# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 46 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #2251–2300 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/46 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/45.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/47.md) ### DASS: A Solver-Adaptable Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy for Symbolic Regression Authors: Yuxiao Hu, Qian Li, Ding Wang, Yekun Zheng, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16812v1 Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions from data and plays a key role in scientific discovery. However, existing methods face a common bottleneck: the enormous search space and severe combinatorial explosion make it difficult to achieve a favorable trade-off between accuracy and algorithmic efficiency. We argue that, in addition to designing increasingly complex solver-specific SR strategies, an equally promising direction is to equip them with a shareable auxiliary strategy that can provide reliable search guidance. To this end, we propose DASS, a solver-adaptable Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy that improves SR by constructing and refining a high-potential auxiliary search subspace. DASS represents the auxiliary search space as a functional subspace spanned by a set of high-potential basis function terms. It estimates term utility through multi-environment evaluation, filters unstable guidance, and updates term potential scores with a Gibbs posterior, thereby calibrating the subspace to provide more reliable guidance for downstream solvers. The high-quality solutions produced by the solver are used to update the set of basis terms. This forms a virtuous closed-loop optimization process: the subspace guides the downstream solver, and the solver feedback reshapes the subspace for subsequent exploration. DASS can be easily integrated with various types of SR solvers. Extensive experiments on LLM-SRBench show that DASS significantly improves the accuracy of original solvers with a manageable increase in runtime. --- ### X-Ragent: Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Evidence-Grounded Chest X-Ray Reasoning Authors: Yi Wang, Zhenlong Yuan, Yuchan Guo, Maolei Huang, Zijian Song, Dapeng Zhang, Rongbin Tan, Jiyuan Wang, Zhiyuan Wang, Fangfang Lin, Shuhan Song, Huawei Cao Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16811v1 Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation often requires integrating visual findings with task-specific evidence rather than relying on direct visual recognition alone. While tool-augmented medical agents can supply such evidence via external modules, they often lack explicit mechanisms for learning when auxiliary evidence is needed and for preventing inapplicable quantitative evidence from entering diagnostic reasoning. To address this, we propose X-Ragent, a post-training framework for tool-augmented reinforcement learning that decouples learned auxiliary-evidence seeking from validity-gated quantitative measurement acquisition for evidence-grounded CXR reasoning. We construct Rad-CoT, a 7.7K-sample corpus combining causally ordered tool-augmented trajectories with report-style diagnostic reasoning, and use it to initialize Qwen3-VL-8B via agentic supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We then optimize the policy with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using an accuracy-gated reward that applies process-level terms for measurement consistency and auxiliary-tool cost only to correct trajectories, preventing plausible process behavior from compensating for an incorrect diagnosis. Across three CXR benchmarks, X-Ragent achieves the strongest results, including an 8.6-point improvement on the fully held-out ChestAgentBench. By seeking evidence selectively and admitting only valid measurements, X-Ragent supports more faithful and evidence-grounded CXR reasoning. --- ### Predicting Audio Popularity: A Comparative Study of Metadata and Acoustic Features Across Music and Sound Effects Authors: Ikram El Hadi, Nihad Elbari, Kawtar Tlemçani, Théo Mariotte, Meysam Shamsi Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16809v1 This study addresses the prediction of audio popularity on an online sharing platform by leveraging both metadata and acoustic feature representations. Two distinct categories of audio content are considered: music and sound effects. Popularity is formulated as a supervised classification task based on two target variables: the number of downloads and the average user rating. We conduct a comparative evaluation of multiple machine learning models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, and a Neural Network model. Experiments are performed across different feature sets, including metadata, platform-provided descriptors, and eGeMAPS acoustic features. Results indicate that metadata consistently provide the most informative representation for predicting popularity. Nevertheless, acoustic features alone achieve performance significantly above chance level, demonstrating that intrinsic properties of the audio signal contribute to popularity prediction. --- ### When Repeated Measurements Hurt Tabular Foundation Models Authors: Yixiang Liu, Ruizhe Deng, Bibhas Chakraborty, Qiong Zhang, Yan Shuo Tan Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16801v1 Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on IID benchmarks, but how do they respond to repeated measurements at the same inputs? Across six TFMs, synthetic and semi-synthetic experiments show that additional measurements can improve predictions at measured inputs while degrading them elsewhere. Harm is most frequent at low noise, and irrelevant features amplify it in several models; real repeated-measurement datasets show similar patterns. Statistically, the IID rule targeted by PFN pretraining treats each repeated input as fresh evidence about the input distribution. When the prior links this distribution to the response function, the resulting protocol mismatch can outweigh the benefit of additional measurements, even under exact inference. Computationally, interventions identify row-count dependence in TabPFN-v3's attention scaling as a contributor to harm. Resetting the count largely reverses distortion in a noiseless linear diagnostic and attenuates amplification by irrelevant features. Finally, we evaluate ways to retain the benefits of repeated measurements while limiting their harm. Averaging measurements usually outperforms supplying them separately at larger repetition counts, whereas count reset can suppress both harm and useful gains. Code, saved results and reproduction instructions are available at https://github.com/drizmiz/PFN-Repeated-Measurement-Supp --- ### One-Layer Transformers Provably Learn In-Context K-Nearest Neighbor Prediction with Chain-of-Thought Authors: Lyumin Wu, Yuan Cao Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16798v1 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enables transformers to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Despite strong empirical success, the mechanisms by which such reasoning abilities emerge during training remain poorly understood, particularly from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we study this question in a stylized yet fully analyzable setting: in-context $\mathrm{K}$-nearest-neighbor ($\mathrm{K}$-NN) prediction with a one-layer transformer. Earlier work has demonstrated that one-layer transformers can be trained to perform $1$-NN without CoT (Li et al., 2024a) by having the softmax attention attend to the nearest neighbor in context. However, this result on $1$-NN cannot be extended to $\mathrm{K}$-NN for $K>1$, as softmax attention is much less naturally suited to attending to the 2nd through $K$-th nearest neighbors. We first give a rigorous negative result showing that this limitation already appears on a well-separated class of binary classification tasks for odd $K>1$. We then give an explicit construction of a one-layer transformer, and show that it can solve $\mathrm{K}$-NN via CoT reasoning. We further prove that, under a stylized training setup, gradient descent can recover this construction, thereby showing that transformers can acquire the capability to solve $\mathrm{K}$-NN through training. In addition, we show that the resulting trained model applies to a broader test class than that assumed in the training analysis. Our results shed light on how CoT expands the ability of transformers to learn and solve tasks that are otherwise hard to solve. --- ### TPPO: Tracking-Value PPO For Language Model Reasoning Authors: Futing Wang, Chenxi Li, Jianhao Yan, Yun Luo, Zhi Wang, Yizhuo Li, Runzhe Zhan, Yu Cheng, Tao Lin Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16794v1 Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for language-model reasoning. While \emph{value evolution along trajectory} characterizes relative token-level credit, yet standard critics often fail to track it under sparse terminal rewards. To model this evolution, we analyze the relation between successive prefix values and show that they admit a Bayesian decomposition with additive updates in log-odds space. We use this additive structure to construct Tracking-Value PPO (\method), a cumulative value parameterization that sums position-wise scalar outputs into value logits. These outputs are learned through terminal-outcome supervision on the reconstructed values. \method improves aggregate mathematical reasoning scores over PPO by 7.0 and 8.4 points on Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-8B-Base, respectively, while improving out-of-distribution generalization. Gains extend to Qwen3-4B, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, Qwen3.5-9B and to countdown, and scientific coding tasks. Further analysis shows more accurate tracking of value evolution and more reliable advantage estimates. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/LINs-lab/TPPO. --- ### ViewStruct: View-Grounded Articulation and Connectivity Inference Authors: Wenjing Bian, Ranran Huang, Andreas Geiger Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16793v1 Interacting with unfamiliar objects requires understanding how their parts connect and move. We introduce ViewStruct, a framework for jointly predicting connectivity and articulation in objects and scenes. Given an RGB image with aligned part segmentation and depth, optionally supplemented by images or video, ViewStruct predicts rigid-body groupings, attachments, and joint parameters. Its view-grounded representation links predictions to observed regions and expresses joint geometry in a gravity-aligned, view-relative frame, without requiring category-specific canonical orientations. A pretrained vision--language model is adapted to predict structure in seconds, without requiring observed articulation motion or per-instance optimisation. Experiments demonstrate improved structural prediction over evaluated baselines and transfer to unseen categories, asset sources, and real-world human-interaction videos, despite task-specific training exclusively on synthetic data. Simulated manipulation experiments further demonstrate the utility of predicted joints for generating robot motion trajectories. --- ### Efficient Preconditioned Optimization Methods with Frequent Directions Authors: Sifan Yang, Yuanyu Wan, Yibo Wang, Lijun Zhang Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16792v1 Adaptive optimization methods have received considerable attention in recent years due to their strong empirical performance. However, they generally require maintaining a preconditioning matrix, which incurs prohibitive computational overhead in large-scale applications. To address these limitations, we investigate the acceleration of preconditioned optimization methods through frequent directions (FD), a widely used matrix sketching technique. We first propose FTSL by integrating FD with adaptive subgradient methods under the primal-dual framework and adding back the cumulative information discarded by FD. FTSL obtains a tighter regret bound than existing state-of-the-art results. We then apply a doubling trick that further reduces the time complexity of FTSL, while maintaining the same regret guarantee. We also consider optimization over matrix-valued decision variables and exploit their structural properties to construct sketched preconditioners. We develop FTSL-Shampoo by adapting FD to Shampoo and give a novel analysis under the primal-dual framework. To further mitigate its computational complexity, we design one-sided variants of FTSL-Shampoo under both mirror descent and primal-dual frameworks. Our algorithms not only reduce the computational cost of FTSL-Shampoo, but also achieve tighter regret bounds. We extend our methods to offline stochastic convex optimization and exploit smoothness to achieve faster convergence rates. Finally, we introduce practical variants of our algorithms and empirically demonstrate their efficiency and effectiveness across a broad range of tasks. --- ### Logit Leakage through Floating-Point Bias Addition Authors: Shaomin Chen, Xiaorui Gong Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16790v1 Language model APIs can expose token-specific biases while withholding logits and token probabilities. Existing bias-based extraction recovers relative logits, leaving a common additive component undetermined in ideal arithmetic. We identify a numerical side channel in floating-point bias addition that exposes information about this component through token identities alone. The channel distinguishes score vectors with identical complete unperturbed log probabilities. Our method exploits changes in representable spacing at binary exponent boundaries. Under the stated binary32 arithmetic assumptions and a known reachable score interval, it recovers a logit pair and its unknown tie-breaking priority exactly in at most 52 token queries. Given complete relative logits, one recovered anchor determines the original logit vector. We evaluate recovery across 11 public checkpoints from seven model families and extend the local method with adaptive interval search and anchor selection. In end-to-end experiments with vLLM, SGLang, and llama.cpp, adaptive recovery succeeds on all 128 Qwen3-0.6B inputs per system, including 64 held-out inputs. A separate token-only experiment extracts a pretrained small model's complete output-head representation up to an invertible hidden-basis transformation. We also establish a sufficient condition for suppressing common-shift disclosure by subtracting the maximum before bias addition. In controlled experiments, this mitigation eliminates all observed distinctions between common-shift variants and preserves token decisions under the tested random biases. --- ### InfoVis: Unified Slide Image Generation and Editing Authors: Jiahao Wang, Xiyan Jiang, Chenyuan Wu, Haoqiang Zhang, Xin Luo, Yueze Wang, Defu Lian, Bo Zhang, Jiajun Zhang, Zheng Liu Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16784v1 Generating and editing presentation slides requires models to combine accurate text rendering, instruction following, visual grounding, aesthetic design, and precise editing within one canvas. Existing work covers only subsets of these capabilities and lacks large-scale slide-native supervision and diagnostic evaluation. We formulate four slide-centric tasks and build a scalable data engine with over 13M continual-pretraining records and 1.9M supervised fine-tuning records. We also introduce VisSlideBench, a benchmark of 1,527 manually screened instances that covers all four tasks with task-specific, multidimensional evaluation. Its automatic rankings agree with blinded, dimension-wise human rankings. Using these resources, we train InfoVis, a unified 9B slide generation and editing model. On VisSlideBench, InfoVis leads every evaluated open-source model on all eleven metrics and scores 7.94 overall against 7.99 for Nano-Banana-2. Starting from FLUX.2-klein-base-9B, slide-specific post-training adds 1.6 points overall, with the largest generation gains in content faithfulness; the remaining gap to proprietary models is smallest in content faithfulness and largest in aesthetic quality. Built on InfoVis, our document-to-slide workflow achieves the second-highest Aesthetics score on the external SlidesGen-Bench. We will release the model, code, data, and benchmark. --- ### LIBERO-Industry: Benchmarking Robotic Manipulation under Industrial Process Constraints Authors: Ming Shin Cindy Sung, Duan Leijiahao, Haoxiang Wang, Boning Tan, Liangna Fu, Chao Tan, Yafu Li, Yulong Chen, Chaoqun Wan, Zhen Huang, Shuxian Liang, Xian-Sheng Hua Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16782v2 Industrial manipulation in flexible manufacturing, e.g., high-mix, low-volume (HMLV) electronics assembly, requires robot policies to adapt to changing products and production conditions. Such settings impose industrial process constraints, including product variants, moving material flows, finite execution windows, and tight geometric tolerances. However, existing evaluation frameworks do not systematically capture these constraints when assessing generalist robot policies. To address this gap, we introduce LIBERO-Industry, a novel benchmark built on the widely used robot learning benchmark LIBERO, that translates the aforementioned industrial constraints into controllable task conditions and measurable success criteria. Specifically, LIBERO-Industry comprises three classic task scenarios: Static-to-Dynamic (S2D) loading, Dynamic-to-Static (D2S) unloading, and Dynamic-to-Dynamic (D2D) transfer. The suites contain 216 tasks in total that systematically vary object geometry, conveyor speed, interaction-window duration, and geometric acceptance region size. Extensive experiments across five generalist robot policies (including vision-language-action models and world-action models) show that performance progressively degrades as industrial constraints are introduced and combined. Under a shared fine-tuning and evaluation protocol, the LIBERO-Industry co-training condition achieved higher observed target-transfer completion than the original-LIBERO condition. --- ### A Bethe-Ansatz Source of Early Token Correlations: A marginal-preserving construction for parallel proposals Authors: Abraham Chachamovits Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16781v2 Parallel token proposals need a joint law, not merely accurate token marginals. We construct coordinate-Bethe-ansatz laws from the periodic XXZ chain and compare them with their maximum-entropy pairwise projections at identical one- and two-site moments. In an eight-site, three-excitation sector, symmetry makes the full probability-law difference one-dimensional, determined by a contiguous three-site moment $δ$. Along the Bethe branch, this gap changes sign and vanishes exactly at $Δ=(3+\sqrt3)/2$, where the eigenstate law becomes pairwise. A nonlinear two-token readout preserves separate token marginals yet exposes a distance $2|δ|$; a direct three-token readout preserves all one- and two-token marginals yet exposes $4|δ|$. At $Δ=1.5$ these deterministic binary distances are $0.02654573$ and $0.05309145$. We give an exact target-alignment formula and prove a strict speculative accepted-prefix advantage throughout an unrestricted open neighborhood of a constructed target. These are finite-law existence results, not measured language-model or wall-clock gains. --- ### PrivacyGuard: Source-Linked Sanitization and Locally Resolvable PII References for Cloud GUI Agents Authors: Zian Yuan, Wei Li Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16778v1 Cloud graphical user interface (GUI) agents send instructions and screenshots to remote planners, exposing personally identifiable information (PII). Existing placeholder defenses mask detected spans and reuse exact strings. Fragmented or changed forms can expose PII or break entity continuity across turns. PrivacyGuard addresses this private reference problem with source-linked sanitization (SAN) and a structured reference lifecycle (REF). SAN reconstructs fragmented or overlapping evidence and rewrites the complete source extent. REF links changed appearances to session entities and supports locally resolvable references without returning raw values to the upload path. In five-turn sessions scored against common gold, PrivacyGuard reduces audited source-value leakage by 33.55\%--82.60\% relative to the closest prior full-pipeline system in all four reader--language combinations. REF raises strict cross-form continuity from 0.04 under exact-value reuse to 0.81. In reference-required Android tasks, verified completion rises from 8/30 and 7/30 to 17/30 and 20/30. On AndroidLab, PrivacyGuard achieves the highest or tied-highest task-success point estimate among protection pipelines for all four planners. On PrivScreen, it reduces fixed-reader field exposure by 62.72\%--62.84\% relative to the same baseline. PrivacyGuard lowers upload exposure while preserving a locally resolvable task path. --- ### Game-Creation-Agents: Autonomous Game Production Authors: Tencent Multimodal RL Team, Xiangxin Zhou, Jiaqi Tang, Ke Ma, Wenhao Yang, Jiarui Yao, Boye Niu, Haiyang Guo, Yifei Zhao, Huanjin Yao, Pu Jian, Ruihuang Li et al. Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16776v1 Game-Creation-Agents (GCA) turns a natural-language request into a runnable Phaser 4 browser game. The pipeline first builds a multimodal game design document that couples mechanics and scene contracts to grounded visual references. It then projects that document into a runtime scaffold, machine-readable contracts, and deterministic tests. Eight specialized agents next carry out production: scenes are implemented serially, assets are produced in parallel, and one reduced manifest joins the two branches into a single build. Build-linked real-UI checks and a code-blind critic then verify that build and decide whether the game may ship. Each blocker returns to the agent that owns the affected artifact for a bounded repair, and the game is released once all the gates pass. We evaluate finished games separately, through their rendered interfaces alone, over prompt-matched tasks run under a common protocol. GCA achieves stronger requirement satisfaction, core mechanics, content depth, and functional visuals than a comparable open pipeline. In a side-by-side human study, raters also score GCA's games higher on every dimension and prefer them overall. --- ### Geospatial Vector Geometry as a Native Spatial Modality for Vision-Language Models Authors: Huang Fei, Boyi Chen, Hao Xue, Yang Yue, Yehong Xu, Xiaofang Zhou Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16769v1 Geospatial reasoning links VLMs to real-world action and decision making. Reliable reasoning requires accurate spatial information and effective spatial representations. However, current VLMs obtain this information mainly from language and vision. At larger geographic scales, limited visual observations make it difficult to establish accurate spatial references and recover precise spatial relations. This leads to a bottleneck for VLM spatial perception and reasoning. This paper proposes that geospatial vector geometry can become a native spatial modality within a VLM and introduces GeoVec-VLM. First, we develop a structured geometry representation that preserves the spatial structure and arrangement of vector objects, building an explicit spatial basis. Second, we introduce a geometry interaction strategy that brings this basis into multimodal computation, where it interacts with visual content and language references according to the queried spatial relations. Together, these designs allow perception and reasoning to operate on shared geometric references. Across five spatial reasoning tasks, GeoVec-VLM improves mean accuracy by about 11\% relative to the strongest baseline, maintains its gains under geographic transfer, and shows greater geometric consistency. Our results show that geospatial vector geometry offers a promising internal spatial basis for VLM spatial reasoning. https://github.com/TXFR/GeoVector-VLM --- ### Relational Learning as World Modeling Authors: Zheyu Zhang, Gjergji Kasneci Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16763v1 Relational learning typically predicts from a database state, but decision making asks a different question: how will that state change under an action? In operational systems, the answer depends on system-specific dynamics that may not be visible in the database itself. We view each such system as a relational "world" and ask whether a model can infer how it behaves from observed executions. We introduce TabWM (Tabular World Model) and WorldRel, a generator of executable relational worlds for pretraining. Given executions from an unseen world, TabWM uses them as context to predict the sparse structured edits caused by a new action without parameter updates. Across 512 held-out worlds, complete-edit F1 rises from 0.016 with no observed executions to 0.685 with 64, where a correct edit must match its operation, relational location, and value. Because these predictions are explicit relational edits, they can be applied recursively to imagine candidate futures and compare actions before they are taken. Broader search over these predicted futures improves the realized return of selected action sequences. Together, these results suggest that relational dynamics can be learned in context, broadening relational learning from modeling system state to modeling how that state changes under action. --- ### Towards Complementary Keypoint Detection via Mixture of Detectors Authors: Xiaoyong Lu, Guobao Xiao, Dong Liang, Songlin Du Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16762v1 Keypoint detection plays a central role in geometric vision pipelines. Existing detectors exhibit complementary strengths across different scene structures and keypoint budgets, and reliance on a single detector often results in suboptimal keypoint distributions. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{Mixture of Detectors (MoD)} for dense matching pipelines, a unified framework for complementary keypoint detection through the adaptive composition of heterogeneous detectors. MoD first distills heterogeneous detectors into a unified model, allowing diverse detection maps to be predicted efficiently within a single forward pass. Detector selection is subsequently formulated as a patch-wise, budget-conditioned decision process, in which a lightweight router assigns the most suitable detector to each local region. To avoid heuristic supervision, the router is trained with task-driven rewards derived from downstream matching quality, jointly capturing both keypoint quantity and precision. Extensive experiments on MegaDepth, ScanNet, and HPatches demonstrate that MoD consistently outperforms strong baselines across a wide range of keypoint budgets, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving keypoint distribution and downstream geometric performance. --- ### Separating Prompt Harmfulness from Interaction Safety via Partial Generation Authors: Ram Vikas Mishra, Shashank Aggarwal, Jahnavi Kumar, Amit Awekar Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16761v1 LLM-based information systems need safety guardrails. Most guardrails classify the prompt alone. If the prompt looks harmful, the system rejects it before any answer is generated. This is costly. Many rejected prompts would have received a safe response. Users lose help they should have received from the information system. This cost grows as conversational and generative search becomes common. Prompt-level labels treat harm as a property of the query. But harm depends on what the model actually writes. Existing input-output guards do look at responses. But they judge a finished response, so the decision comes after full generation. However, we observe that safety of model interaction with the input prompt can be inferred early with only partial output. So the system can start generating, watch the partial response, and stop only if it turns harmful. We test this idea in three steps. First, we build a dataset of 41,944 prompt-response pairs with seven open weights LLMs from three families: Llama, Gemma, and Qwen. Second, we show that prompt harmfulness and interaction safety differ. Prompt labels and response labels agree on only 50.46\% of items (Cohen's $κ$ = 0.06). Of the prompts that make any model respond harmfully, only 3.5\% do so for all seven LLMs. Third, we show that partial responses carry most of the signal. Fine-tuned classifiers predict response-level harm well (best AUPRC 0.885, F1 0.807). About one third of the response tokens recover almost full-response AUPRC. --- ### Image Tokenizers Should Be Trained Between Images Authors: Ole Beißwenger, Jan-Niklas Dihlmann, Hendrik Lensch Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16759v2 Latent diffusion models generate images as codes of an image tokenizer, whose decoder turns them into the pixel image. Recent tokenizers improve how well these codes reconstruct an image and how easily a generator learns them. Yet a generator does not reproduce the codes of training images, and when a generated code lands outside what the decoder expects, the decoded image contains imperfections. Current methods make the decoder more robust to generated codes by adding noise during training. However, generated codes lie between the training codes and resemble their mixture more than one of them plus noise. To improve generated images, decoders should therefore be trained on codes in the space between training samples. We propose InterpTok, which fine-tunes MAETok to decode mixtures of image codes into natural images. Since no target image exists between two training samples, a discriminator judges whether each decoded mixture looks as natural as its two sources. A mixing ratio loss requires the decoded mixture to keep the mixing ratio of the two codes. Together, they prevent collapse to a trivial solution and yield a sharp and natural composition of both images. InterpTok keeps MAETok's reconstruction quality and improves interpolation quality more than threefold, the best of all tokenizers in a recent benchmark. Beyond interpolation, InterpTok improves the generation FID of a matched diffusion transformer from 11.61 to 8.48 without guidance, and even reaches 8.11 at an eighth of the sampling steps, where the generator on MAETok's codes worsens. The generator trained on our tokenizer also reaches the final result of the one trained on MAETok at half the training steps. Our findings show that the space between image codes can and should be explicitly supervised rather than ignored. --- ### Is the Platform Part of the Measurement? A Protocol and Simulation Study for Cross-Platform Equivalence of Machine-Labelled