# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 81 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #4001–4050 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/81 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/80.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/82.md) ### Recompose and Refine Latent Reasoning Flows for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Hongyu Shi, Sen Zhao, Zuyu Zhang, Lifeng Shen, Ding Zou, Xinyu He, Xu Zhang, Qinghua Zhang Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12090v1 Latent reasoning enables vision-language-action (VLA) models to transform multimodal observations into task-relevant internal states before generating continuous robot actions. While existing methods learn to generate or refine such states for each policy query, they discard successful reasoning after execution and therefore reconstruct similar computation from scratch. We present Reasoning and Flow Memory (FLOWMEM), a unified VLA model that turns successful latent computation into reusable reasoning experience. Rather than appending a fixed retrieved context, FLOWMEM dynamically retrieves and recomposes compatible latent fragments as the embodied context evolves, forming a reasoning route that follows the temporal structure and progress of successful computation. The route is then refined using current visual and proprioceptive evidence before it conditions action generation. Experiments on RoboMME and LIBERO-Plus show that FLOWMEM attains 48.0% and 77.3% success, outperforming memory-free policies by 1.7 and 4.1 percentage points, respectively. These results demonstrate the value of reusing successful latent computation for closed-loop VLA control. --- ### EvoAlloc: A Self-Evolving Resource Allocation Agent for Efficient Program Evolution Authors: Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, Nanbo Li, Wenyi Wang, Jürgen Schmidhuber Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12086v1 LLM-based program evolution relies on evaluation feedback to guide the iterative search for high-performing programs. However, evaluation is often computationally expensive, making it essential to allocate limited resources to candidates that can most effectively advance the search. Existing LLM-based methods typically rely on fixed allocation strategies throughout the search, potentially wasting resources on low-value candidates while overlooking promising ones. We propose EvoAlloc, a self-evolving resource-allocation agent that learns from search experience to revise its strategy for allocating computational resources across candidates. EvoAlloc periodically consolidates prior search and allocation outcomes into reusable experience, which informs subsequent strategy revisions. It further uses a counterfactual exploration mechanism to occasionally evaluate candidates denied resources by the allocator, revealing their outcomes to enrich its experience for future strategy updates. Across coding and agent-harness optimization benchmarks, EvoAlloc requires 59-82% fewer full evaluations and 61-89% fewer total LLM tokens to reach baseline-level performance. Moreover, under the same full-evaluation budget, EvoAlloc achieves 8.7-12.0% higher final performance. --- ### Is Memorization Context-Sensitive? Prefix-Based Extraction Beyond Isolated Prefixes Authors: Ali Satvaty, Narjes Sharafi, Jirui Qi, Suzan Verberne, Fatih Turkmen Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12085v1 Large language models (LLMs) can expose memorized training sequences under prefix-based extraction: given a prefix from a training example, the model may assign high probability to the original continuation. In deployed systems, however, prefixes are rarely evaluated in isolation. They often appear together with instructions, retrieved documents, or other task-specific context, as in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This motivates examining whether contextual conditioning mitigates memorization or merely changes the set of memorized samples that become extractable. We investigate this issue through paired item-level measurements of probabilistic suffix extraction. For each prefix-suffix pair, we score the target suffix under an empty prompt and under retrieved contexts of varying relevance, across three open-weight instruction-tuned models. We find that context does not simply erase memorization. Instead, extractable memorization consists of a context-robust core and a context-sensitive boundary. Many samples that are extractable without context remain extractable under the retrieved context, especially as the prefix length increases. At the same time, context mainly affects marginal samples near the extraction threshold: it suppresses some exposures, but also enables new ones that are missed by prefix-only evaluation. These findings qualify the view that RAG reduces memorization risk. Context can lower aggregate extraction by suppressing boundary cases, yet robustly extractable samples persist, and context-enabled extractability remains security-relevant. --- ### All Verdicts are Not Equal: Rethinking LLM Judge Reliability Authors: Vineet Kumar, Darshita Rathore, Anindya Moitra Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12083v1 LLM-as-a-Judge is the standard paradigm for NLP evaluation, yet its systemic reliability remains poorly understood despite being widely treated as a deterministic ground truth. We present a comprehensive reliability audit, stresstesting six frontier models across four benchmarks, five prompt formats, two presentation orders, three sampling temperatures, and ten repetitions per condition. Our empirical analysis reveals severe vulnerabilities: verdicts change across identical replications at temperature zero, position-order swaps flip the majority of verdicts on challenging tasks, and the most deterministic judge achieves perfect consistency by trivially repeating incorrect verdicts, agreeing with ground truth only 51% of the time. To formalize these multi-faceted failure modes, we introduce the trustworthy verdict rate (T ), a unified metric capturing the joint probability that an evaluation is reproducible, order-invariant, and accurate. UsingT , we derive a theoretical upper bound on accuracy imposed by position bias and show that reliability is item-specific rather than modellevel. Finally, we demonstrate that shifting from pairwise win-rate to holistic rubric scoring improves trustworthiness more than any single-format prompting intervention, offering an actionable framework for robust NLP evaluation. --- ### Perception Test 2026: Challenge Summary and Extension to City-scale Audio-Visual Reasoning Authors: Fedor Kitashov, João Carreira, Shiry Ginosar, Dima Damen, Andrew Zisserman, Viorica Pătrăucean Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12081v1 Continuing the Perception Test challenge series, we organised the fourth edition as a workshop at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026 in Malmö, Sweden. This edition focused on spatial intelligence and featured four different tracks: unified multiple-choice videoQA and grounded videoQA from the original Perception Test benchmark, alongside two new tracks based on city-scale walking-tour videos (KilometerAudio and KilometerVision). In this report, we describe the new benchmarks used for the city-scale tracks and summarise the winning solutions across all tracks, including a generalist model that competed across all tracks with satisfactory performance. The winning solutions in the newly added city-scale tracks demonstrated that complex spatial and multimodal reasoning can be solved by expensive agentic pipelines, but remains difficult for multimodal models used standalone. --- ### Exploiting Gradients in Bayesian Inference of Expensive Simulators Authors: Šimon Soldát, Václav Šmídl Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12076v1 Simulators based on differential equations are ubiquitous in science and engineering. They are often used in simulation-based inference to evaluate the posterior distribution of the input parameters based on real-world observations of the simulator outputs. However, inference becomes challenging when individual simulator evaluations are computationally expensive. In such cases, a Bayesian optimization-based active learning approach with Gaussian process surrogate models has been used to maximize the information obtained from a limited simulation budget. Recently, gradients of simulator outputs with respect to input parameters have become increasingly available, yet they are rarely exploited for inference. Even though we only need to learn the simulator input-output relationship, gradient information can provide an additional valuable signal to guide the active learning procedure. This is of particular interest in the case of expensive simulators, when sample efficiency is crucial. In this paper, we demonstrate how incorporating gradient information into the Gaussian process surrogate accelerates Bayesian optimization-based inference under a limited simulation budget. Our results show significant improvement in convergence speed from using gradient information. For reverse-mode differentiation, the inference efficiency gains are maintained when accounting for the additional computational cost. In contrast, for forward-mode differentiation, the inference speed-up does not outweigh the computational costs. These results indicate that gradient-enhanced surrogates are beneficial primarily in problems where the number of parameters exceeds the output dimensionality, where reverse-mode differentiation is efficient. --- ### A Minimal Optical-Flow Representation for Vision-Based Tactile Rotation Classification in Robotic Manipulation Across Gravity Domains Authors: Oscar Martinez-Bernal, Mario Cavero-Vidal, Francesco Grella, Carol Martinez Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12073v1 Vision-based tactile sensors provide rich contact information, but processing high-resolution images can be costly for resource-constrained platforms such as space robots. This work investigates whether a compact representation of tactile motion can classify object rotation across different gravity conditions. Dense optical flow from a simulated GelSight Mini is aggregated over a 7x9 grid into 126 features and used to classify the direction of load-induced rotation under Earth, Mars, Moon, and orbital gravity. Gravity causes a small but significant shift in these features, accounting for 1.6% of their variance (R2 = 0.016). Despite its small magnitude, this shift affects models trained only on Earth data: XGBoost accuracy decreases from 94.4% on Earth to 75.9% in orbit. In contrast, a single model trained across all four gravity domains achieves 96.3% overall accuracy and 95.1%-97.0% across individual domains, without using gravity as an input. The representation can also be reduced to 40 features while retaining 95.7% accuracy, with XGBoost requiring only 0.14 ms per inference. These findings show that Earth-gravity performance alone is insufficient to establish the transferability of tactile perception for space robotic manipulation, highlighting the need to account for gravity-induced domain shifts during training and validation. --- ### LIVIN: Benchmarking Spatial and Embodied Intelligence in Digital Twins of Lived-In Homes Authors: Peijun Xu, Chuansen Nie, Yiyang He, Yinuo Bai, Jingyang Liu, Kuixiang Shao, Yuyang Jiao, Kuanhao Xia, Jiayi Zhu, Zitian Yang, Yanqi Zhang, Tianye Tan et al. Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12069v2 Realistic household simulation must capture not only diverse environments but also the lived-in object arrangements and spatial constraints that shape robot motion and interaction. Existing resources often trade off scale, real-world correspondence, and interaction readiness, leaving a gap in faithful, interactive replicas of how real homes are actually arranged. To this end, we introduce LIVIN, a benchmark for spatial and embodied intelligence built on digital twins of 30 diverse lived-in homes. These replicas preserve observed room layouts, furniture configurations, and everyday belongings. To construct them, we design a human-in-the-loop workflow comprising instance recognition, architectural reconstruction, and object generation and placement, with intermediate results reviewed and corrected by humans against the source observations at each stage. We evaluate four tasks in LIVIN: 3D detection, 3D reconstruction, navigation, and loco-manipulation. Our evaluations show that current methods remain challenged by the dense object arrangements, occlusions, limited free space, and constrained interaction regions found in realistic lived-in homes. We hope LIVIN will help advance embodied AI in real-world homes, from spatial understanding to robotic interaction, and ultimately bring embodied intelligence into everyday home environments. --- ### MAST: Motif-Augmented Diffusion with Search Tree for Spectroscopic Molecular Structure Elucidation Authors: Chenghao Jia, Mengdi Liu, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12067v1 Elucidating molecular structures from spectra is a foundational problem in chemical and materials characterization, yet remains challenging due to spectral ambiguity and the vast molecular space. Although recent diffusion-based generators show strong promise for spectra-conditioned elucidation, existing methods struggle to learn robust spectra-structure relationships from limited paired data when relying solely on global spectral representation. Moreover, the repeated full sampling inference strategy incurs substantial computation overhead. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MAST}, a \textbf{M}otif-\textbf{A}ugmented diffusion framework with \textbf{S}earch \textbf{T}ree, for joint 2D-3D spectroscopic molecular structure elucidation. MAST introduces explicit, interpretable \emph{motif priors} as intermediate evidences throughout denoising, reducing conditional ambiguity and facilitating spectra-conditioned optimization. We further cast diffusion sampling as \emph{reward-guided tree search} to prioritize high-reward denoising trajectories, yielding a compact set of spectra-consistent candidates under limited budgets. On the QM9S multi-spectra benchmark, MAST achieves \textbf{94.89\%} exact recovery and improves 3D fidelity, while preserving high chemical validity and stability. Code is available at https://github.com/Jia040223/MAST. --- ### ILM: An AI-Powered Storytelling Educational Tool Authors: Suhaila Mohammed, Abdelaziz Serour, Allison Lahnala Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12064v2 Digital technologies have made Islamic narratives more accessible, but existing platforms provide limited support for structured learning and comprehension of these stories, particularly in Arabic and multilingual settings. We present ILM, an interactive educational platform for Stories of the Prophets that combines Arabic natural language processing, structured knowledge representation, and retrieval-based question generation. Admin-approved Arabic narratives are processed by a Knowledge Graph (KG) Constructor Engine that identifies entities and narrative relationships and stores them as structured knowledge, enabling learners to explore stories through a visual story map and answer entity- and relation-based questions generated from the KG. Separately, a multilingual retrieval pipeline retrieves relevant passages from the original narratives to generate multiple-choice and open-ended comprehension questions. For open-ended questions, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluates learners' answers against the retrieved passages and reference answers to determine correctness. The platform also incorporates Quranic content as a separate enrichment layer, allowing selected narratives to be supplemented with source-supported information. By combining structured knowledge with passage-based retrieval, ILM supports narrative exploration, comprehension, and assessment across Arabic and multilingual content. The system demonstrates the feasibility of combining structured knowledge representation and retrieval-based generation to support interactive learning of Islamic narratives. A demo is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/mml-5FCF. --- ### When Should Agents Think? Adaptive Reasoning via Cross-Turn Estimation Authors: Yiruo Cheng, Shen Huang, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiejun Tan, Guanting Dong, Pengjun Xie, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12061v1 Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities on complex tasks. They typically perform reasoning before each action throughout an interaction trajectory. However, reasoning may not be necessary at every turn, as reasoning produced earlier can continue to support subsequent actions. A key challenge is therefore to determine when existing reasoning remains sufficient and when a new reasoning step is needed, without relying on costly generation-based verification. We find that decreases in the likelihood of subsequent reference actions after removing additional reasoning closely track whether those actions remain recoverable given earlier reasoning, providing an effective and lightweight signal for estimating cross-turn action support. Based on this observation, we propose Reasoning Adaptation through Cross-Turn Estimation (RACE), a training approach for adaptive agent reasoning. RACE introduces a Likelihood-Guided Progressive Reasoning Cover Detection (LoGiC) procedure that progressively identifies reasoning turns whose removal has limited impact on the current and subsequent reference actions. The resulting removal signals are incorporated into both supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, enabling the policy to learn when to reason and when to act directly. Extensive experiments on four representative agent benchmarks show that RACE substantially reduces reasoning cost while maintaining or improving task performance. --- ### Look Back, Think Ahead: Visual Memory on Demand for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning Authors: Yicheng Xue, Han Wu, Jufeng Yang, Minjing Dong, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Jianyuan Guo Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12060v1 Processing long visual token sequences from high-resolution images makes multi-step reasoning computationally expensive for multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing one-shot pruning and aggregation methods compress visual tokens into a fixed context before decoding. However, visual evidence needs can shift as reasoning unfolds, making it difficult for a fixed compressed context to retain all the details needed across stages. To address this challenge, we propose ViMoD, a lightweight framework that maintains a compact visual context while preserving access to original fine-grained evidence as reasoning needs evolve. Deformable Aggregation of Region-wise Tokens (DART) learns content-adaptive groups and aggregation capacities, constructing compact Coarse representations linked to recoverable original Fine tokens. Temporal Routing for Adaptive Contextual Evidence (TRACE) integrates decoding history to anticipate upcoming evidence needs and select, retain, or replace active Fine-token groups. Selected Fine tokens augment the persistent Coarse context in the frozen backbone, enabling stage-specific evidence access without continuously attending to all visual tokens. On Qwen3-VL-4B, ViMoD outperforms all evaluated baselines on all eight reasoning benchmarks at a 20% target visual token budget, improving the mean normalized score by 39.0% over the strongest evaluated one-shot baseline. These gains are achieved with only 0.0546% additional trainable parameters relative to the frozen backbone. --- ### Structure Tax: How Structured Output affects LLMs Performance Authors: Vineet Kumar, Kanishka, Bhuvanesh Mandora Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12056v1 Deploying large language models in production often requires constraining outputs to structured formats such as JSON or XML, and prior work treats the resulting accuracy loss as an inherent `structure tax'. We re-examine this claim by evaluating a battery of models, datasets and schemas, measuring task accuracy, confidence calibration, and hidden-state geometry. The tax turns out to depend on schema design rather than on structure per se: reasoning-first field ordering matches or exceeds free-form accuracy, while answer-first ordering causes steep drops, particularly in smaller models. Format sensitivity scales inversely with a task's own structural constraints, and schemas that preserve reasoning order also improve calibration with CKA showing greater separability between correct and incorrect representations in middle transformer layers. Our findings indicate that properly designed structured formats can match or exceed free-form