Showing 1–50 of 2,019 results for author: Lu, J

Pretraining Reusable Inference Across Views with Synthetic Task Priors

Authors: Jielong Lu, Zhihao Wu, Jiajun Yu, Zhaoliang Chen, Haishuai Wang

Abstract: Modern pretrained encoders make representations from heterogeneous views increasingly reusable, but the procedure that determines view utility and combines evidence is still relearned for each downstream task. Consequently, knowledge about view relevance, complementarity, reliability, and missingness is repeatedly discarded rather than transferred across tasks. We therefore reformulate multi-view… ▽ More Modern pretrained encoders make representations from heterogeneous views increasingly reusable, but the procedure that determines view utility and combines evidence is still relearned for each downstream task. Consequently, knowledge about view relevance, complementarity, reliability, and missingness is repeatedly discarded rather than transferred across tasks. We therefore reformulate multi-view learning as learning a reusable, task-conditioned inference procedure rather than a fixed fusion function. Based on this perspective, we propose SIMPLE, a prior-fitted multi-view in-context learner that predicts query labels by conditioning on a small labeled support set. Since existing real-world datasets cover only a limited range of view configurations and task structures, we construct a controllable synthetic task prior in embedding space. It generates diverse support-query episodes with varying class structures, shared and view-specific factors, representation geometries, cross-view dependencies, reliability levels, missingness patterns, and distribution shifts. A hierarchical inference architecture then performs reasoning within views, across views, and across support and query samples. Experiments on multi-view and multi-omics benchmarks demonstrate that the frozen variant of SIMPLE achieves competitive performance without updating the inference backbone, while lightweight adapter calibration attains leading performance on most evaluated datasets. Together, the results under frozen, one-shot, and missing-view settings support the central hypothesis that multi-view reasoning itself can be pretrained and reused, while lightweight adapter calibration provides task-specific alignment when needed. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Depth Anything V4: Dynamic 4D Scene Reconstruction via Riemannian Flow Matching on 4D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Jiaming Fan, Jian Lu, Jinling Jia, Chenbin Zhang

Abstract: We present Depth Anything V4 (DAV4), a framework for dynamic 4D scene reconstruction from monocular video. Our key contribution is the application of Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM) to 4D Gaussian Splatting parameters, defining probability paths directly on non-Euclidean manifolds (scale, rotation, opacity), ensuring all intermediate states are valid. Through controlled experiments, we isolate RFM'… ▽ More We present Depth Anything V4 (DAV4), a framework for dynamic 4D scene reconstruction from monocular video. Our key contribution is the application of Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM) to 4D Gaussian Splatting parameters, defining probability paths directly on non-Euclidean manifolds (scale, rotation, opacity), ensuring all intermediate states are valid. Through controlled experiments, we isolate RFM's contribution from test-time optimization (TTO) and pre-training. A deterministic MLP baseline with the same data, architecture, and TTO achieves F-score 0.762; RFM achieves 0.806 - the +0.044 gain is RFM's isolated contribution. We provide corrected computational cost analysis: pre-training is 360 GPU-hours, amortizing for large-scale deployment (over 10,000 scenes). Uncertainty is quantified via Negative Gaussian Log-Likelihood and Expected Calibration Error. DAV4 outperforms prior Depth Anything models and per-scene 4D-GS on dynamic reconstruction and novel-view synthesis, while using no human-annotated depth labels as training losses. △ Less

Submitted 18 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5: A Behavior World Model for Robust Whole-Body Control with Environment Interaction

Authors: Ziyang Cheng, Tianshu Tang, Jinxin Lan, Xinze Chen, Yuhan Gong, Zhichao Liu, Changzhong Wu, Yahao Mao, Zongyan Deng, Mingxuan Ma, Huasen Xi, Yilong Liu, Yutong Wu, Xiaofeng Wang, Yang Wang, Yun Ye, Guan Huang, Xiaojie Jin, Zheng Zhu, Jiwen Lu

Abstract: Whole-body motion tracking policies turn a humanoid into a robust control interface: the teleoperator---or an upstream model---only supplies a coarse movement intent, while the low-level policy keeps the robot balanced and physically feasible. Existing trackers deliver this interface only on flat ground: trained in empty scenes, they never learn how contact with terrain and objects reshapes their… ▽ More Whole-body motion tracking policies turn a humanoid into a robust control interface: the teleoperator---or an upstream model---only supplies a coarse movement intent, while the low-level policy keeps the robot balanced and physically feasible. Existing trackers deliver this interface only on flat ground: trained in empty scenes, they never learn how contact with terrain and objects reshapes their dynamics, and they attempt to teach the policy to balance under any command by continually enlarging the reference-motion corpus, which stops working once feasible behaviors become environment-dependent. We present GigaBrain-WBC-0.5, the first Behavior World Model (BWM) for humanoid whole-body control. Rather than a purely reactive tracker, we train a causal Transformer to jointly predict its next action, next state, and the distribution over its next latent behavior command, so the network that acts also models how the environment shapes what it can do next. An automatic terrain-annotation pipeline recovers full 3D contact geometry from retargeted motion, enabling terrain annotation at the scale of existing motion datasets. The predicted distribution is reused at deployment to detect implausible commands online and retract them onto learned behaviors, so the robot attempts tasks in a "best-effort" manner. The result is a unified policy that takes real-time command, interacts with environment, and stays robust to implausible commands, falls, and disturbances. GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 achieves the highest success rate across all four regimes among three large-scale tracker baselines: 81.3% on terrain interaction (4.3x the strongest baseline), 83.1% under implausible commands, and 99.3% fall recovery (16.8x the strongest baseline). Hardware trials show robust interaction under missing supports and disturbances; the Unitree G1 checkpoint transfers to the Maker L01 robot with simple fine-tuning. △ Less

Submitted 18 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Technical report. Project page: https://shepherd1226.github.io/gigabrain-wbc-0.5/

HiFi-BRep: High-Fidelity Latent Representation for Robust B-Rep Generation

Authors: Junhao Hou, Chenqi Luo, Pufan Wang, Jiaying Lu, Yusheng Liu, Feiwei Qin, Meie Fang, Kun Zhou

Abstract: Boundary representation (B-Rep) generation is a fundamental task in computer-aided design, yet the direct synthesis of high-fidelity and structurally valid B-Reps remains a major challenge. Existing deep generative methods suffer from two forms of brittleness: representation brittleness, caused by padding noise and feature contamination in the latent space, and generation brittleness, stemming fro… ▽ More Boundary representation (B-Rep) generation is a fundamental task in computer-aided design, yet the direct synthesis of high-fidelity and structurally valid B-Reps remains a major challenge. Existing deep generative methods suffer from two forms of brittleness: representation brittleness, caused by padding noise and feature contamination in the latent space, and generation brittleness, stemming from sequential error propagation and a train-inference mismatch due to non-differentiable validity enforcement. We propose HiFi-BRep, a novel framework that addresses these limitations through two synergistic contributions. First, a topology-aware encoder constructs a high-fidelity latent representation by eliminating padding via learnable queries and preventing feature contamination with topology-guided attention. Second, a single-stage decoder jointly predicts geometry and topology in parallel, embedding core manifold constraints as a differentiable learning objective. This design ensures mutual guidance between geometry and topology while avoiding cascaded errors. Extensive experiments show that HiFi-BRep significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both structural validity and geometric fidelity, providing a robust solution for high-quality B-Rep synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/1nnoh/HiFi-BRep. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; v1 submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted to CVPR 2026

RagGAD: Rationale-Aware Conditional Gaussian Mixture Normalizing Flow for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Authors: Junxin Lu, Jing Zhao, Shiliang Sun

Abstract: Graph anomaly detection aims to identify nodes that deviate from normal behavioral patterns within graphs. However, existing methods largely rely on the homophily assumption, which makes it difficult to distinguish spurious affinities and to capture the diverse behaviors of normal nodes,limiting their robustness in complex real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose RagGAD, an unsupe… ▽ More Graph anomaly detection aims to identify nodes that deviate from normal behavioral patterns within graphs. However, existing methods largely rely on the homophily assumption, which makes it difficult to distinguish spurious affinities and to capture the diverse behaviors of normal nodes,limiting their robustness in complex real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose RagGAD, an unsupervised graph anomaly detection framework based on rationale-aware conditional Gaussian mixture normalizing flow. RagGAD introduces an adaptive rationale disentangler to disentangle stable rationales from spurious correlations within node interrelationships, and further decomposes stable rationales into robust and fragile components. The learned rationales capture underlying interaction patterns that characterize normal behaviors under varying conditions, while anomalies emerge as deviations associated with unstable or spurious correlations. To model the intricate distributions of normal and abnormal nodes, RagGAD integrates rationale-non-rationale Gaussian mixture modeling with a robust-fragile rationale mixture learning strategy. By mitigating spurious homophilic correlations and embracing the heterogeneity of normal patterns, RagGAD identifies anomalies as low-density regions within a structure-aware distribution space. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RagGAD outperforms state-of-the-art methods. △ Less

