# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 53 of 156

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### RIVO: Lightweight Adaptive Rerouting for Deep Research Agents

Authors: Mingchen Li, Jiatan Huang, Hong Yu
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15910v1

Deep Research agents rely on long-horizon reasoning and iterative tool use to solve complex information-seeking tasks. However, adaptive decision-making over these trajectories remains challenging, as agents may stop prematurely when further evidence is needed, continue unnecessarily after sufficient evidence has been gathered, or fail to redirect unproductive trajectories. Existing solutions either require costly model retraining and dense turn-level supervision, or rely on heuristic control rules that are not directly optimized for downstream research utility. This motivates a lightweight, utility-aware alternative for Deep Research control. We formulate adaptive rerouting in long-horizon Deep Research as a state-conditioned trajectory correction problem. Based on this view, we introduce RIVO, a lightweight plug-in framework for adaptive trajectory correction. The agent estimates its research state from lightweight signals and determines whether trajectory redirection is needed. Once triggered, the plug-in modifies the Host token logits to steer generation toward a more promising research direction. Theoretical analysis shows that, under a value-alignment condition and bounded local curvature, a sufficiently small logit intervention can locally improve expected downstream research utility. We further construct BrowseCore, a curated dataset with a paired local corpus, for efficient and controlled Deep Research experimentation. Building on this resource, the plug-in is trained from downstream outcomes, enabling it to learn corrections that improve subsequent research and final task performance. Extensive experiments across multiple Deep Research benchmarks and control settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing that lightweight logit intervention can improve long-horizon research without retraining the underlying Host model.

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### Two Linear Programs are Better than One

Authors: Alexander E. Black, Christoph Hertrich, Stefan Kober, Georg Loho
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: math.CO, cs.CC, cs.DM, cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15909v1

The extension complexity $\operatorname{xc}(P)$ of a polytope $P$ is the minimum number of facets of a polytope that projects onto it. Motivated by the complexity of neural networks, Hertrich and Loho introduced the virtual extension complexity $\operatorname{vxc}(P)$ of a polytope $P$, which is the minimum of $\operatorname{xc}(Q) + \operatorname{xc}(R)$ among all polytopes $Q$ and $R$ such that $P+Q=R$. We show the following results pertaining to virtual extension complexity. First, we resolve the core open problem on the topic by showing the virtual extension complexity can be exponentially smaller than extension complexity. Second, we show there are matroid base polytopes with exponential virtual extension complexity by adapting a semi-algebraic counting argument by Hrubeš that extends the counting arguments of Rothvoss. Finally, we show that the maximum virtual extension complexity of a polygon with $n$ vertices is $Θ(\sqrt{n})$. This resolves an analogue of a question on extension complexity of Fiorini, Rothvoss, and Tiwary in 2011 in the case of virtual extension complexity.

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### LURE: a Phase-Labelled Synthetic Corpus of Online-Grooming Exchanges

Authors: Emanuele Florindi, Valentina Franzoni, Ludovico Guercio, Alfredo Milani, Mattia Polticchia
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15908v1

Phase-annotated conversational data is essential for studying the progression of online grooming of minors and for developing early warning tools. However, the only publicly available source (i.e., Perverted-Justice archive, which contains a subset coded using ChatCoder) is small, outdated, and frozen. We present a synthetic corpus of groomer-victim exchanges, generated using a retrieval-augmented pipeline running on institutional hardware. This pipeline uses an openly available, eight-billion-parameter, refusal-ablated language model. The corpus was created using the five stages of the responsible-generation protocol for synthetic datasets: ontology-driven design based on the ChatCoder luring-communication scheme (eight communicative tags mapped onto four grooming phases); multi-model prompt testing; human-in-the-loop supervision; semantic and feature-level validation; and modality-aware documentation. The released corpus contains 2,121 unique exchanges across seven tags and four phases, each accompanied by a Plutchik emotion field. Validation quantifies the integrity and lexical profile of the corpus, as well as the reproduction of real seed lines, in-domain label recoverability (tag accuracy: 0.85; phase accuracy: 0.93) and its transfer to real ChatCoder offender lines, which were coded automatically at the eight-tag level (31,640 lines) and by human coders at the three-construct level (10,876 posts). Accuracy was measured for lexical and sentence-embedding features, while a real-versus-synthetic discriminator was able to separate the two domains with 91% accuracy. The scope of the corpus includes controlled, phase-conditioned experimentation, pipeline development and augmentation alongside real data and awareness material. The corpus, its datasheet and the audit code are released with vetted access.

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### Gen Through the Lens: Camera-Controllable Video Generation via Cross-Coordinate Conditioning Fusion

Authors: Shuai Li, Jinxu Xiang, Xinyuan Li, Hanlei Guo, Xiyang Tan, Alan Zhao, Xiaotong Zhao, Ran Zhang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15900v1

We present Gen Through the Lens, a camera-controllable image-to-video generation framework that synthesizes videos from a given reference image while enabling realistic and physically consistent camera operations. Unlike previous models that treat camera motion as abstract conditioning or rely on a single coordinate system, our approach explicitly decomposes and fuses control signals across three coordinate spaces: the camera coordinate (modeled by intrinsic parameters), the world coordinate (represented by spatial geometry hints), and the object coordinate (described by 3D bounding boxes of target subjects). Through cross-coordinate conditioning fusion, these heterogeneous cues are unified to guide the generative process, enabling precise control of camera motion, focus, and framing while preserving temporal and spatial coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces controllable and visually consistent results across diverse camera operations, outperforming existing approaches in both realism and editability.

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### Lightweight Scheduling Policies for Continuously Batched LLM Serving Across GPU Architectures

Authors: Ashman Mehra, Akshan Agarwal, Aryeh Carmi
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15899v1

Large language model serving is increasingly limited not only by model size and GPU speed, but also by scheduling during autoregressive decoding, where continuous batching interleaves requests at token granularity as sequences arrive and finish. We study whether lightweight scheduling policies can improve latency-throughput tradeoffs without changing model architectures, kernels, or deploying learned schedulers. We implement a Python/PyTorch continuous-batching testbench with real Hugging Face execution and evaluate eight policies across 1,152 GPU-model-scheduler-workload runs using ShareGPT-derived traffic, six Qwen, Gemma, and Mistral models, and Modal L40S, A100, and H100 GPUs. Scheduler choice changes throughput, TTFT, completion latency, and tail behavior under fixed model, GPU, workload, batch size, and prefill budget. Aging shortest-prompt-first is the strongest practical baseline in many L40S and mixed-workload settings, while oracle remaining-length scheduling shows that job-size knowledge alone is insufficient because batching and hardware effects also shape performance. The custom dataset has been uploaded to Hugging Face.

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### Review Rarely Beats the Stronger Model: Separating Verification from Capability Transfer in LLM Pipelines

Authors: Yirui Zhang, Yash Raj Shrestha
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15897v2

Qwen3-8B reviewing Llama-3.1-8B in math adds 33.2 points, yet Qwen3-8B alone is 6.4 points more accurate than the result. Reviewing another model's answer is usually judged by its gain over the generator. We show that this confuses verification, which adds accuracy beyond either model alone, with capability transfer, where a stronger reviewer supplies answers it could have given on its own. Measured against the stronger model alone, across 48 pairs of 12 open-weight models (3B to 72B) in math, knowledge, code and reasoning, review beats it in only 9 of 96 review directions, and does worse the larger the capability gap. The reason is anchoring: the reviewer mostly follows the generator, discarding its own correct answers. Review costs 2.6 to 2.8 times as much as the stronger model alone, while a selector using the same two calls is 2.7 to 4.2 points more accurate than review and cheaper. Studies of verification should report the stronger model alone, not only the gain over the generator.

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### Make Every Expansion Count: Learning to Search Efficiently in LLM Code Repair

Authors: Elad Sharony, Ido Greenberg, Jialin Song, Shie Mannor, Gal Chechik, Eli Meirom
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15894v1

Large language model (LLM) code-repair systems fix faulty programs by repeatedly generating and testing revisions. Each revision is costly, making the choice of which repair to pursue important for efficiency. Existing search policies rely on test pass rates and search statistics, ignoring the details of test failures and proposed edits. We introduce CodeTriage, a learned policy that prioritizes edits before their revised programs are generated and tested. Its 0.6B-parameter model reads the test output, failure diagnosis, and proposed edit, then predicts a distribution over the number of repair steps needed to reach a fix through that edit. These predictions prioritize all pending edits across programs before generating and testing the revised code. On held-out repair tasks, CodeTriage finds fixes with 21% fewer program revisions and 12% fewer output tokens than the strongest baseline on each metric. Without retraining, it achieves the highest average success across search budgets for each of 11 unseen repair LLMs. Ablations show that both the failure context and edit text, as well as comparisons across programs, improve search. We also release a corpus of 12.2 million program versions from four LLMs, organized into repair trees with proposed edits and test results.

