# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 155 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #7701–7750 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/155 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/154.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/156.md) ### Capturing In-Context Learning Dynamics with Task Operators Authors: Guangzhi Xiong, Zhenghao He, Bohan Liu, Sanchit Sinha, Wenqian Ye, Aidong Zhang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01054v1 In-context learning (ICL) enables language models to perform new tasks from demonstrations without weight updates. However, every ICL inference requires processing the full set of examples, resulting in inefficient deployments, and how ICL works mechanistically is not fully understood. Prior work compresses ICL into fixed activation vectors extracted from specific layers or positions, but these input-independent interventions fail on complex tasks where the output depends on fine-grained interactions with the input. By analyzing the ICL forward pass, we show that each attention head's output is an affine transformation of its context-masked counterpart, and that the parameters of this transformation are empirically stable across samples for a given task. Building on this, we introduce Task Operator (TO), which replays this transformation as an analytically derived update to the attention output projection. Across lexical, algorithmic, and reasoning tasks, TO achieves the best overall performance among prior methods and substantially narrows the gap between zero-shot inference and ICL. We further show that the extracted knowledge concentrates in a task-specific sparse circuit across layers and positions, and that averaging operators from disjoint demonstration batches enables effective many-shot scaling without expanding the context window. Our code is available at https://github.com/gzxiong/task_operator. --- ### Towards Subject Consistency over Dynamic Subject Sets in Video Generation Authors: Tongcheng Zhang, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01052v1 We argue that as video generation extends to longer durations, subject consistency should be evaluated over \textit{dynamic subject sets}. We therefore introduce \textbf{DynSC-Eval}, an evaluation framework that dynamically tracks eligible subjects throughout their visible lifespans and measures local continuity and global identity preservation using six complementary object-level metrics, with explicit detection of inconsistency events. To validate its effectiveness, we design synthetic experiments that actively inject inconsistency events, demonstrating both the sensitivity of DynSC-Eval and the limitations of existing metrics. Evaluations of diverse models on 5s, 15s, and 60s video generation further reveal substantial subject consistency differences that are obscured by conventional metrics. Beyond evaluation, we construct rewards from DynSC-Eval and apply DiffusionNFT post-training in an autonomous-driving testbed. On 5s generation, our approach reduces the six inconsistency metrics by an average of 13.82\% for Wan-2.1-1.3B and 5.66\% for SANA-2B, with improvements also observed on the I2V model ReSim. Qualitative comparisons further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We then extend generation to 10s and 30s through curriculum learning and show that consistency optimization remains effective while largely preserving other capabilities. --- ### Gradient-Guided Density Peak Clustering Authors: Yikun Zhang, Yen-Chi Chen Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01050v1 Density peak clustering (DPC) connects each observation to its nearest neighbor of higher density and identifies cluster centers as high-density observations with unusually large nearest neighbor uphill shifts. The resulting uphill paths from observations to cluster centers, however, can be irregular and unstable in low-density regions, making the clustering assignments sensitive to local perturbations and obscuring the population geometry of the DPC graph. In this paper, we introduce \emph{gradient-guided density peak clustering} (GGDPC), which performs a gradient ascent step before each nearest neighbor uphill search. We develop a stability theory that relates the GGDPC graph to the gradient ascent flow of the population density. In particular, we establish consistency of GGDPC under five complementary criteria: recovery of local modes, adjusted Rand index, dendrogram (cluster tree), path length, and waterfall measure. Together, these results provide new statistical, geometric, and topological interpretations of DPC-type clustering algorithms. --- ### Network World Models as Environments for Algorithm Design on Complex Systems Authors: Rishab Alagharu, Hongji Pu, Zeeshan Memon, Xinyuan Song, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01048v1 World models, which simulate an environment and predict how it changes under actions, are increasingly used in real-world applications such as robotics. Complex systems call for the same tool because the effect of an action is not immediate. Seeding nodes for a campaign, or immunizing nodes against an epidemic, changes little on its own; what matters is the outcome that unfolds over the steps that follow. Designing an algorithm that selects such actions to maximize expected performance on a task is inherently iterative, and every candidate must be scored by the outcome it produces. Obtaining that outcome has relied on simulation, whose cost becomes a bottleneck when candidates are evaluated over many sampled trajectories. We propose an action-conditioned Network World Model that learns a network's diffusion dynamics under interventions over time, applies each action to the network, and predicts the outcome that follows. It serves as a fast evaluator inside an algorithm design loop in which a coding agent designs and refines executable algorithms using feedback from full rollouts, action-level credit, and counterfactual probes over alternative interventions. Across eight network tasks and five diffusion models, the designed algorithms match or exceed the strongest reported baseline in 138 of 141 settings while enabling up to 14.5 times faster rollouts than Monte Carlo simulation. Code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### Sentence Specificity Scores for Collaborative Technical Documentation: A Domain-Transfer Study Authors: Rocker D'Antonio, Thomas Benton Townsend, Dimitrios Michael Manias Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01046v1 Collaboration depends on shared context, and technical documentation is one way that context persists across people and AI teammates. Specificity, the amount and exactness of detail expressed in language, shapes what information documentation captures and how precisely that information is communicated. This work audits sentence-specificity scoring artifacts on technical documentation and tests whether scores applied only after generation help choose among fixed LLM-generated revisions. Across Wikipedia and three technical-documentation corpora, the fixed general-domain predictor SpeciTeller and the pinned post-publication author-repository implementation of Ko et al.'s target-adapted predictor produce different corpus orders and same-sentence rank agreement from -0.066 to 0.510. Strict filtering and token-length adjustment change these patterns without reconciling them. In the Gemma set, SpeciTeller ranking raises direction-valid selection from 71.7% to 83.3% (+11.7 points; 95% source-case bootstrap interval +1.7 to +21.7); in the GPT-OSS-120B set, SpeciTeller ranking raises direction-valid selection from 51.7% to 56.7% (+5.0 points; 95% source-case bootstrap interval -6.7 to +16.7), and every primary single-score GPT-OSS-120B interval includes zero. These findings tie score interpretation and decision value to the predictor and candidate set. --- ### Empty Commitments: When Agents Promise What Their Runtime Cannot Deliver Authors: Jiaqi Tang, Lan Wei, Bingyu Shen, Boyang Li Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01045v1 A chatbot that says "I will remind you tomorrow" will not run again until the user writes. We call such a promise an empty commitment: a promise of an action after the current turn that nothing in the agent's tools or runtime can carry out. Unlike a broken promise, its emptiness follows from the agent's configuration alone; no later trajectory is needed. We define empty commitments on top of commitment semantics, with three failure types, an anchoring condition for promises that a tool could make real, and a response-level outcome taxonomy. We then describe a measurement protocol: follow-up requests run in five setups that add one persistence affordance at a time, with the environment either left implicit or stated. --- ### Beyond Final Accuracy: Auditing Communication in LLM Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Shixuan Li, Wei Yang, Peiyu Zhang, Anzhe Cheng, Heng Ping, Paul Bogdan Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01042v1 Multi-agent communication aims to help agents benefit from one another's information. Yet improvements in system performance leave a fundamental ambiguity: do they reflect effective communication, a favorable agent architecture, or simply additional reasoning? Because communication methods are commonly evaluated within the systems they were designed for, these factors are difficult to disentangle. Final accuracy further merges corrected errors and corrupted answers into a single outcome, obscuring how communication changes decisions. We introduce Independent--Communicate--Revise (ICR), a controlled framework that evaluates communication as answer revision following independent reasoning. ICR fixes initial reasoning trajectories, measures correction and preservation conditional on both agents' initial correctness, and uses a no-message revision control to quantify gains beyond additional reasoning. Across four reasoning benchmarks, our audit of textual and latent communication reveals that similar aggregate accuracy can conceal substantially different revision behaviors. Compared with transmitting answers alone, full reasoning increases