performance, reframing the critical question from `whether to structure' to `how to structure' for optimal reasoning preservation. --- ### Diffusion Removes Langevin's Conditioning Dependence: A Sharp Gaussian Analysis Authors: Adam Perbost, Francis Bach, Pierre Marion Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12052v1 Despite their empirical success, why diffusion models overcome the bottlenecks of classical score-based samplers remains unclear. In this work, we leverage Gaussian distributions to isolate this phenomenon. We establish 2-Wasserstein convergence bounds for optimized hyperparameters, showing that diffusion processes achieve a sampling error of $O(\sqrt{dλ_{\max}}\log N/N)$, where $d$ is the dimension, $N$ the number of sampling steps, and $λ_{\max}$ the largest eigenvalue of the target covariance matrix. Unadjusted and underdamped Langevin dynamics suffer from an additional $\sqrtκ$ factor, where $κ$ is the condition number. These rates follow from spectral bounds which are sharp: we confirm them via matching first-order asymptotics as $N\rightarrow\infty$. Our analysis provides a rigorous characterization, in the Gaussian setting, of how time-dependent score trajectories remove condition-number dependence during sampling. By contrast, in the learning phase, we show that estimating the unnoised score by gradient descent leads to essentially the same estimator as estimating a noisy score, which suggests that the benefits of noising do not come from the learning phase. --- ### Do Not Train Away Uncertainty: Early Uncertainty Anchored Calibration Authors: Yutong Xie, Jiawei Tang, Zhenglin Hua, Yuxiang Ma, Si Qin, Yaxin Hou, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou, Yuheng Jia Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12048v1 Deep neural networks, including large language models, have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they are prone to overconfidence during training or fine-tuning. In this work, we observe a consistent phenomenon across different models that the early model is better calibrated, while later training or fine-tuning yields marginal accuracy gains but substantially increases calibration errors. Our analysis suggests that the early model retains uncertainty awareness in both its predictions and features, which is gradually lost with continued training. To avoid training away this uncertainty awareness, we propose \textbf{EUA-Cal}, a novel method that exploits the \textbf{E}arly model as an \textbf{U}ncertainty \textbf{A}nchor for \textbf{Cal}ibration. EUA-Cal introduces early prediction regularization to preserve early predictive uncertainty and prototype structure regularization to exploit uncertainty reflected in the early feature space, jointly mitigating overconfidence. Extensive experiments on image classification and multiple-choice question answering across eight diverse models demonstrate that EUA-Cal outperforms state-of-the-art calibration methods. --- ### MPGE: A Multi-Perspective Graph Explainer for Molecular Classification Explanation Authors: Mahtab Sarvmaili Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12039v1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) predict molecular properties from chemical graph data, but predictive accuracy does not explain how graph information supports an individual decision. A compact prediction-preserving rationale does not necessarily reveal which changes reverse the decision or which modifications the model tolerates. We propose the Multi-Perspective Graph Explainer (MPGE), unifying factual support, counterfactual sensitivity, and exemplar tolerance for a frozen classifier. The factual view, originally termed prototype (PT), seeks a compact retained edge set with the same label and required confidence. Counterfactual (CF) explanations seek bounded prediction-changing deletions; exemplar (EXE) explanations seek non-trivial bounded deletions that preserve the label and confidence. A shared constrained formulation connects prediction behavior, compactness, and edit cost, while separate objectives generate the three views. Our graph-classification extension of CF-GNNExplainer learns symmetric edge rankings and verifies discrete candidates, recording unsuccessful searches. A separate BBBP fragment backend returns RDKit-sanitized molecules. We evaluate the primary GCN implementation on MUTAG, Mutagenicity, AIDS, COX2_MD, and BBBP using semantic coverage, conditional quality, stability, and runtime. Successful factual masks retained 8.6%--15.5% of input edges on average across datasets; bounded counterfactual coverage was 4.8%--67.6%, and exemplar preservation coverage was 98.9%--100.0%. Exploratory controls reveal the influence of hard projection and retained node information. Quantitative comparisons and molecular visualizations characterize model support, sensitivity, and tolerance without treating them as validated chemical mechanisms. --- ### Efficient and Generalizable Archetypal Analysis for Discrete Data Authors: A. Emilie J. Wedenborg, Jesper Løve Hinrich, Morten Mørup Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12035v1 Archetypal Analysis (AA) represents observations as convex combinations of extremal data-driven profiles, yielding interpretable low-dimensional descriptions of complex datasets. Classical AA relies on a least-squares objective, which is poorly suited to discrete observations such as binary, count, and categorical data. We introduce an efficient likelihood-based framework for AA supporting Bernoulli, Poisson, and multinomial observation models. Our optimization scheme employs local quadratic approximations of the negative log-likelihood, enabling constrained updates through sequential minimal optimization (SMO) and an active-set method. Scalability is improved by bounding the active set while preserving simplex feasibility. We further introduce a cross-validated predictive likelihood criterion for selecting the number of archetypes, providing a principled alternative to reconstruction-error heuristics and stability-based diagnostics. Synthetic experiments demonstrate computational efficiency and accurate recovery of model complexity. Applications to single-cell RNA sequencing, microbiome composition, and somatic mutation data show that the learned archetypes capture interpretable domain-specific structures while achieving competitive likelihood fits and stable solutions. Overall, the proposed framework enables efficient likelihood-based archetypal analysis of discrete data, complemented by predictive likelihood-based model selection. --- ### Traceable World State: A Provenance-Aware State Representation and Deterministic Replay Framework for Robotic Systems Authors: Zoe Li Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12033v1 Robotic systems operating over extended tasks must maintain a world state assembled from observations arriving at different times, with varying confidence and potential revisions. Conventional representations emphasize latest estimates, hindering fact provenance, decision reproduction, or execution auditing. We present Traceable World State (TWS), a middleware-neutral semantic representation and reference runtime for provenance-aware robot world state. A TWS snapshot captures entities, relations, observations, confidence, and revision metadata. Validated update operations transform snapshots immutably, ordered updates support deterministic replay, and a canonical SHA-256 hash chain ensures tamper-evident logs. We evaluate TWS through schema conformance, complete state lifecycles, deterministic replay, and fault injection. Passing 38 tests across Python 3.10-3.14, the framework detects record corruptions, broken hash links, sequence discontinuities, and world mismatches. Across ten public BEHAVIOR-1K task definitions, TWS imported 153 entities and 146 relations with successful validation. On 103 NVIDIA Unitree G1 simulated trajectories containing 78,369 frames, TWS achieved exact terminal-state replay in all episodes and detected 412/412 injected corruptions with a 1.72% storage overhead over Plain JSONL. --- ### Natural Language to First-Order Logic LLM-based Autoformalization Authors: Andrea Brunello, Cristian Curaba, Luca Geatti, Michele Mignani, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12030v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have renewed interest in autoformalization. Yet, when First-Order Logic (FOL) is considered as the target formalism, the field still lacks a unified task formulation and a systematic survey. This paper addresses this gap: we first provide a principled definition for the FOL-autoformalization task by distinguishing Ontology Extraction from Logical Translation, showing how their conflation obscures (cross-study) evaluation; we review existing datasets, evaluation metrics, and LLM-based methods, including fine-tuning, prompting, and verification-based refinement; we identify open challenges in benchmarking, semantic evaluation, ontology-aware methods, and end-to-end applications. --- ### HWAM: Humanoid World Action Model With Joint State--Action Generation Authors: Yan Yang, Jikun Rong, Minzhao Zhu, Zheyi Zhao, Qirui Hu, Zihan Lan, Weixin Mao, Yinhao Li, Zhen Fu, Hua Chen Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12026v2 Humanoid robots are a promising platform for general-purpose manipulation. Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies learn actions directly from multimodal observations, while World Action Models (WAMs) further incorporate future visual prediction to improve action generation. However, in hierarchical humanoid systems, VLA and WAM policies output reference actions that are subsequently realized through whole-body control, robot dynamics, balance, and contact. This hierarchy creates an action--execution gap: the reference produced by the policy can differ from the motion realized by the robot. Without explicitly modeling the realized body state, future visual prediction must jointly explain scene evolution and discrepancies between reference actions and executed motion, making it difficult to associate an action with its physical outcome. We propose HWAM, a Humanoid World Action Model with joint state--action generation, which makes the robot's post-execution proprioceptive state an explicit prediction target. By jointly generating reference actions and their realized body states, HWAM directly incorporates supervision of executed motion into action learning. HWAM is trained through three complementary conditional paths. The Policy path jointly denoises state--action trajectories conditioned only on current observations, matching deployment conditions. Forward Dynamics Modeling (FDM) predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions and post-execution states, while Inverse Dynamics Modeling (IDM) reconstructs the joint trajectory from visual transitions. Together, these paths connect policy references, realized body motion, and visual outcomes. HWAM achieves the highest success rate among evaluated baselines on three real-robot tasks on the LimX OLI humanoid. On Candy Picking, HWAM achieves a 70.6% success rate, compared with 43.3% for Fast-WAM. --- ### InterviewPlayground: A Validated Simulation Environment for Evaluating AI Interviewers Authors: Jonathan Ivey, Aimee Liang, Arthur Y. S. Wang, Madeline Mandell, Ziang Xiao, Anjalie Field Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12023v2 Increasingly, AI interviewers are being developed to elicit open-ended responses in applications like market research, public polling, preference elicitation, and social science research. However, evaluating AI interviewers is challenging because they function in extended, multi-turn interactions where they must adapt to participant behaviors. To address this need, we develop InterviewPlayground, a simulation environment for evaluating AI interviewers using simulated study participants whose behaviors are grounded in social theory. Simulated studies in InterviewPlayground produce an InterviewReportCard, which assesses the performance of AI interviewers using a suite of validated measures. To test whether our simulation-based evaluations predict performance with human participants, we conduct 15 real qualitative studies with five AI interviewers, three interview topics, and 450 human participants and compare them to simulated studies in InterviewPlayground. We find that AI interviewer performance in InterviewPlayground predicts performance in human studies with an average Pearson correlation of 0.86 across 12 measures, and the simulated interactions from InterviewPlayground reproduce key findings from behavioral analysis of AI interviewers in the human studies. Together, these findings support the validity of InterviewPlayground in assessing AI interviewer performance and examining potential failure modes. Our work contributes a simulation environment for AI interviewers supported with empirical validation, and more broadly, a roadmap for future work to develop validated, simulation-based evaluations of conversational AI systems. --- ### Examining Social Attribution in LLM Reasoning: A Theory-Guided Probing Methodology Authors: Zhaoxin Yu, Qingchao Kong, Dajun Zeng, Wenji Mao Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12022v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sociotechnical systems where social attribution, the reasoning process attributing external events to the causes and reasons of agents' social behaviors, plays a critical role. These processes involve judgments of social cause, responsibility, and blame/credit to agents. Although attributional models are well-studied in social psychology and cognition through Attribution Theory, social attribution remains underexplored in AI, particularly LLM social reasoning. This paper provides the first systematic exploration of LLM social attribution. Our work focuses on responsibility and blame attributions, examining current LLMs' judgments and their underlying internal mechanisms. Guided by attribution theory, we construct a social attribution benchmark consisting of a Vignette subset based on classic scenarios from attribution theory research and a Reality subset based on real-world social narratives, yielding 7,639 responsibility/blame judgment questions. On this basis, we evaluate 32 representative LLMs and 5 basic non-LLM baselines. To further explore the internal mechanisms underlying the LLM judgment process, we develop a probing-based methodology to investigate the latent-space representations of 5 key attribution dimensions and the consistency of their influences on LLM judgments compared to those in human social attribution. Our research findings reveal that current LLMs exhibit measurable but incomplete agreement with human responsibility and blame judgments, and meanwhile, this agreement is positively correlated with model size. Some attribution dimensions are systematically decodable from specific positions in LLM hidden states, and their influences on the final judgment are consistent with those indicated by human Attribution Theory. The dataset and associated code are available at https://github.com/Yuzhaoxin946/SAB-Bench. --- ### CausalDreamer: Learning Predictive World Models with Latent Disentanglement Authors: Prince Jha, Nils Lukas, Kun Zhang, Salem Lahlou Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12016v1 World models for control must capture which aspects of the environment respond to the agent's actions and which are relevant to reward. Generative world models such as Dreamer 4 consist of a video tokenizer, which encodes each frame into a latent, and a dynamics model, which is pretrained to predict future latents from past latents and actions. Yet the tokenizer is trained with a reconstruction objective, without action or reward supervision, so its latent provides no explicit mechanism to separate controllable, uncontrollable, reward-relevant, and reward-irrelevant information. We propose \textit{CausalDreamer}, which keeps the tokenizer frozen and re-encodes its latent into a factored representation of four groups along two axes: controllability, where only the two controllable groups receive the action, and reward relevance, learned by predicting the reward from the two reward-relevant groups. The pretrained dynamics model is then fine-tuned to predict the factored representation. We evaluate \textit{CausalDreamer} and the pretrained world model it starts from with model-predictive planning on 20 MMBench2 tasks: 10 clean tasks seen during training and 10 unseen tasks, of which 6 are manipulated variants of clean tasks with a changed background, object, or maze layout, and 4 are new environments. We normalize returns so that a policy taking uniformly random actions scores 0 and an expert scores 1. \textit{CausalDreamer} achieves a 14\% higher normalized score than the pretrained world model on the clean tasks (0.199 vs.\ 0.175) and a 25\% higher score on the manipulated variants (0.307 vs.\ 0.246), while neither model scores meaningfully above the random policy in the new environments. Additionally, our analysis shows that the factored representation separates reward-irrelevant changes, such as a changed background, from its reward-relevant groups. --- ### PulseBound: Future-Beat State Forecasting Under an Explicit Information Boundary Authors: Chenyang Xu, Donglin Xie, Xi Xiang, Xiaoyu Li, Yufan Lu, Jiqiun Gao, Yi Zhao, Xin-Yi Li, Guangpu Zhu, Zijian Wang, Xiwen Yang, Dezhen Wang et al. Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12010v2 Predictive representation learning from photoplethysmography (PPG) can violate causal information access even with causal attention, as normalization, nonlocal transforms, or companion views may depend on withheld samples. We introduce PulseBound, a PPG representation learner combining physiologically structured future-beat prediction with an explicit stored-window information boundary. A content-independent cutoff separates the visible prefix from the prediction target. Prefix-only normalization, suffix replacement before derived-view construction, and aligned masking ensure that encoder inputs depend only on the visible prefix and cutoff. This yields stored-suffix invariance: with fixed model state, randomness, prefix, and cutoff, changing the stored suffix cannot change the forecast context. A shared horizon-conditioned head predicts nine rhythm and morphology descriptors for up to four extractor-valid future beats, using elementwise validity masks; optional ECG-derived pulse-arrival-time supervision is restricted to training. On MIMIC and VitalDB groups held out from PulseBound backbone pretraining, PulseBound reduces nine-state transformed-space MAE relative to last-visible-beat persistence by 28.06% and 22.22%, respectively, with gains in MAE, MAE-Skill, and Spearman correlation across all 40 source-cutoff-horizon cells. In a separate comparison of seven models on 13 downstream tasks, PulseBound achieves the best mean on nine frozen linear-probe and seven full-fine-tuning tasks. Stored-suffix interventions cause zero recorded changes in forecast contexts or predictions, with zero suffix-input gradients at audited precision under the stored-window interface. These findings separate three testable aspects of predictive physiological representation learning: information access, supervised future structure, and transfer. --- ### Ghost tasking for parametrized Gaussian Processes solving linear differential equations Authors: Johanna Moser, Christopher Albert, Sascha Ranftl Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: physics.comp-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12009v1 Physics-informed machine learning has gained significant attention in recent years. In regimes of limited data, parametrized Gaussian processes have become popular. Existing approaches, however, often face limitations, such as requiring parametrizable (also called controllable) systems or a large number of output tasks. In this work, we introduce a systematic procedure we call "ghost tasking", using auxiliary tasks to circumvent these limitations. We prove that such ghost tasks can render any non-parametrizable system effectively parametrizable, enabling algorithmic construction of parametrized Gaussian Processes while keeping the number of required tasks (i.e. output dimensions) and latent functions low. We find that ghost tasking performs especially well in an inverse problem setting, even with very few available data. We show the usage and power of ghost tasking in three experiments, providing systematic comparisons to the only other currently available method applicable to all experiments. We provide necessary syntax and explications for two computer algebra programs that compute parametrizations for systems with polynomial or rational coefficients. Our theoretical results extend to systems with meromorphic functions. --- ### Complexity of Grounded Semantics and Preferred Semantics