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### Minimax Rates and Improved Spectral Convergence for Multi-Manifold Clustering

Authors: Haoyu Chen, Chenghui Li
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15892v1

We study eigenpair estimation for the tensorized, density-weighted Laplace--Beltrami operator from $n$ independent data points sampled from a multi-manifold mixture distribution where manifolds may intersect. Let $d$ denote the largest intrinsic dimension of the manifold components and $s\geq2$ the smoothness of the sampling densities. For simple, nontrivial eigenpairs, we establish the minimax rate $n^{-s/(d+2s)}$ for approximating the eigenvalue and eigenfunction of the tensorized Laplace--Beltrami operator, and show that a continuum plug-in estimator based on kernel density estimation attains the same rate when the supporting manifolds are known. We further analyze a manifold-agnostic graph Laplacian estimator and prove that its eigenpairs converge to those of the tensorized Laplace--Beltrami operator at rate $n^{-1/(2.5d-1)}$, up to logarithmic factors, improving upon previously known spectral convergence rates for multi-manifold learning. Numerical experiments on synthetic multi-manifold data corroborate the rates guaranteed by our theorems. These results characterize the information-theoretic difficulty of multi-manifold spectral estimation and quantify the additional cost of learning without oracle component information.

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### Learning Multimodal Sensor Fusion with JEPA Representations for Breathing Activity and Pose Recognition

Authors: Yunxiang Luo, Constantino Álvarez Casado, Xiaoting Wu, Nhi Nguyen, Le Nguyen, Manuel Lage Cañellas, Miguel Bordallo López
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15891v1

Predictive video representations do not by themselves specify how a multimodal system should handle missing sensors. We transfer frozen V-JEPA2 features to a set of heterogeneous sensors comprised by RGB video, depth video, and radar time series. A shared fusion model uses modality queries, fixed sensor slots, and explicit availability to classify breathing activity and pose from all seven non-empty sensor subsets. The contribution is a controlled evaluation of subset supervision, pooling capacity, and representation transfer on 39 OMuSense-23 subjects with five subject-group folds and three seeds. With matched downstream parameter counts, the final model reaches recording-level activity macro-F1 of $75.23%\pm0.60$ averaged across seven subsets. Supervising all subsets in each batch improves the matched query-pooling control by 1.923 percentage points (conditional 95% subject-bootstrap interval (0.647, 3.209)), while query pooling shows no clear advantage over matched mean pooling under balanced supervision. Radar probes support transfer beyond pooled wavelet pixels, 64-token inference approximately preserves mean activity performance, and the tested Consensus-JEPA loss adds no measured benefit against its exact control.

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### Variance-Optimal State Resampling for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Authors: Yibo Wang, Yuanxin Liu, Zhaoran Wang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15888v1

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards spends much of its rollout budget on states that yield no learning signal. We recast this as a question about the sampling distribution itself: under a fixed rollout budget, which distribution over states minimizes the variance of the policy-gradient estimator? The answer admits a closed-form Neyman allocation, $μ_{\mathrm{var}}^π(s) \propto d^π(s)\,σ_π(s)$, which connects naturally to GRPO's group-relative advantage and induces an emergent reverse curriculum as the policy improves, with no externally imposed schedule. Building on this principle, we propose VSR (Variance-driven State Resampling), a plug-in modification to GRPO using a prefix replay buffer and a zero-cost variance proxy. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks and long-horizon agentic tasks (Sokoban, BabyAI), VSR outperforms GRPO and GiGPO on most benchmarks with fewer generated tokens per update.

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### Comparative Study of Canvas- and Coordinate-Based Geometry-Conditioned Neural Networks for Real-Time Prediction of Indoor Environments with Varying Room Dimensions

Authors: Shaofan Wang, Philipp Geyer
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15885v1

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is computationally expensive for iterative building design. Deep learning surrogates offer faster predictions, but generalization across varying room dimensions remains challenging. This study compares two geometry-conditioned neural network surrogate models for rapid indoor airflow and temperature field prediction under varying room sizes. During the architectural design stage, this method is relevant for real-time assessment of whether conditioned supply air will effectively provide fresh and cool air throughout rooms with varying heights and lengths. The canvas-based neural network (CaNN) explicitly encodes room size by preserving different occupied regions within a fixed canvas, whereas the coordinate-based neural network (CoNN) uses normalized coordinate channels. Both employ U-Net autoencoders to separately predict airflow and temperature fields. Evaluation uses simplified rooms with varying heights and lengths as a controlled benchmark. The results show that CaNN achieves higher agreement with CFD results than CoNN, demonstrating its potential to support performance-driven building design.

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### RetryBench: Separating Retry Permission from Recovery Outcomes in GPT Tool Use

Authors: You Liu, Yue Liu, Quanchao Lu
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15884v1

False retry permission (FRP) occurs when an agent retries a timed-out tool call without support from the visible contract. RetryBench separates this error from realized recovery. Successful protected recovery does not imply reliable rejection of unsupported retries. In a 720-response key control, valid keys usually enabled safe progress, but offered changed keys elicited unsupported retries in Sol (1/80), Terra (55/80), and Luna (60/80). A later 240-response control removed the candidate and required models to supply a key. Luna still made 8/80 unsupported dispatches; Sol and Terra made none in 80 responses each. Accepting a displayed bad key therefore cannot explain all observed errors, although changed output requirements and conditions preclude a pure display-effect comparison. Removing the weak-contract label increased retries in Sol and Terra's coded-action conditions in a six-endpoint study. A separate 1,536-response canonical-action block also found a positive Terra contrast (115/128 versus 124/128 retries), concentrated in two task/order conditions; the other five contrasts remained unresolved after multiplicity correction. An explicit-contract cue control elicited deferral in all 762 returned responses, leaving recovery unresolved. These results support reporting permission and recovery together across declared interface variants. The evidence covers four purposive tasks, fixed GPT endpoints, and one recovery decision; it identifies neither internal mechanisms nor episode-level safety.

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### What the Model Cannot See: Covert and Provable Text Invisibility in LLMs

Authors: Mark Russinovich
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15883v1

Text wrapped in a trigger can be made behaviorally invisible to a language model: omitted from summaries and quotations, ignored in question answering, and left unflagged by downstream filtering. We study this selective blindness as a dual-use information-flow primitive, a supply-chain backdoor, and a white-box auditing problem. We first implement it exactly as a serving-time span veto: blocking information flow out of a marked span makes every outside activation bit-identical under same-length substitution of the span's content, a noninterference property we verify across ten models, seven mixer families, and 0.5B-120B parameters. The veto serves as a deployable quarantine, an exact reference for calibrating leakage, and a teacher. Distilled into weights, it yields a backdoor: checkpoints trained on six model families from 4B to 120B ignore marked context at little benchmark cost, and their outputs show no measurable semantic trace of the suppressed content above the veto reference on our held-out suite; an in-domain variant suppresses planted vulnerabilities during AI code review. Detection is therefore a white-box problem. Simpler backdoors remain internally transparent -- linear probes recover suppressed content at 0.57-0.79 accuracy versus 0.025 chance -- but hardening the attack until probes reach chance collapses attention from outside the span into it below the range of base models. Across the attacks we evaluate, probe visibility trades off against routing visibility; we do not establish that this tradeoff is fundamental.

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### Engram Injection: A Study of Temporal Validity in Parametric Language-Model Memory

Authors: Sam Siavoshian, Omar Ramadan, Amir K. Saeed, Benjamin A. Johnson, Benjamin M. Rodriguez
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15882v1

A stored fact may stop being valid when a user changes a preference or an event replaces an earlier one. We study whether a language model can learn these changes in its parameters and answer correctly from only a question and the current time. Engram Injection stores facts in LoRA adapters and supplies the clock through FiLM conditioning on a frozen Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model. We compare it with additive clock conditioning, prompting with the full dated history, and retrieving four dated records. We train six matched adapters across three seeds after fixing a sampler that could admit test-age examples into training. The training audit reports no such examples among 127,760 evaluated training inputs. On 62 pairs of questions asked before and after an update, at an elapsed age of seven days excluded from training, both adapter methods answer zero pairs correctly under the primary blinded assistant review with order code 1 held fixed. Full-history prompting answers 59/62 pairs correctly, and retrieval answers 62/62. Separate experiments show that adapters can store facts and that removable memory units can support local deletion. Combining fact selection with time-based version selection remains unsuccessful. These results separate learning a fact from learning when to use it.