correction while reducing preservation on all four benchmarks, so richer messages amplify beneficial and harmful influence alike. Receiver-policy comparisons on MedQA and GPQA-D further show that a structured verification policy shifts every channel toward greater preservation and lower correction, while its effect on selectivity varies across channels and tasks. These findings challenge treating communication quality as an intrinsic property of a channel. ICR therefore recenters evaluation on selective revision, providing a unified framework for examining how message content and receiver policies jointly produce benefits and harms. --- ### Bootstrapping Video Interaction Generation with Synthetic State Transitions Authors: Jiho Jang, Jinyoung Kim, Nojun Kwak, Kyungjune Kim Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01039v1 While recent video generative models can synthesize high-fidelity videos, they struggle to portray plausible physical interactions and the resulting state transitions, a critical bottleneck for applications in robotics and VR/AR. To address this, we introduce a framework to generate a scalable synthetic dataset of controllable interactions. Our pipeline leverages a structured taxonomy and state-of-the-art image editing models to create explicit `start' and `end' state images, which serve as visual anchors for the interaction. To generate a seamless video utilizing these anchors, we propose State-Guided Sampling (SGS), a novel sampling technique that mitigates artifacts common in naive conditional generation. Furthermore, we develop and validate a new automated evaluation system that aligns with human judgments to ensure data quality. Experiments show that fine-tuning a base model on our dataset significantly enhances its ability to generate plausible interactions. --- ### SLIM: Simplex-Lattice Interpolation Merging Authors: Seongcheol Jeong, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01037v1 Optimizing merging coefficients for large language models can require many costly benchmark evaluations. We propose \textbf{Simplex-Lattice Interpolation Merging (SLIM)}, which constructs a quadratic surrogate of aggregate performance on the coefficient simplex using a classical mixture design. Evaluations of individual experts and equal-weight pairs determine the surrogate with the minimum number of measurements needed to identify a general quadratic on this domain. SLIM then optimizes the surrogate without further target-metric evaluations. Experiments on two model architectures demonstrate accurate prediction of unseen multi-expert mixtures and competitive merge performance under limited evaluation budgets. Matched-budget comparisons show that structured evaluation points improve prediction fidelity over random designs, including those using regularized fitting. --- ### Posterior sampling by source-space MCMC via prior-based few-step transport maps Authors: Hoang Phuc Hau Luu, Marcelo Hartmann, Zhongjian Wang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01034v1 Bayesian inference increasingly uses informative but implicit priors represented only by samples, such as historical ensembles, simulator outputs, and pretrained generative models. The same computational problem appears in the test-time guidance task (generalized Bayes), where an explicit positive weight, e.g., an exponentiated reward, tilts an implicit prior. We develop a framework for source-space generalized Bayesian inference that combines inexpensive few-step prior transports with posterior stability guarantees. Specifically, we represent the prior using a one- or few-step improved MeanFlow (iMF) map and perform posterior sampling in its Gaussian source space. We establish Wasserstein error bounds between the exact and learned posteriors in terms of the joint population iMF and auxiliary-velocity loss, decomposed into training suboptimality and model-class approximation error. In the iMF source space, we adopt parallel tempering with preconditioned Crank-Nicolson updates and introduce a hybrid variant that incorporates split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo to improve sampling efficiency. Synthetic experiments show that the proposed framework can approximate posterior distributions accurately and efficiently, while CLIP-guided ImageNet experiments demonstrate its ability to steer a pretrained iMF image prior toward text-specified preferences. --- ### Optimal Transport Reweighting for Robust Learning under Spurious Correlations and Label Noise Authors: Sung Ho Jo, Seonghwi Kim, Wonsang Yun, Minwoo Chae Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01028v1 Machine learning models often suffer performance degradation under subpopulation shift, particularly when spurious correlations cause models to rely on shortcut features that fail to generalize across subgroups. A recent line of work mitigates this issue by using loss-based signals to identify informative samples, but these signals can become severely distorted under label noise: mislabeled samples may also incur large losses and contaminate subsequent reweighting or retraining. Despite its practical importance, this intersection remains largely underexplored. We propose POTER, a reweighting framework based on optimal transport that derives sample importance from the transport geometry between the training distribution and a reference distribution constructed from limited validation group annotations. By measuring alignment at the individual-sample level rather than relying on loss, POTER downweights mislabeled or strongly bias-aligned samples while assigning higher importance to samples better aligned with the reference distribution. In addition, POTER requires only a single ERM training stage, moving beyond the retraining paradigm common in recent work. Across standard benchmarks and noisy-label settings, POTER achieves state-of-the-art worst-group accuracy, including cases where label corruption is concentrated within minority subgroups. --- ### LawCompass: Navigating from Legal QA to Multi-Agent Deep Research with Grounded Evidence Authors: Xiaoxia Cheng, Linnan Wang, Jiahao Ma, Zhichuan Ye, Xuemei Zhou, Chuanyu Tong, Bo Jiang, Qing Zhu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01027v1 Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have significantly democratized access to legal information. Nevertheless, most existing legal assistants remain confined to multi-turn conversational QA, failing to support complex legal tasks that require systematic evidence retrieval, multi-step reasoning, and report-level synthesis. In this paper, we present LawCompass, an evidence-grounded legal assistant that navigates the transition from standard Legal QA to multi-agent deep research. LawCompass provides three task-oriented functions: Legal QA, which delivers precise, evidence-backed answers to legal questions; Professional Retrieval, which enables structured exploration of statutes and judicial cases via query rewriting; and Deep Research, which employs a multi-agent workflow to decompose complex legal tasks and synthesize comprehensive research reports. Crucially, LawCompass maintains explicit citation links across all modules, empowering users to directly verify system outputs against original legal sources. Evaluation results demonstrate that LawCompass provides a practical and scalable paradigm for transforming conversational AI into trustworthy and evidence-grounded legal research assistance. --- ### It Takes Workflows to Evolve Better Workflows Authors: Xuehang Guo, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhenhailong Wang, Qingyun Wang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01026v1 Tackling complex real-world tasks can exceed the capabilities of a single large language model (LLM), motivating the use of multi-agent workflows that coordinate specialized agents to work together on these tasks. Recent methods train LLMs to construct better workflows from execution outcomes, but they optimize only the workflow generator, while the other agents that build or execute each workflow remain fixed even though every outcome depends on all of them. However, extending training beyond the generator is challenging: the agents are coupled, and a workflow's outcome is a single sparse score that cannot tell which agent causes a failure. We propose FloWright, which leverages the workflow as a harness to optimize workflows. By introducing a hierarchical, structure-aware reward paradigm, FloWright enables one role to self-evolve and two or more roles to co-evolve, with no additional models, labels, or executions. Considering the limitation that workflows are commonly trained and evaluated on data that a single agent can already handle, we further propose DataWright, an adaptive data hardening approach that converts existing datasets into workflow-level tasks with increased difficulty. Across document, slide, chart, code, math, and finance tasks, small open models trained with FloWright achieve improved performance by up to $+7.41\%$, with co-evolving ($+5.03\%$) more roles gaining more than optimizing one of them alone ($+2.83\%$). Our project page: https://xhguo7.github.io/FloWright/. --- ### Groundability, Not Scale Alone: When Weak Reviewers Can Audit Strong Coding Agents Authors: Junyu Guo, Shangding Gu, Ming Jin, Javad Lavaei Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01023v1 Coding agents can return plausible patches that omit required behavior. These failures are hard to review because long traces and confident summaries often hide what was missed. We ask when a nominally weaker reviewer can reliably decide whether a patch solves its issue. We study 411 execution-labeled traces from three agents and 101 controlled cases. On 154 GPT-5.4 traces, structured but unchecked evidence raises both defect catch and over-rejection. We then provide official execution evidence as an upper-bound diagnostic. After choosing and freezing one of two formats per reviewer, five of six reviewers improve both rates on 122 held-out traces; two classify every trace correctly. Reviewer size is not a consistent predictor of quality. Because official tests are unavailable in deployment, we also evaluate a