in Finitary Argumentation Frameworks Authors: Jinfan Xu, Jieting Luo Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12008v1 Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) introduced by Dung provide a formal foundation for non-monotonic reasoning in artificial intelligence. While decision problems for general infinite AFs typically reside at high levels of the analytical hierarchy ($Σ_1^1$ or $Π_1^1$), restricting the framework to be computably finitary reduces some of the complexity to the arithmetical hierarchy. In this paper, we present a complexity mapping of grounded and preferred semantics in computably finitary AFs across standard decision problems: credulous acceptance ($\Cred$), skeptical acceptance ($\Skep$), extension existence ($\Ex$), uniqueness ($\Uni$), and non-empty existence ($\NE$). For grounded semantics, credulous and skeptical acceptance are already known to be $Σ_1^0$-complete. We show that non-empty existence is also $Σ_1^0$-complete, whereas existence and uniqueness are trivial. These classifications are understood within the domain of valid computably finitary representations. For preferred semantics, using a computably finitely branching computation tree, $\Cred_{\pref}$ is shown to be in $Π_1^0$-c and $\NE_{\pref}$ is $Σ_2^0$-c. However, it is insufficient to reduce universal quantification and global uniqueness, leaving $\Skep_{\pref}$ in $Π_1^1$ and $\UniPref$ in $Σ_2^1$-c. Our results show the precise boundary where finitarity succeeds to bring reasoning down to the arithmetical hierarchy and where second-order quantification forces problems back into the analytical hierarchy. --- ### REACT: Rolling Denoising and Dual Decoupling for Reactive Robot Control with VLA Models Authors: Houlong Xiong, Zhenqi Qiu, Zechen Wang, Suohang Zhang, Yiyu Ren, Wanting Xu, Hongfei Niu, Chengyang He, Ge Sun, Ran Cheng, Qian Zhu Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12007v1 Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models generate action chunks for temporally coherent robot motion, but chunked control creates a fundamental closed-loop trade-off: long chunks provide smooth execution, whereas frequent replanning improves reactivity at the cost of action discontinuities. We introduce REACT, a rolling-denoising framework that makes flow-based VLAs more reactive while preserving long-horizon context. Instead of regenerating entire action chunks from scratch, REACT maintains a persistent action buffer with staggered flow timesteps. At each control step, the full horizon is denoised using the latest observation, the cleanest action block is executed, partially refined future blocks are shifted forward, and fresh noise is appended to the tail. As a result, each executed action block is refined across multiple recent observations before deployment. To support real-time control, we further introduce dual decoupling, which separates sensing, VLM encoding, DiT denoising, and action execution, enabling high-frequency observation updates and action streaming under practical compute constraints. Across the RoboTwin 2.0 simulation benchmark and real-world tasks spanning bimanual manipulation and dynamic control on multiple robot platforms, REACT improves task success and reduces reaction latency while producing smoother trajectories than frequent-replanning and asynchronous baselines. --- ### Test-Time Compute for Tabular Foundation Models: Mechanisms, Gains, and Limits Authors: Kanghui Ning, Marin Biloš, James T. Wilson, Yilang Zhang, Kashif Rasul, Dongjin Song, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12005v1 Which forms of test-time compute improve the predictions of strong pretrained tabular foundation models (TFMs)? We systematically study this along three axes: adaptation, aggregation, and context construction. Our evaluation spans modern TFMs across the TabArena benchmark, supplemented by experiments on wide and large-scale tables from OpenML. For adaptation, we introduce DiagScale, a diagonal query-key similarity update. It trains only 0.003-0.03% of model parameters and achieves gains comparable to full fine-tuning across three independently pretrained backbones. For aggregation, both pool composition and selection strategy matter. TabPFN-3 already averages predictions from different preprocessing variants of the same data, and adding more such predictions yields diminishing returns. With a broader pool of 96 configurations, greedy selection reduces error by 2.4% relative to the default predictor, but uniform averaging increases error. For context construction, attention-guided retrieval improves TabPFN-3's predictions on some large tables and supports source pools beyond the full context memory limit. The context expansion methods we test yield no consistent improvement. Taken together, our results suggest that adaptation and selective aggregation yield consistent benchmark-level gains. The benefits of context construction depend more on the task and data regime. Adaptation and aggregation over the same backbone yield further gains when combined, but require substantially more computation than default inference. These trade-offs motivate choosing strategies according to the available computation budget. Code is available at https://github.com/kanghui-learning/test-time-compute-for-tabular-foundation-models. --- ### The Polytopal Neural Network Authors: A. Emilie J. Wedenborg, Anders V. Nørskov, Teresa Dorszewski, Kristoffer Wickstrøm, Morten Mørup Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12004v1 Understanding how deep neural networks process information remains a central challenge. Existing interpretability methods often compromise structural fidelity, rely on prespecified corpora, or explain models post-hoc. We propose Polytopal Neural Networks (PNNs), a framework that extracts distinct layer-wise aspects by enforcing a polytope-based structure that is used directly in subsequent information processing. We scale our approach using learned corpus representations and an amortized simplex inference procedure and highlight how the framework also gives a direct route to vector quantized (VQ) training. In PNNs, observations are explicitly described by their alignment with layer-specific aspects. Empirical results show that imposing polytopal constraints on neural network representations preserves meaningful structures in the latent space with minimal degradation in performance, favorable compressed representations when compared to VQ representations in unsupervised learning, while also providing a performant new approach to VQ deep learning training. Our findings suggest that deep networks can enforce interpretable polytope-based representations, offering a principled path toward more transparent AI systems with minimal performance compromise. --- ### An Interpretable Approach to PDE Solution Discovery via Structural Experience Distillation Authors: Yunpeng Gong, Huolong Wu, Can Yang, Min Jiang Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12003v1 PDE solution discovery aims to identify explicit symbolic expressions for unknown physical fields from observations under known physical constraints. Existing methods, however, collapse data fidelity and physical consistency into a single terminal score used as the sole feedback signal, providing little information about which subexpressions are responsible for a candidate's final performance. This opaque terminal feedback severely limits the interpretability of the search process itself, offering no insight into why a candidate succeeds or fails. Consequently, reusable structures in otherwise suboptimal candidates are often discarded, whereas incidental syntax along successful search trajectories may be repeatedly reinforced. We propose SED-MCTS, a Monte Carlo tree search approach that distills structural experience from evaluated expressions and reuses it to guide subsequent symbolic solution search. Through counterfactual subtree interventions, SED-MCTS estimates local structural contributions, routes reliable evidence to the responsible construction edges, and preserves useful components in a refined structural archive. The approach naturally extends to coupled multiphysics systems. Across a diverse suite of PDE benchmarks, SED-MCTS achieves strong performance under a fixed evaluation budget and improves search efficiency and robustness under noisy or scarce observations. --- ### Agentic-TTT: Training test-time policy for test-time training Authors: Jiahao Lu, Mohan Kankanhalli Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12002v1 Test-time training (TTT) adapts an LLM's parameters using signals derived from test inputs, and can make striking improvements in pre-specified settings such as IMO competitions or designated open problems. By turning deployment experience into parameter updates, TTT provides a direct mechanism for model-level self-improvement. Yet TTT is not universally beneficial: each TTT algorithm works in different settings, and applying an ill-suited method could waste test-time compute or even damage model performance. Therefore, such parameter-level self-improvement requires agency: the model must decide when TTT is warranted, which algorithm to invoke, and whether an existing skill can be reused. To fill this gap, we introduce Agentic-TTT, which learns a test-time policy to govern those decisions. Agentic-TTT turns TTT procedures into callable tools, treats accumulated skills as an evolving deployment environment, and trains its policy using the observed utility gains from its decisions. On our benchmark, Agentic-TTT nearly doubles the utility over the backbone model, learns to trade off utility against compute, and generalizes to domains unseen during training. Together, these results point toward autonomous self-improvement: models that can decide how to learn from their own deployment experience. --- ### Neural Network Verification for Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding Authors: Thanh Le, Hai Duong, Takeshi Matsumura, ThanhVu Nguyen Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11994v1 Deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) transmits data end-to-end over wireless channels using a neural encoder-decoder, but reconstruction quality can degrade sharply under adversarial perturbations and channel disturbances; no method formally bounds this degradation for DeepJSCC. We present the first bound-propagation framework for verifying DeepJSCC's decoder, bounding worst-case