# Research Papers — 2026-10 · bundle page 90 of 156 > Full-text markdown of papers #4451–4500 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/90 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/89.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-10/page/91.md) ### How Narrative Wrapping Affects LLM Refusal: A Cross-Language Benchmark and Defense Authors: Zhankai Ye, Yanning Wang, Yukai Jin, Bo Mei, Fangyi Li, Wei Wang, Shangqian Gao, Xin Liu Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11005v2 Safety-aligned language models often refuse a harmful request stated directly but answer the same request inside a role-play or narrative wrapper. We measure this vulnerability across languages and registers: attack success on Qwen3-1.7B is already 89.4% in English and 93.0% in modern Chinese, and reaches 95.7% in Classical Chinese. We build GUISE, a benchmark for systematically studying this vulnerability. It includes parallel requests in English, modern Chinese, and Classical Chinese, matched harmful and benign pairs, wrapper types held out for evaluation, and a stricter criterion that counts warn-then-answer responses as attack successes. Representation analysis shows that language and register move harmful-request representations only slightly away from the model's refusal direction, whereas narrative wrappers move them much farther away. We propose AXIS, which combines preference optimisation with a rotation objective that aligns harmful-request representations with the refusal direction and a commitment objective that trains the model to refuse completely rather than produce a warn-then-answer response. Across Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B and GLM-4-9B, AXIS achieves the highest combined safety and usability score among the compared methods. --- ### Reconstruction of Multiscale Plasma Dynamics Across Operating Regimes Authors: Maryam Reza, Farbod Faraji Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: physics.plasm-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11004v1 Reconstructing spatially resolved plasma dynamics from few sensors is essential for diagnostics, reduced-order modelling and control, yet remains difficult because the sparse measurements incompletely constrain multiscale, regime-dependent degrees of freedom. The Shallow Recurrent Decoder (SHRED) partially addresses spatial sparsity by using measurement histories; however, its fully connected decoder provides no explicit mechanism for resolving spatial structure across scales or explicit parametric dependency. We introduce the Recurrent Multiscale Affine-modulated Inference Network (ReMAIN), which preserves SHRED's recurrent temporal encoding but replaces its decoder with a U-Net whose feature hierarchy is conditioned by the recurrent state through feature-wise linear modulation. The temporal representation supplies both a dense prior and scale-specific modulation throughout the U-Net. A parametric extension jointly embeds the operating condition and sensor history, enabling reconstruction to adapt as the governing dynamics change with operating regime. ReMAIN is first benchmarked against SHRED on six one-dimensional nonlinear PDEs representing diverse dynamics. Across all benchmarks, it reduces reconstruction errors on unseen trajectories and more faithfully resolves sharp transitions, localized extrema and fine-scale variations. The parameter-conditioned model is then demonstrated on a collisionless $E \times B$ plasma subject to perpendicular axial electric and radial magnetic fields, with the electric-field strength serving as the operating parameter. ReMAIN reconstructs the high-dimensional, multiscale plasma state and recovers its regime-dependent spatiotemporal dynamics at electric-field strengths withheld from training. Together, ReMAIN improves sparse-sensor full-state reconstruction and, through parameter conditioning, generalizes across plasma operating regimes. --- ### Low-rank tensor structure of precipitation and its application to satellite-reference merging Authors: Ryan Solgi, Rohan Shankar, Hugo A. Loaiciga Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, physics.ao-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11000v1 The intermittent and variable nature of precipitation makes its accurate estimation over extended domains difficult, yet its spatiotemporal structure suggests that a low-rank representation may be possible. This work represents daily precipitation over the contiguous United States (CONUS) as spatiotemporal tensors and applies CANDECOMP/PARAFAC factorization, showing that preserving the native spatial and temporal modes yields more accurate reconstruction than factorizing independent daily fields or unfolded space--time matrices. Building on this finding, this work presents TMerge, a tensor-based framework that integrates satellite precipitation with sparse reference observations through shared low-rank spatial and temporal factors. TMerge was applied to correct the IMERG Final Run product with climate prediction center reference observations over CONUS. During 2019-2022, TMerge increased correlation from 0.53 to 0.85 and reduced root-mean-square error and mean absolute error by 48.2% and 29.3%, respectively. TMerge consistently outperformed linear bias correction, quantile mapping, and neural networks across seasons, precipitation-intensity regimes, and regions. Improvements were spatially coherent and largest in coastal regions where IMERG errors were greatest. These results demonstrate that low-rank tensor structure parsimoniously approximates the dominant spatiotemporal variability of precipitation and provides a practical mechanism for improving satellite estimates under limited reference observations over extended domains. --- ### F$^3$NO: Frequency-Decomposed Finite-Time Flow-map Neural Operators with Cross-Scale Conditioning Authors: Fan Wu, Cheng Jing, Kookjin Lee Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10998v1 Neural operators enable fast PDE forecasting, but repeated predictions accumulate errors and fine-scale structures remain difficult to resolve. We introduce a frequency-decomposed finite-time flow-map neural operator (F$^3$NO) that leverages updated low-frequency features to guide nonlinear refinement of high-frequency information. Within each layer, this cross-scale conditioning connects global spectral processing with local detail refinement. The model directly predicts states at specified future times and adjusts the contributions of the two branches according to the prediction interval. For longer trajectories, it combines parallel predictions within short temporal segments with recursive propagation between segments. Experiments on five PDE benchmarks demonstrate improved forecasting accuracy over autoregressive and direct-prediction baselines. Ablations show that frequency-decomposed refinement can improve accuracy with fewer parameters, while the benefits of segmentation depend on spatial resolution and dynamical regime. --- ### Invariant-Measure Reasoners: Stable Representations for Latent Reasoning Authors: Yuto Inui, Takuya Konishi, Yoshinobu Kawahara Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10996v1 Latent reasoning models repeatedly update a latent state using the same recurrent block. As the recurrent depth increases, the sequence of latent states may converge to a compact subset of the state space without necessarily converging to a fixed point. Existing models typically predict by applying a prediction head to a single latent state. However, the latent state can continue to change even after many updates, potentially making predictions unstable across recurrent depths. To address this instability, we introduce invariant-measure reasoners (ImR), a framework that uses an invariant measure as a stable representation. This measure describes the long-run distribution of latent states on the compact subset and is invariant under updates by the recurrent block. ImR predicts from the expectation of the prediction head's output under this measure. We use ImR in two ways: fine-tuning only the prediction head of existing models and training models from scratch. Both approaches reduce prediction instability and improve accuracy in many settings on maze and Sudoku tasks. In some settings, models trained with ImR exhibit non-fixed-point behavior more frequently than existing models yet achieve high accuracy even with such behavior, unlike existing models. These results suggest that ImR can leverage otherwise destabilizing dynamics for latent reasoning. --- ### Region-Aware CLS Token Augmentation for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval Authors: Ian de Holanda Cavalcanti Bezerra, Vivek Trivedy, Lucas Pascotti Valem, Longin Jan Latecki Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10991v1 Image retrieval methods often rely on a single global semantic descriptor extracted from an image, e.g., the (CLS) token in vision transformers. However, trying to squeeze all the semantic information of an image into a single descriptor can hurt downstream retrieval performance, especially for fine-grained retrieval tasks. In this work, we augment the semantic tokens in the newer visual transformers, the global (CLS) token and the four register tokens, with a carefully selected collection of spatial tokens, aiming to capture the spatial region representation that characterizes the contents captured in each of the semantic tokens. We leverage the DINOv2-reg model, which includes register tokens that emergently learn object and part-based representations. For each "cue" token ((CLS) and each register token), we find a "buddy" image patch token and extract an N x N patch region to produce a set of localized ROI tokens. Our approach automatically captures important regions of interest without any external bounding boxes or saliency modules, purely by matching semantic tokens with their spatial representation regions. Furthermore, we incorporate these tokens into a multi-vector retrieval framework inspired by ColBERT, enabling fine-grained matching via a per-token alignment mechanism while avoiding the large storage cost of keeping all patch embeddings. Through extensive experiments, we find that (1) register tokens encode useful fine-grained details that can complement the (CLS) token; (2) automatically pooled ROI tokens further improve fine-grained discrimination; and (3) multi-vector retrieval with a small set of tokens improves over a DINOv2-reg single-vector baseline while remaining tractable for large-scale search. The code is available at