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### Entropy-Regularized Mean-Field Games with Average-Reward Criterion: Span-Seminorm Contractions and Model-Free Learning

Authors: Gunes Akbas, Naci Saldi, Berkay Anahtarci, Can Deha Kariksiz
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: math.OC, cs.GT, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15871v1

We study stationary discrete-time mean-field games with finite state and action spaces under the average-reward criterion, with an entropy-regularized objective and population-dependent dynamics and rewards. Under a minorization condition, the soft Q-operator is a span-seminorm contraction for the full transition kernel, so relative value iteration does not require the minorizing measure. When the Lipschitz constant of the kernel is below the minorization mass and the temperature exceeds an explicit threshold, the equilibrium fixed-point operator is a contraction: an equilibrium exists, its population distribution is unique, and a fixed-point iteration converges to it geometrically. We then learn the equilibrium model-free from a simulator, combining soft Q-learning at a fixed population distribution with an empirical transition kernel. We prove a finite-sample bound for soft Q-learning in the span seminorm, with temperature-independent constants, and derive convergence rates for the learned population distribution and policy. A congestion-aware routing game illustrates the results.

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### Unchecked or Falsely Accused? Evaluating AI-Generated Text Detectors on Kazakh

Authors: Mansur Ozaman
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15870v1

AI-text detectors are already applied to Kazakh writing, yet no study reports how often publicly available detectors flag Kazakh text whose human authorship is dated before ChatGPT. We present AINA-KK: 3,811 human passages from encyclopedic, news, web and educational pages that provably existed before ChatGPT, and 5,597 machine and gray-zone passages from 9 generators, including the Kazakh-built KazLLM and Sherkala, with script and length stress tests. Five English-trained detectors from the Hugging Face Hub flag up to 81.4% of human passages and 79.6% of published student essays; recalibrated, they catch at most 1.3% of machine text. Calibrated zero-shot detectors catch at most 50.3% of machine text from in-distribution generators. Fine-tuned encoders rank text almost perfectly, but mDeBERTa at its default threshold flags 24.4% of 50-word human excerpts, partly because machine outputs are shorter than human text; calibrated, it catches only 47.1% of KazLLM and 62.7% of Sherkala passages. Without script handling, machine-transliterated Latin-2021 text defeats every detector. Fixes that need no new data (calibration, script canonicalization, script-augmented and length-matched training, and an OR with a zero-shot scorer) form AINA-KK-Det. On test it flags 0.9% of human passages (95% CI 0.4-2.7; 1.5% on development data) and catches 85.2% of machine text from known generators, 92.9% from two unseen Gemini-family Gemma-4 models and 61.3% from the Kazakh-built ones; its configuration was chosen with test results in view. We release the data, code and detector at https://github.com/ozxmn/aina-kk.

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### Personalized LLM Recommendation with Semantic IDs: Autoregressive Beam Search vs. Multi-Token Prediction

Authors: Sejoon Oh, Fernando Amat Gil, Evan Smothers, Dan Iter, Mark Thornburg, Dawit Mureja Argaw, Sourabh Medapati, Thea Wang, Ria Verma, Qiuling Xu, Harshit Syal, Ehsan Gholami et al.
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15864v1

Large-scale personalization is shifting from embedding-table retrieval to LLM-based recommenders that generate the Semantic ID (SID) of the item to recommend, where each SID is a short sequence of discrete hierarchical content codes. A single instruction-tuned model can then unify retrieval, content understanding, and language, and recommend brand-new titles from their content alone using SID; then, how should the model generate the SID? Traditionally, models rely on a single language modeling head that generates tokens autoregressively, typically using constrained beam search. In contrast, an emerging body of work explores multi-token prediction (MTP), where dedicated heads predict all tokens in parallel, substantially reducing the decoding latency associated with beam search. We report an industry-scale, apples-to-apples comparison of these two generation paradigms: single-head autoregressive decoding vs. MTP. We introduce a new auxiliary ranking loss, defined over the joint SID score, to train the MTP objective. We evaluate the SID training objectives on both quality and training/inference cost, inside a multi-task LLM that jointly does personalized retrieval, content question-answering (QA), and instruction following over a large streaming-media catalog. Our experiments show single-head beam search consistently beats MTP on most product-critical metrics: ranking and content QA, and trains at roughly 2.6x lower dollar cost on Qwen3-8B scale; MTP wins only on raw inference throughput. Around this finding, we detail an efficient training and inference stack and report end-to-end gains over the previous non-SID baseline equipped with an auxiliary ranking head: +77% item cold-start ranking, +22% content-QA accuracy, +2.8x faster training, with language metric regression traced to SID vocabulary expansion. We address the language regression by reinforcement learning post training.

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### A Hybrid Gaussian Process-Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine Learning Framework for Robust Knockdown Factor Prediction and Reliability-Based Design of Thin Spherical Shell Caps

Authors: Budhaditya De, Rohan Majumder, Devasmit Dutta, Aman Deep Gupta, Sudib Kumar Mishra
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15862v1

Elastic buckling remains a critical concern in the design of deep spherical shell caps, given that experiments reveal a significant reduction of critical loads from those predicted by linearized eigen-buckling analysis. This discrepancy has been attributed to initial geometric imperfections and is often reconciled through a dimensionless parameter, namely the knockdown factor (KDF). However, conventional KDFs (NASA SP-8007; Eurocode 3) are highly conservative, as they represent the lower bound of an extensive body of experimental data. This study aims to narrow the conservatism in the KDFs for spherical shell caps through machine learning (ML) regression models trained on experimental data on spherical shell buckling. A hybrid model is proposed by combining Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) with Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and its improved performance is demonstrated over conventional ML algorithms, i.e., the Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Regressor (SVR), Random Forest Regressor (RFR), and Histogram-based Gradient Boosting (HGBoost). Each of these models uses six input features and a single output, i.e., the KDF. The most critical feature affecting the KDF is ascertained through a sensitivity analysis. The study concludes with a reliability-based design framework that relies on the predictive ML model to obtain safety-consistent, yet less conservative, KDFs.

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### GuidanceNFT: NFT-Based Reward Fine-Tuning of Guided Diffusion Models

Authors: Jiayin Liu, Zeyu Michael Li, Bingshuo Qian, Xiang Cheng
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15856v1

DiffusionNFT (NFT) fine-tunes diffusion models toward task-specific rewards, but optimizing these rewards does not guarantee fidelity to the full prompt. Although classifier-free guidance (CFG) strengthens prompt alignment, NFT is formulated as a CFG-free method, and applying CFG to the fine-tuned velocity field can reduce the optimized reward. This motivates optimizing rewards over the guided output distribution while seeking to retain its prompt alignment. However, applying standard NFT directly to guided samples can cause reward degradation or training collapse. We trace this failure to a mismatch between the reference velocity used in the NFT loss and the score of the guided sample distribution, which biases the improvement direction. We propose GuidanceNFT, which estimates the matching reference velocity through online flow matching on guided samples and uses it to correct both regression terms. With an exact reference, the corrected objective recovers NFT's intended update. In our experiments, the learned correction sustains reward improvement under both explicit and built-in guidance. On SD3.5-M, GuidanceNFT achieves higher optimized rewards than NFT with and without CFG across GenEval, text-rendering, and multi-reward objectives, together with better overall prompt alignment as measured by off-domain evaluation metrics. Experiments on models with built-in guidance, including Model Guidance and ELF, further demonstrate improved ImageNet generation, a better perplexity-entropy tradeoff on OpenWebText, and higher accuracy on GSM8K.