reconstruction error over a given wireless channel's noise region. Current deep neural network (DNN) verifiers do not support three DeepJSCC decoder components: parametric rectified linear activations (PReLU), transposed convolutions, and Rayleigh fading. We extend state-of-the-art techniques for optimization of linear relaxation in DNN verification for PReLU, replace the transposed convolution with its restricted upsample-then-convolution form, and formulate Rayleigh fading as a structural perturbation prepended directly into the decoder, thereby reducing the dimensionality of the verification problem. We also instantiate Lipschitz-regularized global robustness training, denoted GloRo, improving global robustness and enabling tight certification of DeepJSCC models for the first time. On DeepJSCC model for image transmission, this global robustness training procedure combined with structural encoding lowers the median certified bound by up to 41% and certifies about ten times more safe cases (192 against 19) than GloRo with interval encoding at a 10-degree error in channel estimation. Over-the-air validation with an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) implementation on software-defined radio devices confirm the certificate holds on real hardware, with a worst observed error on radio link at 0.082 against a certified bound of 0.128. --- ### DataVista: Diagnosing Multimodal LLMs on Data Video Understanding Authors: Yupeng Xie, Zhenyang Wang, Jiayi Zhu, Yinghao Tang, Zhouan Shen, Yiyu Chen, Yuyu Luo Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11993v1 Data video is a media form that integrates data visualization with video narrative, widely adopted in news reporting and business analysis. Compared with general video understanding, data video understanding places greater emphasis on accurately reading data from animated charts, integrating evidence across charts and time, and understanding how narrative organization and visual design communicate information. Yet existing benchmarks target either general videos or static charts, and data video understanding has not been systematically evaluated. We present DataVista, the first benchmark for data video understanding, containing 961 real-world data videos and 6,775 evaluation questions organized under a three-level progressive capability framework (data perception, temporal reasoning, narrative understanding) with 10 fine-grained question types across five topic domains. Systematic evaluation of 19 mainstream MLLMs shows that the best-performing model, Gemini-3.1-Pro, achieves 70.0% overall accuracy, still far below human expert performance, with models performing worst on Causal Reasoning and Narrative Structure. Increasing frame counts and adding subtitles mainly benefit data perception and temporal reasoning, with limited gains in narrative understanding. Further analysis of model responses identifies typical failure modes in chart reading, evidence judgment, and instruction understanding. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DataVista. --- ### MetaOPD: Meta-Learned Token Weighting for On-Policy Distillation Authors: Zipeng Wang, Xinpeng Dong, Yuefan Wang, Pingchen Lu, Xian Wei, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu, Zhongxiang Dai, Min Zhang Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11989v1 On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated responses using token-level teacher supervision. However, uniform weighting overlooks differences in token learning value, while existing weighting methods rely on predefined mappings from prediction signals to token weights. These mappings are not learned from the effectiveness of the resulting student updates, limiting their ability to adapt to evolving learning needs. In this paper, we propose MetaOPD, a bilevel optimization framework that jointly learns the student model and a lightweight token-weighting network. The inner objective updates the student through weighted OPD, while the outer objective optimizes the weighting network using validation loss on reference solutions after a virtual student update. Differentiating through this update connects weighting decisions to their effects on post-update performance, allowing the mapping from prediction signals to token weights to evolve alongside the student. Experiments on six mathematical reasoning and three out-of-domain datasets, covering two student scales and seven baselines, demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaOPD, with Avg@8/Pass@8 gains over OPD of 1.99/5.97 percentage points for the 0.6B student and 2.25/6.41 points for the 1.7B student. --- ### FearCaut-Qwen: Affective Steering in a Vision-Language Model Shifts the Decision Criterion for Hazard Assessment Authors: Xiaoshan Zhou Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11986v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) show great potential for damage assessment after a disaster, but a recurring deficiency is that they are reluctant to declare a hazard; that is, recall is low even when overall accuracy appears adequate. This study examines that deficiency by using signal detection theory to decompose the decision behavior into perceptual capability and decision-criterion placement. We then propose a novel method for correcting the over-conservative decision policy, inspired by the finding that fear makes humans risk-averse, and ask whether an affective representation associated with fear can be causally manipulated to similarly alter a VLM's decision tendency. Using mechanistic interpretability, we localize a causally implicated affective circuit in the model and use activation steering to manipulate it while observing the effect on downstream prediction. The method is tested on a two-stage SeisMLLM pipeline built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, which flags only 27.0% of genuinely unsafe buildings on the SeisMLLM-1K test split and never issues a false Red, an SDT criterion of c = +1.354, despite adequate evidence quality (d' = 1.521). An affective direction is localized on emotion-rich natural scenes, causally validated by sparse-neuron knockout and distributed steering on held-out emotion data, and then injected into the building task. Fear-direction injection raises Red recall to 75.7% (p<0.001), and subtracting the same direction suppresses Red predictions entirely, whereas norm-matched random and matched happiness directions show no significant effect. The mechanism is a shift in criterion (c=-1.515) while discrimination is not improved (d'=-0.493). These results show that VLM decisions can be adjusted at inference time without retraining and demonstrate how mechanistic interpretability can be used to diagnose and control VLM decision behaviors in engineering applications. --- ### Example-driven Parametrisations for Bayesian Shape Optimisation Authors: Gabriel Diaz-Aylwin, Joseph Neighbor, Abiel Malkani Talwar, Rui-Yang Zhang, Henry B. Moss Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11984v1 Bayesian optimisation is the natural tool for shape design when objectives are expensive and non-differentiable, but it needs a compact yet expressive parameterisation of the search space. Hand-crafting one is a complex endeavour requiring domain expertise, and often yields implicit infeasible regions, artificial bounds, and coupled, unordered coordinates. We instead learn the parameterisation from a collection of existing designs, applying principal component analysis to the deformations between shapes. The result is a linear, interpretable search space in which the number of components explicitly trades expressivity against dimensionality. Across aerofoils, wings, and radio-frequency cavities, spanning 2D geometry to 3D aerodynamics and electromagnetics, we show improved sample efficiency and the ability to explore beyond the confines of hand-crafted baselines. --- ### Specialized Decision Models vs. General-Purpose LLMs: Benchmarking Jev Across Knowledge, Reasoning, and Multilingual Tasks Authors: Xing Li, Qingcheng Chang, Jinzhong Ning, Changfeng Xu, Shenlong Zhang, Yijia Zhang, Ling Luo, Hongfei Lin Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11978v1 Jev is a "System One" model that returns a choice among given options instead of generating text. We study how such a specialized decision model compares with general-purpose large language models (LLMs). We evaluate Jev on 13 multiple-choice benchmarks covering knowledge, reasoning, and multilingual understanding, and compare it with 19 LLMs in three tiers: frontier, representative, and small. Jev is competitive with frontier LLMs on knowledge and commonsense benchmarks and obtains the best score on MMLU-Redux and ARC-Challenge. Outside mathematics, it also outperforms most representative LLMs and all small LLMs. However, it falls behind on mathematical word problems: on MathQA, it is 17.7 points below the frontier median and scores lower than all 19 LLMs. These results indicate that a specialized decision model can match general-purpose LLMs on decisions that rely mainly on knowledge, but not on decisions that require multi-step calculation. --- ### Efficient quadratic entropy with distance sketches Authors: Steve Huntsman Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11976v2 We detail scalable methods for approximating the quadratic entropy $p^T d p$ for arbitrary distributions $p$ and common distances $d$ of negative type. We focus on the Euclidean and spherical geodesic cases, which both use random feature embeddings and projections to dramatically improve computational complexity within a simple framework. Amortization of a single large matrix multiplication and control variates further enable computation at large scale with low memory and runtime in situations where $d$ is held constant while $p$ varies. We demonstrate this with a comparison against direct pair sampling and bibliometric/scientometric examples on Open Graph Benchmark datasets, revealing papers, fields, and institutions with both particularly narrow and broad interdisciplinary reach from their citations and text features alone. --- ### CAPABLE: Capability-Aware Policy Adaptation via Behavioral Latent Encoding Authors: Mohammad Khoshnazar, Mohammad Dehghani Tezerjani, Deyuan Qu, Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Jeroen Schafer, Andrew Melnik, Qing Yang, Michael Beetz Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11971v1 Vision-language-action (VLA) policies assume the