https://github.com/IdhcbIan/Augmenting_CLS_with_ROI_tokens. --- ### Omni-Diffusion-Distill: Few-Step Distillation of Unified Multimodal Diffusion Large Language Models Authors: Hong Huang, Chenhongyi Yang, Junzhe Sun, Animesh Sinha, Wuyang Chen, Yifan Jiang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10990v1 Unified multimodal diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a single architecture for both image generation and multimodal understanding, but their iterative decoding requires tens to hundreds of forward passes. Existing few-step distillation methods largely focus on either image generation or text generation, making it unclear how to compress a fully discrete multimodal dLLM into a single efficient student while preserving both generation and understanding. We introduce Omni-Diffusion-Distill, a unified two-stage distillation framework that retains strong generation and understanding capabilities while substantially reducing the inference cost of a unified multimodal dLLM. Omni-Diffusion-Distill aligns the distillation of both generation and understanding, for both images and text, in the discrete token space. In the first stage, the student is trained to skip decoding steps by replaying cached teacher trajectories, and in the second stage the student is refined on intermediate states along its own rollouts. We further remedy two sources of degradation in unified distillation with a pairwise collision penalty that reduces repetition under parallel text decoding, and entropy-matched guidance that prevents entropy collapse caused by fitting the sharpened teacher distribution in image generation. Omni-Diffusion-Distill achieves state-of-the-art trade-offs between decoding efficiency and generation and understanding performance for multimodal dLLMs, reducing image generation from 128 to 8 decoding steps and multimodal understanding from 512 to 64, giving 18.2x and 21.2x wall-clock speedups. Under these budgets, it scores 0.828 on GenEval and 83.0 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation, while reaching GPT judge scores of 20.0 on MM-Vet and 57.2 on COCO captioning (twice the teacher's 28.4 at the same steps) for multimodal understanding. --- ### Multi-Bandwidth Distribution Matching Distillation: On the Equivalence of Distribution Matching Distillation and Drifting Models Authors: Jialin Zhu, Xing Liu, Feixiang He, He Wang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10989v1 Researchers are exploring effective one-step generative model continuously, and, Drifting Models (Deng et al., 2026), demonstrate great potential in one-step generation recently. There are works that reveal the connection between Diffusion & Flow Style Generative Models (DFSGMs) (Ho et al., 2020; Song et al., 2020a;b; Lipman et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2022) and Drifting Models (Li & Zhu, 2026; Lai et al., 2026; Turan et al., 2026). But no one has yet established a precise correspondence between the Drifting Model and the widely used distillation method- Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD/DMD2) (Yin et al., 2024b;a) to the best of our knowledge, even though their optimization objective formulas are virtually identical. In this paper, we prove that by converting the velocity-field / noise-field from the pre-trained DFSGMs into the attraction force field in Drifting Models and estimating the repulsion force field from the generative distribution, training the Drifting Model is naturally equivalent to the Distribution Matching Distillation. With this equivalent concept, we propose an improved method based on DMD from the Drifting Model's perspective- Multi-Bandwidth Distribution Matching Distillation (MBDMD). --- ### Back in Style: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Authoring and Measuring Persona Fidelity in User Simulation Authors: Lex Konnelly, Elena Khasanova, Riqiang Wang, Matthias Lee, Harsh Saini, Parsa Kavehzadeh Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10988v1 As agentic systems gain commercial popularity, user simulators increasingly serve as measurement instrument for their evaluation. However, the fidelity of simulated users in comparison to real human users is generally low, and typically assessed by costly, subjective LLM judges. In this pilot study, we ask whether fidelity can instead be measured deterministically by treating a user persona sociolinguistically: as a social type that emerges from observable linguistic style, rather than one predicted by labels or descriptions a model must extrapolate into behaviour. We author personas as concrete stylistic rates, which lets us transfer two established, model-free instruments -- authorship-verification stylometry and lexicon-based content analysis -- as fidelity diagnostics. We A/B-test the sociolinguistic schema against a flat descriptive baseline across five task-oriented customer-service agents. Results show that the sociolinguistic schema improves both stylistic adherence and stylometric distinguishability for most of the tested models, with a caveat that persona style fidelity does not necessarily equal persona "naturalness". We argue that a sociolinguistic approach to persona design is a promising path towards more diverse and representative user personas, and that these metrics are most valuable in an error-attribution analysis, localizing where fidelity breaks down. This is a first step towards interventions that move user simulations closer to faithful renderings of diverse and variable linguistic outputs. --- ### Fluid-Gen-Zero: Grounding Pretrained Video Generators in Physics without Training Authors: Hong Huang, Yuqiu Liu, Chenyu You, Daniel Martin, Chuhang Zou, Wuyang Chen Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10984v1 We present Fluid-Gen-Zero, a training-free framework for physics-aware fluid-object interaction video generation that decouples physical reasoning from appearance synthesis. Our key insight is to delegate motion dynamics to a physics simulator while preserving the appearance modeling capacity of pretrained video generators. We bridge these two domains through a two-level agentic workflow: generation-time planning, where a vision-language model (VLM) agent interprets intent and the simulation rollout to organize generation clips, and latent-space guidance, which injects simulation signals into denoising through region-aware latent wrapping. This plug-and-play design is compatible with current video foundation models. We further introduce a benchmark for fluid-object interaction video generation. Across Tora (CogVideoX-based), VACE and WanMove (Wan-based), Fluid-Gen-Zero consistently improves simulation alignment, reducing object trajectory error by 26.7%-81.5% and fluid fEPE (fluid flow endpoint error) by 67.9%-84.0%, while largely preserving perceptual quality. In a human preference study, raters favor Fluid-Gen-Zero in 55.1%-74.4% of same-backbone comparisons across three backbones, and in 90.4%-94.2% of comparisons against simulation-based methods. Code and data will be released upon acceptance. --- ### Probabilistic Sensing, Deterministic Authority: Admitting Model-Produced Observations into Sufficiency-Checked Governance Contracts Authors: Gaston Besanson Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10978v1 When a field that an authority contract needs exists only in unstructured evidence, a model can sense it. We admit the model's output only as an observation record with a score. An admission policy, with thresholds fitted on a held-out split at a declared false-positive ceiling, maps each score to true, false or unknown. Unknown denies. A deterministic, sufficiency-checked contract decides. The probability that sensing changes the verdict is bounded by the sum, over the contract's sensed fields, of the admitted-wrong and unknown rates. This is an instantiation of union-bound reasoning, indexed by the contract. Minimising the estimated bound is a valid cost model for choosing among sufficient contracts. In a registered study on two constructed domains with two sensor families (36,000 model calls), no cell refuted the bound. Deny-to-allow changes from sensing appeared for the first time in this programme: 13 of 21,000 test verdicts, all from 3 contradictory records; each flip in a cell with a registered bound lay under it. Sensing-aware selection picked the lower-exposure contract in 4 of 4 registered tests. Both sensors' scores were informative but not calibrated. Correctness is relative to the declared loss model, candidate representation and reachable states; all domains are constructed. --- ### Optimizing Large Language Models with Chained LMOs Authors: Sungyoon Kim, Kaan Ozkara, Youngsuk Park Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10975v1 Muon has motivated a growing family of optimizers that compose multiple matrix normalizations, but these methods remain fragmented and lack a unified perspective. We introduce chained linear minimization oracles (chained LMOs), which cast these methods as compositions of LMOs. Despite their empirical success, many chains fall outside the standard LMO framework and can diverge on smooth convex objectives. To explain why composition can nevertheless help, we turn to linear associative memory and show that chaining can improve over Muon under anisotropic embeddings. Empirically, we propose TensorChain, a novel optimizer within the framework that stacks compatible weight matrices across different layers and normalizes the 3d tensor across its axes. In Qwen3 0.6B and 1.7B pretraining, TensorChain outperforms all chained baselines in average token efficiency, with average token savings of 9.6% over Muon at matched validation loss. --- ### Budgeted Multi-Source Counterfactual Annotation for Off-Policy Evaluation Authors: Biao Xiang, Ali Eshragh, Yuexing Li, Kai Wang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10974v1 Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target policy from logged data, but limited behavior-policy coverage can force high-variance reweighting or reward-model extrapolation. Counterfactual annotations can add evidence about unobserved actions, yet practical sources, including domain experts and large language models (LLMs), may be costly, biased, or noisy. We study budgeted acquisition of such annotations for contextual-bandit OPE. Given source-specific costs and error profiles, we formulate an integer allocation problem over context-action pairs and annotation sources to minimize the component of estimator variance that depends on the annotation plan. We characterize