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### Attention Sinks in VLMs Are Borrowed, Not Seen

Authors: Dengjia Zhang, Alexander Martin, Pengyu Yan, Xihan Sun, Jiaqi Li, Benjamin Van Durme, Andrew Yates, Reno Kriz, William Walden
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15855v1

We study how to detect and mitigate visual attention sinks in vision-language models (VLMs). Visual attention sinks are image tokens that absorb a large share of attention over the image regardless of the query or task, and they mislead methods that treat attention maps as a record of where the model ``looked.'' Prior work has detected sinks through massive activation dimensions and proposed redistributing their attention, but none have addressed what makes a token become a sink. Comparing six candidate detectors on ten VLMs from four families, we find that only the centered cosine similarity between an image token's key and the key of the language model's text-sink detects visual sinks. Thus, a visual sink is an image token whose key aligns with the text-sink's key. Moving a sink's key component along this direction to the median of the image keys sends its attention back to the text-sink (\textbf{Are Borrowed}) while leaving model answers unchanged~(\textbf{Not Seen}). Building on this, we propose a training-free, entropy-triggered re-look that first cleans the attention map, then crops the most-attended region of the cleaned map and inserts it into the reasoning trace. Cleaning adds negligible computation to the forward pass, and the re-look improves accuracy with a mean gain of $+4.3$ points on fine-detail VQA benchmarks across model families.

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### Sharper Frames, Worse Rooms: Viewpoint Coverage Dominates Image Quality in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

Authors: Alibek Dadajonov, Hikmatillo Umarhojiyev
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15854v1

Grounded spatial reasoning about indoor scenes rests on a geometric reconstruction that the multimodal system does not itself produce. Feed-forward multi-view reconstruction models operate under a fixed view budget, making frame selection a critical upstream decision. We show that under this setting the conventional preference for sharp frames can be actively harmful. Across nine handheld room scans, selecting the sharpest 16 of 200 candidate frames is the worst strategy we test, reaching 48\% room dimension error where uniform temporal sampling reaches 3\%. We trace this failure to a coupling between image quality and camera motion: sharp frames tend to occur during slow motion and therefore concentrate the selection in a narrow angular region, leaving $192^\circ$ of the room unobserved in the case we illustrate and over $300^\circ$ in the worst cells. A $2\times2$ factorial experiment that independently manipulates viewpoint spread and per-frame sharpness shows that spread has roughly three times the main effect of quality, and that blurry but well spread selections outperform sharp but clustered selections in 8 of 9 captures. The advantage also diminishes as the frame budget increases and angular coverage saturates, consistent with this mechanism. Finally, we ask whether the failure is detectable at inference: the reconstruction model's multi-view consistency score increases with reconstruction error, while a vision-language model given the same frames reports confidence unrelated to its own spatial estimation error. Under small view budgets, viewpoint coverage is a more important constraint than per-frame image quality, and neither uncertainty signal available at inference reveals this upstream failure.

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### What Do Sparse Autoencoder Feature Discovery Scores Identify? From Activations to Interventions

Authors: Yifeng Guo, Yanran Li, Xiang Chen
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15850v1

Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are typically discovered from how their activations co-vary with behaviour, yet they are often used through interventions such as steering or ablation. We take intervention attribution, the first-order effect of a specified intervention on the model output, as our estimand. For a broad class of response functions, we show that observational feature-discovery evidence generally does not identify this attribution, and derive an exact gradient-based decomposition of the gap between linear-probe predictions and intervention attribution. Across four model-SAE pairs, median probe-to-attribution magnitude ratios range from tens to hundreds, while attributions closely track small-step steering. For single-latent ablations with nonzero effects, gradient predictions match the realized sign in 91-97% of cases, compared with 17-35% for probe-implied changes. Attribution-selected sets also produce larger absolute mean ablation effects on held-out prompts than sets selected by correlation, rank tests or probe coefficients. Together, these results establish intervention attribution as a principled, gradient-estimable target for selecting SAE features for intervention.

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### Mobility Helps Learning: Unsupervised Model Adaptation for Object Recognition via Movement

Authors: Yanan Ma, Yihang Tao, Zhengru Fang, Senkang Hu, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15846v1

Movable agents, such as autonomous vehicles and robots, should be able to autonomously adapt their pre-trained object recognition models to new environments without human annotations. While existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods address label-free model adaptation, they typically treat test data as independent snapshots, without constructively exploiting a rich, unique source of supervision: the significant variance in prediction quality as an agent observes the same object from different distances and viewpoints. To capitalize on this, we propose \texttt{MoCaFe}, a model-agnostic and hyperparameter-insensitive paradigm that leverages motion-induced prediction variance for unsupervised adaptation. Specifically, we first develop mobility-calibrated filtering of pseudo-labels, which constructs reliable pseudo-labels by fusing cross-view predictions using inverse-variance weights. The filtered pseudo-labels then guide the selection of ``hard samples'' for effective learning. To further suppress pseudo-label corruption, we introduce \texttt{p-MoCaFe}, an optional extension that uses a public dataset to assign weighting factors to data samples, yielding an estimator of the clean loss with bounded bias. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving (nuScenes, KITTI) and embodied-agent datasets show that \texttt{MoCaFe} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art TTA schemes, achieving up to approximately 20% accuracy gain.

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### Binding Phoneme Identity to Position in Neural Models and the Human Brain

Authors: Nafiseh Momeni, Malo Renaudin, Itzhak Fried, Yair Lakretz
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15843v1

A fundamental challenge in cognitive science and neural computation is the binding problem. Compositional generalization can be achieved by factorizing representations into roles, the structural slots of a representation (e.g., serial position or syntactic function), and fillers, the contents occupying them (e.g., a phoneme or a word), which can be recombined freely to represent novel combinations. How neural systems implement role--filler binding, however, remains unknown. One of its simplest cases is phoneme sequencing, where phoneme identity (filler) must be bound to position (role) so that /gum/ and /mug/ are represented differently. A proposal from NLP, the `onion hypothesis' (Csordas et al., 2024), holds that the direction of the neural population state encodes token identity, while its magnitude encodes position. It was formulated for random token sequences; we extend it to natural language and test it in neural models and the human brain. We first evaluated it in an encoder-decoder trained to repeat English words, using representational geometry analyses and causal interventions. Magnitude alone proves incomplete: position is encoded by magnitude together with a systematic rotation of the state direction, a scheme we formalize as the `spiral hypothesis'. We then analyzed intracranial recordings from the auditory cortex of 20 participants listening to short sentences. Across superior temporal gyrus electrodes, the change in population response between consecutive phonemes decreases in magnitude as position advances, and its direction is aligned within consonants and within vowels but near orthogonal across the two classes, supporting the magnitude coding shared by both accounts. These results provide a geometric account of how neural systems bind phoneme identity to position, and show how neural-model hypotheses can yield testable predictions about human neural computation.

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### LLM Value Functions for Credit Assignment in Agentic RL

Authors: Kaijie Zhu, Weixiang Yan, Omar Attia, Abbas Kazerouni, Alexander Toshev, Andrew Szot
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15840v1

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents remains challenging in long-horizon tasks with sparse outcome rewards, where assigning credit to individual actions is difficult. Methods such as GRPO assign the same trajectory-level advantage to all actions, while critic-based methods require learning an additional value function that can be costly and unstable. We introduce LLM Value Function RL (LVRL), which uses the pretrained knowledge and in-context learning ability of an LLM to estimate policy-aware state values without finetuning a separate critic. LVRL conditions the value model on group context and calibrates its predictions using known values at the initial and terminal states, enabling step-level credit assignment from estimated value differences. We further extend this idea to learning from an expert policy through on-policy distillation (OPD), introducing LLM Value Function OPD (LVOPD), which focuses teacher supervision on actions associated with decreases in estimated value. We evaluate our approach across diverse agentic benchmarks: AppWorld, BabyAI, and SWE-bench Verified. Across policy scales (4B to 32B), LVRL consistently and substantially outperforms both GRPO and PPO. On AppWorld and SWE-bench Verified, LVRL yields absolute improvements of up to 13.6 and 8.6 percentage points over GRPO. Notably, on tasks requiring extended exploration like BabyAI, LVRL bridges the gap from total failure to 75.0% success. Furthermore, LVOPD yields consistent improvements over standard distillation baselines on AppWorld. Finally, Monte-Carlo analysis confirms that our frozen critic accurately identifies semantic pitfalls and recoveries, proving that LVRL extracts robust, policy-aware step-level credit from sparse terminal outcomes.