Submitted 16 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

ES3D: Embedding Semantics into 3D Space for Component-Aware Editing

Authors: Xuancheng Jin, Rengan Xie, Jiayuan Lu, Wenting Zheng, Rui Wang, Yuchi Huo, Lincheng Li, Yingfeng Chen

Abstract: Existing 3D editing methods have made notable progress in controllability, yet they remain limited in several important ways. Most approaches rely on text-driven editing, which struggles to express fine-grained visual changes intended by the user. Moreover, many methods require manually supplied 3D masks or introduce unintended changes to regions that should remain untouched. These limitations lar… ▽ More Existing 3D editing methods have made notable progress in controllability, yet they remain limited in several important ways. Most approaches rely on text-driven editing, which struggles to express fine-grained visual changes intended by the user. Moreover, many methods require manually supplied 3D masks or introduce unintended changes to regions that should remain untouched. These limitations largely arise from the absence of fine-grained semantic understanding, making it difficult for existing models to retrieve or modify specific 3D components. We introduce ES3D, a framework that embeds semantics directly into 3D space, enabling component-aware retrieval and editing of a 3D asset conditioned on multiple local reference images and optional text queries. We first construct a 3D semantic embedding by projecting multi-view semantic features into the voxelized space of the asset. We then perform 3D component retrieval by computing feature similarity between the 3D semantic embedding and the semantic embeddings of image or text queries. For editing, we employ a pretrained 3D generative model with an inpainting mechanism to modify the retrieved components guided by user-provided images while preserving the rest of the asset. Overall, ES3D is a 3D editing framework that retrieves editable regions based on semantic cues and uses multiple images as conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ES3D produces geometrically consistent and semantically coherent edits, enabling robust image-based and text-assisted control for 3D editing. △ Less

Submitted 16 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Some Modifications to Our End-to-End UAV Planner

Authors: Junjie Lu, Bailing Tian

Abstract: The one-stage planner YOPO maps a single depth image and the robot state directly to a set of candidate trajectories, trained by backpropagating through differentiable trajectory costs. This yields dense, geometrically informative supervision, but inherits the pathologies of soft-constrained optimization: the safety cost competes with the smoothness and goal-reaching terms, is non-convex across ho… ▽ More The one-stage planner YOPO maps a single depth image and the robot state directly to a set of candidate trajectories, trained by backpropagating through differentiable trajectory costs. This yields dense, geometrically informative supervision, but inherits the pathologies of soft-constrained optimization: the safety cost competes with the smoothness and goal-reaching terms, is non-convex across homotopy classes, and the single-piece polynomial is limited in expressiveness. In this report, we summarize several effective modifications. We adopt a two-piece MINCO parameterization, trading time for smoothness without altering the trajectory's spatial profile. We further lift YOPO's multi-modal prediction to span distinct homotopy classes, treating each motion primitive as a homotopy anchor that confines the trajectory to a feasible basin - without explicit safe-flight-corridor construction or front-end search. For dynamic feasibility, we impose barrier penalties on velocity and acceleration together with a curvature-dependent speed limit whose gradient acts only on the velocity, producing an adaptive-speed behavior that decelerates in cluttered regions or sharp turns. We replace score regression with a ranking loss, preventing small score errors from reordering the candidate set. These yield richer trajectory representations, safer obstacle avoidance, and more direct flight paths. △ Less

Submitted 16 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for 6G AI-RAN: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors: Jie Lu, Peihao Yan, Qijun Wang, Ruxin Lin, Huacheng Zeng

Abstract: The evolution toward sixth-generation (6G) networks is transforming the radio access network (RAN) into a programmable and intelligent control platform that must continuously adapt to heterogeneous services, dynamic environments, and competing performance objectives. Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) provides the open interfaces, disaggregated architecture, and multi-timescale control loops needed… ▽ More The evolution toward sixth-generation (6G) networks is transforming the radio access network (RAN) into a programmable and intelligent control platform that must continuously adapt to heterogeneous services, dynamic environments, and competing performance objectives. Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) provides the open interfaces, disaggregated architecture, and multi-timescale control loops needed to support this transformation, while deep reinforcement learning (DRL) offers a natural framework for optimizing sequential decisions under uncertainty. However, existing surveys either address artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in O-RAN broadly or focus on isolated DRL use cases, leaving a gap in the systematic connection between DRL methodology, O-RAN architecture, and operational deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this article presents the first dedicated and comprehensive survey of DRL for Open AI-RAN. We review the foundations of model-free, model-based, offline, safe, multi-agent, federated, and transfer learning, and provide an O-RAN-aware framework for formulating RAN control problems through states, observations, actions, rewards, constraints, and temporal structure. We classify DRL applications across radio resource management, mobility management, interference control, traffic steering, energy efficiency, network slicing, integrated sensing and communication, security, and massive MIMO. We further examine multi-agent and federated coordination, foundation models and agentic AI, trustworthy DRL, sim-to-real transfer, continual adaptation, resource-efficient inference, and reinforcement learning operations. Finally, we review experimental platforms, benchmarks, standards, and industry activities, and identify research directions toward sample-efficient, safe, scalable, interoperable, and deployable DRL control for 6G Open AI-RAN. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

PriCoRec: A Privacy-Aware Cloud-Device Collaborative Framework for Ad Recommendation under Feature Constraints

Authors: Dairui Liu, Zhongyi Lu, Jitao Lu, Aghiles Salah, Mete Sertkan, Roger Zhe Li, Changhong Jin, Barry Smyth, Xingsheng Guo, Ruihai Dong

Abstract: Privacy regulations increasingly restrict cloud processing of sensitive user data (e.g., age, gender), hindering traditional cloud-only recommendation models. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a Privacy-aware Collaborative cloud-device ads Recommendation framework (PriCoRec) which personalizes recommendations while keeping sensitive features on-device. While separating recommendation into clo… ▽ More Privacy regulations increasingly restrict cloud processing of sensitive user data (e.g., age, gender), hindering traditional cloud-only recommendation models. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a Privacy-aware Collaborative cloud-device ads Recommendation framework (PriCoRec) which personalizes recommendations while keeping sensitive features on-device. While separating recommendation into cloud-based and on-device stages enables privacy-aware deployment, naive splitting suffers from degraded shortlist quality and inefficient on-device inference due to limited private features. We therefore design a collaborative framework that comprises a cloud-based pre-ranking stage using cloud-accessible features, and an on-device ranking stage that locally incorporates highly personalized features. We introduce a diversity regularizer to pre-ranking to improve candidate quality. Moreover, to control device power consumption and computational cost, we incorporate a cloud-guided training mechanism that enhances device model performance while keeping the model lightweight. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework maintains strong recommendation performance while keeping sensitive features on-device. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure. Accepted to RecSys'26

Understanding Backdoor Vulnerabilities in Vertical Federated Learning: The Gap Between Research and Practice

Authors: Ziqi Zhao, Jialin Lu, Junjie Shan, Junyuan Zhang, Shuya Yang, Ka-Ho Chow