Policy Sentiment Authors: Asad Ikram, Ella Haig Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16757v1 Comparing machine-labelled sentiment across social media platforms is now routine: differences in classifier scores between platforms are read as differences in public opinion. These comparisons rest on an assumption that the classifier measures the same construct, on the same scale, on every platform. Some studies check a classifier's validity platform by platform, but to our knowledge none has modelled the platform as a facet of the classifier's measurement. We adapt the psychometric equivalence toolkit (generalizability theory, measurement invariance and differential item functioning, and score linking) to machine-labelled policy sentiment, treating the platform as a survey mode, and specify a six-step protocol with anchor events fixed in advance, an anchor-density audit, and a two-classifier convergence control. A simulation with known ground truth illustrates what the assumption can cost in one generating configuration fixed in advance: across 500 replications, because the platforms measure through different functions, a pooled index that takes platform scores at face value reports the wrong sign of aggregate sentiment on nearly a quarter of days, whereas an index adjusted with each platform's known measurement function does so on under one day in sixty on average. A case study of the instrument from the first author's MSc dissertation, a fine-tuned BERT classifier over 255,446 UK economic-policy comments from Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, and Quora, motivates the design and illustrates the instrument-dependence the protocol addresses. The full four-platform application, under fresh collection with the pre-specified design, is the designated follow-up study. The protocol lets a researcher test whether pooling platforms is defensible in a given corpus, or whether platform scores must be linked before any average is taken. --- ### The Multilingual Artificial Hivemind: Do All LLMs Think Alike in Every Language? Authors: Xaver Raphael Davey, Shubhra Mishra, Anton Adelöw, Siyao Liu Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16755v1 Text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) often remains limited in diversity compared to that produced by humans. Recent advances demonstrate the presence of inter- and intra-model collapse in open-ended generation of English text, raising concerns about the long-term homogenization of LLM, and more importantly, human thought. However, our understanding of whether this homogenization extends to languages beyond English is limited. In this work, we investigate the role of language on output diversity. Specifically, we aim to understand whether multilingual LLM-generated text is also homogeneous, and whether this homogeneity matches what we observe in humans. Across 23 open-weight models and 13 languages, we find that the artificial hivemind effect is pervasive but uneven in its extent. The intra-model effect holds in three different embedding spaces and under a lexical metric that uses no embedding model, so it is not an artifact of how diversity is measured. The size of the homogenization gap is associated with a model's competence in a language, measured on a held-out translation benchmark, robustly across embedding spaces. Thus, we demonstrate a performance-diversity tradeoff in multilingual LLMs. --- ### NFMap: Topographic 2D Manifold Learning with Invertible Normalizing Flows Authors: Héléna Alexandra Gaspar Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16750v1 We present NFMap, a dimensionality reduction method for 2D visualisation that extends Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) with a bijective normalizing flow. Like GTM, NFMap places a fixed mixture grid prior over a 2D latent map, giving a parametric embedding, an explicit likelihood, and the ability to project new points onto an existing map; the likelihood is an effective out-of-distribution signal on chemical datasets. Unlike GTM, whose latent-to-data mapping is an RBF network of bounded flexibility, NFMap's mapping is a normalizing flow, and is therefore fully invertible: any location on the map can be carried back to data space. To alleviate map crowding on large datasets, NFMap additionally supports heavy-tailed Student-t mixture components. NFMap maps data to a latent space of the same dimension, split into a 2-dimensional navigable map and an off-manifold residual. Because the flow is bijective and its objective penalises volume contraction, variance squeezed out of the residual must reappear in the navigable map. The residual scale is the main control between local neighbourhood fidelity and global distance fidelity; its effect depends on the dimensionality of the data and is coupled to the extent of the latent grid. --- ### The Midas Touch for Metric Depth: Interpretable Metricization for Generalizable Depth Perception Authors: Mengtan Zhang, Yu Ma, Shiqi Jiang, Yi Feng, Wei Ye, Xieyuanli Chen, Hanli Wang, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16749v1 Recent foundation models have drastically improved the generalization of monocular relative depth estimation, yet recovering accurate metric depth from their estimates for depth perception tasks remains challenging due to scale ambiguity and local metric-scale inconsistency. Existing approaches recover metric depth from sparse observations using either explicit global affine transformation algorithms or implicit data-driven depth completion networks. The former cannot accommodate spatially varying relative-to-metric relationships, while the latter are sensitive to the distribution of sparse observations and may not fully exploit generalizable relative depth priors. To simultaneously address these issues, this study extends our previous work MTD and proposes MTDv2, a hybrid metric depth perception framework that combines explicit depth metricization with data-driven metric depth refinement. The explicit depth metricization process performs segment-wise affine transformations to recover spatially varying metric scales while preserving the geometric structure of relative depth, followed by pixel-wise depth refinement that propagates metric observations along paths with minimal accumulated geometric variation. The data-driven depth refinement process subsequently extends the explicit single-path depth propagation to a learnable multi-path formulation while preserving its interpretability. Extensive experiments conducted on 16 public datasets demonstrate the robust and generalizable depth scale recovery capability of MTDv2 across diverse sources of sparse observations and different depth estimation paradigms, as well as its broad applicability to downstream 3D perception tasks. Code will be publicly available at https://mias.group/MTD upon publication. --- ### Before Attention Sinks Form: Hidden-State Geometry Reveals and Modulates Their Formation Authors: Fan Yang, Yue Song Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16745v1 Attention sinks are usually studied after they have formed. We ask whether a measurable hidden-state change appears beforehand and whether changing that geometry alters what happens later. To remove network depth as a shortcut, we compare prompts in the same model and at the same layer. When sink timing varies across prompts, simple spectral summaries of the hidden states add information beyond current attention, with the clearest prompt-specific signal in a short window about two to three layers before sink formation. The predictive strength varies across cohorts, so we treat the spectrum as a readout of a pre-sink state change rather than a universal warning statistic. The signal is broader than one measured extreme activation. We then modify only the singular values of the post-layer hidden states after current attention has already been computed. These interventions change later sink behavior in Qwen2.5, GLM-Z1, and GPT-OSS relative to norm-matched random spectral perturbations. In Qwen2.5, the immediate suppressive effect is accompanied by a reduction in next-layer query--key preference for position~0, and the learned spectral directions remain stable when estimated from substantially less training data. Together, the results show that attention sinks are preceded by a short spectral reorganization of hidden states, and directly perturbing this geometry can causally alter subsequent sink formation. --- ### FoveaTree: Information-Density Trees for Query-Guided Visual Token Pruning in Video Large Language Models Authors: Zihan Meng, Weidong Chen, Dexiang Hong, Xinyan Liu, Zhendong Mao Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16744v1 Video large language models (Video LLMs) encode each frame into hundreds of visual tokens, making video inference expensive. Existing methods reduce this cost through similarity-based merging or attention-based selection but face two challenges: Hierarchy-blind Pruning, which overlooks regional compressibility and can discard critical evidence, and Attention Drift, where positional effects and attention sinks shift text-to-vision attention away from task relevance. We propose FoveaTree, a two-stage, training-free visual-token pruning framework. First, Merge-Gain Density Estimation measures the feature distortion caused by regional merging and constructs a quadtree-derived density map to guide token dropping, merging, and retention. Second, Attention Tree Pruning uses the surviving units and inherited tree topology to refine text-to-vision attention in intermediate LLM layers, preserving relevant regional evidence while removing low-relevance content. We evaluate FoveaTree on InternVL3.5-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B across five video question-answering benchmarks and one captioning benchmark at 50%, 30%, and 10% visual-token retention. FoveaTree consistently achieves overall state-of-the-art performance across the evaluated settings, offering a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off. --- ### CopyQuad: Quadrupedal Skill Transfer from a Single Side-View Video Without a Depth Model Authors: Mohamad H. Danesh, Raina Hu, Mengxue Xu, Hsiu-Chin Lin Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16737v1 Video-to-robot pipelines for quadrupedal