when annotations are valuable through a first-annotation threshold and local annotation-value regimes. For the coupled multi-source problem, we develop a majorization-minimization algorithm with dynamic-programming subroutines that monotonically improves the objective. Experiments in synthetic clinical and LLM-annotated education bandits show that our allocation method reduces fixed-profile mean squared error (MSE) by 20.58% and 10.77%, respectively, relative to no annotation. --- ### Transferability of Learned States in Neural PDE Solvers Authors: Shunye Wang, Haochen Wen, Shuo Li Liu, Xuanyi Wang, Lihao Liu, Zhongying Deng Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10972v1 Assessing useful reuse in neural PDE solvers is challenging: final accuracy can reflect source learning and target-time computation. Our reuse contract separates solution accuracy, learning contribution, and numerical utility through paired state comparisons, matched target information and budgets, and cost accounting. A literature audit extracts 18 version-specific protocol records from 12 papers, documenting retained states, target-time resources, and reported controls. For a fixed linear system and residual tolerance, we construct two initial guesses with identical solution-error, energy-error, and residual norms, reaching the same solution with different conjugate-gradient (CG) iteration counts. Across 240 source-training trajectories, two linear PDE families, Fourier neural operators and convolutional networks, a fixed predictor's benefit reverses across correction algorithms. Among pairs with both relative prediction errors less than or equal to 5 percent on 64 in-distribution tasks (63 by 63 interior grids), reductions in all three norms accompany more CG iterations, at mean taskwise rates of 23.5 percent and 23.9 percent in two libraries. Work-based selection saves 2.50-3.33 CG iterations on held-out in-distribution tasks; matched adaptation demonstrates finite-budget pretraining value. Independent batches confirm a 0.73 percent complete online saving for one physics-trained Fourier neural operator against zero-initialized Poisson-preconditioned CG. Reuse requires matched state comparisons and downstream computational evidence. --- ### When Citations Mislead? A Claim-Level Benchmark for Legal Hallucination Detection Authors: M. Mikail Demir, M. Abdullah Canbaz Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10971v1 Large language models are increasingly used in legal research and drafting, but they can still produce claims that sound convincing without being supported by the cited source. We introduce PARCEL, a benchmark for checking whether a legal claim is supported by the underlying authority. Using recent New York State Court of Appeals decisions, we build a dataset of 3,396 parenthetical-style claims labeled as Supported, Refuted, or Not Found. We cast this task as a three-way natural language inference problem and evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs in a zero-shot setting. Although the strongest models reach up to 0.97 accuracy, the results also show an important weakness: models still incorrectly mark unsupported claims as supported, even when the full opinion text is provided. Across models, missing support is harder to detect than direct contradiction, and fabricated but plausible citations cause the largest drop in performance. Overall, PARCEL provides a practical benchmark for testing claim-level groundedness in legal RAG systems. --- ### ASPIRE: Saddle-Point Discovery through Set Prediction and Physical Refinement Authors: Yucheng Zhao, Quanyou Zhang, Shaoxiang Qin, Haixuan Xu, Xiongye Xiao Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10969v1 Predicting thermally activated diffusion and defect evolution with event-driven models requires identifying atomic rearrangement mechanisms and their activation barriers. Discovering the associated saddle points is a major computational bottleneck: multiple rearrangements may originate from one metastable state, while costly local searches can fail or repeatedly converge to the same saddle. To address this challenge, we introduce ASPIRE (Atomistic Saddle-Point Inference with Refinement for Events), a framework that predicts a set of saddle candidates from a single initial atomic environment and refines them through Dimer searches on the original interatomic potential. The framework's equivariant set predictor, Ev-Quiformer, integrates (i) geometry-conditioned scalar-vector event slots for generating multiple saddle-point proposals and (ii) a decoder that maps each slot to a full atomic displacement field by combining atom, slot, and anchor-relative vectors with invariant coefficients. We also contribute two datasets: (i) BCCFE4VACAV-4000, comprising 4,000 four-vacancy body-centered cubic iron configurations and 65,450 reference events grouped by initial state for set supervision and post-refinement evaluation; and (ii) BCCFE-1TO4VAC, comprising 5,372 configurations with one to four vacancies each. Theoretically, we establish conditions for proposal equivariance. Experimentally, ASPIRE achieves 77.20% reference-event coverage on this benchmark, compared with 75.73% for a conventional Dimer baseline, while requiring approximately half as many Dimer force evaluations. In a timing evaluation on 50 configurations, ASPIRE reduces wall time per configuration from 478.8 s to 176.3 s under the stated hardware settings. --- ### Spectrally Targeted Muon Authors: Vishrut Goyal, Rohan Ramkumar Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10965v1 The Muon optimizer orthogonalizes each update matrix, setting all of its singular values to one, and has proven highly effective for training large language models. It remains unclear, however, whether this success comes from amplifying small singular directions that gradient descent neglects or from suppressing large, degenerate directions that disrupt training. We introduce Spectrally Targeted Muon, which orthogonalizes only the singular values above or below a threshold $τ$, so that varying $τ$ interpolates between normalized SGD and Muon. It isolates the relevant singular subspaces with projections computed by Newton-Schulz iteration on a shifted Gram matrix, so no SVD is needed. We evaluate these variants on the CIFAR-10 and NanoGPT speedruns, tracking the effective rank of gradient, update, and weight matrices and a new metric, the alignment of updates with the tangent space of the weight matrix's isospectral manifold. We find three things. First, the small singular values of the momentum are not noise. Orthogonalizing everything except the few largest singular values of each matrix nearly matches Muon while touching only a small fraction of the momentum, whereas orthogonalizing only the top falls well short even though it holds almost all of it. On language models every momentum singular value is far below one, so targeted orthogonalization can only amplify, and Muon wins by making directions that are too small to train on at their raw scale trainable. Second, shrinking the largest singular values is what keeps the parameter spectrum flat; this is cheap, and it is not what drives the loss. Third, AdamW differs from Muon mainly in how slowly it builds structure, which explains its slower start and why warmup helps AdamW but only hurts Muon. --- ### iAm.md: Robot Skill Self-Assessment through Agentic Introspection for Unknown Open-Vocabulary Domains Authors: Vincenzo Guarino, Emanuele Musumeci, Vincenzo Suriani, Daniele Nardi Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10962v1 Agentic AI based on Large Language Model generalization capabilities offers a wide range of potential applications, including planning for embodied tasks. For example, embodied agents based on Foundation models can generate plausible plans in autonomous robotics scenarios. Due to limited context windows or hallucinatory phenomena in the next-token prediction formulation, behaviors may be generated without establishing whether the deployed robot and the observed environment actually support the requested operation, in what we call a "grounding failure". Thanks to the recent improvements in reasoning capabilities of foundation models, autonomous robot behavior generation problem can be formulated as a code generation problem. We present iAm.md, a Markdown standard and generation framework, that allows anchoring this process in complementary forms of deployment evidence. Through open-vocabulary semantic mapping, we combine local vision-language detections and object segmentation and refer them to persistent object records in this intermediate standardized representation, allowing agentic introspection. We then study this new technique on a simulated TIAGo, on navigation-and-manipulation tasks, showing how this standardized representation jointly supports skill self-assessment and executable task generalization. --- ### Cross-Provider Review as a Runtime Contract for Coding Agents: A Controlled Pilot and Fault-Injection Study Authors: Bowen Xu, Boyu Chen Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10961v1 Coding agents increasingly share a workstation while drawing on separate providers and subscription allowances. A second agent can inspect a completed answer, but the call spends another pool and may provide no substantive finding. We describe an advisory cross-provider review contract: distinct resource pools, bounded execution, restricted reviewer capabilities, complete input delivery, usable semantic output, explicit failure states and durable per-attempt evidence. In a controlled, agent-authored pilot of 20 paired development turns, eight had a material reviewer finding (95% exact interval 19.1-63.9%). A boundary-condition scan across both reviewer backends reproduced a previously discovered false success on partial input: four truncation levels passed historically and failed after repair. The scan also found and repaired cancellation during process reaping. In real CLI probes, Claude had no writing tools; Codex attempted writes in five of five read-only trials, each write tool failed, and no disposable repository changed. These tests cover specified paths and versions, not field reliability. A preregistered shadow study of metadata-only review allocation accrued 25 formal observations before an exact-runtime regression found a third defect: a reviewer exiting nonzero with a well-formed verdict was counted as complete. Exit status was not recorded per attempt, so exposure cannot be resolved retrospectively. The 25 formal and two pending records remain