Abstract: Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables organizations holding complementary features of shared entities to collaborate and train models. In this setting, the initiator can withhold information about the learning task, while other contributors participate without exposing their local datasets, creating an asymmetric information structure aligned with growing privacy demands. However, this asymmet… ▽ More Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables organizations holding complementary features of shared entities to collaborate and train models. In this setting, the initiator can withhold information about the learning task, while other contributors participate without exposing their local datasets, creating an asymmetric information structure aligned with growing privacy demands. However, this asymmetry is a double-edged sword. Among various threats, backdoor attacks are particularly concerning because VFL not only enables malicious contributors to poison the model during training, but also allows them to activate the backdoor at inference time to manipulate predictions. Although prior work has reported near-perfect attack success rates and proposed effective defenses, we find that most findings fail to hold under realistic conditions, exposing a fundamental gap between research and practice. In this paper, we present a systematic, practice-oriented study of backdoor vulnerabilities in VFL, revealing this gap in both methodological design and evaluation practices. We show that existing approaches overlook key practical constraints and therefore rely on unrealistic prior knowledge. Furthermore, these limitations have remained hidden due to poorly designed evaluation practices in the literature. To bridge this gap, we redefine threat models under realistic constraints, propose practical backdoor workflows, and introduce BVBench, a backdoor-centric benchmark that enables fair, practical, and comprehensive evaluation, preloaded with state-of-the-art baselines. BVBench provides strong evidence of the fragility of the current understanding of VFL backdoor risks and establishes a foundation for steering research toward uncovering practical vulnerabilities and developing more meaningful defenses. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Sustaining Plasticity via Learnable Wavelet Activations in Continual Learning

Authors: Zeyang Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Junyan Lu, Weizhan Zhang

Abstract: Plasticity loss has emerged as a critical challenge in continual learning that significantly hinders the acquisition of sequential tasks. While optimizing activation designs offers a potential solution, current fixed-form functions suffer from an inherent spectral bias towards low-frequency variations, whereas learnable variants permit unconstrained updates that induce catastrophic forgetting. To… ▽ More Plasticity loss has emerged as a critical challenge in continual learning that significantly hinders the acquisition of sequential tasks. While optimizing activation designs offers a potential solution, current fixed-form functions suffer from an inherent spectral bias towards low-frequency variations, whereas learnable variants permit unconstrained updates that induce catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learnable wavelet activation that decomposes the activation function into low-frequency and high-frequency components to explicitly counter spectral bias. Furthermore, we employ dynamic wavelet injection to adaptively enhance plasticity for new tasks, alongside a regularization strategy to ensure the stability of previous learned knowledge. Theoretically, we provide rigorous mathematical guarantees for the proposed framework, proving the structural necessity of the hybrid wavelet architecture for efficient $L^2$ approximation and demonstrating that the decoupled learning rate mechanism successfully restores network plasticity for high-frequency information. Additionally, we provide a formal derivation of the loss-driven injection trigger mechanism to precisely guide the injection. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach maintains superior trainability and generalization throughout the learning process and achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse continual learning benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

VICBench: A Multi-Language Benchmark for Code Vulnerability Detection

Authors: Jin Lu, Xuening Han, Yang Zhong, Lin Tan, Kevin Luo, Andrew Gacek, Neha Rungta

Abstract: Evaluating security vulnerability detection tools requires benchmark datasets with vulnerability-inducing commits (VICs) - the commits that first introduce vulnerabilities into codebases. VICs are essential for determining the full range of vulnerable software versions. Existing vulnerability datasets suffer from limited programming language coverage, restricted patch complexity, and narrow projec… ▽ More Evaluating security vulnerability detection tools requires benchmark datasets with vulnerability-inducing commits (VICs) - the commits that first introduce vulnerabilities into codebases. VICs are essential for determining the full range of vulnerable software versions. Existing vulnerability datasets suffer from limited programming language coverage, restricted patch complexity, and narrow project scope. Through our dual annotation by human experts and an agentic workflow, we create a benchmark - VICBench - of 100 verified VICs for 100 CVEs across 88 projects in Python, Java, and C++, covering 48 CWE types. VICBench features complex real-world vulnerability fixes averaging 38.6 lines and corresponding VICs of 252.5 lines - significantly larger than prior work. Our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art algorithms V-SZZ and LLM4SZZ achieve only 33.3%-40.1% F1, confirming that using existing approaches still entails significant manual effort. VICBench enables robust evaluation of vulnerability detection approaches. △ Less

Submitted 12 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

A Consolidated Game Framework for Cooperative Defense Against Cross-Domain Cyber Attacks in Satellite-Enabled Internet of Things

Authors: Linan Huang, Peilong Liu, Xu Chen, Chunxiao Jiang, Linling Kuang, Jianhua Lu

Abstract: As the adoption of satellite-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) continues to rise, its intricate multidomain architecture becomes increasingly susceptible to cross-domain cyber threats. Attackers can exploit compromised IoT devices, inject malicious packets into data streams aggregated at the IoT gateway for satellite backhaul, and potentially endanger the satellite network during transmission by ex… ▽ More As the adoption of satellite-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) continues to rise, its intricate multidomain architecture becomes increasingly susceptible to cross-domain cyber threats. Attackers can exploit compromised IoT devices, inject malicious packets into data streams aggregated at the IoT gateway for satellite backhaul, and potentially endanger the satellite network during transmission by exploiting the hardware, software, and protocol vulnerabilities. Compared to single-domain defenses, cooperative defense at the IoT devices, IoT access network, and satellite transmission network provides fine-granularity defense against cross-domain intelligent attacks. However, quantifying cross-domain impacts and tilting incentive misalignment among different participants remain significant challenges, making systematic cooperative defense development a complex task. To address this, we develop a tripartite security game framework to characterize the impacts of attacks and defense methods across both the terrestrial and satellite domains. Leveraging this game model, we devise flow pricing to optimally motivate the IoT network operator (IoT-NO) to prevent malicious packet infiltration into the satellite domain. Subsequently, we propose efficient learning algorithms enabling both the IoT-NO to ascertain their ideal flow sampling strategies and the satellite service provider (SAT-SP) to determine optimal flow pricing. The simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the consolidated game in counteracting cross-domain cyber attacks and facilitating cooperative defense between the IoT-NO and the SAT-SP with nonaligned incentives. △ Less

Submitted 11 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: L. Huang, P. Liu, X. Chen, C. Jiang, L. Kuang and J. Lu, "A Consolidated Game Framework for Cooperative Defense Against Cross-Domain Cyber Attacks in Satellite-Enabled Internet of Things," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 12, no. 9, pp. 12853-12868, 1 May1, 2025 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10836158

MESA:Task-Adaptive Multi-Structure Evidence Selection for Long-Horizon Agent Memory

Authors: Beidi Zhao, Yaoqi Chen, Yuru Feng, Menghao Li, Qianxi Zhang, Baotong Lu, Jianan Lu, Zhirui Wang, Xinjiang Wang, Shusen Xu, Zengzhong Li, Xiaoxiao Li, Qi Chen

Abstract: Long-horizon agents accumulate trajectories spanning hundreds of interleaved reasoning, action, and observation steps, where answering a query may depend on evidence buried far back in the history. External memory stores such trajectories as structured representations, yet each structure provides a distinct and incomplete view. Existing multi-memory systems either read a fixed set of structures fo… ▽ More Long-horizon agents accumulate trajectories spanning hundreds of interleaved reasoning, action, and observation steps, where answering a query may depend on evidence buried far back in the history. External memory stores such trajectories as structured representations, yet each structure provides a distinct and incomplete view. Existing multi-memory systems either read a fixed set of structures for every query, inflating context and introducing noise, or route each query to a single structure, preventing the composition of complementary evidence. A controlled analysis on AMA-Bench shows that the optimal memory configuration is typically neither a single structure nor the full union, but a tailored composition of multiple structural memories that varies with query and task demands. Motivated by these findings, we formulate structure-level dynamic selection: selecting and fusing a query-adaptive subset from a library of specialized memory structures. We propose MESA (a Multi-structure Evidence Selection framework for long-horizon Agent), which builds five complementary structure views of each trajectory and learns from end-to-end answer-level feedback to select and fuse a query-specific subset for a frozen answer model. To learn under this weak supervision, MESA employs harness optimization with prior-guided search and UCB-guided scheduling to balance exploration and exploitation. On AMA-Bench, MESA outperforms the strongest baseline by 8.5% while using 41% fewer evidence tokens than the all-structure alternative. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures

Tree-of-Experience: Hierarchical Experience Management for Self-Evolving Agents

Authors: Zihao Deng, Yining Zhu, Leiming Wang, Jingfei Lu, Junbo Wang, Chuncheng Ran, Yu Yang, Dixuan Yang, Jikun Shen