imitation insert a learned lifting stage, either a monocular depth model or a per-clip 3D reconstruction, to recover the one axis a side-view camera cannot see. We present CopyQuad, which omits that stage and pins the missing axis to the robot's own stance width instead. The setting is side-view footage of sagittally dominated motion, where limb motion is almost entirely in the image plane. A frozen 2D keypoint detector and a fixed analytic retargeting then turn a single uncalibrated clip into a robot reference whose foot targets are reachable by construction, so no per-clip trajectory optimization is needed. One phase-indexed reward structure, whose only per-behavior freedom is three scalars from a shared sweep, learns a dog walk, a horse walk, a horse trot and two non-periodic gestures, all deployed zero-shot on hardware. We then measure what omitting the axis costs. In a training-free rigidity test, a video depth model varies the distance between the animal's hips by $40$ to $107\%$ of its own mean and a single-image metric model by $22$ to $58\%$, though that distance cannot move. Motion capture puts the true lateral paw travel of a dog walk at $4.5$ cm peak to peak, a mean deviation near $1.4$ cm against the $3.5$ cm of lateral foot error our policies already leave, so the discarded axis sits below the pipeline's resolution. Depth repaired to feasibility never beats the constant, and the unrepaired estimates put the robot on the ground. --- ### Amortised adaptive importance sampling Authors: Arran Carter, Víctor Elvira, Esmeralda S. Whitammer Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16736v1 Monte Carlo sampling algorithms aim to produce samples from a target distribution with a given unnormalised probability density function. The high cost of running Monte Carlo algorithms, with many simulation steps or particles needed to obtain a good empirical approximation to the target, can be reduced by introducing learnable components into the sampler -- a form of amortisation. Once these components are trained, amortised samplers can produce high-quality samples with less computation at sampling time than training-free algorithms would require. We propose an amortised sampler built upon the framework of adaptive importance sampling -- a hierarchical importance sampling procedure where the proposal is iteratively adapted. Our amortised adaptive importance sampling algorithm fits a lightweight neural network that adapts the proposal using information obtained over the course of sampling. By training our sampler over many different targets taken from the same family of distributions, we obtain a sampler that can adapt to a specific target at sampling time without a priori access to the target's parameters. We show that our procedure can efficiently sample from targets within the family the sampler was trained on, giving improvements over target-specific amortised samplers and training-free adaptive importance sampling algorithms. We also explore the potential for generalisation, where the trained sampler is used to sample from targets outwith its training family. --- ### VAttnPO: Visual Attention-Guided Policy Optimization Authors: Lihao Zheng, Zhenwei Shao, Zhou Yu, Yan Yang, Haoyi Sun, Qian Wang, Ning Mao, Pan Zhou Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16735v1 Multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards commonly assigns one sequence advantage to an entire response. This outcome-level signal distinguishes overall response quality but leaves changes in visual-evidence use across generated tokens implicit. We introduce VAttnPO (Visual Attention-Guided Policy Optimization), which uses answer-conditioned visual attention to refine token-level credit while preserving the verifier-derived trajectory-mean advantage. A frozen old policy constructs a visual reference by teacher forcing the known correct answer and produces a visual distribution for each rollout token. VAttnPO measures their agreement in visual-attention space using Jensen--Shannon divergence, rather than reading guidance from teacher output-token distributions or introducing an attention-matching objective. Trajectory centering, relative-position weighting, and credit balancing turn this agreement into a zero-mean, position-aware correction to the GRPO sequence advantage. Token intervention, visual-index permutation, and trajectory analysis provide diagnostic evidence linking this signal to model behavior, visual correspondence, and generation position. On Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, VAttnPO raises six-task image AVE from 70.97 with GRPO to 73.50 and scores higher on every reported structured, video, and MME metric. Gains over GRPO also hold on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL3-8B-Instruct. --- ### PathPilot: An Adaptive Question-Conditioned Multi-Magnification Navigation Agent for Whole-Slide Image Analysis Authors: Zhengyang Xu, Han Li, Jingsong Liu, Ayako Ura, Shihui Zu, Shaohua Kevin Zhou, Nassir Navab, Peter Schüffler Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16734v1 The diagnostic capability of WSI agents relies on effective slide navigation to identify diagnostically relevant regions and efficiently integrate evidence across the slide. While in clinical practice, pathologists dynamically examine slides across multiple scales, integrating global and cellular evidence in a sequential manner, existing AI navigation approaches mostly operate at a single fixed magnification or rely on predefined magnification traversal. This mismatch prevents existing methods from modeling cross-magnification interactions and adaptive magnification selection inherent to real diagnostic workflows. We propose PathPilot, a clinically consistent multi-magnification WSI navigation agent that explicitly models cross-magnification localization and evidence-adaptive exploration. Specifically, we introduce a CrossMagLoc that learns magnification-specific diagnostic localization from pathologist viewing behavior and integrates information from adjacent magnifications to identify the diagnostically most relevant region within the current ROI, thereby providing a diagnostically informed starting point for subsequent question-conditioned exploration. We further introduce an EviRegionSearch that starts question-conditioned exploration from this region, progressively accumulating question-relevant evidence and adaptively determining the next navigation action according to the remaining evidence requirement. Their iterative interaction enables PathPilot to sequentially explore across ROIs and magnifications until sufficient evidence is acquired. Extensive QA evaluations across five cohorts demonstrate consistent superiority over competing SOTA methods on inter/external cohorts, respectively, validating question-conditioned evidence acquisition across regions and magnifications that mirrors the sequential, knowledge-driven navigation of pathologists. --- ### Queue-Aware Token Communications: Bridging AI Representation and Wireless Service Authors: Yuquan Xiao, Qinghe Du, Chaoyang Zhang, Wenchi Cheng, Jingqing Wang, Tao Chen, Jiangzhou Wang Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16730v1 The rapid advancement of foundation models and edge intelligence is transforming wireless networks from data-oriented communication systems into artificial intelligence (AI)-native service platforms. Token communications (TokenCom) has emerged as a promising paradigm that directly transmits task-oriented AI representations. However, existing studies typically assume that generated tokens can be transmitted immediately, overlooking the queueing dynamics arising from the mismatch between token workload generation and time-varying wireless service capability. To address this limitation, we introduce Queue-Aware TokenCom, which explicitly incorporates token queues into the AI service pipeline. We present an end-to-end architecture integrating AI representation generation, token workload management, wireless transmission, and downstream task inference. We then discuss two key design directions: budget-aware token representation optimization and queue-aware token service optimization, with the token budget serving as a critical interface between AI performance and communication efficiency. Moreover, we investigate fixed and adaptive token budget strategies to characterize the fundamental tradeoff between AI performance and communication efficiency in dynamic wireless environments. Finally, we outline research directions toward closed-loop, task-aware, and scalable TokenCom systems. --- ### Trace-to-Architecture: Capability Bottleneck Diagnosis for Harness Revision Authors: Wenfeng Wang, Jianrui Shi, Mingang Guo, Jiayuan Ma, Yuqi Lu, Jiajun Sun, Guojiang Zhao, Jing Li Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16725v1 Improving an LLM agent requires knowing what to change when it fails. Similar failures can require different fixes, and resolving one problem can expose another. We introduce Trace-to-Architecture (T2A), a framework that uses execution trajectories to determine what to change in an agent's harness and when those changes apply. A development agent diagnoses failures using execution evidence from successful and failed tasks, revises the corresponding harness components, and then checks whether target tasks improve, selected successful tasks remain successful, and the edits are actually triggered. New execution evidence guides subsequent diagnosis and revision. Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and AppWorld, T2A achieves the highest aggregate score for all three evaluated task agents, exceeding their respective strongest baselines by 6.2--30.3 points. We also integrate T2A's diagnosis and validation procedures into Meta-Harness, improving the resulting harnesses' mean ScienceWorld score by 21.6 points from the same starting harness. --- ### Lost in Contrast: Instruction-Preserving Decoding for Reliable Visual Question Answering Authors: Haonan Zhang, Ting Jin, Wenzhong Tang, Shuai Wang Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16722v1 Visual contrastive decoding corrects answers using the prediction difference between the original image and a reference condition, yet the same contrast also turns supported abstentions into incorrect answers. We find that abstentions are lost at two stages: contrastive decoding with candidate filtering can exclude the abstention token before any comparison takes place, and the reference branch's response to the abstention instruction is removed when the reference prediction is subtracted. We therefore propose instruction-preserving decoding, which keeps the effect of the abstention instruction on the original-image prediction intact while leaving the contrast strength freely adjustable. Using a perturbed image and an image-free prediction as references, we obtain IP-VCD and IP-M3ID. On decision utility (DU), which credits both correct answers and supported abstentions, both methods outperform all compared non-IP baselines on every one of nine models on VizWiz, and IP-VCD also leads on eight of nine models on Food-101. Candidate measurements and paired per-question comparisons show that computing the instruction effect and the visual contrast term separately lets contrastive decoding support both correct answers and supported abstentions. --- ### Learn from Move: the Next Step for GUI Agents Authors: Jiahao Lu, Yize Shen, Chuanyuan Tan, Mianqiu Huang, Shicheng Fang, Xinchi Chen, Yining Zheng, Yuxin Wang, Xipeng Qiu Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16720v1 Existing benchmarks for GUI agents primarily focus on increasing task difficulty by extending task horizons. Besides, enabling agents to explore unfamiliar environments and successfully complete tasks within them is also a critical yet challenging problem. We introduce LatentGUIWorld, a benchmark of six tasks in three matched pairs organized by the evidence needed for control: $I_0$ uses prior knowledge and available observations, $I_1$ requires interaction that directly reveals hidden semantics, and $I_2$ identifies dynamics from action-response relationships. Frontier models struggle especially on $I_2$ tasks. We introduce MOVE, which separates movement from button events and exposes intermediate visual feedback, together with demonstrations of iterative exploration and control. Ablations show that both action granularity and multi-step demonstrations improve performance. After SFT, LatentLearner-9B achieves 50.0% overall success on LatentGUIWorld, comparable to several frontier models. Joint RL further raises egocentric Drag and Ten-Choice success to 92.0% and 75.3%. Behavioral analysis reveals multi-step exploration. In egocentric Drag, RL increases Pearson correlation between error-normalized commands and ideal gain compensation from 0.610 to 0.803. Together, these behaviors show that models learn to explore through interaction and adapt their control to environment dynamics. The same format improves GUI grounding after RL, reaching 67.37% mean accuracy across five benchmarks versus 66.72% for conventional RL. --- ### Where Is the "Self" of a Large Language Model? -- From Self-Index to Self-Reference Authors: Yuchen Li, Xintong Li, Zongqi Fan, Ken-tye Yong, Nguyen H. Tran Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16717v2 Does a large language model have a self, and if so, of what kind? We separate two functional levels familiar from biology: a self-index, which distinguishes one's own material from external material and shapes processing, as corollary discharge does in nearly all animals, and self-reference, the higher ability to recognize what is one's own, as in mirror self-recognition. We probe both in Qwen3.8-27B by placing the same text in an Assistant, a User, or a System message rendered by the model's own chat template, and report three levels of evidence. Persistence: as predicted in advance, the representation of the text separates the model's own message from both external sources at all 64 layers and for every test text, along a shared direction, even when the answer does not depend on who supplied the text. Coupling: asked who wrote the preceding message, the model claims its own messages (0.77) and assigns User and System messages alike to the user, and how strongly it claims each message is predicted by the size of its self-index (Spearman correlation up to 0.68). Intervention: exchanging the internal states that follow a message, rather than those of its text, reverses the self-attribution between layers 15 and 31; removing the self-index direction from them at layer 39 lowers the claim more than a random direction; and in arithmetic the model adopts a wrong step more often when it wrote the step itself (0.92 versus 0.75), an effect carried by the step's representation at layers 31 to 39. Reasoning first in thinking mode raises the probability of the correct answer (0.96 instead of 0.77), but recognition is present without it. We propose that self-reference is a higher-level ability built on a self-index, a content-independent displacement superimposed on the whole representation of the model's own messages. --- ### Audit Before You Distill: A Controlled Workflow for Reasoning Transfer into Compact Medical Language Models Authors: Tiago Martinelli, João Paulo Papa, Adriano José Pereira Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16713v1 Teacher rationales can help a smaller model answer health professions questions, but they can also reinforce errors. We examined when they help and how this evidence can guide training using Brazilian Portuguese questions from medical and multiprofessional residency examinations. First, we measured how a teacher rationale changed the student's probability of selecting the correct answer and compared this effect with rationales drawn from other questions. The complete rationale increased this probability by 21~p.p. when the teacher was correct and decreased it by 14~p.p. when the teacher was wrong. By intervening on the reasoning content, we showed that shuffled rationales did not produce the same pattern. Guided by this result, we trained only with rationales attached to correct teacher answers and compared answer-only training, step-by-step distillation, and our proposed Distill-SFT method. Distill-SFT showed a modest advantage over step-by-step distillation on previously missed questions under reasoning, while using fewer training instances by combining the answer and rationale into a single target. We also investigated catastrophic forgetting using the out-of-domain ENEM dataset. Answer-only training reduced reasoning accuracy by 12~p.p. relative to baseline, compared with approximately 4~p.p. for either rationale-based training method. Together, these findings support a workflow that audits rationale content before distillation, verifies teacher answers before supervision, and trains compact models efficiently for health professions question answering. --- ### Attention-Graph Curvature for the Verification of Mathematical Reasoning Authors: Kanghyeon Kim, Johannes F. Lutzeyer, Yanzhu Guo Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16709v1 Language models have recently solved open Erdős problems and achieved gold-medal level performance on International Mathematical Olympiad problems. But their solutions, written in natural language, cannot yet be verified by proof assistants. An erroneous reasoning step can invalidate every step that comes after, so it is advantageous to detect errors early. Several methods have been proposed to detect erroneous reasoning quickly based on the features of the forward pass of the language model that performs reasoning. In this work, we study whether the directed Forman curvature of that model's attention graph, a local quantity computed at an edge from the attention weights around it, carries information about a step's correctness. To do so, we evaluate four per-step verifiers on ProcessBench with and without the curvature appended to their input. Appending curvature values improves the overall mean performance of all four verifiers. ReProbe, the verifier that takes every token of a step as input, shows the largest improvement. Adding the curvature increases the time of the language model's forward pass by 18% on average. --- ### Universal Distributed Feature Extraction Complementary to Side Information via H-Score Authors: Yuan Xinjie, Dier Tang, Shaolun-Huang Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16707v1 This paper considers a distributed estimation system where edge nodes transmit averaged features to a center node for parameter estimation. A key challenge arises when the center node possesses auxiliary side information: how to design local extractors that are universally optimal for any downstream task, while avoiding redundancy with the side information. To tackle this problem, we orthogonally decompose the joint function space and demonstrate in the weak-dependence regime that the modal decomposition of the canonical dependence kernel's conditional-additive component yields optimal, task-independent features. We construct a distributed nested H-score to learn this decomposition and show that, under a limited feature budget, the mean-squared error (MSE) gap to the best task-specific features is determined solely by the task's alignment with the discarded, least informative modes, and vanishes to leading order for every square-integrable task once the budget is sufficient. --- ### Averaged Annealed Markov Chains Achieve the Algorithmic Threshold for Tensor PCA, Part I: Glauber Dynamics Authors: Aniket Das, Tselil Schramm Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.DS, math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16705v1 In the tensor principal components analysis (tensor PCA) problem, we are asked to recover an unknown vector in $\{\pm1\}^N$ from a noisy observation of its $k$-th tensor power, for a fixed $k\ge3$. Tensor PCA exhibits a well-studied information-computation gap: global algorithms such as spectral methods and sum-of-squares work above an algorithmic threshold, below which we know matching lower bounds (against these and some other restricted models of computation). In contrast, local algorithms such as Markov chains were only known to succeed from a random initialization at a polynomially larger signal-to-noise ratio, and were believed to be inferior to global algorithms for tensor PCA. We show that Glauber dynamics, when supplemented with annealing and ergodic averaging, achieves polynomial-time strong recovery above the algorithmic threshold from a uniformly