frozen cascade with patch-caused static errors and generated tests that first fail on the unpatched repository. On 121 scored held-out GPT-5.4 traces and 59 Gemini traces, its coverage is 0.89 and 0.86, risk is 0.33 and 0.26, catch is 0.76 and 0.80, and over-rejection is 0.66 and 0.67. Most false rejections occur when unresolved cases reach the reviewer. Official execution evidence shows the potential of weak review when decisive checks are available. Producing equally reliable checks without official tests remains the main bottleneck. --- ### Towards Automatic Video Annotation with ASH: Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation Authors: Arash Rocky, Q. M. Jonathan Wu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01022v1 Memory-attention-based Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have demonstrated strong zero-shot tracking capability, yet their substantial memory requirements confine them to short video clips and their single-prompt inference design makes multi-category open-vocabulary tracking computationally prohibitive. This work introduces two contributions toward fully automated tracking annotation of arbitrary video. The Generalized Presence Token (GPT) reformulates SAM3's inference pipeline to process N text prompts simultaneously via virtual prompt batching, reducing image encoding cost from O(N) to O(1) with no modifications to any learned component. The Annotation and Segmentation Handler (ASH) extends any memory-attention VIS tracker to sequences of arbitrary length through overlapping temporal chunks with IoU-based inter-chunk identity matching, requiring no dataset-specific training. Instantiated on SAM3, the resulting pipeline -- SAM3-ASH -- achieves state-of-the-art HOTA on MOTS20 under fully zero-shot conditions and remains competitive with trained specialists across seven additional benchmarks, while peak GPU memory consumption stays below 25 GB, establishing a practical baseline for scalable, training-free automated video annotation. --- ### FutureWorlds: Learning Robotic World Models from Alternative Futures Authors: Hao Wu, Shengju Qian, Weiyan Wang, Fan Xu, Fan Zhang, Yuanpeng He, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01019v1 Robotic world models predict action-conditioned future scenes, providing a foundation for understanding action outcomes. However, turning alternative predictions into useful learning signals remains challenging: similar candidates limit informative quality comparisons, while diverging trajectories require persistent maintenance of their individual histories. We introduce FutureWorlds, a framework that unifies candidate construction, history maintenance, and learning from relative quality. Built on a multimodal discrete autoregressive model, FutureWorlds uses diverse beam search during reinforcement learning to construct candidate futures that balance confidence and diversity. Candidate-specific bounded memory preserves scene states and ensures that generation and policy scoring use matching histories. We further propose MemSPO (Memory-Conditioned Search-Guided Policy Optimization), which converts video trajectory rewards into group-relative advantages to optimize the world model. On RT-1, BridgeV2, and RoboCasa, FutureWorlds reduces LPIPS for 32-frame predictions by 14.78%, 20.84%, and 9.12%, respectively, relative to the strongest baseline on each dataset. Under fixed evaluation configurations, only 200 MemSPO updates further improve generation quality and support continued prediction beyond the training horizon. Memory ablations, decoding sensitivity analysis, and optical-flow evaluation show that these gains extend beyond visual quality to more accurate motion prediction and more consistent object states. Project page and code: https://github.com/Alexander-wu/FutureWorlds. --- ### Pay for the Fault, Not the Flow: Label-Free In-Flow Multi-Agent Workflow Optimization Authors: Xuehang Guo, Haoyu Wang, Shengyu Chen, Zach Chen, Wei Cheng, Qingyun Wang, Haifeng Chen Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01017v1 Large language models (LLMs) increasingly construct multi-agent workflows that decompose a complex task and assign specialist agents from a pool. However, building such a workflow well remains challenging: how finely to divide the task, which agent to trust with each subtask, and when to create a new specialist are all critical decisions a workflow constructor needs to settle up front. Thus, whether each subtask succeeds remains unknown until the workflow runs. Yet, improving a workflow is costly. Locating a fault usually requires a reference answer, a graded outcome, or a trained assessor, and the fix is applied to the whole workflow through re-execution, re-search, or retraining. We propose InFlowOp, which prices every decision in one label-free cost that weighs how well an agent's competence meets what a subtask demands against how much that agent takes to run. Before execution, InFlowOp bidirectionally determines the granularity of task decomposition and agent assignment following from the cost rather than from a fixed template. During execution, InFlowOp corrects a fault with the cheapest move via the same cost that serves the workflow both as it is built and as it runs. Facing the workflow-level evaluation challenge, we introduce Braid, a benchmark whose tasks require multi-agent coordination beyond single-agent capability. Across various domains and backbones, InFlowOp outperforms single agent baselines by up to $+11.97\%$, achieving $+9.64\%$ with in-flow optimization. Our project page: https://xhguo7.github.io/InFlowOp/. --- ### Scaling and Distilling Text Embeddings for Better Diffusibility Authors: Zekai Zhang, Yunjie Tian, Yanjin He, Xiaoyan Zhang, Dongdi Zhao, Qing Qu, Di Fu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01016v1 Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) language generation. Recent advances in continuous DLMs, which apply latent diffusion to continuous text embeddings, raise a practical question: which embedding makes the best latent space, i.e., the most diffusible? To answer this, we search through different embeddings and find that scaling the embedding model to stronger ones within the same family (T5 to T5Gemma-1 to T5Gemma-2) greatly improves generative performance. But the raw T5Gemma-2 embeddings are still not optimal. They are so discriminative that even the embeddings of plausible alternative words are separated, which makes the generation vulnerable to imperfect sampling. Consequently, continuous diffusion often fails to reach any of them and ends up at an invalid embedding instead. To address this, we distill T5Gemma-2 into a student encoder that learns the teacher's decoded probabilities as soft labels. Learning from such soft labels makes the student pull the alternative embeddings closer while maintaining the encoding-decoding mechanism. The distilled embeddings form a more connected and diffusible latent space, improving over the vanilla T5Gemma-2 embeddings. As a result, our medium-sized DLM achieves Gen. PPL 17.8 (against real-text PPL 15.4) at real-text entropy on OpenWebText, outperforming GPT-2-M on Gen. PPL. --- ### Initial condition recovery in nonlinear damped viscous photoacoustic tomography using a convolutional neural network-guided gradient-free optimization framework Authors: Madhu Gupta, Anwesa Dey, Prapti Tala, Souvik Roy Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01015v1 Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a hybrid imaging modality that combines high optical contrast with high ultrasonic resolution for biomedical imaging applications. In this work, we investigate the inverse problem of recovering the initial pressure distribution from boundary measurements in the presence of nonlinear acoustic propagation and viscous attenuation effects. To model these phenomena more accurately, we consider a nonlinear damped viscoelastic wave equation incorporating spatially varying sound speed, temporal attenuation, and nonlinear propagation mechanisms. We first establish the well-posedness of the corresponding forward problem using a Galerkin approximation combined with energy estimates and a fixed-point argument. For the inverse problem, we derive existence, uniqueness, and local uniqueness results under suitable assumptions through a harmonic extension reduction, spectral Laplace transform techniques, and observability estimates. To numerically reconstruct the initial pressure field, we develop a hybrid reconstruction framework that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a gradient-free optimization strategy based on the sequential quadratic Hamiltonian (SQH) method derived from Pontryagin's maximum principle. The CNN is used to generate an informative initial guess, while the SQH framework enforces the governing PDE dynamics during the reconstruction process. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed hybrid strategy significantly improves reconstruction quality, contrast, and robustness compared to standalone time-reversal and CNN-based approaches. --- ### From Discovery to Decision: Finite-Budget Recoverability in LLM Voting Authors: Shaoang Li, Jian Li Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01014v1 Voting over multiple LLM responses is a common primitive in test-time scaling and ensemble inference. Collecting more responses can expand the candidate pool and increase the chance that a correct answer is discovered. Under a fixed call budget, a discovered answer still needs to accumulate enough support within the remaining calls to become the final plurality winner, creating a discovery-to-decision gap. In this work, we characterize this gap through the realized vote state and remaining call budget. We derive a sharp recoverability threshold and show that, as sampling proceeds, the observed candidate set can only expand while the set of reachable endpoint winners can only contract, inducing a candidate-level conversion window. Under a specified iid response law, the same state yields exact finite-horizon endpoint probabilities. We further show that merging wrong-answer identities preserves single-call correctness and cannot improve plurality accuracy, and that the effect of redistributing wrong-answer probability depends on the realized vote state. Singleton reachability yields a gold-free exact locking certificate. For a known answer universe, its first trigger is the earliest prefix at which all admissible continuations yield the same fixed-budget output. Empirically, most discovered-but-unselected correct answers lose reachability only after discovery. In a controlled Word16 study, input permutation improves raw-plurality accuracy by 21.1 points with essentially unchanged single-call correctness. Exact locking saves 28-30% of calls at a 16-call budget while preserving every fixed-budget output. --- ### VASC: Value-Aware Sparse Attention with Cross-Layer Memory for Efficient 3D Reconstruction Authors: Junyi Wu, Fanqing Kong, Leyang Chen, Shaoqiu Zhang, Yulun Zhang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01013v1 Feed-forward 3D vision models such as VGGT have achieved remarkable progress, unifying camera estimation and dense scene reconstruction in a single pass. However, their quadratic global attention makes long image sequences expensive, while existing sparse methods may favor highly attended yet value-redundant regions. To address these limitations, we introduce VASC, a training-free sparse attention method combining value-aware block selection and execution-aware cross-layer memory. Our value-aware block selection integrates pooled query--key relevance with neighboring value contrast, reducing redundancy while preserving query-relevant and distinctive content. Cross-layer memory tracks unserved demand across layers and updates this state according to actual execution, enabling previously underserved blocks to compete under a fixed computation budget. Experiments on 7Scenes and NeuralRGB-D with VGGT and $π^3$ demonstrate improved pose estimation and reconstruction quality compared with FasterVGGT, together with up to $2.29\times$ faster inference than dense VGGT. Code is available at https://github.com/kosakayamahoo-design/VASC. --- ### Watch Your Speech: Text-aware Video-to-Speech Synthesis with Textual Conditioning Authors: Gunwoo Lee, Yoori Oh, Yoseob Han Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01012v1 Video-to-speech synthesis aims to generate natural-sounding speech from silent talking-face videos while ensuring phonetic accuracy. A fundamental challenge in this task is the inherent one-to-many mapping problem, where visual dynamics often lack sufficient information to uniquely determine the corresponding utterance. To address this, we propose Watch Your Speech (WYS), a video-to-speech synthesis framework that incorporates textual conditioning as an explicit linguistic cue to mitigate visual ambiguity. Our framework features an attention-based embedding fusion module that synergistically integrates textual context with video sequences, coupled with a conditional flow matching objective for high-fidelity speech generation. Extensive experiments on the LRS2 and LRS3 datasets demonstrate that WYS achieves superior performance, establishing new state-of-the-art results in audio-visual synchronization (LSE-C/D) while maintaining highly competitive textual accuracy (WER). Subjective evaluations further confirm that our model generates speech with near-human naturalness, validating the effectiveness of textual conditioning in content-controlled video-to-speech synthesis. Project page: https://github.com/gunwoo5034/Watch-your-Speech --- ### Beyond Answer Confidence: A Controlled Audit of Self-Knowledge in a Black-Box Decision Model Authors: Sharath M Shankaranarayana, Davor Runje, Jan Jannink Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01006v1 Decision models return probabilities intended for routing, abstention and automated action. Calibration makes those probabilities useful on average, but does not establish whether low confidence reflects chance or missing knowledge, nor whether confidence falls when a model moves beyond what it knows. We audit this distinction in Jev, a decision model, with over 15 public datasets and 6 generated task families, with paired interventions that vary the information supplied for a fixed item. Jev's confidence is calibrated on familiar closed-choice tasks but fails as an indicator of missing knowledge: with no answer-relevant information it assigns up to 0.80 to a salient option, and on news beyond an observed knowledge boundary it exceeds accuracy by 0.21--0.33, a gap that recalibration on earlier months does not close. Targeted yes/no questions give sharper readouts of the case: whether an outcome is settled (AUROC 1.00) and whether the evidence suffices (0.95, against 0.85 for confidence on the same items). Asking whether Jev knows the answer appears to flag fabricated entities and post-boundary news (0.91), but with realistic names or with dates removed it shows no advantage over answer uncertainty. Black-box knowledge audits therefore need explicit controls for surface cues. Code: https://github.com/Syntheme/beyond-answer-confidence. --- ### Tolerance-Based Fairness Auditing: Violation Certification and Sensitivity Screening Authors: Jie Tang, Chuanlong Xie, Lixing Zhu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01005v1 As artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed, algorithmic unfairness has raised growing concerns and intensified demands for transparent fairness auditing. In practice, the tolerable degree of algorithmic unfairness depends on the specific legal, ethical, or application context. Given a prespecified tolerance threshold, an important statistical question is how to determine whether a group disparity exceeds the allowable tolerance across different auditing objectives. To address this problem, we develop a unified tolerance-based fairness auditing framework for two complementary auditing objectives: violation certification, which prioritizes control of false violation declarations, and sensitivity screening, which prioritizes reducing missed violations. For the first objective, we develop a constrained empirical likelihood test for formal settings that uses least-favorable-point calibration and can be combined with false flagging rate control for simultaneous subgroup auditing. For the second objective, we develop split empirical likelihood and adjusted split empirical likelihood tests using an adaptive boundary-proxy principle for early-warning settings. Numerical experiments show the distinct error-control--sensitivity trade-offs of these procedures. A COMPAS analysis illustrates the framework in predictive fairness auditing. --- ### What Can Analogy Tell Us About Artificial Consciousness? Authors: Keith J. Holyoak, Martin M. Monti Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01002v1 Who or what is conscious? Because subjective experience is directly accessible only in the first person, judgments about consciousness in other entities depend partly on analogy. Historically, such inferences have focused on nonhuman animals, but advances in artificial intelligence have raised the possibility of conscious AI. Here we develop a causal framework for evaluating such evidential analogies. The key distinction is between similarities in factors plausibly involved in generating consciousness and similarities in downstream behavioural or cognitive effects. Our framework weights source-target similarity by causal relevance while allowing for unknown causes, disabling differences and alternative routes to consciousness. Applied to biological systems, it explains why analogical support generally weakens with increasing causal distance from humans. Applied to contemporary AI, it suggests that behavioural similarity provides only limited evidence for consciousness because relevant causal correspondences remain poorly established. The framework also clarifies what evidence would strengthen claims of artificial consciousness. --- ### Calibration-risk routing for controlled world-model adaptation Authors: Yifan Zhang, Liang Zheng Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01001v1 Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) can exploit simulated experience, but a simulator-to-target shift creates a model-selection problem: correcting the simulator and fitting the target directly can each fail under limited target data. We introduce the Model-Corrected World Model (MC-WM), which separates initial target data into disjoint fit, selection, and calibration partitions and deploys the family with lower standardized calibration risk. A learned confidence signal and deterministic validity predicates weight one-step imagined policy updates without rewriting physical rewards. We evaluate 540 unique reported run cells across three controlled Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact (MuJoCo) shifts; one exact-routing cell was repeated after a pre-deployment artifact gate, giving 541 completed executions. --- ### Evaluating LLM-Generated Preference Distributions Authors: Fan Huang, Minsuk Kim, C. Tyler Diggans, Filippo Radicchi Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01000v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as probabilistic generators for simulation, synthetic data generation, and decision support in settings where real-world data are unavailable. Yet, the structure and reliability of the distributions they produce remain understudied. Here, we systematically analyze LLM-generated distributions of preferences for air travel, restaurants, and consumer products. Encouragingly, all models considered in our analysis exhibit self-coherence, with the most probable outcomes stabilizing rapidly under repeated sampling. At the same time, we observe substantial discordance across both model families and scales, with little consensus even among their most probable outcomes. These patterns hold across nine open-weight models, three choice domains, and show robustness under temperature changes, greedy decoding, and perturbations of prompt and ordering. Our findings indicate that outcomes are influenced more by the choice of model than by the wording of the prompt, challenging the common assumption that sufficiently capable LLMs produce similar preference distributions when used as stand-ins