Abstract: Continual self-evolution requires LLM agents to transform environmental interactions into reliable and reusable experience. Existing methods typically refine individual trajectories or abstract shared knowledge from related trajectories, but their experience representations are often disconnected from the underlying reasoning process. This limits feedback attribution, cross-task transfer, and upda… ▽ More Continual self-evolution requires LLM agents to transform environmental interactions into reliable and reusable experience. Existing methods typically refine individual trajectories or abstract shared knowledge from related trajectories, but their experience representations are often disconnected from the underlying reasoning process. This limits feedback attribution, cross-task transfer, and update and retrieval efficiency, particularly in complex reasoning tasks with outcome-level feedback. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{T}ree-\textbf{o}f-\textbf{E}xperience (ToE), a structured experience-management framework that aligns experience organization with the hierarchical reasoning process of LLM agents. Specifically, ToE organizes the experience into a shared tree of analytical perspectives and reasoning paths, whose reliability is calibrated through environmental outcomes to support systematic updating, transfer, and efficient retrieval. The experimental results on \textsc{Game of 24} and \textsc{FinEvolveBench} show that ToE substantially improves both problem-solving performance and efficiency. On \textsc{Game of 24}, ToE achieves a 31.4\% relative improvement in accuracy over the experience-free ToT baseline. On \textsc{FinEvolveBench}, ToE improves tsIC by an average of 41.24\% over the experience-free pipeline across 12 evaluation settings, whereas conventional experience-management methods often underperform experience-free baselines. △ Less

Submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Generative Models: Principles, Architectures, and Applications

Authors: Jun Lu

Abstract: Generative AI has emerged as one of the most transformative forces in modern artificial intelligence, reshaping how we create, imagine, and interact with digital content. From photorealistic images to coherent text, from immersive videos to novel molecular structures, generative models now power applications that were once confined to science fiction. This book is designed to guide readers through… ▽ More Generative AI has emerged as one of the most transformative forces in modern artificial intelligence, reshaping how we create, imagine, and interact with digital content. From photorealistic images to coherent text, from immersive videos to novel molecular structures, generative models now power applications that were once confined to science fiction. This book is designed to guide readers through the foundational principles, mathematical underpinnings, and practical architectures that underpin this revolution. △ Less

Submitted 8 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

DINO-3DRA: Leveraging 2D Foundation Model Semantics for 3D Cerebral Aneurysm Segmentation

Authors: Jiayang Lu, Fengming Lin, Alejandro F. Frangi, Ali Sarrami-Foroushani

Abstract: Accurate aneurysm segmentation in 3D rotational angiography (3DRA) is hindered by extreme class imbalance, morphological similarity to vessels, and absent large-scale 3D pretraining. 2D vision foundation models encode dense structural priors from 1.7 billion images, yet naïve slice-wise transfer fragments anatomical continuity and destabilises optimisation. We propose DINO-3DRA, a dual-path framew… ▽ More Accurate aneurysm segmentation in 3D rotational angiography (3DRA) is hindered by extreme class imbalance, morphological similarity to vessels, and absent large-scale 3D pretraining. 2D vision foundation models encode dense structural priors from 1.7 billion images, yet naïve slice-wise transfer fragments anatomical continuity and destabilises optimisation. We propose DINO-3DRA, a dual-path framework achieving effective cross-dimensional semantic transfer by injecting frozen DINOv3 features into a 3D U-Net backbone via Room-Lite spatial mixing and calibrated residual fusion. On multi-centre 3DRA data, DINO-3DRA achieves state-of-the-art aneurysm segmentation (Dice: 0.758; HD95: 2.75 mm; +13% over nnU-Net) with only 5.72M trainable parameters. Ablation studies confirm that gains arise from structured cross-dimensional transfer rather than loss design alone, with bridged foundation features improving anatomical continuity between aneurysms and parent vessels. Without fine-tuning on CADA and SHINY-ICARUS, DINO-3DRA eliminates all catastrophic failure cases observed in baseline architectures, demonstrating robust generalisation across heterogeneous imaging protocols. △ Less

Submitted 7 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted by MICCAI 2026

Is Forward Prediction Enough? Physical State Grounding for JEPA World Models

Authors: Haodong Yan, Jiaguan Zhu, Mingyuan Jia, Ruiqing Yin, Junjie He, Zhide Zhong, Junfeng Li, Jinxuan Lu, Hengtao Li, Tianran Zhang, Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Wen Chen, Yuxiang Gao, Haoang Li

Abstract: Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pa… ▽ More Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels. △ Less

Submitted 7 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

SkillMemo: Expert-guided Skill Memory Framework for Compositional Embodied Manipulation

Authors: Changyuan Wang, Chubin Zhang, Zhenyu Wu, Runhao Li, Angyuan Ma, Ke Chao, Yinan Liang, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Yansong Tang, Jiwen Lu

Abstract: Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks. However, their potential remains fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of large-scale embodied trajectory datasets, leading to insufficient compositional generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios with limite… ▽ More Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks. However, their potential remains fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of large-scale embodied trajectory datasets, leading to insufficient compositional generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios with limited capability to capture reusable skill structures. To address this limitation, we propose Skill-Based Memory (SkillMemo) framework that implicitly decomposes long-horizon demonstrations into latent atomic skills and integrates skill-level features into a dynamic episodic memory bank for solving compositional tasks. Specifically, we first introduce an expert-guided trajectory segmentation module built upon a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which implicitly partitions trajectories into distinct skill primitives represented by learned gating coefficients. We further design a skill-level episodic memory architecture that stores compact skill representations as retrievable key-value pairs. During inference, the memory bank retrieves the most relevant skill primitives which are subsequently fused with the model's current gating distribution, providing a robust contextual prior to refine action predictions. Extensive experiments on the simulation benchmark and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SkillMemo consistently enhances both DP and VLA backbones, achieving state-of-the-art performance and outperforming $π_{0.5}$, while exhibiting strong compositional generalization to unseen task configurations. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

SkillHEX: Improving Agent Skills via Hypothesis-Driven Autonomous Exploration and Exploitation

Authors: Yuru Feng, Yaoqi Chen, Beidi Zhao, Qianxi Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Jianan Lu, Zhirui Wang, Shusen Xu, Zengzhong Li, Qi Chen

Abstract: Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment. Real-world deployments thus require autonomous, on-demand skill evolution at test time, constrained by limited interaction budgets and a lack of training or validation sets. This setting introduces a severe sparse reward challenge, where outcomes conflat… ▽ More Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment. Real-world deployments thus require autonomous, on-demand skill evolution at test time, constrained by limited interaction budgets and a lack of training or validation sets. This setting introduces a severe sparse reward challenge, where outcomes conflate multiple latent failure causes. Under such ambiguity, existing methods that greedily refine a single incumbent skill are particularly vulnerable to an exploitation trap, allowing early misdiagnoses to exhaust limited trials along unproductive trajectories. To address this, we introduce SkillHEX, a closed-loop framework coupling hypothesis-driven self-verification with evidence-guided tree search. SkillHEX translates falsifiable failure hypotheses into executable tests, producing diagnostic evidence as dense reward without additional environment attempts. This evidence guides a search over persistent skill-revision branches, dynamically balancing the exploitation of supported edits with the exploration of plausible alternatives. Evaluated on 87 tasks from SkillsBench, SkillHEX outperforms existing self-evolving methods and achieves an average pass rate of 55.9% and 57.9% using GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.7 under a five-iteration budget, respectively. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

GAUGE: Granularity-Adaptive Counterfactual Gating of Evidence for Incomplete Multimodal Classification

Authors: Yunping Shi, En Yu, Kairui Guo, Jie Lu

Abstract: Multimodal classification typically assumes all modalities are available, yet real-world inputs are often incomplete. Imputation and dynamic fusion can mitigate such incompleteness, but existing methods operate at a coarse modality level and thus cannot retain reliable components while suppressing misleading ones within the same recovered modality, compromising prediction reliability. To address t… ▽ More Multimodal classification typically assumes all modalities are available, yet real-world inputs are often incomplete. Imputation and dynamic fusion can mitigate such incompleteness, but existing methods operate at a coarse modality level and thus cannot retain reliable components while suppressing misleading ones within the same recovered modality, compromising prediction reliability. To address this issue, we propose GAUGE, a lightweight counterfactual gating framework for incomplete multimodal classification. GAUGE first imputes missing modalities with a frozen imputer and encodes observed and recovered inputs uniformly as fine-grained evidence units. Rather than intervening on each unit explicitly, GAUGE scores the counterfactual effect of replacing every unit with a reference representation through prediction-aware Taylor evidence scores, all obtained in a single forward-backward pass. These scores are mapped to continuous gates, which are converted into additive attention-logit biases for unit-wise evidence modulation without altering the backbone architecture. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that GAUGE outperforms strong baselines across diverse incomplete-input settings. Furthermore, a Taylor remainder theoretical analysis characterizes the error of the first-order approximation relative to the exact counterfactual effect, establishing GAUGE as a principled and scalable framework for fine-grained evidence control under modality incompleteness. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