an audit cohort; the measurement-valid cohort restarted at zero and collection has begun. No gate result is reported. --- ### LVSPM: Long Sequence View Synthesis and Pose Estimation Model Authors: Xi Chen, Yachi Zhang, Linghao Chen, Minghua Liu, Hao Su, Zexiang Xu, Xiaoshuai Zhang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10960v1 We present LVSPM, a generalizable model that jointly estimates camera poses and synthesizes novel views from uncalibrated image collections. Trained with only RGB images and pose supervision, LVSPM avoids dense 3D ground truth and employs test-time training (TTT) layers to scale seamlessly to hundreds of input views. On RealEstate10k, Co3Dv2, and DL3DV, LVSPM surpasses VGGT in pose estimation across 16-256 views, with especially large margins at strict thresholds. For novel view synthesis under a practical protocol where more views cover larger scenes, LVSPM achieves state-of-the-art pose-free quality---surpassing even pose-dependent models in PSNR---and still maintains high quality as scene scale grows, while baselines collapse. The code is available at https://burningdust21.github.io/Projects/LVSPM . --- ### GPU-Accelerated Computation of Persistent Homology for Topological Analysis of Image Data Authors: Fan Wang, Hubert Wagner, Rezaul Chowdhury, Chao Chen Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10959v1 In recent years, persistent homology has seen rapid adoption in deep learning, yet its computation remains a major bottleneck in network training. This paper introduces TopoGPU, a GPU streaming pipeline that computes persistence diagrams of cubical complexes induced by 2D and 3D images. TopoGPU streams the input image chunk by chunk, processing each chunk with massively parallel GPU kernels on a grid of GPU blocks; the resulting boundary relations are accumulated in host memory, where the CPU performs the boundary matrix reduction. TopoGPU introduces a stratification-aware discrete Morse matching that provably preserves persistent homology under streaming, together with a parallel topological sorting algorithm and a parallel V-path parity algorithm for deriving Morse boundaries on the GPU. TopoGPU outperforms Cubical Ripser, a state-of-the-art method for persistent homology computation, on every benchmark evaluated, achieving an average end-to-end speedup of 53.24x and a maximum of 198.01x. We further integrate TopoGPU into a topology-preserving deep network, demonstrating that it substantially reduces the cost of persistent homology computation during network training. TopoGPU is open source, with pre-built binaries, Google Colab notebooks, and Docker images available at the project's GitHub page: https://github.com/seravee08/GPU-Computation-of-Persistent-Homology-for-Image-Data. --- ### TRACE: A Governance Framework for Measuring Explainability Debt in Production AI Systems Authors: Harish Kant Pathak Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10957v1 Production AI systems deployed in high-stakes domains accumulate a governance liability that existing monitoring frameworks fail to detect: the progressive inability to explain individual decisions when regulators, auditors, or affected individuals demand accountability. We introduce TRACE (Transparency, Risk, Accountability, Compliance, and Explainability), a seven-instrument governance framework for measuring, tracking, and remediating Explainability Debt in production AI systems. The foundational instrument, the Explainability Debt Score (EDS), quantifies the proportion of production decisions falling below a governance-defined explainability confidence threshold at any point in time. Complementary instruments include DART (Debt Accumulation Rate Tracker for breach forecasting), SHIV (Scenario Health and Integrity Validator for daily governance), FDE (Feature Drift Evaluator for causal attribution), HVE (Human Validation Engine), AIDE (Audit Intervention Decision Engine), and ZERO (Zero Explainability Risk Optimiser for remediation). Through a twelve-month longitudinal case study of a production fraud detection system processing 50,000 daily financial transactions, achieving 98.46% accuracy and ROC-AUC of 0.9990, we demonstrate that an EDS of 0.23 on audit day was statistically predictable six months in advance using DART trajectory analysis (beta = 0.008/week, R-squared = 0.94, 95% CI: (0.006, 0.010)), and that 78% of Explainability Debt was concentrated in the highest-regulatory-risk decision category (transactions above $10,000), a risk asymmetry completely invisible to system-level metrics. TRACE provides the first quantitative operational architecture for EU AI Act Article 13 compliance in production AI deployment, establishing a new subdiscipline of explanation governance distinct from explanation generation. --- ### Learning How to Search for Plans with Exponentially Less Space Authors: Dominik Drexler, Simon Ståhlberg, Markus Fritzsche, Blai Bonet Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10954v1 Heuristic search for a plan can store exponentially many states, even when its heuristic is almost perfect. We instead learn search control, one specification per domain, written as an indexical policy: a generalized policy with registers that hold objects and modes that sequence its rules. We add the choose rule, which loads an object into a register and marks a backtracking point, where one candidate suffices; every other rule must work for all of its outcomes and needs no search. Our main result is that structural termination, which rules out infinite executions, also bounds every execution by a polynomial in the number of objects. A depth-first procedure then finds a plan in polynomial space, however large the state space, with no list of visited states. The cost is time, exponential only in the choice depth, the number of real choices along an execution. Any class that such a policy solves therefore lies in NP, and in P at constant choice depth. We learn these policies with a language model in a counterexample-guided loop that certifies termination, verifies the training tasks, and keeps the choice depth small. With the learned policies, the procedure solves 1,709 of 1,890 test tasks of the IPC 2023 Learning Track and the Autoscale Agile suite, more than LAMA, BFWS, and Levitron, and most of them within one second and 100 MiB. --- ### SPD-MetaFormer is what you need for small-data brain decoding Authors: Zhida Wang, Wei Lyu, Guo Yu, Sui Tang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10952v1 Brain signal decoding is challenging because neural recordings are noisy and vary across individuals, while labeled data are often limited. Recent attention-based models on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold have nevertheless achieved strong performance using covariance and connectivity representations, yet the contribution of learned token weighting remains unclear. We examine two representative architectures, MAtt (based on log-Euclidean geometry) and GBWAtt (based on generalized Bures--Wasserstein geometry), and find that their learned attention weights remain close to uniform after training. We relate this behavior to bounded similarity parameterizations that, under the original softmax scaling, limit attention-weight contrast. Moreover, replacing learned weights with uniform weights, throughout training and evaluation, has little effect on mean predictive performance while preserving each model's original aggregation geometry. Motivated by these findings, we introduce SPD-MetaFormer, an attention-free architecture built on uniformly weighted Fréchet aggregation under log-Euclidean geometry. Its backbone uses a geodesic residual to update a summary token and a shared spectral feedforward map to transform all tokens, followed by a learned weighted readout. Token states remain SPD-valued until tangent-space classification. Across three EEG benchmarks, SPD-MetaFormer achieves competitive results relative to published Euclidean and manifold baselines. Separate matched reproductions test learned versus uniform weighting within MAtt and GBWAtt. These results suggest that, in the short-sequence and limited-data regimes studied, carefully designed SPD architectures can provide a simpler and effective alternative to adaptive manifold attention. --- ### RH-Detect: A Unified Benchmark for Reward Hacking Detection Authors: Junwei Quan, Evgenii Opryshko, Rohan Subramani, Igor Gilitschenski Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10947v1 Reward hacking, where a model exploits an evaluation signal without completing the intended task, threatens the reliability of deployed language model systems. Existing datasets use different labels, response formats, and metadata conventions, making detector results difficult to compare. We present RH-Detect, a benchmark that combines reward-hacking-relevant subsets from eleven public datasets, comprising 92,761 rows and six behavior categories, into a common schema. On 5,021 open-ended evaluation units, each comprising a task prompt and a free-form model continuation, including multi-turn tool-use trajectories, we evaluate six off-the-shelf language models from five families as reward hacking detectors without additional training. The best model achieves a pooled AUROC of 0.962, with accuracy above 93%. For the four strongest models, however, accuracy on the two multi-turn tool-use datasets, MALT and TRACE, is 10.7-15.9 percentage points lower than on the other sources at a common decision threshold, highlighting a key gap for deployment-time monitoring. We find that different input formats have different effects across models. Removing thinking raises Qwen3.5-4B AUROC from 0.779 to 0.849, but lowers Qwen Flash from 0.977 to 0.950. We also evaluate the benchmark as a training dataset for detectors. Holding out each source in turn, single-token SFT improves average AUROC on five of six held-out sources. A GRPO follow-up on that failure case yields a slight improvement in detection performance. Our results show that a single pooled score can conceal variation across data sources, detector inputs, and training procedures. --- ### AI4Fire: Evaluating Large Language Models on Wildfire Tasks Authors: Yue Zhao, Zuobin Xiong, Xiyang Hu, Zhangyu Wang, Xiongye Xiao, Ruolin Li Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10946v2 Large language models (LLMs) are entering wildfire management, where overstated evaluations can cost property and lives. How do they perform on wildfire tasks, with and without grounding? Bare means a model receives the task input alone. Grounded means it also receives one task-specific addition: for smoke detection, a smoke-free reference frame from the same camera. AI4Fire runs six core models bare and grounded on five wildfire tasks, zero-shot; a sweep adds 29 more. Our literature search on fire tasks found 138 works; none combines this roster, task coverage, and paired bare and grounded runs. We report three findings. (1) Grounding helped most where the addition carried the answer: a read-only SQL tool lifted every core model's database accuracy from at most 16 to at least 88 percent. (2) Simple rules were hard to beat: no core model outperformed repeating today's staffing count, and two open-weight models mostly copied the median of similar earlier fire-days, a worse forecast. (3) Public releases carry hazards: a fire-danger column separates the holdout perfectly, and 67 aerial fire frames carry smoldering or fire-free labels read from a clipped thermal maximum. We release prompts, responses, scores, code, and the survey record. --- ### GHARP: Real-time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-scale Reconstruction Prior Authors: Ali Benlalah, Sepehr Johari, Patricia Vitoria, Armin Kappeler, Artem Sevastopolsky, Alexander Jung, Gabriele Fanelli, Kevin Mader, Manuel Breitenstein, Claudia Plüss, Jan Rüegg, Simon Biland et al. Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10945v1 We present GHARP (Real-time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-scale Reconstruction Prior), a method that animates 3D human heads in real time from a few input images of a subject and a driving expression signal. We decouple the problem into an identity stage that builds a representation of the subject's geometry and appearance offline, and an animation stage that predicts expression-dependent residuals on top of it at runtime. This separation offers a favorable trade-off with respect to fidelity, quality and runtime: the identity stage can be expensive while the animation stage runs a lightweight network, optimized for mobile devices. Our method performs animation in a semantically structured latent space of a pretrained reconstruction model, where expression changes remain spatially contained, making residual prediction efficient. This reconstruction prior provides a consistent spatial layout, allowing fusion of multiple input views into a compact, fixed-size canonical Gaussian representation. While this two-stage design improves the runtime-quality trade-off, it still inherits a problem common to all expression-driven avatar methods: expression codes describe only the face and thus omit body pose and clothing position, making these regions underspecified in the input. The animation network faces an ill-posed mapping and resorts to averaging over conflicting body appearances, producing blur and temporal flicker. We address this with a body alignment network that learns to align the person's body in the target image with the input reference images, removing the ambiguity from the training signal. Our method achieves state-of-the-art quality on the Ava-256 benchmark while running up to 13x faster on an A100 GPU with 8x fewer Gaussians. --- ### StoreBench: A Live-Commerce Environment for Evaluating and Training Autonomous Operator Agents Authors: Daksh Raghuvanshi, Ved Vedere, Yifan Wang Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10942v1 Reinforcement learning environments are now a primary lever for improving large language model (LLM) capabilities in post-training, yet most agentic benchmarks remain static: the world moves only when the agent acts, the reward is a terminal verdict, and the pass bar is set arbitrarily. We introduce StoreBench, a live-commerce environment in which an agent runs a mid-size online apparel store on a production-grade commerce backend, testing long-horizon planning and economic judgment under uncertainty. Customers order around the clock, suppliers reprice and fail, and market shocks arrive with partial or no warning. The agent acts through the same 29 merchant tools a human operator would use, under a windowed operation budget that makes simulated time a function of actions taken, so model latency cannot influence simulated time. Pass thresholds are calibrated against scripted anchor policies, the reward is hardened against a catalogue of reward hacks, and every episode replays identically given a sequence of actions. We evaluate seven frontier LLMs on 11 scenarios of 30 to 45 days and a full simulated year, over three world seeds at matched reasoning effort. No model matches the scripted smart-triage policy on average: the best, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, passes 49% of task-seed cells against the heuristic's 97%. Human experts working through the same tools and budgets outscore every model (mean composite 0.708 vs. 0.700). Over a full simulated year under the Claude Code harness, most models show dramatic performance improvement. In a GRPO post-training run, Qwen3.5-27B trained on only five disjoint tasks raises its mean composite on the held-out evaluation tasks from 0.136 to 0.373. We release five example training-split tasks, ten sample trajectories, and the scoring and verification tooling; the full environment and evaluation suite are withheld to keep the benchmark uncontaminated. --- ### Higher-Order Morphology Priors for Quadruped Reinforcement Learning Under Actuator Degradation Authors: Derek You, Zafir Shamsi, Keqin Wang, Christine Allen-Blanchette Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10934v1 Actuator degradation turns quadruped locomotion into a coordination problem requiring joints to compensate for lost actuation. Prior work suggests that morphology-aware graph policies improve learning and generalization under body perturbations. We ask whether these benefits can be strengthened by explicitly modeling higher-order mechanical structure. We represent the Unitree Go1 as a cell complex with limb- and body-level rank-2 cells and apply Hodge-based message passing. Under degradation training, the node-edge-face Hodge actor achieves the highest return on unseen actuator degradations, with higher survival and lower velocity-tracking error. These results support higher-order morphology as a useful inductive bias for whole-body compensation under actuator degradation. --- ### Rethinking the Tradeoff Between Temporal Encoding and Nonlinear Computation in Spiking Language Models Authors: Hanfei Liu, Shuchang Feng, Yanxia Chen, Changzeng Fu, Shiqi Zhao Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10933v1 Spiking language models face a tradeoff between representing continuous semantic features over short temporal windows and retaining costly nonlinear attention operations. We introduce Spora, which jointly designs spike encodings and attention operators. Binary temporal weights let $T$ spikes represent compositional values with up to $T$ bits of capacity, compared with $O(\log_2 T)$ bits for spike-count readout. Unipolar Binary Spiking (UBS) uses thresholds and spike-triggered residual decay to produce non-negative integer codes; Bipolar Binary Spiking (BBS) separates sign and magnitude and learns a scale for signed activations. These representations support accumulation-and-shift dot products and integer-exponent mappings in attention. With four time steps, Spora achieves 76.6 average GLUE score and 44.1 CoLA MCC, improving over SpikeLM by 1.2 and 6.2 points, respectively. Extending BBS to six steps raises these scores to 78.2 and 47.4. Conditional-decay analysis, matched-budget activation-quantization comparisons, event-workload statistics, and fixed-point evaluation further characterize the connection between encoding fidelity and computational cost. --- ### World-Model Policy Arbiter for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Authors: Junwei Quan, Evgenii Opryshko, Nicholas Rhinehart, Igor Gilitschenski Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10932v1 Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) has produced a diverse set of goal-reaching algorithms, yet no single algorithm performs best across environments, goals, and even different phases of the same task. Rather than deploying only the best-performing policy, we ask whether a set of frozen goal-conditioned policies can be used collectively as a portfolio, deciding at every state which policy should act. Choosing a policy at each state is not straightforward. The policies' own value functions cannot be compared directly: they may use different scales, and some policies have no value function. We need to judge each policy by the states it is likely to reach, even though we can execute only one policy at a time. We also need to avoid switching so often that control becomes unstable. To address these challenges, we introduce World-Model Policy Arbiter (WMPA), a test-time framework that, given a set of frozen policies as input, rolls out each frozen policy in a learned state-space world model, evaluates the imagined futures with a shared goal-conditioned value function, and executes the highest-scoring policy for a short commitment interval before the next round of arbitration (policy selection). WMPA assumes access to a bank of frozen goal-conditioned policies and requires neither policy retraining nor privileged task-specific knowledge. Under the official OGBench evaluation protocol on 18 state-based datasets spanning maze navigation as well as cube, scene, and puzzle manipulation, WMPA improves the macro-average success rate from the 44% achieved by the best policy selected per dataset to 58%, with statistically significant gains on 12 datasets. These gains include +33 percentage points on cube-double-play and +36 percentage points on scene-play. --- ### Coefficient Calibration as Selection Pressure in Symbolic Regression Authors: Mattia Billa, Veronica Guidetti, Federica Mandreoli Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10931v1 In memetic symbolic regression, candidate structures are compared after coefficient calibration, so the calibration protocol itself contributes to evolutionary selection. Standard centralized calibration evaluates each structure at its pooled-sample optimum, ignoring how stable this calibration is under covariate shifts, and can thus favor structures whose fit relies on sample-specific coefficients. We propose Dirichlet-Sinkhorn Constant Averaging (DSCA), a calibration strategy that partitions the optimization data into equally sized subsets with different covariate distributions, calibrates each candidate independently on every partition, and evaluates it at the mean