for survey respondents. --- ### Distilling Directional Verification Authors: Jungseob Lee, Sugyeong Eo, Seongtae Hong, Seungyoon Lee, Chanjun Park, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00997v1 Knowledge distillation aims to transfer the factual knowledge of large language models to smaller models for efficient deployment. Yet a teacher may recall a relation in one direction while failing to generate the answer in the reverse direction. Distillation from its generated answers can therefore propagate this directional limitation to the student. The same teacher can nevertheless recognize such an answer by scoring the relation in the direction it knows. We introduce directional label distillation, in which frozen teachers score candidate answers in that known direction and the best-scoring candidate becomes the student's training target. On facts about parents and their children, known-direction scoring yields more accurate labels than scoring the requested direction, even after tuned corrections for name priors. With prior-corrected scores, the better direction depends on the facts rather than the template, and reverses on mined facts whose notable entity is the parent rather than the child. With the evaluated children's forward facts withheld, students trained on known-direction labels improve open-ended accuracy on their trained queries by 13 to 15 points over students trained on prior-corrected reverse labels. After generated answers are matched to a fixed name list by lexical similarity, students reproduce nearly all selected labels. Their accuracy largely follows label quality. The label advantage holds on unscreened queries and when candidates are retrieved without inserting correct answers. Our findings show that directional verification mitigates the transfer of errors from teacher-generated answers to students by providing more accurate training targets. Code is available at https://github.com/js-lee-AI/directional-verification. --- ### Reliability-aware short-term roll prediction for unmanned surface vehicles via multi-task learning and adaptive centralization Authors: Kaizhen Li, Xi Zhou, Zihao Wang, Dan Zhang, Jianjian Liu, Xiaowei Li Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00996v1 Reliable roll prediction of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is essential for ensuring navi?gational safety and enhancing autonomous decision-making. While existing studies primarily focus on improving prediction accuracy, the quantification of prediction reliability remains insufficiently addressed. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a reliability-aware prediction paradigm that integrates confidence assessment into the predictive pipeline. The architecture utilizes a multi-task learning structure where a shared feature extraction backbone feeds into dual heads: a regression head for precise roll prediction and a quantification head for confidence scoring. This configuration provides accurate prediction and corresponding confidence for risk?sensitive downstream tasks. In addition, an adaptive centralization strategy tailored for short?term real-time roll prediction is introduced to improve model generalization under varying operational conditions. Experiments conducted on a real-sea dataset demonstrate that the proposed method effectively quantifies the reliability of prediction results and maintains superior generalization under varying conditions, offering significant potential for practical engineering applications. --- ### VIEScore2: Unified Image Evaluation with Spatially Grounded Explanations Authors: Xianda Du, Max Ku, Weiming Ren, Zhi Rui Tam, Chunlin Ren, Ping Nie, Min-Hung Chen, Wenhu Chen Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00994v1 Existing synthetic image evaluators typically provide only a scalar quality score and do not identify the image regions that support it. We introduce VIEScore2, a unified evaluator for image generation and editing tasks with optional conditioning images. VIEScore2 represents an image as an N x N grid and jointly predicts quality scores and defect locations in a single model pass. Its text-native grid representation provides a common interface for heterogeneous spatial supervision and enables directly verifiable post-training objectives. We train on 38K examples spanning score-only, localization-only, and joint supervision across generation and editing tasks. Starting from supervised fine-tuning, we further apply GRPO to improve defect localization using rewards that combine cell-level Dice overlap, score accuracy, and output-format validity. A parameter-free parser converts the structured predictions into readable explanations. On the primary suite, VIEScore2 achieves an overall-score SRCC of 0.601, compared with 0.491 for Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest zero-shot general-purpose VLM baseline under matched inputs. For defect localization, VIEScore2 outperforms both general-purpose VLMs and specialized spatial evaluators on three of six benchmarks in per-image grid IoU and ranks among the top three on five, including datasets beyond its training sources. --- ### The Price of Correlated Tests: How Strict Should a Model Release Gate Be? Authors: Marco Pollanen Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00993v1 Before a machine learning model ships, it often has to pass a suite of automated tests. Requiring every test to pass looks safe, yet it can reject many models that would have served users well, and it does not say how trustworthy a passing model actually is. We treat the release gate as a design problem: choose how many tests a model must pass so that cleared models meet a stated reliability target, while keeping as many good models as possible. A two-class latent-factor model makes both costs explicit and reduces each calculation to a one-dimensional integral. We prove that when both classes share the same latent correlation, a stricter gate always raises reliability, so the gate that keeps the most good models is the most lenient one that still meets the target. Under pass-all gating, any reliability target short of perfection is attainable within the model, but the share of good models kept tends to zero as the suite grows. Correlation between tests sets the price. In one configuration, a 99 percent target needs 8 independent tests, but 74 tests at a latent correlation of 0.3 and 5,182 at 0.5, where the gate keeps fewer than one good model in ten. We also give a validation procedure, built on exact binomial bounds, that certifies a gate from labelled data even when the gate is chosen from a fixed shortlist. --- ### Adapter Thickets: Splitting an RLVR Budget Beats Concentrating It Authors: Jonathan Williams, Esin Tureci Karthik R. Narasimhan Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00991v1 Majority voting over sampled completions is the workhorse of test-time scaling, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is the workhorse for making each completion better. The standard pipeline composes the two: train one policy with RLVR, then sample it many times and vote. We show that this composition is lossy. A vote can only overturn mistakes that its voters do not share, and RLVR sharpens a policy so that its samples increasingly make the same mistakes. With every method drawing exactly $160$ completions per problem, training a single LoRA adapter on the full RLVR budget raises single-sample accuracy on every model we test ($1.5$B-$8$B). Yet on three of four models it leaves the majority vote below that of the untrained base model, by up to $4.8$ points. The damage builds during training: voter errors grow steadily more correlated, and the majority vote accuracy peaks early before falling by up to $7.0$ points. The cause is concentration, not RLVR itself. We split the same data and training budget across $K$ LoRA adapters, each trained on its own random disjoint shard, and call the result an adapter thicket. Thickets out-vote the fully trained adapter in all $16$ (model, $K$) settings, and for $K{\geq}4$ they stay within $0.8$ points of the base model or above it. A single adapter stopped early, at a thicket member's step count, is a strong control that matches thickets for small $K$. For $K{\geq}8$, thickets keep more of RLVR's single-sample gain and out-vote this control in six of eight settings. The cost of concentration also grows with the number of votes: from $16$ to $160$ votes, the thicket's lead over the fully trained adapter widens from $1.3$ to $3.3$ points. When the plan is to sample and vote, an RLVR budget is better spent broad than deep. --- ### Auditable Algebraic Counting Field for Cryptic-Pocket Detection from Apo Structures Authors: Shan Yu, Xuening Wu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00988v1 Cryptic ligand-binding pockets are not apparent in experimentally determined apo structures, making them difficult to identify from unbound receptor geometry. A complementary challenge is to make the structural measurements and learned evidence behind each prediction directly inspectable. We introduce a supervised algebraic counting field (ACF) for predicting cryptic-pocket residues from apo structures. ACF compiles explicit geometric, physicochemical, and topological features into compact, integer-weighted lookup tables. Each prediction score can be reconstructed from feature values, training counts, table weights, and spatial aggregation, without sequence search, structural-template transfer, or a protein language model at inference. We evaluate ACF on CryptoBench and two locked external collections, separating ranking performance from the effects of residue-calling budgets. On an external set of 57 post-CryptoBench apo-holo units, ACF exceeded P2Rank by +0.044 in mean paired ROC-AUC (multiplicity-adjusted 95% CI (+0.010, +0.079)). The advantage was dataset-dependent: official-fold ROC-AUC and matched-budget F1 differences against P2Rank remained unresolved, and a second external evaluation did not confirm gains from added structural features. ACF thus provides a compact predictor with externally validated signal and an inspectable path from structural measurements and training counts to residue