OmniMech: All-in-one Multimodal Mechanical Benchmark for 3D Reconstruction

Authors: Taiting Lu, Runze Liu, Ziwei Dong, Sisong Bei, Jingying Zeng, Mingjia Wang, Zhenghao Li, Kaiyuan Lin, Yi-Shan Wu, Yangshoudu Zheng, Hongxing Pan, Kai Zhang, Guoliang Shi, Ling Ma, Yifan Yang, Jiaying Lu, Qi He, Sung-Liang Chen, Yi-Chao Chen, Yincheng Jin, Mahanth Gowda

Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) can generate executable CAD programs from images, but existing methods mainly target coarse, general-purpose 3D objects and rarely address the fine-grained geometry and millimeter-level tolerances required in industrial mechanical design. We introduce OmniMech, the first million-scale benchmark for evaluating VLMs on executable CAD generation from industrial ma… ▽ More Recent vision-language models (VLMs) can generate executable CAD programs from images, but existing methods mainly target coarse, general-purpose 3D objects and rarely address the fine-grained geometry and millimeter-level tolerances required in industrial mechanical design. We introduce OmniMech, the first million-scale benchmark for evaluating VLMs on executable CAD generation from industrial manufacturing data. OmniMech contains more than 251,000 fully dimensioned and toleranced 2D orthographic drawings, paired with native CAD models, multi-view renderings, mesh, STEP and B-rep representations, and rich semantic annotations. The benchmark includes four tasks: (1) parametric CAD program synthesis from engineering drawings; (2) diagram-to-3D reasoning for geometrically and structurally consistent reconstruction; (3) annotation-grounded reasoning over dimensions, symbols, feature callouts, and manufacturing constraints; and (4) tool-augmented agentic reasoning using visualization, measurement, CAD execution, and verification tools. Experiments show that current VLMs and CAD-specialized models still struggle with executable program synthesis, fine-grained 3D reconstruction, and reliable enforcement of dimensions and tolerances. We will release the benchmark data, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to support future research. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

BioMedJImpact: A Comprehensive Dataset and LLM Pipeline for AI Engagement and Scientific Impact Analysis of Biomedical Journals

Authors: Ruiyu Wang, Yuzhang Xie, Xiao Hu, Carl Yang, Jiaying Lu

Abstract: Assessing journal impact is central to scholarly communication, yet existing resources rarely capture how collaboration and artificial intelligence (AI) research jointly shape venue prestige in biomedicine. We present BioMedJImpact, a large-scale, biomedical-oriented dataset built from 1.74 million PubMed Central articles across 2,744 journals. BioMedJImpact integrates bibliometric indicators, col… ▽ More Assessing journal impact is central to scholarly communication, yet existing resources rarely capture how collaboration and artificial intelligence (AI) research jointly shape venue prestige in biomedicine. We present BioMedJImpact, a large-scale, biomedical-oriented dataset built from 1.74 million PubMed Central articles across 2,744 journals. BioMedJImpact integrates bibliometric indicators, collaboration features, and an LLM-derived AI engagement rate, defined as the proportion of AI-related articles within each journal-year. Specifically, AI engagement rate is extracted through a reproducible three-stage LLM pipeline. We analyze how collaboration intensity and AI engagement rate jointly influence scientific impact across two temporal subsets (2016-2019, 2020-2023). Two main patterns emerge: journals with larger author teams tend to have higher citation impact, while AI engagement rate is positively associated with Impact Factor only in the 2019 subset. To validate the LLM pipeline for deriving the AI engagement rate, we conduct human evaluation, confirming substantial agreement in AI relevance detection and consistent subfield classification. Together, BioMedJImpact provides both a comprehensive dataset at the interface of biomedicine and AI and a validated framework for scalable, content-aware scientometric analysis. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/JonathanWry/BioMedJImpact. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

YOLOv14: Adaptive Real-Time Object Detection for Diverse Imaging Conditions

Authors: Jian Lu, Jinling Jia, Jone Yawl, Chenbin Zhang

Abstract: Real-time object detectors achieve remarkable accuracy under controlled conditions, yet degrade sharply on non-ideal inputs-fisheye distortion, game-rendered content, aerial views, and 360°panoramas. We present YOLOv14, a unified adaptive detection framework that addresses these variations through four complementary mechanisms, formalized under a novel Adaptive Routing and Modulation (ARM) paradig… ▽ More Real-time object detectors achieve remarkable accuracy under controlled conditions, yet degrade sharply on non-ideal inputs-fisheye distortion, game-rendered content, aerial views, and 360°panoramas. We present YOLOv14, a unified adaptive detection framework that addresses these variations through four complementary mechanisms, formalized under a novel Adaptive Routing and Modulation (ARM) paradigm. Unlike conventional unsupervised domain adaptation, our approach employs Target-Prior Guided Source-Domain Augmentation(TP-SDA), using only 50 unlabeled target images offline to estimate style statistics, while adversarial alignment serves as a lightweight regularizer rather than the primary adaptation driver. Together, these components enable YOLOv14 to achieve 49.1 mAP on COCO val2017 at 2.91 ms (T4 GPU), with substantial gains of +4.1 (fisheye), +6.6 (panorama), +6.4 (drone), and +26.1 (gamestylized) mAP over YOLOv12s. Crucially, we validate generalization on real-world game screenshots (GTA-V, Unity), achieving +14.2 mAP, confirming practical transferability beyond synthetic benchmarks. Code and models are released at https://github.com/zhangcbb/yolov14. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; v1 submitted 5 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

OmniRouting: A Semantic-Coupled Multimodal Benchmark for Constraint-Aware Spatial Reasoning in PCB Routing

Authors: Taiting Lu, Kaiyuan Lin, Ziwei Dong, Sisong Bei, Haolin Ye, Yuxin Tian, Runze Liu, Mingjia Wang, Jingying Zeng, Hongxing Pan, Kai Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Guoliang Shi, Ling Ma, Yifan Yang, Jiaying Lu, Qi He, Yi-Chao Chen, Sung-Liang Chen, Yincheng Jin, Mahanth Gowda

Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in constraint-aware navigation, maze reasoning, and graph reasoning. However, their ability to reason about complex routing problems under strict geometric, topological, and electrical constraints remains largely unexplored, despite routing being one of the most challenging and critical stages of electronic design automation… ▽ More Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in constraint-aware navigation, maze reasoning, and graph reasoning. However, their ability to reason about complex routing problems under strict geometric, topological, and electrical constraints remains largely unexplored, despite routing being one of the most challenging and critical stages of electronic design automation (EDA). To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniRouting, the first large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on printed-circuit-board (PCB) routing reasoning under real-world industrial design-rule, manufacturability, and connectivity constraints. OmniRouting contains 1,681 industrial-grade schematic-coupled PCB designs, including board geometries, routable component placements by human engineers, footprints, pad locations, netlists, stackup information, and routing constraints. The benchmark comprises four tasks: (1) geometric routing reasoning, generating physically valid copper traces, vias, and layer assignments to connect circuit nets within constrained board regions; (2) design-rule-aware routing reasoning, producing routable layouts that satisfy clearance, trace-width, via, obstacle-avoidance, and board-boundary constraints; (3) electrical functionality reasoning, preserving schematic-specified connectivity while reasoning over net names and functional roles to produce electrically correct routing; and (4) tool-augmented agentic routing, leveraging external tools for tasks (1)-(3). Our results reveal substantial limitations of current LMMs in PCB routing, including weak path-planning capabilities, poor adherence to design-rule constraints, and inconsistent preservation of electrical functionality. We will open-source all benchmark data, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to facilitate future research. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Sample Complexity of Multicalibration for Multilevel Properties

Authors: Jiuyao Lu, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Aleksandr Podkopaev, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

