a gate makes one prohibition exact on a gated deployment. The 49 unflagged runs and the unmet or unaddressed obligations form the residual. Discovery makes unknown requirements explicit, and new or stronger checkers then reduce it. --- ### Localized Operator Learning with Adaptive Partition-of-Unity Mixture-of-Expert Networks Authors: Madison Cooley, Ramansh Sharma, Shandian Zhe, Robert M. Kirby, Varun Shankar Published: 2026-10-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04708v2 Operator learning methods such as DeepONets and FNOs often struggle with PDE families featuring sharp interfaces, heterogeneous coefficients, and localized multiscale structures. We introduce a partition-of-unity (POU) mixture-of-experts framework for localized operator learning, in which geometry-aware gating networks produce smooth spatial partitions which blend the contributions of local expert networks. Our main contribution is HiRefPOU, a residual-style hierarchical POU architecture for DeepONets that organizes localized representations through nested parent-child partitions while preserving global continuity. We also show that the same POU principle can be incorporated into Fourier Neural Operators to introduce spatial adaptivity without modifying the underlying spectral layers. On heterogeneous Darcy and reaction-diffusion benchmarks, HiRefPOU achieves substantially lower error than global DeepONet and static POU-MoE baselines, while the broader operator-learning experiments show that the benefits of localization depend on the PDE structure and the chosen neural-operator backbone. The learned partitions are interpretable and align with interfaces and regions of rapid solution variation. These results show that explicit geometric localization can improve both accuracy and interpretability in neural operator learning. ---