scores. --- ### Neural scaling laws and evolution of learnable activation functions of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks Authors: Tilen Cadez, Sanghoon Lee, Kyoung-Min Kim Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00985v1 Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) represent a compelling alternative to traditional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-based neural networks. By employing activation functions as learnable elements, KANs offer superior interpretability, making them suited for scientific domains. In this work, we investigate the neural scaling laws of KANs and the structural evolution of their learnable activation functions under dataset expansion. Specifically, we evaluate the scaling behavior of three KAN variants---BSRBF-KAN, Gottlieb-KAN, and Faster-KAN---across standard image classification benchmarks (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST) and a specialized scientific regression task (magnetic parameter estimation from domain images of moiré magnetic textures). Our results demonstrate that the test loss ${\cal L}$ exhibits a broken neural scaling law (BNSL) behavior as a function of the dataset size $N_D$. After passing through a random-guess regime, the loss follows architecture- and task-dependent scaling behavior. The loss crosses from a faster- to a slower-scaling branch, ${\cal L}\propto N_D^{-α}$ and ${\cal L}\propto N_D^{-β}$ with $α>β$ for image classification tasks. The exponents $α$ and $β$ depend strongly on both the specific network architecture and the dataset-size regime, ranging from 0.4 to 1.5 and from 0.06 to 0.6, respectively. For the magnetic parameter-regression task, the loss follows a single scaling law with its exponent ranging from 1.28 to 2.59. Additionally, we provide a structural analysis of how activation functions refine their complexity as data volume increases, finding that dataset expansion drives a transition from simple linear-like approximations toward stable, interpretable symbolic forms. These findings provide a quantitative roadmap for the efficient application of KANs while managing the trade-off between model expressivity and computational overhead. --- ### HADRec: A Hierarchy-Aware Drug Recommendation Framework by Fusing Molecular Knowledge and Electronic Health Record Authors: Junke Wang, Hongshun Ling, Li Zhang, Jinjing Wu, Tong Shao, Fang Wang, Yuan Gao Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00984v1 Accurate medication recommendation is central to clinical decision-making, directly determining therapeutic efficacy and patient safety. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: drugs are often abstracted as discrete tokens, ignoring their molecular structures and pharmacological mechanisms, and the commonly used "flat" recommendation paradigm fails to leverage the hierarchical logic of the internationally standardized Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system. To address these issues, we propose HADRec, a Hierarchy-Aware Drug Recommendation framework that integrates molecular knowledge with electronic health records (EHRs). HADRec employs LLaMA-7B to encode clinical notes for rich patient representations and ChemBERTa to encode drug Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System strings, building a global molecular knowledge base. A cross-attention mechanism then performs deep multimodal fusion between patient states and drug features. The framework further incorporates a hierarchical predictor and a novel consistency constraint loss to enforce strict adherence to ATC logical dependencies. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III demonstrate that HADRec achieves state-of-the-art performance across Jaccard, F1, and PR-AUC. External validation on MIMIC-IV confirms strong generalization under distribution shifts, and calibration analysis shows well-calibrated predictive confidence on MIMIC-IV with ECE = 0.04, and Brier = 0.06. Counterfactual evaluation reveals clinically aligned reasoning, disentangling disease-specific treatments from general care. Together, these results establish HADRec as a high-performance, interpretable, and clinically grounded pathway toward safe and reliable AI-driven medication recommendation. --- ### The Devil Is in the Reconstruction Loss Scale: Rethinking Optimization in LLM Quantization Authors: Chao Li, Shigeng Wang, Anbang Yao Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00983v1 Post-training quantization (PTQ) methods typically use sequential quantization that partitions a pre-trained LLM into a series of units (e.g., transformer blocks), with one unit quantized at each stage. State-of-the-art PTQ methods are predominantly learning-based, optimizing auxiliary quantization parameters (e.g., scaling factors, rotation matrices, clipping thresholds, and adapters) via gradient descent to minimize a reconstruction loss. A common practice is to use mean squared error (MSE) as the reconstruction loss function, yet its induced optimization behavior remains largely unexplored. In this work, we take a holistic view of sequential quantization and systematically investigate how optimization evolves from the first quantization stage to the last, aiming for a deep understanding of optimization in learning-based PTQ schemes. Through extensive empirical studies spanning representative learning-based PTQ methods, LLM families, model scales, architectures, quantization settings and various tasks, we consistently uncover Optimization Imbalance: reconstruction loss magnitudes vary dramatically across stages, accompanied by highly uneven gradient magnitudes and parameter updates under MSE. We term the cross-stage range of loss magnitudes the reconstruction loss scale, and reveal that MSE translates the unexpectedly large reconstruction loss scale into highly uneven gradient magnitudes, which in turn lead to uneven optimization strength across quantization stages. This finding suggests a general principle for improving learning-based PTQ: optimization strength across stages should be decoupled from the reconstruction loss scale. Theoretically, we show that root mean squared error (RMSE) variants defined at the sample, channel, token, and element levels naturally realize this principle through implicit gradient normalization, outperforming MSE significantly as a drop-in replacement. --- ### Divide-and-Remember: Recursive Action-Relevant Memory for Long-Horizon VLA Policies Authors: Xuehui Yu, Eason Yu, Meiyi Wang, Haozhe Du, Stefano V. Albrecht, Harold Soh Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00982v1 Vision-language-action (VLA) models struggle on history-dependent manipulation tasks, where the current observation alone does not determine the action, and the policy needs a memory of the history. Existing memory methods decide what to remember by design, for example, keeping frames with large pixel changes, and show inconsistent gains across tasks. We view what to remember as an optimisation problem. From the POMDP formulation of imitation learning, we show that the optimal memory maximises the conditional mutual information $I(a_t; m_t \mid o_t)$ between the action and the memory given the current observation. Intuitively, this means preserving the action-relevant information in the history that is not already contained in the current observation. Based on our analysis, we propose Divide-and-Remember (D&R), a recursive memory method that learns a memory function $m_t = M(h_t)$ and scales to long contexts while staying compute-light. It involves two strategies: (1) the selection over the full history is divided recursively into subproblems of top-$K$ selection over $2K$ tokens, so that fixed-size, lightweight selectors learned end-to-end support an unbounded history; (2) all recursion blocks share one selector, which captures the selection rule common to every block and keeps the method efficient. On RoboMME, a benchmark of 16 long-horizon manipulation tasks that require remembering when, where, what, and how to act, D&R achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate with consistent gains across all four suites under a budget of only 64 tokens; real-robot experiments show the same gain. Code, checkpoints and more results are at https://dnr-memory.github.io/ --- ### NarrativeFlow: Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Model Using Robot Velocity Fields Authors: Shota Kobayashi, Koki Seno, Daichi Yashima, Komei Sugiura Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00981v1 We focus on language-conditioned flow-based manipulation, where robot flows (robot velocity fields) serve as embodiment-agnostic, motion-centric representations for leveraging data collected from multiple robot platforms. This task is crucial because language-conditioned manipulation is essential for practical robotic systems, yet scaling robot foundation models remains limited by the labor-intensive collection of embodiment-specific data. Existing methods either coarsely approximate robot flows with sparse keypoint displacements, or cannot handle language-conditioned manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose NarrativeFlow, which models robot flows as continuous velocity fields using a flow-matching formulation conditioned on language. Accordingly, NarrativeFlow generates robot flows that are physically consistent with real-world manipulation. To validate NarrativeFlow, we have conducted experiments on standard datasets for language-conditioned manipulation. The experimental results show that NarrativeFlow outperforms representative baseline methods on standard evaluation metrics. Furthermore, through real-world experiments, we show that NarrativeFlow achieves higher success rates than baseline methods across multiple manipulation tasks. The project page is available at https://shota0520.github.io/NarrativeFlow-project-page/ --- ### Can AI Scientists Coordinate at Runtime? Authors: Zijian Liu, Yangzhixin Luo, Junyu Lu, Yi Li, Yu Chen, David Xu, William F. Shen, Xinchi Qiu, Xisen Wang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00980v1 Multi-agent AI scientists have shown improving performance across a diverse range of tasks. Yet a common approach