Abstract: Calibration requires a predictor to be unbiased after conditioning on its own predictions. Multicalibration asks for this guarantee simultaneously across a collection of groups. Many prediction tasks ask for several related features of the same conditional outcome distribution: variance is defined relative to the mean, skewness relative to both mean and variance, and conditional value at risk rela… ▽ More Calibration requires a predictor to be unbiased after conditioning on its own predictions. Multicalibration asks for this guarantee simultaneously across a collection of groups. Many prediction tasks ask for several related features of the same conditional outcome distribution: variance is defined relative to the mean, skewness relative to both mean and variance, and conditional value at risk relative to a quantile. We study multicalibration for a sequence of $k$ properties in which each property is identifiable once the preceding properties are fixed. This framework includes Bayes pairs but does not require the properties to arise from a single loss. For every fixed $k\ge2$, we establish matching upper and lower sample-complexity bounds up to logarithmic factors under regularity conditions. Even with only polylogarithmically many binary groups, achieving multicalibration error $\varepsilon$ requires $\widetildeΩ(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)})$ samples. Conversely, for any finite group family $\mathcal G$, we give a randomized learner using $O(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)}+\varepsilon^{-2}\log|\mathcal G|)$ samples. Thus the sample complexity is $\widetildeΘ(\varepsilon^{-(k+2)})$ for polynomial-size group families. We instantiate the theory for three canonical examples. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

MatrAIx: Simulating the World with 8.3 Billion Persona Agents

Authors: Xiaomin Li, Yuexing Hao, Jianheng Hou, Jintao Huang, Qianfeng Wen, Shirley Huang, Yifan Liu, Xiaoyi Liu, Yilan Fan, Yijun Wang, Koutian Wu, Ruoqi Gao, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Jing Tang, Brihi Joshi, Heming Liu, Zheyuan Deng, Zonglin Di, Sankalp Jajee, Jiuyao Lu, Zhiwei Zhang, Saksham Kapoor, Ishan Gupta, Yunhan Zhao, Chanwoo Park , et al. (68 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Human evaluation of AI systems and digital products is costly, slow, and difficult to scale. Offline evaluations are more scalable but often abstract away human diversity and interactive behavior. We therefore introduce MatrAIx, a population-scale simulated-user evaluation infrastructure for testing AI systems and digital products with heterogeneous users. MatrAIx has three core components: First,… ▽ More Human evaluation of AI systems and digital products is costly, slow, and difficult to scale. Offline evaluations are more scalable but often abstract away human diversity and interactive behavior. We therefore introduce MatrAIx, a population-scale simulated-user evaluation infrastructure for testing AI systems and digital products with heterogeneous users. MatrAIx has three core components: First, Persona 8B contains 8.3 billion persona records represented by 1,290 categorical dimensions. Records are either sampled from a dependency graph that preserves correlated attributes or derived from human-authored profiles. We release a quality-filtered coreset of approximately 1 million personas, comprising 599,847 human-grounded and 400,000 synthetic records. Second, the MatrAIx Playground provides four environments in which diverse users evaluate and interact with digital products: Survey, AI Chatbot, Web, and App. Third, MatrAIx provides 1,010 application tasks spanning more than 25 domains, including Commerce, Software, Finance, and Healthcare. We conducted 18,189 evaluation trials across eight representative tasks. Persona agents were powered by three LLMs: Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, and Claude Haiku 4.5. The resulting feedback captures how decisions and preferences vary across persona backgrounds, including hesitation after a price increase, willingness to continue after an AI assistant fails, and latency tolerance. We conducted two main validation studies: First, a 400-trial controlled study evaluated persona adherence across ten behavioral attributes and all four environments. The declared behavior was expressed or correctly suppressed in 366 trials (91.5%). Second, human and LLM judges evaluated the extraction quality of human-grounded personas. Overall, MatrAIx provides an end-to-end infrastructure for evaluating AI systems and digital products with diverse simulated human users. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Project website: https://matraix.ai

Perceptual Anchoring: Prototype-Guided Text Calibration for Training-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Authors: Wanli Ma, Jiangwen Lu, Qinmu Peng, Xinge You

Abstract: Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) partitions an image into semantically distinct regions based on arbitrary text descriptions, without learning any additional parameters. However, existing methods typically focus on improving visual representations while treating text embeddings that encode only generic category concepts as fixed classification references. The resulting se… ▽ More Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) partitions an image into semantically distinct regions based on arbitrary text descriptions, without learning any additional parameters. However, existing methods typically focus on improving visual representations while treating text embeddings that encode only generic category concepts as fixed classification references. The resulting semantic gap between these generic concepts and the visual representations that capture the specific appearances of target instances often causes incomplete masks and erroneous predictions in non-target regions. Inspired by the symbol-percept correspondence underlying perceptual anchoring, we propose Prototype-Guided Text Calibration (PTC) for training-free OVSS. In the Perceiving stage, PTC selects reliable visual evidence based on initial matching scores to construct category-specific visual prototypes. In the Anchoring stage, PTC uses these prototypes to calibrate their corresponding text embeddings, with the calibration strength adaptively adjusted based on the amount of visual evidence. Consequently, the calibrated text embeddings align more accurately with instance-specific visual representations while preserving generic category semantics and open-vocabulary generalization. Moreover, PTC requires neither additional training nor external models and can serve as a plug-and-play module for existing methods. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that PTC significantly enhances the performance of six representative methods and yields more complete and accurate segmentation results. These results validate PTC as a simple and effective approach to improving visual-text alignment. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; v1 submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 17 pages, 5 figures

RamanPFN: learning from Raman spectral structure with a tabular foundation model

Authors: Xingyu Pan, Huan Wang, Jinjia Guo, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong, Jixi Lu

Abstract: Raman spectroscopy enables non-destructive, label-free molecular characterization across materials science, biomedicine and process monitoring. Predictive Raman datasets often contain few labelled spectra and thousands of ordered wavenumbers, with informative variation within bands and across distant spectral regions. Latent-variable chemometrics accommodates collinear small-sample data but can ob… ▽ More Raman spectroscopy enables non-destructive, label-free molecular characterization across materials science, biomedicine and process monitoring. Predictive Raman datasets often contain few labelled spectra and thousands of ordered wavenumbers, with informative variation within bands and across distant spectral regions. Latent-variable chemometrics accommodates collinear small-sample data but can obscure fine peak morphology, whereas deep spectral networks resolve this structure only after task-specific training. TabPFN avoids task-specific parameter fitting through pretrained in-context inference, but processes very wide inputs as feature-subsampled views that do not preserve joint visibility of related bands. We present RamanPFN, a spectral representation framework that encodes these dependencies before TabPFN inference. Global Compositional Unmixing constructs non-negative coordinates over the complete spectrum so that distant bands with shared latent variation occupy a common predictive axis. Local Vibrational Subspace Encoding represents contiguous wavenumber regions with multiple orthogonal modes that retain independent changes in peak shape, intensity and position. The representations are evaluated separately and combined at the prediction level. Evaluation covered 150 tasks from 74 public Raman datasets. RamanPFN reduced root-mean-square error by 19.6% on average across 129 regression targets relative to direct TabPFN inference and further reduced the remaining classification error by 9.0% across 21 classification tasks. These results establish explicit spectral representation as an effective interface between high-dimensional Raman measurements and reusable tabular inference. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

UniqueSplat: View-conditioned 3D Gaussian Splatting for Generalizable 3D Reconstruction

Authors: Haixu Song, Xiaoke Yang, Shengjun Zhang, Jiwen Lu, Yueqi Duan

Abstract: In this paper, we propose UniqueSplat, a view-conditioned feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting model to reconstruct customized 3D radiance fields for each view query. Existing feed-forward methods such as pixelSplat and MVSplat aim to generate fixed Gaussians across all views of each scene by minimizing the error between rendered views and ground-truth images. However, such fixed Gaussians generally… ▽ More In this paper, we propose UniqueSplat, a view-conditioned feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting model to reconstruct customized 3D radiance fields for each view query. Existing feed-forward methods such as pixelSplat and MVSplat aim to generate fixed Gaussians across all views of each scene by minimizing the error between rendered views and ground-truth images. However, such fixed Gaussians generally render images from all views and lack the ability to adapt to specific viewpoints, as they do not incorporate target view information when predicting Gaussians. To address this, our UniqueSplat learns the view-conditioned information as a prior and incorporates this knowledge into network parameters, so that Gaussians are dynamically adjusted in accordance with different views. Specifically, we propose a two-branch view-conditioned hyperNetwork to simultaneously learn view-agnostic embeddings and view-specific knowledge, which not only explores the shareable knowledge from various views, but also adapts the model to specific views at test time. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets including RealEstate10K, ACID and DTU demonstrate the superiority of UniqueSplat over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, UniqueSplat encouragingly outperforms existing methods in cross-dataset evaluation, showing its notable generalization ability. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