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### KhyontekAI at CheckThat! 2026: Multilingual Dense Retrieval and Cross-Encoder Reranking for Scientific Web Claims

Authors: Bhargab Jyoti Bhuyan, Pritam Deka
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15837v1

Scientific claims shared through social media platforms frequently reference research findings without explicitly linking to the corresponding scientific publications. Automatically retrieving the correct scientific source for such claims is a challenging multilingual retrieval problem involving semantic matching, paraphrasing, noisy social media text, and cross-domain language variation. In this work, we present a multilingual two-stage retrieval framework for CLEF 2026 CheckThat! Task 1 on Source Retrieval for Scientific Web Claims. Our system combines fine-tuned dense retrieval models with cross-encoder reranking for improving multilingual scientific document retrieval. We evaluate multiple transformer-based dense retrieval architectures including multilingual-E5, BGE, and Contriever under different metadata configurations. We further investigate multilingual joint training, retrieval depth analysis, metadata enrichment, and language balancing strategies for improving retrieval effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that metadata enrichment consistently improves retrieval effectiveness, while fine-tuned cross-encoder reranking provides additional gains in retrieval precision. Our final multilingual system achieves MRR@5 scores of 0.6222 for English, 0.5112 for German, and 0.6254 for French, with an overall average MRR@5 score of 0.5862.

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### Latent Taxonomies: How Property Induction Develops in Language Model Pre-training

Authors: Jan Sobotka, Ekaterina Goliakova, Marcin Detyniecki, Antoine Bosselut, Xavier Renard
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15836v1

When told that robins have sesamoid bones, people are far more prone to extend the property to sparrows than to whales. This behavior, called category-based property induction, is well documented in humans, but whether and how it develops in language models trained only to predict the next token is unclear. To shed light on this, we construct a hierarchical taxonomy of synthetic entities grouped by the properties they share. We then inject facts from this latent taxonomy into the continued pre-training of Pythia and OLMo 2 models from 70M to 7B parameters, and track the development of inductive behaviors. We find that taxonomically aligned induction emerges from next-token prediction alone: a property learned for one entity transfers more strongly within its taxonomic category than across categories. Internally, entities that share a deeper category become more similar in activation space, and clustering recovers the full taxonomic tree from entity representations. Contrary to the usual expectation that scale helps, we find that induction weakens with model size when the data budget is fixed, suggesting that larger models memorize individual facts rather than compress them into shared structure. Induction also strengthens with more pre-training before the taxonomy injection, transfers to novel in-context properties, and can be overridden by a latent taxonomy implied by the prompt. Together, these results show that a model's inductive generalization reflects the latent organization of its training data, with implications for data curation and for predicting how far a learned fact will spread.

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### Local Citation Recommendation Without Graph Signals

Authors: Benjamin Basseri, Pavlos Protopapas, Kemeng Zhang, Alberto Accomazzi, Stephanie Jarmak, Anna Kelbert
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.DL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15832v1

Resolving correct citations can be a time-consuming task for research writers. We address local citation recommendation (LCR), where the goal is to retrieve appropriate references for a given sentence. Web tools generally depend on the existing citation graph, which may bias results toward citation count or more recent publications. LCR research using full paper texts has been limited by the lack of publicly available data. We present a new dataset, the Local Citation Recommendation Corpus (LCRC), containing 14,735 scientific statements derived from astrophysics review papers, each with one or more citation targets whose full text is accessible via API. Using this dataset we systematically compare retrieval methods and develop a citation recommendation system that avoids citation graph bias while achieving 8.0% improvement in Recall@25 and 6.9% improvement in NDCG@25 over dense retrieval baselines without model fine-tuning. To support reproducibility, we make our code and dataset publicly available.

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### How Shared Representations Become Specialized: Formation, Maintenance, and Latent Susceptibility

Authors: Toru Takahashi
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15830v1

When several predictions use the same internal representation, information about some targets can remain easier to recover than information about others. We study how this specialization forms, persists, and changes in minimal artificial learners. With reconstruction errors weighted equally during learning, changing which target is observed precisely selects the favored target and redirects an already specialized learner. Removing current support can reduce a formed bias, whereas state-following update feedback can maintain it. We then compare learners formed through different observation and update conditions but matched on specified reconstruction measurements. Both change under the same brief opposing intervention, yet their responses differ. Resetting Adam largely removes the ten-update difference; exchanging its second moment reverses which route is more susceptible. New interventions show that equalizing the mean second-moment scaling reduces but does not remove the difference: its coordinate-wise pattern also matters. With fresh Adam or calibrated SGD, smaller route differences emerge later, whereas 500 common opposing updates bring the selected allocation endpoints close. A further control produces response differences with identical acquisition and equal mean loss weights but jointly different weight variability and realized sequence. Acquisition-selected formation also extends to a symmetric three-target setting. These interventions distinguish specialization's formation, present support, and time-dependent latent susceptibility.

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### Guarded Block Transfers for Polytope Distance: Linear Convergence with Explicit Constants and Gap-Certified Screening for SVM Training

Authors: Mayank Gupta
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15829v1

Hard-margin SVM training is the distance problem between two convex hulls, which the Triangle Algorithm (TA) solves with a certified duality gap. We propose \emph{guarded block transfers}: $k$ Mitchell--Demyanov--Malozemov (MDM) transfers per scan are aggregated into one exact line search, guarded by a comparison with the single best transfer at a cost independent of the number of points $n$, and replaced by an away step when the leading transfer is capacity-clipped. On the Minkowski-difference polytope, where the objective is $1$-strongly convex, we prove global linear convergence with explicit constants and no combinatorial swap-step bounds; the per-step contraction is $k$-independent and only the drop-count bound grows with $k$, so aggregation is provably safe while the saving in scans is measured, not proved. Since the TA certificate is the Frank--Wolfe gap divided by the current distance, gap-safe screening applies, and we bound the iteration after which it has removed every zero-weight point off the optimal faces by $O\!\left(\tfrac{k}ρ\log\tfrac{1}τ\right)$ up to logarithmic factors in the geometry, $ρ$ the rate constant and $τ$ the optimal-face margin. On five LIBSVM benchmarks, with fairer baselines than our submission, the solver matches the baselines to four or five digits wherever both converge, ties LIBSVM on sparse-support hard margins and beats our blended pairwise conditional gradients (BPCG). But our full-cache sequential minimal optimisation (SMO) code ties or beats it on kernel $L_2$ margins, LIBLINEAR's dual solver is up to $4.5\times$ faster on the separable $L_2$ margin, and our solver is one to three orders of magnitude slower than LIBLINEAR's Newton solver on dense-support $L_2$ margins and than LIBSVM on a nearly touching kernel hull. Its edge is the certificate, not speed.

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### Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Anomaly Detection in Real-World Cloud Telemetry

Authors: Sumit Dhyani, Sougata Mukherjea
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15818v1

Modern cloud platforms generate high-dimensional, noisy telemetry from thousands of microservices. Unlike classical anomaly detection benchmarks, cloud anomalies are short-lived, irregular, and largely non-periodic, making timely detection challenging. We present an empirical benchmark of deep learning models for anomaly detection using a real-world IBM Cloud Console dataset. We evaluate GRU, Transformer, TimesNet, and Autoformer architectures using the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark (NAB), a timing-aware metric that accounts for early detection and false alarms. TimesNet achieves the highest NAB scores due to strong early-detection sensitivity. Transformer models also detect anomalies early but incur higher false-positive rates. An improved GRU autoencoder, incorporating robust scoring and persistence rules, achieves competitive performance with a more stable false-alarm profile. Overall, the modest performance differences suggest that real cloud anomalies are dominated by short-term deviations rather than persistent periodic structure, emphasizing the importance of timing-aware evaluation and robust post-processing.

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### ML-CLAPPS: A Probabilistic Framework for Imbalanced Multilabel Learning under Class Prioritization

Authors: Priel Hazan, Nir Almog, Noam Keidar, Yael Yaniv, Assaf Schuster
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15816v1

Real-world datasets often exhibit severe class imbalance, degrading the performance of deep learning models, particularly on rare classes. While imbalance is well studied in binary and multiclass settings, it is substantially more challenging in multilabel problems due to complex label co-occurrence. In clinical applications such as ECG classification, this challenge is coupled with a second critical challenge: the need to prioritize high-risk conditions, regardless of their prevalence, to mitigate the high cost of false negatives. We introduce the Multilabel Class-Prioritized Probabilistic Sampler (ML-CLAPPS), a learnable sampler that optimizes a distribution over training instances to control the model's exposure to different classes. This approach addresses multilabel imbalance while enabling prioritization of significant conditions via a user-defined importance vector (IV). Empirical evaluation on a real-world multilabel ECG image dataset demonstrates that ML-CLAPPS achieves state-of-the-art performance. We show that it aligns class exposure with the specified IV, and that increasing a class's importance leads to corresponding improvements in its classification performance, enabling explicit prioritization of clinically critical conditions.