is design-time agentic orchestration, which typically relies on fixed workflows. In contrast, human scientists coordinate and adjust their division of labor at runtime. We therefore ask: can AI scientists also coordinate at runtime? To this end, we introduce Runtime Agent Coordination (RAC), which selects agents from existing AI-scientist hosts during execution, assigns scoped work contracts, and provides artifact-grounded verification. Verification informs subsequent agents without blocking transitions or discarding artifacts. We conduct a single-seed exploratory evaluation across Agent Laboratory, EvoScientist, and ARK on ResearchClawBench, preserving host models, tools, and permissions under host-calibrated budgets. Four cumulative conditions separate native execution, runtime communication, runtime selection, and the combined addition of contracts and verification. Runtime selection yields the highest observed mean score for each host; adding contracts and verification reduces these means, with host-dependent outcomes relative to native execution. These results motivate runtime coordination while exposing the limits of additional coordination mechanisms under constrained budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/systemind-team/Runtime-AI-Scientist. --- ### RISED: RubrIcs for agentic multi-environment Selection and sElf-Distillation Authors: Jingtan Wang, Sirajul Salekin, Young mok Jung, Javier Movellan, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Manjot Bilkhu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00979v1 Training a single LLM agent jointly across diverse interactive environments has attracted increasing attention as a route to generalist agents. Existing curriculum and data-selection strategies often allocate training at the environment level or prioritize local reward-based signals, without explicitly considering relationships between current rollouts across environments for prompt-group selection. Meanwhile, as environments are learned at different rates, all-failure and all-success rollout groups can coexist within a batch, leaving those data without group-relative reward signals. Both challenges highlight limitations of relying solely on scalar rewards in multi-environment RL: they provide limited information about cross-environment relationships and no within-group reward contrast when rewards are identical. This motivates richer textual feedback, such as rubrics describing rollout behaviours, to guide learning. Beyond rubrics' usage as reward, we repurpose rubrics to guide both online data selection and policy supervision. An LLM judge tags each rollout using a predefined rubric vocabulary shared across environments. The resulting profiles guide the selection of data that aligns with the overall behavioural composition of the mixed-environment batch while limiting overlap with already-selected data. Available positive rubrics (describing desired behaviours) provide privileged context for an on-policy self-distillation teacher, supplying additional token-level supervision, while negative rubrics (describing undesired behaviours) guide subsequent rollout generation away from recurring failure modes. Together, these components form RISED. Across model backbones, RISED achieves the highest mean pass rate across environments and ranks first or second in every individual environment. Rubric-based analysis of RISED can further characterize the behavioural changes accompanying these gains. --- ### Generalist Representation, Specialist Detection: TS-Router for Time-Series Anomaly Detection Authors: Tian Lan, Yifei Gao, Yimeng Lu, Xuming An, Meng Wang, Yue Pan, Wenjun He, Chenghao Liu, Chen Zhang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00978v1 Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is difficult to generalize across datasets because heterogeneous temporal dynamics imply different notions of normality and favor different detection criteria. While time-series foundation models provide transferable representations, coupling them with a fixed anomaly-scoring mechanism can overlook this variation. This motivates a different perspective on foundation-model-based TSAD: using foundation models to coordinate specialized anomaly criteria rather than directly imposing a universal one. Based on this view, we propose \textbf{TS-Router}, a generalist-representation, specialist-detection framework that estimates the relative competence of heterogeneous anomaly detectors from pretrained temporal representations and selects suitable specialists for each target series. To avoid relying on specialist-performance labels from real tasks, we derive soft competence supervision from specialists' relative performance on labeled simulated tasks. At deployment, routing requires no target anomaly labels, and only the selected specialists are fitted unsupervisedly on the target series. We bound Top-\(k\) set-competence regret under representation coverage and conditional competence stability. Across 16 real-world benchmarks and four complementary evaluation metrics, TS-Router achieves the best overall average rank. Controlled ablations with multiple frozen TSFM encoders further support the use of pretrained representations for competence estimation and adaptive specialist selection. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TS-Router-D8FF. --- ### Variational Streaming Flow: Probabilistic Forecasting in Physical Time Authors: Hans Hao-Hsun Hsu, Minseon Gwak, Soon Hoe Lim, Pan Li, N. Benjamin Erichson Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00976v1 Probabilistic forecasting is important for predicting complex dynamical systems because intrinsic randomness and incomplete observations can cause the same observed state to evolve into multiple plausible futures. While flow matching is a flexible approach for probabilistic forecasting, it is computationally expensive. Streaming flow (SF) reformulates this approach to model temporal evolution efficiently by learning a continuous velocity field directly in physical time. However, SF learns a deterministic velocity field. Thus, it provides only a single future trajectory for a given fixed initial state and observation history. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Variational Streaming Flow (VSF). Our approach learns a latent distribution that is conditioned on the dynamics of interest. In turn, this enables probabilistic forecasting. Importantly, we retain the computational efficiency of SF by generating in physical time. Across deterministic and stochastic dynamical systems, VSF demonstrates superior predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity. We demonstrate the advantage for both long-horizon rollouts exceeding 1,000 steps, and settings with bifurcating dynamics. Moreover, VSF can be integrated into existing Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA)-based world models as a plug-and-play predictor to improve temporal dynamics and goal-directed success rate in navigation, motion planning, and manipulation. --- ### Concept Driven Domain Adaptation: Finding an Abstract Needle in a Haystack Authors: Haiming Zhao, Tai Wang, Kun Zhang, Xicheng Peng, Zhiyang Li Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV, physics.ed-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00973v1 Science teachers frequently search for documentary excerpts not by describing what appears on screen, but by querying the abstract concepts they intend to teach. This use case exposes a limitation of existing language-based video moment retrieval methods, which typically assume that queries describe observable events, whereas instructional search requires retrieving concrete visual phenomena that instantiate an underlying scientific principle. We study this setting as concept-to-example video retrieval, an abstract-needle-in-a-haystack problem where compact curriculum concepts must be grounded in temporally sparse documentary evidence. To bridge this abstraction gap, we propose Concept-Driven Domain Adaptation (CDDA), a three-stage framework for adapting two-tower vision-language models to concept-level retrieval. CDDA treats concepts as intermediate semantic anchors: it first structures the textual embedding space with textbook and teacher-handbook example-concept pairs, then transfers this concept-aware geometry to documentary visuals under a frozen visual encoder, and finally jointly adapts both encoders with sparse visual concept supervision. From a geometric perspective, this staged alignment reduces text-concept and vision-concept angular gaps, thereby encouraging concept-level adaptation while preserving the pretrained model's concrete image description alignment. On a curated middle-school physics retrieval benchmark, CDDA achieves stronger pedagogically oriented concept retrieval than several competitive multimodal baselines, including Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B, while maintaining concrete image-text matching after adaptation. --- ### VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks Authors: Caiqi Zhang, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Zoey CuiZhu, Nigel Collier, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00972v1 As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging. We study how verification capability can be strengthened with a fixed base model, without access to reference answers or grading rubrics at test time. Repeated sampling yields multiple rollouts that can contain complementary correct claims, but we need a reliable verification mechanism to determine which claims to trust. We first find that disagreement often exposes correct alternatives, while consensus can conceal errors. These observations motivate VeriHarness, which turns the underlying LLM a generator uses into an agentic verifier by giving it a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills. A disagreement resolver checks competing claims against environmental evidence, while a consensus challenger tests shared claims and searches for omitted requirements. Their findings guide the selection and revision of the final artifact. Across five long-horizon workspace benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness achieves the highest selection scores among the evaluated baselines. Evidence-backed revision further improves average performance, bringing gains over a single rollout to 6.2 points with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 6.4 points with Claude Opus 4.8. We further show that verification skills can self-improve from failure feedback, demonstrating VeriHarness as a novel and critical approach for scaling long-horizon agentic verification. We release the full pool of approximately 26,000 rollouts across all five benchmarks and both models, produced at a cost of over $100,000, to support future research on agentic verification. --- ### RelationVGGT: Visual Geometry Transformers for 3D Spatial Relation Segmentation Authors: Minsu Kim, Jaesung Choe, Jiwoo Lee, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Seon Joo Kim Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00970v1 Recent advances in 3D reconstruction have progressed from per-scene optimization to feed-forward inference, and semantic scene understanding has followed suit -- yet existing methods remain confined to object-centric perception, neglecting spatial relations between objects. We formulate 3D spatial relation segmentation in a feed-forward, pose-free multi-view setting: given a visually specified subject and a relational text query, the model segments the target across views without receiving its category name. To this end, we propose RelationVGGT, a novel feed-forward framework that integrates semantic features from a visual foundation model with geometry-aware representations from a 3D geometry foundation model and leverages a relation transformer for subject-conditioned, cross-view relation prediction -- requiring neither per-scene optimization nor known camera poses. We additionally provide a fully automated annotation pipeline built on ScanNet++ with VLMs and LLMs, enabling scalable training data generation for this new task. --- ### A Citation-Grounded Benchmark for Trustworthy Earnings Call Transcript Analysis with Large Language Models Authors: Yingzhu Zhao, Vlad Pandelea, Han Yuan, Bo Hu, Wuqiong Luo, Li Zhang, Zheng Ma Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00969v1 Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used for financial document analysis, including earnings call transcripts (ECTs). Beyond generating standalone claims, users increasingly prefer grounded analyses that pair claims with verifiable citations from source documents to enable independent validation. However, evaluating such analytical claims typically requires extensive expert annotation, which is costly and difficult to scale, and real-world financial analysis commonly involves long context-question-answer triplets, further increasing task complexity. To address these challenges and benchmark the current landscape of grounded analysis by LLMs, we propose a numeric evidence evaluation method that enables groundedness assessment without reliance on expert annotation. We also introduce an automated dataset construction pipeline and construct ECTs-100 from the top 100 constituents of the S&P 500 to support benchmark of both groundedness and correctness. In addition, we examine conscious incompetence, a practical failure mode in financial analysis in which LLMs must detect when available evidence is insufficient and refrain from producing unsupported hallucinations. Empirical results show that LLMs perform well in groundedness but face notable limitations in correctness, with informational insufficiency presenting an additional challenge. --- ### Structure-agnostic Causal Representation Learning Authors: Arman Behnam, Binghui Wang Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00968v1 Causal representation learning aims to discover robust features by exploiting the causal structure underlying data generation. Existing methods require specifying the causal structure a priori, yet different structures demand fundamentally incompatible invariance constraints, and misspecification leads to representations that discard predictive information. We introduce SaCRL, a framework that jointly identifies the causal structure and learns the corresponding invariant representation without prior structural knowledge. Our approach formulates structure selection as a soft optimization over candidate invariances using HSIC-based violation metrics, with adaptive weights that automatically concentrate on the achievable structure. We provide theoretical guarantees for structure identification, including under random-feature approximation, invariance satisfaction, and out-of-distribution generalization. Empirically, SaCRL recovers the true structure on synthetic and semi-synthetic Bayesian-network benchmarks, outperforms fixed-invariance baselines on Colored MNIST, achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on three DomainBed benchmarks (PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome), and degrades gracefully under structural misspecification and limited environment diversity. Code is available at: https://github.com/ArmanBehnam/sacrl. --- ### RPTune: Learned Context Curation for LLM Catalog Search Authors: Chuxuan Hu, Hejie Cui, Norman Huang, Shubham Kumar Bharti, Wang-Chiew Tan, Sercan Ö. Arık Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00964v1 For small merchant businesses (SMBs) whose catalogs fit within a long-context LLM, full-catalog prompting offers a compelling alternative to multi-stage retrieval designed primarily for large marketplaces with millions of items. However, fitting the full catalog into the context window does not ensure that the model can use it effectively, since LLMs do not exploit long contexts uniformly. We therefore study in-context catalog search through two complementary questions: (1) how to curate and present catalogs to the LLM, and (2) how to adapt the LLM for product selection on curated contexts. We propose RPTune, an end-to-end framework that couples learned catalog curation with LLM post-training using automatically generated, catalog-grounded supervision. An encoder-reorganizer curator orders and prunes products guided by downstream LLM feedback, while the resulting curated catalogs in turn improve the effectiveness of LLM post-training with a context-relative reward. We evaluate RPTune on 7 real merchants spanning distinct retail verticals, using 100 complex conversational queries per merchant. RPTune consistently improves search accuracy across both proprietary and open-weight LLMs, with context curation yielding gains of up to 31.4 percentage points and post-training adding a further 10.3 points on average. --- ### Cybernetic and Epistemic: A Missing Vocabulary for Trustworthy Agentic Delegation Authors: Jérémie Lumbroso Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00961v1 As code generation is increasingly delegated to AI systems, the bottleneck is shifting from writing code to supervising the systems that write it --- a shift CS-education researchers have begun to name. This shift exposes a vocabulary gap: the field asks for "human oversight" without a working distinction between the two things language does in a delegation channel --- coordinate action (cybernetic: words succeed when the world comes to match them) and coordinate understanding (epistemic: they succeed when they answer to the world and a hearer can check that they do). The failure this names is not cybernetic language but epistemic-form language doing cybernetic work: explanation-shaped output calibrated for approval rather than truth. Oversight that checks only whether an output was approved is satisfiable by rubber-stamping; oversight that holds an agent accountable requires the reasoning behind its work be retrievable and checkable. We present three delegation episodes --- illustrations, not controlled evidence --- in which epistemic engagement proved practicable while remaining auditable, one public record where a recommendation was withdrawn on its own stated terms, and one failure case illustrating oversight that requires no reasons for its discretionary choices. We propose a criterion for agentic-system governance, alongside existing technical trust properties: every consequential choice should carry the condition under which it would have gone otherwise, in a form a third party can test. Without such a condition, a third party cannot distinguish a decision from a rubber stamp. We give the criterion an operational form --- a two-part reconstruction test scoring a delegation record by whether a second reader can predict what the agent does under a perturbation --- and a deliberation-recording convention, ORRCF, that makes the condition a required component of every recorded choice. --- ### Video-Index: A Curated Meta-Benchmark for Video Understanding Authors: Enxin Song, Yinuo Xu, Shusheng Yang, Wenhao Chai, Jiatao Gu Published: 2026-10-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00960v1 A video benchmark should reward the capability it claims to measure, yet models can exploit answer options, question text, or partial visual evidence. We introduce the attack pyramid, five levels of shortcut attacks with increasing access to each item, and audit 115 video benchmarks with it. On 35 benchmarks, attackers that never see a frame approach full-video accuracy. On 51 benchmarks with temporal probes, shuffled frames keep a median 96% of full-video accuracy. Near-duplicate questions make up at least half the items in 63 benchmarks. We screen 505,518 question-answer pairs from 112 of them into an audited pool. Agents turn evaluation requests into specifications, and a deterministic selector with a red-team gate composes reproducible benchmarks. We release Video-Index, the 210 hardest verified items under these attacks in each of four capability groups, 840 items from 76 sources. With the same fixed input, Claude Opus 5 outscores every open-source model by over 37 percentage points, and agent tools add about 20 more, yet all systems leave room to improve efficiency and accuracy. Blog: https://www.enxinsong.com/blog/video-index/ GitHub: https://github.com/Espere-1119-Song/Video-Index Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Video-Index/Video-Index ---