HAFI-VLM: A Frequency Perspective for Diagnosing and Enhancing Visual Perception in Vision-Language Models

Authors: Jin Cui, Chuanchang Su, Jiayi Lu, Xinyue Long, Boran Zhao, Pengju Ren

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable when predictions require fine-grained visual evidence. We identify a previously overlooked cause: spectral response rigidity. Despite substantial frequency variation across images and tasks, pretrained vision encoders exhibit persistent, encoder-specific layerwise spectral profiles that change only marginally under downstream fine-tuning. Since pretr… ▽ More Vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable when predictions require fine-grained visual evidence. We identify a previously overlooked cause: spectral response rigidity. Despite substantial frequency variation across images and tasks, pretrained vision encoders exhibit persistent, encoder-specific layerwise spectral profiles that change only marginally under downstream fine-tuning. Since pretrained vision encoders only receive images, they cannot adapt spectral extraction to the evidence required by the current query. We therefore propose HAFI-VLM, which introduces a task-conditioned frequency pathway while preserving the pretrained semantic representation. Hierarchical Adaptive Frequency Injection (HAFI) retrieves complementary low-, mid-, and high-frequency evidence at multiple encoder depths using text-modulated, spatially aligned cross-attention. A Visual Enrichment Layer Adapter further recalibrates shallow LLM attention to effectively utilize the enriched visual tokens. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate consistent improvements in general VQA, text-rich understanding, and hallucination robustness, outperforming representation-level enhancement methods and most resolution- or cropping-based approaches without additional high-resolution encoding. Mechanistic analyses show that HAFI restores task-dependent spectral allocation while retaining semantic attention, establishing frequency enrichment as a distinct and effective route for improving VLM perception. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figure

SpatioLM: Towards General Physical Spatial Intelligence in Vision-Language Models

Authors: Jing Wu, Jianhua Wu, Jiayi Guan, Jiahong Chen, Jinghui Lu, Hangjun Ye, Bingzhao Gao, Long Chen

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on commonsense reasoning tasks but struggle with visual spatial reasoning. Most existing solutions introduce extra 3D prior inputs or external spatial encoders, which increase complexity and degrade the underlying VLMs' general-purpose capabilities after spatial fine-tuning. To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient \textit{\textbf{Spatio}-vision \tex… ▽ More Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on commonsense reasoning tasks but struggle with visual spatial reasoning. Most existing solutions introduce extra 3D prior inputs or external spatial encoders, which increase complexity and degrade the underlying VLMs' general-purpose capabilities after spatial fine-tuning. To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient \textit{\textbf{Spatio}-vision \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{M}odels (SpatioLM)}, that enhances spatial intelligence without extra 3D prior inputs or third-party spatial encoders. Concretely, we design a plug-and-play and non-invasive spatio-vision module that elicits the spatial knowledge inherent in VLMs. Furthermore, we innovatively leverage pseudo depth and camera information as supervision to guide the model in learning physically coherent representations. Extensive experiments show that SpatioLM achieves significant improvements in diverse tasks, including spatial perception and understanding while effectively limiting the degradation of general capabilities. Notably, the model achieves an impressive score of 71.6 on the VSI-Bench (the first model to surpass 70). In addition, it attains competitive performance when transferred to embodied manipulation tasks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiaomi-research/spatio-lm}{\faGithub~spatio-lm}. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 27 pages,13 figures,16 tables

TurboClear: One-Step Object-Effect Removal via Region-Calibrated Distribution Matching and Fusion

Authors: Jiawei Guo, Junxian Li, Yixin Tang, Bingya Zhang, Jiaxin Lu, Yulun Zhang, Shangchen Zhou

Abstract: Recently, diffusion-based removal methods have achieved promising visual quality in removing both target objects and their associated effects. However, they typically rely on multi-step denoising, leading to high inference cost. Directly applying existing one-step distillation methods is also suboptimal, since their global objectives lack explicit region-wise calibration and may weaken the asymmet… ▽ More Recently, diffusion-based removal methods have achieved promising visual quality in removing both target objects and their associated effects. However, they typically rely on multi-step denoising, leading to high inference cost. Directly applying existing one-step distillation methods is also suboptimal, since their global objectives lack explicit region-wise calibration and may weaken the asymmetric edit-and-preserve behavior required by object-effect removal. To address these challenges, we propose TurboClear, a one-step SDXL-based object-effect removal model. During training, we design Region-Calibrated Distribution Matching (RDM) for region-aware distillation to preserve the teacher model's asymmetric edit-and-preserve behavior. Furthermore, we propose Learnable Spatial Fusion (LSF) for lightweight inference-time fusion. Extensive experiments show that TurboClear significantly improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive visual quality. TurboClear reduces the computational overhead by up to $40.04\times$ compared to ObjectClear, and by up to $665\times$ against the Flux-based method OmniPaint, all while maintaining comparable or better visual removal quality. Code is available at https://github.com/GuoCalix/TurboClear. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Code: https://github.com/GuoCalix/TurboClear

From Patches to Evidence Balls: Class-Conditioned Evidence Retrieval for Few-Shot Whole Slide Image Classification

Authors: Di Zhang, Li Zhang, Jiashuai Liu, Junbo Lu, Zhi Zeng, Jiusong Ge, Chunze Yang, Yi Niu, Jian Chen, Kai He, Zeyu Gao, Chen Li

Abstract: Whole slide image (WSI) classification is an evidence-driven task, where diagnostic cues are often sparse, spatially organized, and class-dependent. Existing MIL and vision-language methods aggregate a large pool of patch features into a single global slide representation. Under few-shot supervision, limited slide-level labels make it difficult to learn a reliable aggregation mechanism that organi… ▽ More Whole slide image (WSI) classification is an evidence-driven task, where diagnostic cues are often sparse, spatially organized, and class-dependent. Existing MIL and vision-language methods aggregate a large pool of patch features into a single global slide representation. Under few-shot supervision, limited slide-level labels make it difficult to learn a reliable aggregation mechanism that organizes sparse local cues into compact and coherent diagnostic evidence. Moreover, a shared slide representation compresses evidence supporting a candidate class and its alternatives into the same feature, limiting class-specific reasoning and interpretability. To address these issues, we propose EviBall, a class-conditioned evidence retrieval framework for few-shot WSI classification. EviBall organizes local patches into Evidence Balls through semantic-spatial assignment and center refinement, yielding compact and spatially coherent evidence units under weak supervision. It then uses task-specific class queries, including language-guided queries for morphology-oriented tasks and molecular-guided queries for molecular endpoint prediction, to retrieve supporting evidence balls and produce class-conditioned evidence representations for direct class-wise prediction. By introducing structured evidence units and task-relevant semantic guidance, EviBall reduces the reliance on learning an unconstrained global aggregation mechanism from scarce slide-level labels. It therefore reformulates few-shot WSI classification as structured evidence retrieval and competition among candidate classes. Extensive experiments across four morphology-oriented and molecular endpoint WSI tasks demonstrate that EviBall consistently outperforms conventional and vision-language MIL baselines under diverse few-shot settings, while providing spatially localized and class-specific evidence for each prediction. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Characterizing Bias in Post-Bandit Inference under Index Algorithms

Authors: Lisu Wang, Yilun Chen, Jiaqi Lu

Abstract: Bandit algorithms generate data for downstream inference, but adaptive sampling biases post-bandit sample means. We analyze this bias for stable index algorithms, including UCB1 and its generalizations, and derive sharp leading-order expressions for the sample-mean bias and expected $Z$-statistic. Our characterization reveals the algorithmic origin of bias through a key index-function-dependent qu… ▽ More Bandit algorithms generate data for downstream inference, but adaptive sampling biases post-bandit sample means. We analyze this bias for stable index algorithms, including UCB1 and its generalizations, and derive sharp leading-order expressions for the sample-mean bias and expected $Z$-statistic. Our characterization reveals the algorithmic origin of bias through a key index-function-dependent quantity, which we term effective exploration rate. For example, under UCB1, the effective exploration rate is of order $\sqrt{\log T}$, and the standardized bias of any arm (that is not uniquely optimal) decays at the extremely slow rate $1/\sqrt{\log T}$. We also show how the choice of the index function affects both regret and bias, which reveals a regret-bias trade-off: more exploratory algorithm reduces bias but increases regret. Our sharp characterization for bias uses a novel empirical fluid approximation of the algorithm's sampling dynamics, which may be of independent interest. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