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### ChangeT$^3$: Evaluating Vision Test-Time Training for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Authors: Sharukshan Niranjan, Oshadha Samarakoon, Nichula Wasalathilaka, Roshan Godaliyadda, Parakrama Ekanayake, Vijitha Herath
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15813v1

Bitemporal remote sensing change detection requires representations that preserve spatial detail while capturing contextual information relevant to changes between acquisitions. Visual test-time training offers an alternative to explicit token-to-token attention by adapting a compact inner model to each image. This letter describes ChangeT$^3$, a vanilla Siamese configuration combining the existing hierarchical ViT$^3$-Tiny encoder with the multiscale ChangeFormer decoder. The two image streams share learned encoder parameters, while their fast weights are computed independently from their respective spatial features. Each encoder block retains the inherited global simplified SwiGLU and local adaptive depthwise-convolution branches. Temporal comparison is performed by the decoder through learned fusion of paired features at four resolutions, followed by coarse-to-fine aggregation and binary prediction. This separation provides a direct setting for examining image-conditioned inner updates without introducing an additional temporal interaction module. Trained from scratch on LEVIR-CD+ with the same decoder, recipe, and budget as a ChangeFormer control, ChangeT$^3$ reaches an F1 of 80.61$\pm$0.90 against 78.84$\pm$0.21 for ChangeFormer (three seeds each); as in the standard protocol for this dataset, checkpoints are selected on the test split. Trained with both inner updates disabled, the same encoder reaches 78.63$\pm$0.20. Neither model transfers zero-shot to SYSU-CD, DSIFN-CD, or WHU-CD, and ChangeT$^3$ is the slower of the two at small inputs despite similar parameter and operation counts.

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### Adaptive Look, Flexible Thought: Learning How and How Long to Think in Multimodal Reasoning

Authors: Quanlin Chen, Xiuwei Chen, Kun Xiang, Zehua Ma, Chunjin Ye, Boqiang Guo, Xianming Liu, Xiaodan Liang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15810v1

The introduction of long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and external tools has substantially improved the performance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on general and reasoning tasks. However, existing fast-slow reasoning paradigms mainly regulate textual reasoning length, while visual computation introduced by external tools or visual tokens is often treated as an auxiliary component. This separation prevents MLLMs from jointly optimizing visual perception and textual reasoning. To address this issue, we propose L2T (adaptive Look, flexible Thought), a unified reasoning framework that jointly optimizes the form and depth of computation. L2T first discretizes tool-produced visual states into visual tokens, bringing visual perception and textual reasoning into a shared autoregressive space. Based on this unified representation, L2T introduces a modality-aware routing reward to select appropriate reasoning modes and a difficulty-aware fast-slow strategy to adapt reasoning depth according to task complexity. Experiments on general perception and reasoning-intensive tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of L2T. Compared with explicit tool-calling approaches, L2T maintains competitive performance while achieving 1.7--3.6 times higher throughput.

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### Grounding Deep Learning Framework Testing in Data Flow

Authors: Jiatao Ge, Yanzhou Mu, Yinglong Zou, Yibo Hu, Zhenyu Chen, Chunrong Fang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15808v1

Data flow underlies deep learning (DL) framework execution, including automatic differentiation and operator-fusion optimization. Bugs involving data flow can cause incorrect results or unexpected behavior. Existing testing methods represent models primarily by operator topology, omitting runtime tensor values and properties and operator input requirements. They therefore cannot distinguish data flows in models with similar topologies, even when these differences affect framework behavior. We introduce the Tensor Flow Graph (TFG) to capture runtime tensor states and operator input requirements. Its nodes represent operators and their input requirements, while its edges record tensor values and properties. Building on the TFG, we propose FlowMuT, a mutation-based testing method grounded in data flow. Mutations are represented as constrained subgraph replacements, with mutation operators derived from prior work and an analysis of mutable data flow objects. In each round, FlowMuT builds a TFG for the seed model, pairs mutation operators with TFG sites, and filters illegal candidates using data flow constraints. It uses LinUCB to select a candidate based on coverage and impact, executes the mutant, updates selection feedback, and uses each accepted mutant as the next seed. We evaluate FlowMuT on PyTorch and MindSpore using representative models from diverse application scenarios. FlowMuT submitted 55 bug reports for cases missed by all baseline methods; developers confirmed 41 reports and fixed the bugs described in 7 reports. FlowMuT achieves 43.4% higher data flow diversity than the strongest baseline and a legal mutant rate of 96.7%, compared with 86.4% without constraints. These results show that testing from a data flow perspective is practical and effective.

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### Totem: Object-Centric 3D Memory for World-Consistent Video Generation

Authors: Zichen Wan, Tianyu Huang, Fan Li, Kai Wang, Hongzhi Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15807v1

Generating coherent videos grounded in a unified underlying world remains a major challenge, particularly under large viewpoint changes, where existing methods often struggle to maintain stable representations of individual objects. To this end, we introduce Totem, an object-centric 3D memory framework for world-consistent video generation. Totem first represents each selected object as a persistent 3D memory aligned to a shared world frame, assigning it a dedicated state. Based on these memories, we design a dual-stream 3D conditioning architecture that combines object memories with scene geometry for target-view synthesis. Moreover, these object memories constrain the model's attention with 3D structural information, thereby preserving object surfaces and relative spatial layouts. Extensive experiments on world-generation and object-centric benchmarks demonstrate that Totem generates videos depicting a more object-consistent 3D world under challenging camera trajectories, while supporting versatile applications.

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### Reference-Efficient Multimodal Bitstream-Corrupted Video Recovery via Depth-Conditioned Adaptation

Authors: Tianyi Liu, Jiaojiao Wang, Ye Lu, Kejun Wu, Chengtao Cai, Zhengguo Li, Chia-Wen Lin
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15806v2

Recovering visually faithful content from damaged video bitstreams is important for reliable multimedia communication and storage. Existing methods exploit local residuals and non-local RGB references of the input video sequence, but both sources can become unreliable after decoding, while processing additional references increases receiver computation and memory. This paper studies multimodal bitstream-corrupted video recovery (MBSCVR) using RGB and depth information, where pre-transmission depth-based geometry aids reconstruction when the received appearance is corrupted. We propose a novel MBSCVR framework that selects and effectively utilizes a single selected non-local RGB reference per recovery window to achieve higher performance. It integrates a reliability-aware multimodal selector that combines valid appearance with depth compatibility before reference encoding. Depth-Conditioned Reference Adaptation (DCRA) introduces selected RGB evidence into feature completion and content generation, while frame-aligned depth conditions completion queries. On the complete BSCV benchmark with oracle masks, MBSCVR uses one selected reference to achieve 32.30 dB on YouTube-VOS and 28.93 dB on DAVIS, surpassing full-reference B2SCVR by 0.27 and 0.33 dB and improving SSIM on both subsets. Matched receiver-forward measurements show 36.8\% lower latency and 40.8\% lower peak memory. These results demonstrate how compact geometric guidance and adapted appearance processing improve the quality--resource trade-off of multimedia recovery.

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### Passing Tests, Missing Semantics: Evidence of Interpretive Lock-In in Plan-Based DataFrame Code Generation

Authors: Jingjing, Liu, Dishu Yang, Hongbo Qin, Hansong Zhang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15797v1

Planning and revision are intended to bring generated code closer to the task specification. Yet a mistaken interpretation can persist across the plan, implementation, and tests - a pattern we call interpretive lock-in. We investigate this risk on 30 DataFrame tasks derived from TPC Benchmark DS, comparing Frozen One-Pass, Test-Guided Revision, and PlanAudit-Guided Revision. Test-pass counts rose from 22/30 to 29/30 and 30/30, yet no generated solution matched its stored reference output. Evaluator controls returned the expected outcome in 57/57 cases. Same-engine SQL re-execution reproduced 28/30 references; all 77 test-passing runs on these tasks still failed reference agreement. PlanAudit-Guided Revision improved code scores on 3/30 tasks and test coverage on 11/30, but the median paired change was zero for both measures. Failure analysis revealed tests that omitted requirements, adopted candidate-defined schemas, used nondiscriminating fixtures, or repeated the implementation's incorrect logic. Fresh generation on ten targeted tasks produced 0/30 reference matches and 25/25 false passes among test-passing runs. These findings are diagnostic rather than causal: the pipelines differ in feedback, grounding, call budgets, and editing permissions, and the study uses one model and one primary generation per eligible task. Because pre-adjudication human labels were not retained, inter-rater agreement cannot be reconstructed and the mechanism analyses remain exploratory. Overall, increasingly successful self-generated tests did not establish semantic correctness, even after excluding unreproduced references.