of the resulting parameters. We show that the excess loss of DSCA relative to centralized calibration vanishes at the population level for correctly specified, identifiable expressions, whereas under misspecification it persists when partition-specific calibrations do not aggregate to the pooled optimum. On synthetic benchmarks and ten real-world datasets, DSCA improves functional recovery and the accuracy-complexity trade-off over centralized Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno and Levenberg-Marquardt calibration, under selection by negative log-likelihood and by the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria. Mechanism analyses associate the DSCA excess loss with the generalization gap and show that the effect is not reproduced by repeated centralized fitting. These results indicate that controlled heterogeneous calibration provides a complementary source of selection pressure in symbolic-regression search. --- ### Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding Authors: Adam Y. J. Jones, Yu Yuan, Sergio Maffeis Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10929v1 Speculative decoding is a popular technique for increasing the speed and reducing the costs of large language model (LLM) inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in a single target-model forward pass. The resulting benefit depends on the ability of the drafter to approximate the target model's distribution. In this work, we study Speculative Rejection Attacks (SRAs), a novel class of attacks that cause draft and target models to disagree more often, resulting in fewer draft tokens being accepted per draft cycle. This leads to more target model forward passes needed per generated token, slowing down inference and increasing costs for the victim. We introduce two attacks which append an adversarial suffix to attacker-controlled content to degrade speculative decoding on a victim's prompts. Both attacks optimise the expected length of the accepted speculative prefix, estimating per-depth acceptance from the target's probability of the drafted proposals (Speedbump-P) or from the overlap between the draft and target distributions (Speedbump-D). In some cases, attacks degrade speculative decoding to the point of being slower than autoregressive decoding. The degradation reduces the output quality - regularisation restores output quality but gives up most of the degradation, trading effectiveness for stealthiness. Additionally, the suffixes remain effective under sampling, and transfer across drafters (Speedbump-P) or across target models sharing a drafter (Speedbump-D). These findings identify the draft-target interaction of speculative decoding as a realistic attack surface through which adversarial inputs can inflate inference costs. --- ### Adaptive Multi-Discriminator WGAN Framework for Resource-Constrained Internet of Vehicles Using Reinforcement Learning and Game Theory Authors: Farhoud Jafari Kaleibar, Amr M. Zaki, Marin Litoiu Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10926v1 Managing machine learning workloads as a network service introduces a resource-orchestration problem distinct from conventional model training; which nodes should be allocated to a task, how communication and computation budgets should be divided among them, and how service quality should be sustained as connectivity and node availability change with mobility. Deploying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environments is a demanding instance of this problem; resource constraints, dynamic network topologies, and competing optimization objectives mean that traditional GAN architectures cannot simultaneously achieve high accuracy, efficient resource use, low delay, and low communication overhead. This paper introduces an adaptive multi-discriminator Wasserstein GAN (MD-WGAN) framework that integrates reinforcement learning with game-theoretic coordination to address these challenges jointly. In our framework, roadside units host generators paired with Deep Q-Network (DQN) agents that select discriminator subsets and manage distributed training across mobile vehicular nodes, while a game-theoretic coordination step allocates training epochs between generators and discriminators. A unified optimization objective ties adversarial learning quality to resource efficiency, communication overhead, and latency under vehicular constraints, allowing the framework to continuously adapt its training behavior as network conditions change. Evaluation on real-world NGSIM trajectory data shows that the framework attains prediction accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art GAN baselines - the lowest RMSE (1.029) and MAE (0.894) among all evaluated methods - while markedly improving resource efficiency: average CPU utilization is reduced by roughly 28% and mean memory usage by roughly 6%, at competitive communication overhead and latency. --- ### The Missing Fourth Term for the Emulation Tensor Memory Equilibrium (TME) Model: The Residue Deconstruction Cost Authors: Harun Bayraktar, John Gunnels, Peter Caday Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10924v1 The Tensor-Memory Equilibrium (TME) model of "FP8 is All You Need (Part 1)" calculates the execution time of Ozaki Scheme II emulation of fp64 as the maximum of a tensor-core term and a High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) traffic term, plus a per-output reconstruction term. However, it omits the per-input deconstruction cost: every streamed fp64 operand must be scaled, rounded, and reduced modulo each of the $r$ moduli on SIMT pipes before any matrix multiply can issue. In this note we add this fourth term, calibrate its constant from the cuBLAS emulation path, and derive a closed-form operational-intensity threshold $\mathrm{OI}^{*} = c_q r P_{\mathrm{fp64}}/(8P_{\mathrm{int}})$ below which emulation cannot match native fp64 regardless of tensor-core throughput. On the NVIDIA B300 GPU the threshold is $\mathrm{OI}^{*}\approx 0.56$ FLOP/B. As a result, GEMV, SpMV, and low-batch GEMV, which are the memory-bound kernels the original paper claims to accelerate, are limited to 0.3-0.9x of native performance, and the 7-point stencil to 1.8x rather than the claimed 3.1x. Dense GEMM is unaffected as expected. We also show that precomputing and storing the residues moves the same cost into the bandwidth term, and we state the instruction count that an implementation would have to achieve to invalidate the bound. --- ### Language Models for Page-Level Layout Decisions in E-commerce Search Authors: Varun Joshi, Eva C. Song, ChengXiang Zhai Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10920v1 E-commerce search pages are critical touchpoints for millions of online shoppers. While traditional search engines return a ranked list of results, modern E-commerce search pages increasingly incorporate recommender system modules -- for example, secondary stacks that surface alternative product groupings at specific positions. When introduced appropriately, secondary stacks can improve user engagement; however, suboptimal placement may disrupt browsing flow and degrade the primary results. Unlike traditional search ranking, where evaluation techniques such as interleaving are well established, evaluating page-level layout changes e.g., when and where to insert a secondary stack remains challenging without costly online A/B testing. To address this, we study offline methods for evaluating whether a given layout decision -- specifically, the inclusion of a secondary stack at a particular position -- is beneficial to users. We investigate language models as scalable evaluators by comparing direct prompt-based, prompt-derived feature, and representation-based methods. Our results show that representation-based approaches consistently outperform prompt-based judging in predicting user engagement, suggesting they provide a reliable foundation for offline layout evaluation in E-commerce search. --- ### Implementation Guidelines for Data Quality Metrics Authors: Philipp Jung, Katinka Becker, Felix Biessmann, Valerie Restat, Martin Seyferth, Daniel Schwabe, Lisa Ehrlinger Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10919v1 Despite decades of data quality (DQ) research, a gap remains between DQ dimensions, such as accuracy or completeness, which the literature defines in textual form, and DQ tools, which typically implement low-level checks that are not aligned with these dimensions. ISO/IEC 25024 and ISO/IEC 5259 attempt to bridge this gap by defining DQ metrics for each dimension. However, these DQ metrics are hardly used, because the standards leave open how to implement them: for example, the metric for syntactic accuracy counts syntactically accurate values, but does not state how to decide that a value is syntactically accurate. This simply moves the problem to another level without solving it. As a result, DQ assessment currently cannot build on the standards. In this paper, we make the ISO DQ metrics executable. We classify all data-level metrics of both standards into (i) generalizable metrics that need no input beyond the data, (ii) parameterized metrics whose parameters can be learned from clean reference data or set by an expert, and (iii) non-generalizable metrics that need qualitative judgment and cannot be automated. For the metrics that can be automated, i.e., categories (i) and (ii), we propose implementation guidelines that resolve what the standards leave open. We realize the guidelines in dqmeasure, an open-source library of 20 metrics that learns these parameters from reference data instead of relying on manually defined rules. Our experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that the metric scores decrease monotonically with an increasing number of injected errors, decline together with downstream ML performance, and scale linearly with the number of rows, which enables automated DQ monitoring based on the standards. --- ### Large Language Models for Machine Translation Quality Annotation: Humans and Models Are Both Challenged Authors: Hala Almaghout, Christian Federmann, Qin Gao Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10918v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are considered to be a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to human judgment for Machine Translation (MT) evaluation. With MT evaluation spanning a large number of language pairs, domains and levels of annotation granularity, LLMs must be thoroughly evaluated across these dimensions before being reliably used as alternatives