random initialization, demonstrating that local Markov chains can succeed all the way down to the algorithmic threshold from an uninformative cold start. --- ### Feature-Context Consistency: Unsupervised Adversarial Detection with Drift Stability on Attributed Graphs Authors: Firas Bayram, Maxime Cordy Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16694v1 Adversarial detection on evolving attributed graphs faces two challenges: fraud labels arrive late or not at all, and natural distributional drift erodes any trained decision boundary. Modern detectors can reach strong detection rates when labels are available and the distribution is stationary; sustaining that quality without labels and under drift is the open problem. We identify feature-context consistency -- the alignment between a node's attributes and its aggregated neighborhood attributes -- as a single structural signal that addresses both. We formalize it as the Context Boost (CB) score within a Restricted Boltzmann Machine framework (CB-RBM) and prove two complementary worst-case guarantees: a strict separation between the expected CB of legitimate and adversarial nodes, with gap growing linearly in model capacity, whenever the adversary's context stays far enough from legitimate neighborhood context; and a Wasserstein-Lipschitz bound on how far the CB distribution moves under natural drift. We validate on XBlock Ethereum phishing (~153K nodes) and Reddit banned-user detection (~11K nodes), with two further datasets in the appendix spanning diverse domains. With zero labels, CB-RBM achieves AUROC >= 0.96 on four adversarial attacks and keeps FPR close to its calibrated 5% target under drift -- outperforming supervised GNNs (hundreds of labels), unsupervised graph-anomaly baselines, and a standard RBM whose FPR collapses to 89-100%. What typically requires separate mechanisms -- label-free operation and drift stability -- here follows from a single structural regularity of the data. Code: https://github.com/serval-uni-lu/CB-RBM. --- ### 3D-VITAL: Visibility-aware Identity Training from Artificial Liftings of 3D Reconstruction model for Cross-View Object Re-Identification Authors: William Grolleau, Astrid Sabourin, Guillaume Lapouge, Catherine Achard Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16692v1 We address the Cross-View Object Re-Identification (ReID) task, aiming to match identities across drastically different viewpoints. We focus on Single-View Aerial-Ground ReID (SV AG-ReID), where models train on one viewpoint and must generalize to another at inference. To bridge this viewpoint gap, related work employs generative models to synthesize novel views from source images as additional training data. We leverage recent advances in large-scale single-view 3D mesh reconstruction to lift source images into textured meshes and to render them from new viewpoints. However, this pipeline produces unreliable data in two distinct ways. First, the reconstruction may fail and produce geometrically incorrect meshes, resulting in severe corruption in rendered novel views. Second, even when the geometry is correct, the rendered novel views contain hallucinated textures in regions not visible in the source image. The reconstructed mesh carries a per-pixel partition between regions visible from the source view and regions that the reconstruction model had to hallucinate, available as a deterministic byproduct of rendering. We introduce this per-pixel visibility map and exploit it in a two-stage design. Cross-View Consistency Filtering (CVCF) discards geometrically incorrect meshes by ensuring multi-view consistency between source and novel views over visible patches. Visibility-Aware Attention Supervision (VAAS) leverages the visibility map to guide the model's attention toward reliable regions of the rendered view during training. Combined, these two components enable our method, 3D-VITAL, to better leverage the synthetic signal from single-view 3D mesh reconstruction. 3D-VITAL sets a new state-of-the-art on three SV AG-ReID benchmarks. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/TurtleSmoke/3D-VITAL. --- ### EHR-Bench: A Chinese Multi-Task Benchmark for Recruitment AI Authors: Ruijia Yang, Bing Xu, Zulong Chen, Zhipeng Xu, Jia Xu, Yipeng Yu, Ying Zhou, Zeyi Wen Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16689v1 Recruitment applications span diverse operations, from drafting job descriptions and interpreting queries to organizing profiles, assessing fit, and recommending candidates and jobs. Systematic LLM evaluation therefore requires task coverage that reflects this range of business needs. We introduce EHR-Bench, an open Chinese benchmark comprising twelve tasks across six capability families and five recruitment scenarios. The tasks cover generation, extraction, classification, retrieval, semantic similarity, and reciprocal ranking within one evaluation framework. An internal recruitment dataset guides task definitions, the occupation taxonomy and sampling targets, output requirements, and scoring protocols. Following these specifications, we construct 8,336 task instances from public materials and controlled augmentation, with source-aware expert review and documented provenance. We evaluate twelve LLMs through task-level, capability-level, and aggregate comparisons. Closely ranked models exhibit distinct task strengths, and performance varies across input sources, reference evidence, and candidate pools. Five shared models retain the same observed Overall ordering on a private operational reference, with variation in capability and task correspondence. EHR-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for systematic model assessment, task-specific model selection, and further research on LLMs for recruitment. The project repository is available at https://github.com/EhrBench/EHR-Bench. --- ### Spectral Costs of Multinomial and Residual Resampling in High-Dimensional Particle Ensembles: A Free-Probability Analysis Authors: Deming Song, Chi Kin Lam Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: math.ST, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16680v1 Resampling is the standard remedy against weight degeneracy in particle filters, yet its effect on the spectrum of the particle second-moment matrix is poorly understood. We study a single resampling step for a d-dimensional ensemble of N particles with d/N -> c. For any unbiased scheme, the resampled empirical second-moment matrix dominates its pre-resampling counterpart in conditional convex order, while the conditional mean is preserved; the excess second spectral moment equals the Frobenius energy of the resampling perturbation. For multinomial resampling, the empirical count law converges to the mixed-Poisson law determined by the limiting weight law. For residual resampling, the count law is determined by the joint limit of floor-fraction pairs: we classify all residual limits of weight sequences converging to delta_1 in law as a one-parameter family between the deterministic identity and the full multinomial count law. Each count law feeds a common covariance-side spectral map, yielding exact consequences: a closed-form zero-eigenvalue mass, a rank-and-spectral-gap transition with a universal lower edge benchmark, computable regular edges, unbounded right support, and scheme-specific second-moment costs. The effective sample size determines one bulk statistic but cannot determine the limiting spectrum. Pre-registered numerical experiments confirm the theory at every level. --- ### EvoSpatial: Experience-Driven Skill and Tool Evolution for Spatial Reasoning Agents Authors: Bin Yu, Shijie Lian, Zhaolong Shen, Xiaopeng Lin, Yao Zhang, Haishan Liu, Haotian Li, Yuliang Wei, Kai Hu, Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Bailing Wang et al. Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16679v2 Spatial reasoning agents can inspect tool outputs and repair errors, but reusing these lessons requires preserving both the computation and the conditions that make it valid. We introduce EvoSpatial, a framework that learns from execution experience by updating a library of linked skills and tools. Skills describe procedures, geometric assumptions, and verification steps; tools implement the operations those procedures require. When solving a task, the agent retrieves relevant skills and synthesizes reusable computational functions if existing tools are insufficient. After each task, execution feedback and evidence checks guide skill revision and tool consolidation, without ground-truth answers or benchmark scores. Across 20 benchmarks, EvoSpatial averages 63.9, 4.0 percentage points above the average reported by SpatialClaw. The evolved library also improves held-out and cross-benchmark performance when updates are disabled, and trajectories generated with evolved skills improve supervised fine-tuning, even without external skills at evaluation. Keeping checked procedures on record, together with the tools that support them, lets an agent carry spatial reasoning experience from one task to the next. --- ### Amortized Variational Inference of Latent Intensities from Replicated Point Patterns Authors: Wenqing Liu, Xenia Miscouridou, Déborah Sulem Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16669v1 Bayesian inference for latent point process intensities often relies on per-dataset sampling or optimization, making repeated inference computationally expensive. We propose a neural-network-based amortized variational framework that learns a reusable inference rule mapping a variable number of replicated point patterns to a distribution over their shared latent intensity. Trained from event times using the point process likelihood, the model learns an amortized inference rule without ground-truth intensity supervision. At test time, it performs inference of the latent distribution in a forward pass. On synthetic data, additional realizations improve intensity recovery and yield narrower credible intervals with broadly stable coverage. Our method is tested on bicycle-sharing data and achieves the highest mean held-out log likelihood among the evaluated methods while requiring substantially less inference time than the Log-Gaussian Cox Process baseline. --- ### Revisiting Natural Language Prompts from Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Video Recognition Authors: Haichen He, Weibin Liu, Weiwei Xing Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16666v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown great success in image tasks, however, applying CLIP to open-vocabulary video recognition poses challenges. Due to the limited text information, directly fine-tuning CLIP on video recognition datasets may lead to overfitting and hinder its generalizability. A prevalent method is to enrich text information by generating prompts using Large Language Models (LLMs). However, limited efforts have been made to explore how to generate higher-quality prompts that can contribute to classify unseen categories, and how to further enhance vision-text alignment based on these prompts. In this paper, we propose P2CLIP (Prompt-guided CLIP), which aims to bridge this gap by exploring the impact of prompts across three aspects: category, video, and frame. At the category level, we argue that LLM-generated prompts under simple instructions may suffer from semantic overgeneralization, which can blur the category boundaries and hinder the performance of the model. To address this issue, we design Generic-Discriminative Prompt using LLMs to obtain discriminative category embeddings with rich semantic information. At the video and frame levels, we first use VLM and LLM to generate frame and video descriptions for enhancing vision-text alignment. Then we propose a Knowledge-Guided Temporal Aggregation mechanism, which leverages the expert knowledge derived from LLMs to guide the temporal modeling of videos and encourage a better construction of the joint visual-textual feature space. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks, including zero-shot and few-shot settings, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. --- ### Making LoRA Identifiable: Orthogonal Alignment for Continual Learning Authors: Pratik Rakesh Singh, Mohammadi Zaki, Akash Saha, Aneesh Mukkamala, Pankaj Wasnik Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16664v1 There is growing interest in applying Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to Continual Learning, as it enables faster training, mitigates catastrophic forgetting, and facilitates better adaptation to new tasks. Prior approaches have explored a range of strategies, including extending new LoRA branches for each incoming task, training under orthogonal loss objectives across all task-specific LoRA modules, and employing gating mechanisms to integrate new and existing LoRA modules. However, these methods incur memory costs that grow linearly with the number of tasks, limiting their scalability. More recent approaches investigate training a single LoRA by leveraging asymmetries in its parameterization; however, they often suffer from insufficient representational alignment across the LoRA parameter space. To address these limitations, we propose Stiefel Optimization and Aligned Rotation (SOAR), a two-stage framework for continual LoRA learning. First, we constrain the A matrix to lie on the Stiefel manifold, thereby reducing coordinate misalignment to the space of orthogonal rotation matrices. Second, we introduce an Orthogonal Procrustes alignment procedure for the B matrix to estimate the optimal rotation, coupled with a per-rank retention merging strategy that quantifies directional agreement between representations of new and previously learned tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks, demonstrating that SOAR achieves strong continual learning performance without incurring additional memory overhead. --- ### Structural Baselines Matter for Agent Failure Detection and Attribution Authors: Ramesh Arvind Naagarajan, Stefan Streif Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16661v1 An LLM agent using tools can fail silently. It stops before the task is done, raises no error, and answers fluently. Two kinds of monitor address this, one deciding whether a run failed and the other naming the step where failure became unavoidable. Much of the reported performance on both tasks comes from regularities that need no model. Failing runs are longer, and the step labelled decisive is usually the last. A rule that always names the last step is correct $67\%$ to $96\%$ of the time here, without reading the run at all. That ceiling reflects how the labels were written, not how agents break. On failures whose decisive step replay can confirm, it falls to near chance. Reporting gain over that rule therefore changes what a score means. Under that correction, methods tested here gain nothing on give-up failures, while several published systems keep a clear advantage on other splits. For detection, the agent's internal states beat transcript length and text similarity on the agent benchmark, and hold up where the text baseline does not. Precision stays low when failures are rare, so such a monitor should rank runs for review, not replace it. --- ### Compression Through Time: An Interplay of Separability, Stationarity and Capacity Authors: Nikolaus Kopp, Franz Pernkopf, Bernhard Geiger Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16660v1 Information-theoretic and geometric compression have been widely studied as possible explanations for generalization. Yet their temporal dynamics in recurrent networks remain largely unexplored. Using discretized LSTMs, whose finite embedding space enables direct estimates of information quantities, we observe pronounced compression across the final timesteps of many datasets. We explain this effect through three competing mechanisms: (i) class separability permits stronger compression at the final timestep; (ii) shared recurrent dynamics propagate this pressure across timesteps with similar activation states, making its extent depend on temporal stationarity; and (iii) limited representational capacity opposes prolonged compression because it restricts information available for subsequent computation. We systematically test these mechanisms through controlled synthetic interventions and real-world sequence tasks. Our results identify class separability, temporal stationarity, and network capacity as key determinants of temporal compression, and suggest that compression acts as a regularizer-potentially beneficial when excess capacity is available, but harmful to generalization when it consumes memory needed for the task. --- ### RFWeave: Learning Wireless Propagation Across Scenes and Transceiver Configurations Authors: Shurui Xu, Xiao Ye, Yijie Bian, Junjie Ai, Yuxuan Chen, Weicong Chen, Wankai Tang, Shi Jin Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16656v1 Wireless propagation modeling is foundational to the evaluation and design of modern communication systems. To achieve accurate wireless propagation prediction, recent learning-based approaches leverage scene geometry and materials, demonstrating promising generalization across transceiver locations and unseen scenes. However, these approaches remain largely confined to a fixed configuration of array size, receiver orientation, and transmit beam. In this work, we introduce RFWeave, a learned wireless propagation model designed to generalize across scenes, transceiver locations, and transceiver configurations. To accommodate varying array structures, RFWeave incorporates variable-length transceiver tokens that represent antenna elements individually. Furthermore, to capture the geometry between transmit and receive antenna elements, RFWeave aggregates their pairwise spatial relations into propagation tokens. A configuration-conditioned decoder predicts the spatial spectrum and received power. RFWeave is trained on a large-scale simulated dataset spanning 10,000 indoor scenes and more than 5 million channel records under diverse transceiver configurations. Extensive evaluations show that RFWeave achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated generalization settings, improving spatial spectrum structural similarity (SSIM) by up to 15.7% and reducing received power mean absolute error (MAE) by up to 35.4% over the strongest baselines on unseen scenes. Additional experiments on measured DICHASUS data and in beam management further demonstrate RFWeave's broader applicability to real-world channels and downstream wireless tasks. --- ### Does a Hosted Decision Model Respect Irrelevant Alternatives? A Pre-Registered Test of Option-Set Dependence in Jev Authors: Dushyant Rajput, Nirdesh Chauhan, Siddharth Kosaraju Published: 2026-10-12 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16655v1 Decision APIs that return a probability for each option are routinely used as if those probabilities were properties of the options themselves. That reading is valid only if the model satisfies independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): adding an option that is neither the right answer nor its strongest rival should leave the odds between those two unchanged. We test this in a pre-registered study of jev-1.13.0, a hosted decision model, using 299,463 calls on intent classification (BANKING77, CLINC150) and topic classification (AG News). Every added option moves the log-odds between the gold label and the strongest wrong label: the root-mean-square systematic shift is 0.20-0.52 nats, 1.2 to 3 times the run-to-run variation, even when the added option takes at most 0.1% of the probability mass. The shifts are directional. An option similar to the wrong answer draws probability from it (+0.10 nats toward the gold label). A paraphrase of the wrong answer produces an intermediate pattern: the gold label's probability is almost conserved, but the paraphrase receives only about a third of the wrong answer's share rather than the half that strict substitution implies. The distortion grows steadily with the logarithm of the number of options, reaching about 1 nat at 255 options, and off-domain padding pushes the odds against the gold label. In contrast, questions packed into one call do not interact (bias < 0.001). Scoring each option with an independent yes/no question removes the option-set dependence but picks the right answer 8.7 points less often. Jev sits between two local baselines, an option-independent scorer and a prompt readout. Its probabilities are best read as relative to the option list they were computed over. ---