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### An Explainable System for Offensive Content Detection in Nastaliq Urdu: Corpus Curation, Transformer Benchmarking, and Word-Level Attribution

Authors: Muhammad Shahid Iqbal Malik
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15795v1

Automated moderation systems are deployed at scale, yet they remain opaque to the users and moderators affected by their decisions, and their coverage is almost entirely confined to English. For Urdu written in the Nastaliq script, no such system exists, and the annotated resources it would be built on are drawn largely from Twitter/X, where character limits constrain how users write. Interpretability has received little attention, leaving it unclear what such models actually learn. This study addresses these gaps in three steps. First, we curate and publicly release a corpus of 7604 Nastaliq Urdu Facebook comments, extending an earlier corpus by correcting text-level inconsistencies and re-examining the original labels. Second, we fine-tune four Urdu-capable transformers under a common grid-search protocol and compare them against twelve feature-classifier baselines on identical data partitions. The best configuration, Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), reaches 87.05% accuracy and 87.06% macro F1, improving on the strongest baseline by 5.52 percentage points, a margin that exceeds the 95% confidence interval on test accuracy; the two leading transformers differ by less than the test set can resolve, and performance is stable across five optimizers. Third, we compute word-level SHAP attributions adapted to right-to-left rendering. Attribution mass concentrates on high-frequency slurs but extends to syntactically neutral function words and to political vocabulary characteristic of the source pages, indicating that aggregate performance may rest partly on lexical and topical regularities rather than a generalizable representation of offensiveness.

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### Inference on the Value of Policy Improvement in Adaptive Experiments

Authors: Justin Whitehouse, Emma Brunskill, Vasilis Syrgkanis
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, econ.EM, math.ST
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15789v1

In this paper, we develop an asymptotically normal estimator for the value of policy improvement (VPI) under adaptively collected data. This value, which is defined as the gap between the value of the best treatment policy in a class and that of a baseline policy, gauges whether or not it is worth deploying a personalized treatment policy. Building an estimator for the VPI is naturally more difficult than estimating the value of a fixed policy. This is because, in addition to contending with the correlated data and decaying propensities associated with adaptive experiments, any estimator must also handle the non-regularity, or lack of pathwise differentiability, of the underlying estimand when the optimal policy is non-unique. Our proposed estimator works by sequentially fitting a weighted empirical welfare maximizing policy on historical data and then evaluating it using inverse propensity weighting on future samples. We neither assume that the optimal policy is unique nor make a margin assumption on the underlying heterogeneous treatment effects. A key difficulty in analyzing our estimator is showing that the regret incurred through policy learning is asymptotically smaller than the standard error of the estimator. We accomplish this by showing faster regret rates for policy learning under decaying propensities, which may be of independent interest. We not only evaluate the coverage of our estimator on a mix of synthetic and semi-synthetic data, but also employ it to estimate the VPI in an adaptive experiment evaluating the efficacy of job assistance programs in Jordan due to Caria et al. Although our estimates are generally more conservative than their hierarchical Bayesian analysis, which assumes that the optimal policy is unique, we still corroborate the benefits of personalization amongst Syrian refugees.

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### Agent Sociodrama: Social-Dynamics-Guided Persona Recasting for LLM Agent Teams

Authors: Yirui Qi, Xiaoming Zhang, Jaehong Yoon
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15788v1

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as teams, yet they fail in characteristically social ways: information holders stay silent, dominant speakers anchor groups on wrong answers, and norm violations go unsanctioned. We present Agent Sociodrama, a framework for modeling and validating evolving social dynamics in LLM agent teams. Under fixed personas, agents' emotional states and directed, asymmetric relationships are updated every round by a unified external LLM judge and shape their subsequent interactions. Across six LLM backbones and five social scenarios, we assess social fidelity through classical social-theory patterns and agreement with human judgments. The resulting trajectories exhibit structured social patterns and model-specific differences. We then introduce Trajectory-Guided Persona Recasting (TPR), which diagnoses group-dynamic failures from interaction transcripts and social trajectories and recasts agent personas before rerunning the task. Across four collaborative benchmarks, TPR improves performance from both heterogeneous and randomly initialized agent persona compositions, yielding up to 83.3%p of accuracy improvement over the initial casting. On representative distributed-information cooperation and mixed-motive bargaining tasks, we outperform SOTOPIA and AgentVerse in three of four comparisons, by up to 37.5%p in Pareto rate. These results show that validated social trajectories provide actionable signals for repairing LLM agent teams.

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### Data-Centric Recursive Self-Improvement for Navigation via Policy-Synchronized Language-Action Dual Bootstrapping

Authors: Songze Li, Haoming Gu, Ziyang Gong, Zhitong Wang, Gengze Zhou, Zun Wang, Yuhan Zhu, Tianxiang Jiang, Juanzi Li, Qi Wu, Weinan Zhang, Yu Qiao et al.
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15782v1

Vision-language navigation requires agents to follow natural-language instructions to reach target locations, making high-quality language supervision essential. Since human annotation is costly, prior work has explored scalable data synthesis methods. However, existing methods typically either use separate models for navigation and instruction generation or couple the two tasks through task-specific components; most also annotate the full trajectory corpus with a fixed model before updating, which can cause generated supervision to lag behind the evolving policy. Therefore, we introduce RSI-Nav, a data-centric recursive self-improvement framework for navigation via policy-synchronized language-action dual bootstrapping, which unifies vision-language-to-action instruction following and vision-action-to-language instruction generation within a shared model. Specifically, after supervised fine-tuning establishes fundamental capabilities, RSI-Nav progressively processes unlabeled trajectories in small shards. The current model generates instructions for these trajectories, executes them to evaluate goal completion and path efficiency, retains qualified samples, and immediately updates itself before processing the next shard. This shard-wise update keeps newly generated supervision aligned with the evolving policy. We also incorporate spatial understanding data, since stronger spatial reasoning benefits navigation. Extensive experiments show that RSI-Nav reaches 68.6% SR on R2R-CE and 72.4% SR on RxR-CE, while providing stronger instruction-generation utility and modestly improved spatial understanding after recursive evolution.

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### Heterogeneous Structured Pruning Under Resource Constraints for Hardware-Efficient Large Language Models

Authors: Cameron Barker, Andreas Paraskeva, Jan N. van Rijn, Elliot J. Crowley, Henry Gouk
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15781v1

Training-free pruning removes weights from pretrained large language models to reduce their deployment cost. However, existing approaches typically consider only the total number of retained weights. Consequently, their pruning decisions do not account for how target hardware stores and processes those weights. These methods select a sparsity structure in advance and apply it uniformly to all projections, rather than accounting for how each structure trades pruning error against latency and memory across sublayers. We propose Heterogeneous Structured Pruning (HSP), a hardware-aware pruning framework that combines two components: (i) a heterogeneous search space of dense, unstructured, 2:4, block-sparse, and head / channel (H/C) pruning options and (ii) structure-regularising constraints based on latency and memory models. Our contribution generalises existing importance-based methods: a global solver selects one option per sublayer to minimise proxy pruning loss under a resource budget, thereby assigning each projection a structure and density. We evaluate HSP on OPT and LLaMA models for an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super edge device, where it improves the quality-resource frontiers over training-free baselines. A project page and updated links for the related code is maintained at: cameronbarker.me/publications/hsp.

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### Who Sets the Pace of Judge Hacking? Judge Capability versus the Policy-Judge Gap

Authors: Haosen Wang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15778v2

Under GRPO against a frozen, reference-free LLM judge, RL exploits the judge's false positives. Does the policy-judge capability gap or the judge itself set how fast and how far? We train 0.5B and 1.5B Qwen2.5 policies on GSM8K against four judges at least as large, and the 1.5B policy also against one smaller judge. In a post-hoc analysis, judge acceptance rose, but no cell of 12 gained more than 0.04 in seed-mean held-out greedy accuracy. A gold-reward control with the same recipe raised the 1.5B policy's accuracy by +0.054 (for the 0.5B policy, gold reward gave no detectable gain either). The depth of judge hacking tracks the judge: the plateau correlates with judge AUC (Spearman -0.69 over 12 cells), and within a family the larger judge is fooled less deeply. For the pace, two pre-specified pairs contradict the gap account: the cell with the larger gap was fooled 3.5x sooner at the pre-specified threshold. With 12 cells, however, we cannot formally separate judge AUC from the gap for either endpoint. A blind test of step-0 predictors on three held-out judges was inconclusive. At 7-8B, judges from three families plateaued between 0.37 and 0.85.