embodiment on which they were trained and can fail when a joint fault changes how commanded actions are physically executed. Existing fault-recovery methods often require task-specific retraining, fault labels, explicit diagnosis, or privileged embodiment information. We introduce CAPABLE, a unified capability-aware adaptation framework for frozen VLAs that integrates self-supervised capability inference with residual reinforcement learning. CAPABLE infers capability, how much of the commanded motion each joint actually realizes and how that motion contributes to end-effector behavior, online from command-response history and kinematics using a temporal encoder shared across joints, Jacobian grounding, cross-joint attention, and self-supervised physical prediction. The resulting representation conditions a residual policy that adds bounded corrections to the VLA arm action without fault labels or faulty-joint identifiers. Across 28 LIBERO tasks, CAPABLE raises success on an actuator excluded from fault training from 24.8% to 59.3%, outperforming a parameter-matched global-history baseline by 17.4 points while preserving healthy performance. Leave-one-actuator-out experiments across six joints show that this transfer is not specific to one actuator, and additional evaluations characterize transfer to unseen fault families and demonstrate recovery on a physical Franka Panda. https://capable-vla.github.io/ --- ### Learning Which Correspondences to Trust: Confidence-Weighted Event-Camera Localization in LiDAR Maps Authors: Panagiotis Kiousis, Kuangyi Chen, Jun Zhang, Friedrich Fraundorfer Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11967v1 Localizing an event camera against a pre-built LiDAR map can be cast as dense optical-flow estimation between a rendered depth view and an event image, followed by a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver over the induced 3D-2D correspondences. Existing pipelines rely on geometric consensus during pose estimation, but do not explicitly model the reliability or pose informativeness, i.e., how strongly a correspondence constrains the camera pose, of individual correspondences. We show that the natural way to learn it -- using the per-correspondence error to constrain the learning of confidence -- suffers from a depth-dependent bias: small pixel errors reside predominantly at large depths and do not lead to high pose informativeness. Instead, in our method (CELL), we learn a per-correspondence confidence end-to-end through the pose, using a differentiable probabilistic PnP whose log-partition term encourages weight configurations that yield a better-constrained pose distribution. The learned confidence is used in three ways: (i) it reweights the flow supervision in a decoupled training scheme that keeps pose gradients out of the flow/edge backbone; (ii) it drives a probabilistic correspondence selection at test time; and (iii) together with the network's edge-probability it weights a final edge-matching refinement. We further design a partial-completion depth representation that adds signal without hallucinating across large gaps. On M3ED and DSEC our full system improves over the LEAR baseline on the majority of the evaluated sequences: it reduces the median translation error by up to 26.9% and the median rotation error by up to 15.8%. --- ### MindFlow: Mind Supernet Powered Thinking Flows for Research Idea Innovation Authors: Mengdi Liu, Wenjue Chen, Wenyue Chen, Cheng Yang, Fanqi Kong, Zhangyang Gao, Xiaoxue Cheng, Yiheng Li, Yujian Yuan, Keliang Li, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan et al. Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11966v1 Research idea innovation is a fundamental engine of scientific progress, yet it remains difficult to generate and evaluate in a scalable and controllable way. This challenge lies in its inherently open-ended and multi-objective nature, where ideas should balance novelty, plausibility and feasibility. While recent LLM-based approaches have made progress through carefully designed prompts or agent pipelines, they are constrained by predefined, static ideation workflows. To address this limitation, we propose MindFlow, a framework that explicitly formulates ideation as a graph-structured Flow in Mind, which is composed of modular thinking operators and modeled by a probabilistic mind supernet. Given a research topic, a controller dynamically samples thinking flows to generate candidate ideas. This open-ended problem is optimized using a tournament-based relative ranking, enabling the controller to progressively favor higher-quality thinking flows. We further introduce an evaluation protocol that jointly assesses problem finding and problem solving, going beyond title- or abstractonly judgments. Across diverse topics, MindFlow shows its superiority as an explicit, controllable and optimizable research idea innovator. --- ### Can LLMs Fix It Without Code? Toward Automated Verification of No-Code Bug Fixes Authors: Utku Boran Torun, Veli Karakaya, Eray Tüzün Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11963v1 A no-code fix resolves an invalid bug report by directing the user to change a setting, update to a version where the problem is already fixed, or adjust their workflow. Manually verifying whether a proposed no-code fix resolves the reported bug takes considerable developer time. This study proposes an automated, execution-based pipeline for evaluating the capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate no-code fixes in a real browser environment. We evaluate 322 no-code fixes generated by the 12 configurations released with the benchmark of a previous study, covering bug reports categorized as Faulty Configuration, Wrong Version, or External System & Dependency. An executor agent applies each fix by following its natural-language instructions, and an issue-specific checker determines whether the reported bug persists. We repeat the pipeline with three executors: two Computer-Use Agents, OpenCUA-72B and Claude Sonnet 5, and one multimodal agentic LLM, Meta's Muse Glimmer. Only 17.6% of the candidate issues could be set up and passed both sanity gates. Across the 322 fixes, 14.6% to 49.7% resolved the bug depending on the executor, and the strongest configuration, Claude Opus 4.6 in the Vanilla pipeline, resolved up to 74.1% of its fixes under Claude Sonnet 5. Changing only the executor shifted a configuration's resolution rate by 38.8% on average, and the three executors reached the same verdict on only 46.9% of the fixes. Compared with human execution, the executors matched the human consensus for 66.1% to 88.1% of the sampled fixes. Even under the best executor, fewer than half of the LLM-generated no-code fixes resolve the reported bug, so such fixes need verification before they reach users. Execution-based verification can provide this, but the measured capability depends strongly on the executor, which evaluations must report and control. --- ### MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvement Authors: Xiaomi LLM-Core Team, :, Zongming Qiao, Ziyue Hua, Zirui Ou, Zihao Yue, Zihan Jiang, Zhuo Huang, Zhiyang Chen, Zhixian Zheng, Zhipeng Xu, Zhengrui Ma et al. Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11959v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) is the central training paradigm for advancing large foundation models towards self-improvement. This report introduces the MiMo-V2.6 series, an omni-modal family that pushes the frontier of model intelligence by scaling RL compute. Prior to RL, we conduct mid-training on a broad multimodal corpus to provide ample exploration space, and build a solid infrastructure on the pretrained hybrid-SWA architecture to support subsequent scale-up. We scale RL compute along three dimensions: (1) larger batches and higher throughput, with an asynchronous training that consumes 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at context lengths of up to 1M; (2) more diverse and complex environments, spanning code, general, visual, and cyber domains under a mixture of agent harnesses; and (3) more grader compute, via groupwise agentic grading that yields more accurate reward signals for long-horizon tasks and steers the model towards shorter, more token-efficient solutions. To keep training stable at scale, we freeze the MoE router and establish a multi-layer defense against reward hacking. We further build infrastructure for mixed-task agentic RL, including a unified trajectory representation, high-concurrency multi-framework rollout, decoupled control and data planes, and training-inference consistency. We open-source the training dynamics, RL environments, and RL framework to facilitate reproduction and further research on scaled RL and model self-improvement. --- ### Stochastic Grouping Conformal Prediction for Effective Subgroup Reliability Authors: Meihui Zhong, Wenxin Tai, Ting Zhong, Fan Zhou Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11957v2 Conformal prediction offers a distribution-free coverage guarantee, making it especially attractive for clinical applications. Standard conformal prediction, however, provides such guarantees only at the population level, and its prediction sets can exhibit coverage disparities across clinically important subgroups. A natural remedy is to calibrate within predefined groups. However, this can require access to sensitive subgroup attributes and is prone to a worst-group bottleneck: protecting the most difficult subgroup can inflate prediction sets for all, increasing cognitive burden on decision makers. To this end, we propose Stochastic Grouping Conformal Prediction (SGCP), a conformal framework for subgroup-reliable uncertainty quantification. It learns a stochastic grouping map that allows each sample to draw calibration information from others with similar calibration behavior, yielding a local score law that boosts reliability across subpopulations. We prove that SGCP retains the standard coverage guarantee. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that it consistently reduces subgroup coverage gaps while achieving smaller or comparable prediction set sizes relative to existing baselines. --- ### Reliability-Aware Future Conditioning for Temporally Robust Robot Manipulation Authors: Mohammad Khoshnazar, Mohammad Dehghani Tezerjani, Zhiyuan Gao, Deyuan Qu, Max Gandyra, Yanxiang Zhan, Mehreen Naeem, Andrew Melnik, Jeroen Schafer, Qing Yang, Michael Beetz Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11956v1 A generated video of a task the robot is about to perform is useful guidance only if it depicts the phase the robot is actually in. We show that temporal misalignment can turn a task-consistent generated future into actively harmful guidance. On CALVIN, a five-frame early shift nearly erases the benefit of generated futures, reducing success from 81.3% to 54.8% against 54.0% without futures; imposed timing shifts reduce it even further to 34.2%, 19.8 points below the future-free policy. We introduce Reliability-Aware Future Conditioning (RAFC), which treats this as a control problem rather than a generation problem. At every step, RAFC estimates how far to trust the received clip and which nearby temporal hypothesis to prefer, falling back toward a static branch when neither fits, and it learns both from task reward alone without shift labels or alignment supervision. RAFC sits on top of Future-Experience Conditioning (FEC), which builds the clip once from task grounding, a robot-free digital-twin rollout, and mask-free video diffusion. Under deliberately off-grid phase shifts and rate mismatch, RAFC substantially improves success under temporal mismatch. Candidate ensembling accounts for most of the recovery near alignment, while learned reliability adds a further 7.0 percentage points over uniform averaging of the identical candidate bank under off-grid shifts. The gain holds on the evaluated task sets and survives on a Franka under natural timing mismatch nobody imposed, where aggregate success rises from 26.7% to 56.7%. All resources will be made publicly available. https://future-condition.github.io/. --- ### Look Where You Can: Active View Selection for CAD Reconstruction under Occlusion Authors: Kartik Bali, Mahish Guru, Yiderigun Borjigin, Alexandra Starostina, Christian J. Cyron, Roland Aydin Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11954v1 CAD reconstruction methods assume a luxury reality rarely grants: unrestricted visual access to the object, photographed from any desired angle. Real objects, however, are scene-embedded, bolted against walls, wedged into corners, resting on floors, where the scene renders much of the view sphere unreachable and the remaining views unequally informative. We introduce \textbf{SightCAD}, a framework for parametric CAD reconstruction that treats view feasibility as a first-class constraint. In this work we consider objects from standard CAD benchmarks embedded in realistic indoor scenes with physically derived visibility constraints over a discrete view sphere. A learned view selector must choose $K$ feasible views for a vision--language model (VLM) that generates executable CadQuery code, scored by geometric fidelity of the executed solid. Because reward arrives only after discrete view selection, autoregressive generation, and CAD-kernel execution, we propose a joint training paradigm in which the view selector and the CAD-generation VLM are trained together against this reward. The learned selection policy departs sharply from random, uniform, and coverage-greedy alternatives, outperforming surface-area maximization (SA-max) by up to $6.4$ Intersection-over-Union (IoU) points across budgets $K\in\{1,\dots,5\}$. The full system surpasses strong external baselines on scene-embedded, occluded multi-view renders of DeepCAD and Fusion360 objects ($+21$ and $+17$ effective-mIoU points over the best baseline, respectively), as well as on test-time domain-canonicalized real images from the industrial T-LESS benchmark and on both synthetic and real images from the MP6D industrial metal-parts benchmark, while producing the highest rate of executable programs of any method compared (invalid-code rate ${\leq}1.5\%$). --- ### Interval-valued SHAP in Tree-Based Models Authors: Chenrui Zhu, Vu-Linh Nguyen, Marie-Hélène Masson, Sébastien Destercke Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11953v1 Shapley values are among the most popular feature-attribution explanations. Efficient approaches for computing/estimating Shapley values for tree-based models, which are state-of-the-art for tabular data sets, have been developed. However, it is known that Shapley values can be (highly) unrobust due to small and realistic changes. In this paper, we propose an imprecise Dirichlet model (IDM) based method to analyze the robustness of Shapley values in decision trees and random forests. Technically, it is done by quantifying and analyzing the interval-valued Shapley values when a few unannotated instances are randomly introduced to the leaves of the trees. The interval-valued Shapley values can be defined following common principles in handling incomplete data: the pessimistic and averaging principles. We derive various theoretical results that lead to efficient computation of the interval-valued Shapley values. We also show that the proposed method can be straightforwardly generalized to the case of Banzhaf values. We then present various case studies and experiments to illustrate the behaviour of the proposed interval-valued Shapley values and their applications in debiasing uninformative features. --- ### When History Helps and Hurts: Selective History Use across Multimodal Turns Authors: Shuoyang Sun, Kerui Gu, Hao Fang, Shaoli Huang, Bin Chen Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11948v2 Reliable multimodal interaction depends on selective use of conversational history: an earlier question may remain relevant while its previous answer is outdated, whereas a current request may depend on historical evidence despite conflicting new observations. Existing multi-turn evaluations rarely separate these history-use demands from underlying question difficulty. To address this gap, we introduce ReTurn, a benchmark of 7,000 base tasks spanning visual and audio evidence for evaluating selective history use. For task-carrying history, Reconfirm/Reground require applying a historical question to current media while varying historical agreement; for evidence-carrying history, Retrieve/Rebind require answering a current question using historical media while varying current-media competition. Each pair preserves the target question, media, and answer. Tasks support open-ended and multiple-choice evaluation, with matched single-turn counterparts serving as answerability references. Across 13 omni-modal, vision-language, and audio-language models, median model-level open-ended accuracy falls from 93.7% with direct input to 72.3% in conversation. Behavioral probes show that high question recall can coexist with weaker task application, while competing media can redirect answers away from historical targets. Supervised adaptation yields only partial gains. ReTurn provides a controlled framework for assessing whether multimodal models select and use the historical information required by each request. --- ### Score-Based Learning of Cluster DAGs from Interventions Authors: Gaetano Tedesco, Alex Markham Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11947v1 Graphical approaches to causal abstraction transform a low-level causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) over many measured variables into a smaller, high-level DAG whose nodes cluster the original variables and whose edges summarize the causal relations between clusters. Such cluster DAGs are easier to interpret, but learning them requires finding the clusters and recovering the edges between them. Madaleno et al. (2026) learn the interventional coarsening (the cluster DAG that merges variables the interventions cannot distinguish) in two constraint-based phases: first the clusters, then the edges. We introduce COARSE, the first score-based method for this task: it keeps the two-phase structure but, under linear Gaussian assumptions, swaps the constraint-based edge phase for a score-based one. We show that the interventions themselves identify a causal order over the clusters, and learning the edges reduces to a single local search per cluster under a cluster-level BIC score. We prove that the procedure runs in polynomial time and, provided the variables affected by each intervention are correctly identified, that it is consistent. On synthetic and real-world interventional data, COARSE matches state-of-the-art edge recovery given enough samples, with an edge phase up to two orders of magnitude faster, including on dense graphs with hundreds of nodes. --- ### TACROSS: An Efficient and Low-Cost Scalable Human Touch System Across Heterogeneous Tactile Sensors for Dexterous Robot Learning Authors: Bo Chen, Huanzhang Hu, Junyang Ma, Bo Yue, Fangdi Yu, Haijier Chen, Xianxin Lai, Shuyu Pan, Zhen Yang, Xiaoquan Sun, Wenze Cui, Zhongliang Jiang et al. Published: 2026-10-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11945v1 Collecting tactile demonstrations on robots is costly and slow, motivating the use of lower-cost human tactile gloves for scalable data collection. However, human capacitive/piezoresistive gloves and robotic tactile sensors differ fundamentally in transduction principle, sensor layout, spatial resolution, and dynamic response, making alignment of raw sensor channels ill-posed. To address this problem, we present TACROSS, a scalable system for learning from human touch and transferring it to robots that bridges this heterogeneity by aligning tactile streams at the level of contact events rather than raw sensor values. The hardware component of TACROSS integrates a piezoresistive glove with five layers and a cost of USD 10.86 with 285 sensing points. To align contact semantics, we design canonicalizers and residual adapters that map heterogeneous signals into a shared tactile latent with 256 dimensions via a temporal Transformer with attention across fingers. We further introduce a robot-grounded policy learning scheme in which robot demonstrations provide the sole source of ground-truth action supervision, while human demonstrations support tactile representation learning and provide confidence-weighted auxiliary supervision through valid retargeted hand targets. We evaluate our system on four contact-rich manipulation tasks. Compared to conventional teleoperation, our proposed system achieves a 3.5-fold efficiency improvement while reducing demonstration acquisition equipment cost by 95.7%. We will open-source the TACROSS hardware and software system and publicly release a tactile dataset comprising over 150 hours of recordings. Project page: https://tacross-touch-project.github.io/. ---