to human evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for two prominent MT quality evaluation schemes: Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA) by comparing their agreement with human annotators. We present results on a long-context test set of 70 language pairs and the publicly available WMT23 and WMT25 data, investigating both score and error span annotation agreement across a variety of language pairs and domains. Our results show that while LLM agreement with human annotators exceeds agreement between human annotators for some evaluation tasks, both vary substantially across annotation schemes, language pairs and domains and remain unreliable for most settings. Furthermore, we identify challenges facing both human and LLM annotators: humans are particularly challenged by fine-grained MQM annotations and low-resource language pairs, while LLMs struggle with minor errors, wrong language variants and error span annotation. Our results highlight the potential for improvement for both human and LLM annotation performance, possibly through human-LLM collaborative annotation pipelines that address the reliability issues identified in this work. --- ### When Listening Becomes Easier: Scrubbing Visual Cues for Shortcut-Free VLAs Authors: Jasper Gerigk, Kenzo Aspuru-Takata, Chin-Hsuan Wu, Mohammad Mohammadi, Shuhong Zheng, Igor Gilitschenski Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10912v1 Shortcut learning is a prevalent issue in robot learning. The limited diversity of robot demonstration datasets can mislead policies into exploiting spurious correlations between tasks and irrelevant features, such as viewpoint or background. Collecting sufficiently diverse robot demonstrations is costly and inefficient, motivating algorithmic alternatives. We focus on vision-language-action (VLA) models and discover that different vision-language model backbones exhibit substantially different levels of susceptibility to visual shortcut learning. We find that model behavior correlates with our proposed representation-level metric, action margin, which requires no policy rollouts. Visual shortcuts consistently enter action representations in early layers, with models differing in the extent to which later layers correct them by incorporating language information. To boost models' attention to language, we introduce task scrubbing, a new domain-adversarial training method that decreases models' likelihood of using visual shortcuts and improves VLAs' generalization. Experiments in both simulation and the real world across multiple VLAs and visual cues show that task scrubbing improves out-of-distribution robustness and often eliminates visual shortcut learning. --- ### Power Side-Channel Membership Inference Attack on Embedded Machine Learning Authors: Sahan Sanjaya, Prabhat Mishra Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10909v1 Membership inference attacks (MIAs) threaten the privacy of machine learning (ML) training data by determining whether a sample was used to train a target model. Existing MIAs rely on model outputs, ranging from prediction probabilities to predicted labels, an assumption that can be restrictive for on-device ML systems with limited or inaccessible outputs. However, suppressing model outputs does not eliminate the data-dependent computations that produce them, which may remain observable through physical side channels. We present PSCMIA, a power side-channel membership inference attack against embedded ML models that can infer membership directly from power traces without requiring prediction probabilities or even the predicted labels. We evaluate PSCMIA across multiple datasets (MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR10, CINIC10), fully connected (FC) and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, and two embedded platforms (STM32F3, XMEGA). PSCMIA achieves ROC-AUC values of up to 0.907 on FC models. For CNN models, the ROC-AUC gap between PSCMIA and probability vector-based shadow MIA ranges from 0.006 to 0.116. Across the FC and CNN evaluations, PSCMIA outperforms label-only MIA in 11 of 16 model-dataset-hardware configurations, demonstrating that physical execution can expose membership information even when conventional model outputs are unavailable through unintended power side-channel leakage. --- ### Reading the Room: Foundations, Design, and Challenges of Normative Competence in LLMs Authors: Andrea Wynn, Harsh Satija, Nathan Baek, Anqi Liu, Eric Nalisnick, Gillian K. Hadfield Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10906v2 Human communities are governed by normative systems: shared standards that produce \textit{norms} dictating acceptable behavior, enforced through community sanctioning. Aligning increasingly autonomous AI systems with these norms is a central alignment challenge, complicated by the fact that norms are vast in number, change quickly, and are often arbitrary (e.g., dress or language conventions). Thus, alignment requires \textit{normative competence}: the ability to discern from interaction alone what norms a community enforces without relying on static pretrained knowledge. We introduce a multi-agent community debate setting, where access to debate is governed by synthetic norms, to study normative competence in isolation from pretraining exposure. We show that baseline LLM agents fail to learn norms even when doing so would improve their accuracy. We then experiment with various \textit{normative modules} -- architectural components for norm inference -- finding that norm-following is highly sensitive to both the style of norm and the model powering the normative module, suggesting a lack of generalizability. Furthermore, when idiosyncratic, non-normative behaviors accompany the true norm, LLM agents exhibit an unselective attribution failure: they indiscriminately copy idiosyncratic noise alongside enforced rules, a pattern that persists even when imitating unnecessary behaviors is explicitly penalized. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to operationalize and evaluate normative competence in LLMs, demonstrating that current AI systems excel at behavioral mimicry but lack the capacity to discern socially enforced order. --- ### How Hackable Is Your Speech Quality Metric? A Corrected Protocol, a Benchmark, and What Patching Buys Authors: Ali Alavi, Donald S. Williamson Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10899v1 Speech quality predictors are increasingly used as rewards, yet no agreed measure of their hackability exists. The usual measurement has two flaws. First, the perturbation reaches the predictor through a processing chain -- here a neural codec -- that shifts the score on its own, which scoring against the raw input charges to the attack. Referencing the unperturbed round trip instead changes measured hackability by up to a factor of four (0.31 to 0.08 for one defence). Second, one trained attacker is a sample, not a measurement: five attackers differing only in random seed reach success rates from 0.00 to 0.38 against one fixed predictor, so a defence claim needs the worst case over several. Under this protocol, four published predictors differ widely: NISQA is hacked on 90% of utterances, SSL-MOS on 21%, DNSMOS on 14% and UTMOS on 6%. We then audit a closed attack-detect-patch loop. It hardens the predictor only in its own attack space, by less than the spread between attackers; a random-perturbation baseline matches it; and it costs up to 0.30 system SRCC out of domain. Enhancers post-trained against patched predictors hack them far less (PESQ -0.03 versus -0.23). Code, preregistration and run outputs are released. --- ### Gen-PINNs: Generative Adversarial Physics Informed Neural Networks for solving partial differential equations Authors: Muhammad M. Akmal, Kamy Sepehrnoori, Michael J. Pyrcz Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10897v1 Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a widely used data-free method for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using machine learning. With recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), adversarial learning has shown strong capabilities for modeling complex data-driven problems; however, the use of GANs in deterministic physics-informed PDE solutions remains limited. In this work, we first identify limitations of standard PINNs for solving PDEs, including spectral bias, loss imbalance, and optimizer stagnation. We then propose Generative Adversarial Physics-Informed Neural Networks (Gen-PINNs), a unified deterministic residual-adversarial framework designed to improve data-free solutions of PDEs with sharp or shock-front behavior. The generator learns the underlying PDE solution using dynamically weighted physics-informed loss components, while separate discriminators evaluate complementary PDE residual features against ideal zero-residual states. The framework further develops and adapts several methodological components, including a Fourier representation for resolving high-frequency spatial content, an orthonormal spectral diagnostic for quantifying frequency-dependent solution errors, and a modified gradient-based dynamic weighting system for physics, initial-condition, boundary-condition, and adversarial loss objectives. Gen-PINNs is tested against standard PINNs on nonlinear and higher-order PDEs, including the Burgers, Allen-Cahn, and Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equations. The results demonstrate substantial improvements in accuracy and convergence across sharp-front, stiff, and higher-order PDE solutions, highlighting the potential of deterministic residual-adversarial learning as an effective approach for solving challenging nonlinear PDEs. --- ### Less from More: Reinforcing Sparse Video Reasoning from Dense References Authors: Wenfang Sun, Yingjun Du, Cees G. M. Snoek Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10893v1 Video-language models commonly assume that more temporal observations lead to more reliable reasoning. We question this assumption and argue that the key challenge is not merely processing more video frames efficiently, but learning to reason reliably under limited temporal evidence. We propose SAVER, a dense-to-sparse post-training framework that uses dense video views as training-time references for sparse-frame inference. During reinforcement post-training, paired dense and sparse views are optimized with grounding rewards and a reliability-gated reference reward, encouraging sparse view predictions to preserve task-relevant temporal evidence. Notably, SAVER is trained only on 1,250 randomly sampled temporal grounding examples, without using any video question answering annotations. Across three temporal grounding benchmarks and six video question-answering benchmarks, SAVER consistently improves performance across frame budgets. In particular, SAVER can match or surpass dense-frame Qwen3.5 baselines while using substantially fewer frames. These results show that temporal grounding can serve as an effective evidence-localization proxy for learning sparse video reasoning that transfers to broader video understanding tasks. --- ### SPLIT-RL: Staged Perception-Language Reasoning Training with Claim-Level Advantages Authors: Raja Kumar, Rajat Koner, Ritwick Chaudhry, Zhuowei Li, Nishant Sankaran, Yifan Xing Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10889v1 Vision-Language (VL) reasoning requires a model to both extract relevant and accurate information from an image (visual reasoning, VR), and to infer the answer from it (language reasoning, LR). Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards typically trains both through a single chain-of-thought with a final-answer reward. This gives every CoT token the same sequence-level advantage, failing to distinguish capability specific errors. We propose SPLIT-RL, a staged post-training approach that trains VR and LR in disjoint phases. Because a group's rollouts differ along one capability at a time, the group-relative advantage isolates it, and each phase is optimized using phase-specific reward. We further introduce Claim-Level Advantage (CLA-GRPO), which decomposes VR-phase rollouts into atomic visual claims and provides a fine-grained advantage at claim level based on visual-type group formation. Although trained in two phases, trained policy is evaluated like GRPO model, with a single CoT call at inference time. Under this protocol, SPLIT-RL improves average accuracy over GRPO by 1.4-6.1 points across Qwen3-VL models from 2B to 30B-A3B and InternVL3.5-8B. Evaluating each capability using an oracle based diagnostic shows that answer-only GRPO leaves perception unchanged, whereas SPLIT-RL improves both VR and LR. --- ### Stochastic Teacher Intervention for Agentic On-Policy Distillation Authors: Junnan Liu, Linhao Luo, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Thuy-Trang Vu, Gholamreza Haffari Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10878v1 On-policy distillation (OPD) efficiently transfers capabilities from a stronger teacher to a student language model through dense token-level supervision on student-generated rollouts and has shown promise on complex tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, in multi-turn agentic tasks, student decisions shape subsequent observations, causing early errors to accumulate across turns. The resulting trajectories can drift away from the teacher's rollout distribution, making the teacher's token-level supervision less reliable or even counterproductive for OPD training. To address this issue, we introduce STI-OPD, a stochastic teacher intervention framework for multi-turn agentic OPD. During multi-turn interaction, STI-OPD uses teacher intervention guided by teacher-student policy discrepancy to replace the student's proposed action with a teacher-generated one to maximize the acquisition of reliable supervision. We further develop a stochastic intervention strategy, addressing the limitations of previous threshold-based or fixed-schedule approaches, that estimates policy discrepancy using KL divergence and maps it to an intervention probability. By sampling whether to intervene from this probability, STI-OPD adaptively balances teacher control with student exploration. To learn from the resulting mixed-policy trajectories, we introduce an Importance-Weighted Reverse KL objective that corrects the token sampling mismatch between teacher-generated responses and the student policy to preserve the original OPD objective. Across tool-integrated reasoning and long-horizon interaction, STI-OPD outperforms the strongest prior OPD baseline on every evaluated benchmark and student size. Ablations further show that both discrepancy-guided intervention and importance weighting contribute to these gains. --- ### Barron Optimal Transport I: Generative Modeling Authors: Evan Dogariu, Joan Bruna Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.LG, math.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10875v1 Motivated by recent applications in generative modeling and sampling, we introduce a framework for optimal measure transport where cost captures the notion of neural network complexity. In transport-based generative models, samples from a reference distribution (e.g. Gaussian) are mapped to samples of a target distribution along ordinary or stochastic differential equations. These are implemented as deep residual networks when discretized in time, where each hidden layer approximates the associated instantaneous velocity. Thus, given a pair of target and reference measures, a natural question is to search for the most efficient neural representation that implements this transport. Our starting point is the kinetic formulation of OT, due to Benamou and Brenier. We replace the average kinetic $L^2$ energy by the \emph{Barron} energy \cite{bach2017breaking, ma2022barron}, a natural norm which measures the complexity of representing a given vector field with a neural hidden layer, and which captures the adaptive properties of feature learning. This defines a metric on the space of probability measures, complementing existing Wasserstein and Stein geometries. In this work we examine the properties of this metric in the context of generative modeling. As a first application, we quantify the suboptimality of diffusion generative modeling in the Barron geometry by establishing super-polynomial score approximation lower bounds for data generated by neural network pushforwards of the Gaussian. We then investigate the benefit of adaptivity as a way to study alternative generative models. In a companion paper \cite{companionpaper} we leverage the Barron transport geometry for sampling applications, extending the scope of Stein variational gradient methods via feature adaptation. --- ### Sparse Attention Is Matrix Approximation, Not Choosing from a Bag of Values Authors: Fang Wan, Xufeng Liu, Fan Li, Yi Liu Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10871v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many domains, but their efficiency is limited by the quadratic cost of attention with respect to prompt length. Sparse attention reduces this cost by retaining only a small fraction of query-key interactions to approximate the full attention matrix. However, existing methods are trapped in a mathematically wrong view: they simply keep large scalar entries or high-mass regions of the attention matrix. This treats the attention matrix as a bag of values, ignoring that it is used as a structured matrix whose entries jointly determine the attention output through multiplication with value vectors. We argue that this is the core conceptual issue: sparse attention should be formulated as matrix approximation, not as blindly choosing the largest values from a bag of entries. Based on this view, we propose Matrix Approximation Sparse Attention (MASA). MASA replaces raw attention-mass ranking with a closed-form score that measures how much each sparse unit reduces matrix-product approximation error. As a theory-grounded plug-in correction, MASA can be added to existing sparse attention frameworks without changing their sparse kernels or budgets. Extensive experiments across multiple sparse attention methods, benchmarks, and LLM backbones show consistent accuracy gains, supporting both MASA and the matrix-approximation view of sparse attention. --- ### Transformed Samplers with Variance Reduction Authors: Siran Liu, Michalis Tisias, Petros Dellaportas Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10870v1 Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the standard tool for computing expectations under complex probability distributions. Control variates reduce the variance of the resulting estimates, but a good control variate requires solving the Poisson equation of the sampler, which rarely admits a closed-form solution. Exact solutions are available when the sampler's kernel has a known spectral decomposition on a simple reference density. In our work, we extend these solutions to general targets through a learned change of variables. A bijection, such as a normalizing flow, is trained so that the target becomes close to the reference in a latent space, and we show that Markov kernels and their Poisson solutions are transformed by any bijection. Running such samplers in the latent space then yields explicit control variates, and the estimator is consistent under mild tail conditions on the map and target. Importance sampling (IS) from the flow is the limiting case of the same construction and the control variates apply to it as well. Experiments on synthetic targets and real posteriors compare the procedure against state-of-the-art samplers and control variates. --- ### Conversational Voice Aesthetic Model with Reinforcement Learning from Human Listeners Authors: Xilin Jiang, Shun Zhang, Tejas Jayashankar, Yinghao Aaron Li, Osama Hanna Published: 2026-10-07 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.MM, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10868v1 We introduce Conversational Voice Aesthetic Model, a speech large language model for describing the voice aesthetics of real or synthetic speech responses in natural conversational contexts. Given a context and a response speech, CVAM describes salient moments that characterize the voice and predicts nine categorical attributes spanning gender, pitch, pacing, emotion, and delivery. The key challenge lies in perceptual fields such as emotion and delivery, which are inherently subjective and lack definitive ground truth. Therefore, we collect ~10 human annotations for each of 3k real and synthetic responses derived from the CANDOR corpus. CVAM is supervised finetuned on synthesized aesthetic descriptions and labels, then optimized with Group Relative Policy Optimization on human judgments. Experiments show that CVAM better agrees with human listeners than Gemini 3.1 Pro and open-source speech LLMs, and outperforms single-human-vs.-rest agreement. Together, we demonstrate the importance of grounding voice aesthetics in human perception and propose a principled framework for human alignment. ---