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### RSIPO: Recursive Self-Improving Policy Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learning via Skill-Policy Co-Evolution

Authors: Fan Zhang, Hao Wu, Jinyang Wu, Hongyu Qu, Zheng Lian, Xiao Luo, Yefeng Zheng, Bo Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Pheng-Ann Heng
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15772v1

Recent focus in agentic reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to improve credit assignment in long-horizon tasks. One promising direction combines reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), integrating trajectory-level advantages with dense token-level supervision. This line of work often conditions a teacher model on privileged context, such as agentic skills, to score tokens generated by the student policy. Despite their progress, they largely overlook the on-policy evolution of agentic skills and the reliability of teacher supervision. Towards this end, we introduce Recursive Self-Improving Policy Optimization (RSIPO), a self-evolving agentic RL framework that enables agentic skills and the policy model to co-evolve throughout the training process. Specifically, RSIPO enables the policy itself to extract skills from completed trajectories and explicitly optimizes its skill-generation capability through trajectory replay. It further employs empirical Bayes shrinkage to dynamically calibrate the student's trust in teacher scores, accounting for the fact that skill-enhanced teacher guidance can sometimes be less reliable. Experiments with Qwen-family models on embodied interaction and search-based agentic tasks demonstrate that RSIPO outperforms all the compared baseline approaches. With Qwen2.5-7B as the base model, RSIPO achieves an average success rate of 98.6\% on ALFWorld, yielding absolute improvements of 2.5\% and 17.4\% over the second-best baseline and standard GRPO, respectively.

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### Hand2Robot: Object-Centric 4D Hand Reconstruction from Human Demonstrations for Robotics

Authors: Zetao Du, Weiqing Wang, Hanbing Zhang, Yimiao Zhou, Ye Shi, Liang Wang, Jingya Wang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15769v1

Human demonstrations can capture task-relevant manipulation without using the target robot, but the recorded hand motions cannot directly serve as robot action supervision. Hand reconstruction and motion retargeting provide a direct route to such supervision, yet recovering hand motion alone does not ensure physically consistent hand-object interactions. To address this issue, we introduce Hand2Robot, an object-centric 4D hand reconstruction framework for robot policy post-training. Given videos of humans performing the target task, Hand2Robot extracts interaction clips, reconstructs object geometry, and generates robot action supervision through hand-object interaction optimization and motion retargeting. For object tracking, we combine observation confidence with temporal motion constraints to select a globally consistent object pose trajectory from per-frame pose candidates. For hand refinement, we use object geometry and motion as a reference and combine staged 2D alignment with object-local contact constraints to refine hand trajectories and finger joint configurations. Experiments on DexYCB and HO3D-v3 show improved object pose accuracy and hand-object interaction quality. Experiments on three real-robot dexterous manipulation tasks further show that reconstructed and retargeted human demonstrations can effectively supplement limited robot data for target-task policy post-training.

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### SurgiCLAW: An Interpretable Atomic-Skill Agent for Precision Robotic Micromanipulation

Authors: Angen Ye, junjie xie, Yujia Song, Junkai Huang, Dapeng Zhang
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15766v1

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and vision--language--action models have provided robots with new capabilities for long-horizon task understanding and planning. In surgical robotics, however, end-to-end prediction of low-level actions remains limited by insufficient precision, opaque decisions, and scarce data. This paper presents SurgiCLAW, a hierarchical skill-based framework for precision surgical manipulation. SurgiCLAW confines an MLLM to intraoperative visual understanding, structured explanation, and atomic surgical-skill selection, while delegating physical execution to verifiable deterministic control programs. For brain--machine-interface implantation, a representative high-precision surgical task, we construct a state-to-skill invocation dataset and expand it through visual and state perturbations. The model first learns structured skill invocation through supervised fine-tuning and is then optimized using three rewards for action correctness, operation prerequisites, and format validity, improving action selection, operational safety, and output parseability. We evaluate subtask success, offline model comparison, real-robot performance, and ablations. On a fixed test set, SurgiCLAW achieves 94.6% skill-selection accuracy and 93.0% macro-averaged F1 (Macro-F1). Across 50 closed-loop real-robot implantation trials, it achieves an 88.0% task success rate.

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### A Decade in a Day: Synthesizing Agent-Native Interfaces from Human-Oriented Software Evolution

Authors: Alan Wu, Wei Tao, Yiwen Guo
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15765v1

Large language model agents are emerging as an important new class of users of desktop applications. However, existing desktop interfaces were designed for human end users or application developers, leaving agents to interpret visual controls or discover and compose low-level software operations. This mismatch can hinder even capable agents, yet it remains unclear what interface properties make desktop software easier for agents to use. To study this question, we treat software evolution as a natural source of interface variation and introduce DeskIF-Bench, a benchmark of 255 artifact-verified tasks across six desktop applications. By holding the task, agent, and verifier fixed while varying the software release, we measure how interface changes affect agent performance. Across two models and six applications, the newest release consistently outperforms the oldest. Trajectory analysis identifies three relevant interface properties: discoverability, granularity, and observability. Guided by these properties, we develop ANIS, a framework that synthesizes agent-native interfaces from the capabilities of installed applications. On an expanded evaluation of 368 tasks across eight applications, atomic interfaces improve success over native SDK use by 3.8 and 3.5 percentage points with DeepSeek V4 Flash and Claude Haiku 4.5, respectively, while reducing online token usage by approximately 73%. Goal-level commands further raise success to 74.5% and 67.4%, respectively.

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### SlotAVS: Object-Centric Audio-Visual Segmentation via Bi-Modal Slot Attention

Authors: Arnav Sharma, Anand Mishra, Renu Rameshan
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15764v1

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) requires predicting pixel-wise masks of sounding objects by grounding acoustic signals in visual space. In multi-source scenes, concurrent sound sources often remain entangled within shared visual representations, leading to merged masks or unstable specialization when using standard alignment-focused transformer architectures. To address this, we present SlotAVS, an object-centric framework driven by competitive bi-modal slot attention. While robust foundation models provide rich semantic priors, SlotAVS shifts the paradigm from global cross-modal fusion to explicit competitive binding. By initializing discrete object slots from temporal audio sequences and enforcing strict slot-wise competition over spatial visual tokens, our method structurally mitigates the blending of distinct acoustic entities. Further, to stabilize instance-level learning, we introduce a Hungarian matching strategy that optimally aligns slots with ground-truth objects using spatial and boundary overlap. Coupled with a numerically stable, confidence-aware mask fusion mechanism, SlotAVS robustly aggregates multi-source predictions. Extensive experiments on the AVSBench dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving 88.6% mIoU on the Single-Source (S4) split and 71.7% mIoU on the Multi-Source (MS3) split. These results show that explicit competitive binding is critical for complex audio-visual scene understanding and effectively leveraging foundation-model priors without relying solely on their capacity.

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### Robust Marathi Sentiment Analysis using Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Data Augmentation Approaches

Authors: Tanvi Somani, Aryan Babare, Samyak Bora, Raviraj Joshi, Abhinay Dhamankar
Published: 2026-10-11
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15761v1

For languages with limited resources, Sentiment Analysis remains a challenging problem due to limited annotated data and strong domain variability across textual sources. Marathi, despite being widely spoken, lacks extensive multi-domain sentiment analysis studies. Recent efforts by L3Cube have introduced multi-domain datasets in Marathi, enabling a better study of domain-aware sentiment classification. This study uses the pretrained MahaBERT model to improve sentiment classification for Marathi across different domains. Models are trained on individual domain datasets and domain-adaptive pretraining is applied using masked language modeling to help the model better understand domain-specific language. In addition, back-translation is used as a method of data augmentation to increase the diversity of training data. Results show that these methods lead to consistent improvements in accuracy across all domains. The improvements range from a minimum of about 0.12% to a maximum of about 1.74%, depending on the dataset. These results demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining and data augmentation are effective strategies for improving sentiment analysis models. This helps achieve more robust performance across different domains and makes the approach more suitable for low-resource languages like Marathi.

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