PixelSR: Efficient Screen Content Super-Resolution via Pixel Classification

Authors: Zhiheng Li, Lei Chen, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Abstract: Screen content images are generally composed of texts and graphics. Compared to natural images, these man-made images contain a large quantity of sharp but repetitive structures. However, existing works in screen content super-resolution underutilize the special characteristics of screen content, leaving a large room to improve model performance and speed up. In this paper, we propose PixelSR, a s… ▽ More Screen content images are generally composed of texts and graphics. Compared to natural images, these man-made images contain a large quantity of sharp but repetitive structures. However, existing works in screen content super-resolution underutilize the special characteristics of screen content, leaving a large room to improve model performance and speed up. In this paper, we propose PixelSR, a simple yet effective method to improve super-resolution performance but with faster inference speed. To improve model performance, we classify pixels via pixel binning to compute content attention in the training phase. Specifically, after binning pixels into content-dependent groups, content attention is aggregated from pixel features within each group to introduce a content-dependent and non-local receptive field for every pixel. In the testing phase, we utilize the properties of self-repetitiveness and redundancy in screen content to speed up inference without the loss of model performance. We divide targeted high-resolution pixels into three types, which are unique pixels, repeated pixels, and background pixels for each test image. We conduct conventional network processing on unique pixels and cache their predictions in the on-the-fly lookup table. For repeated pixels which have appeared in unique pixels, we directly retrieve prediction results from the lookup table without network processing. For background pixels, we use the nearest neighbor algorithm to generate high-resolution pixels. The on-the-fly lookup table is cleaned and repeats the procedure above for the next test image. Experiments show our PixelSR achieves state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time in screen content super-resolution. △ Less

Submitted 1 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

LLMBDC: Language Model for Biological Domains Oriented Clustering of Gene Ontology

Authors: Ximing Ran, Jie Xu, Peng Jin, Zhaohui Qin, Zhexing Wen, Jiaying Lu

Abstract: Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis is a foundational tool for translating large-scale genomic data into biological insights, but typically yields hundreds of redundant terms that obscure overarching themes. Existing summarization tools rely on fixed similarity metrics (REVIGO, GOSemSim, clusterProfiler::simplify()), gene-overlap measures (Metascape), or static hierarchy mappings (GO-slim), and… ▽ More Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis is a foundational tool for translating large-scale genomic data into biological insights, but typically yields hundreds of redundant terms that obscure overarching themes. Existing summarization tools rely on fixed similarity metrics (REVIGO, GOSemSim, clusterProfiler::simplify()), gene-overlap measures (Metascape), or static hierarchy mappings (GO-slim), and therefore cannot incorporate biological context. Manual curation provides context-aware grouping but is subjective and labor-intensive. A scalable, context-aware framework is needed to cluster GO terms into interpretable higher-order biological domains. Here we present LLMBDC (Large Language Model for Biological Domains Oriented Clustering of Gene Ontology), a training-free framework that leverages zero-shot semantic reasoning of LLMs with confidence scoring to cluster GO terms into BioDomains using only ontology information at inference time. Benchmarked across Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Fragile X syndrome (FXS) against six baseline methods including SapBERT, LLMBDC achieved substantially higher precision, recall, and clustering performance. Against ground-truth annotations, LLMBDC improved ARI from 9.7% to 73.3% (AD) and from 15.7% to 66.6% (FXS) over REVIGO, with corresponding NMI gains from 59.9% to 73.4% (AD) and 66.0% to 79.5% (FXS). A Cauchy combination test further confirmed that aggregated BioDomains retained statistically significant functional signals. LLMBDC provides a scalable, reproducible, and interpretable route to context-aware, system-level interpretation of GO enrichment results while preserving biological specificity. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

EarlyDx: An Admission-Anchored Benchmark for Open-Ended Generation of Evidence-Supported ED-Encounter Diagnoses

Authors: Jiahui Li, Ruili Fang, Zishuai Liu, Yutong Guo, Nan Yang, Wenzhan Song, Jin Lu, Fei Dou

Abstract: Clinical diagnosis at hospital admission must be made rapidly from limited, incomplete evidence. Existing diagnosis-prediction benchmarks are poorly suited to this setting: they restrict prediction to closed code sets, exclude free-text notes, and supervise with discharge diagnoses that incorporate the full inpatient course. We introduce EarlyDx, a large-scale benchmark for open-ended early diagno… ▽ More Clinical diagnosis at hospital admission must be made rapidly from limited, incomplete evidence. Existing diagnosis-prediction benchmarks are poorly suited to this setting: they restrict prediction to closed code sets, exclude free-text notes, and supervise with discharge diagnoses that incorporate the full inpatient course. We introduce EarlyDx, a large-scale benchmark for open-ended early diagnosis, built from 154,834 emergency department encounters in MIMIC-IV. Each encounter is restricted to records available at admission time $t_0$ and supervised by the diagnoses recorded during the ED encounter rather than at discharge. An LLM auditor further verifies every free-text label as supported, partially supported, or unsupported by that evidence; the primary evaluation scores only fully supported labels. Under a semantic LLM-as-judge protocol, no evaluated system --- frontier general, medical-specialized, or in-domain post-trained --- synthesizes admission-time evidence reliably. Zero-shot models score largely by extraction, recovering only 3-31% of diagnoses that must be inferred rather than read from the record; post-training raises inference-dependent recall to 56%, but a sizeable margin remains, and on time-critical conditions no system attains a clinician's balance of sensitivity and precision. We release the full construction and evaluation pipeline at here. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Windowed thinning and query complexity for the bouncy particle and Zigzag samplers

Authors: Jianfeng Lu, Yinchen Luo

Abstract: Let $μ(d x)\propto e^{-U(x)} d x$ on $\R^d$, where $U$ is $m$-strongly convex and $L$-smooth, and denote by $κ=L/m$ the condition number. We consider windowed thinning, an exact simulation method for the bouncy particle sampler and the coordinate Zigzag process. The method divides a trajectory into deterministic windows and uses a gradient evaluation at the beginning of each window to construct a… ▽ More Let $μ(d x)\propto e^{-U(x)} d x$ on $\R^d$, where $U$ is $m$-strongly convex and $L$-smooth, and denote by $κ=L/m$ the condition number. We consider windowed thinning, an exact simulation method for the bouncy particle sampler and the coordinate Zigzag process. The method divides a trajectory into deterministic windows and uses a gradient evaluation at the beginning of each window to construct a tractable local envelope for the event rate. Combining this construction with quantitative mixing estimates and finite-time bounds on the expected numbers of bounces and flips yields query complexity guarantees from a Gaussian cold start. For total-variation error $\varepsilon$, the expected query counts are $O(κ^{1/2}d\,(d\logκ+\log\frac1\varepsilon))$ gradient queries for the bouncy particle sampler and $O(κd^{1/4}(d\logκ+\log\frac1\varepsilon))$ full-gradient equivalents for Zigzag, where $d$ coordinate-partial queries count as one equivalent. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

MSC Class: 65C05; 60J25; 65C40; 65Y20

ROCS: Request-Oriented Compute Sharing for Efficient Large-Scale Recommendation

Authors: Yuxin Chen, Liang Luo, Buyun Zhang, Jian Jiao, Boda Li, Haoyu Wang, Tongyi Tang, Ao Cai, Zijian Shen, Zhengkai Zhang, Wenyi Xie, Ryan Dick, Han Liu, Neng Shi, Bin Yu, Jianbo Xiao, Shuyao Bi, Hongtao Yu, Yuanwei Fang, Zhuoran Zhao, Sijia Chen, Yang Chen, Shuqi Yang, Qianru Li, Zikun Liu , et al. (22 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Modern recommendation models gain prediction quality by scaling feature-interaction and sequence modules, but production cost constraints cap how far systems can scale. In this work, we propose Request-Oriented Compute Sharing (ROCS), a modeling and inference paradigm that exploits a unique property of recommendation inference: each user request is evaluated against many candidates, while reques… ▽ More Modern recommendation models gain prediction quality by scaling feature-interaction and sequence modules, but production cost constraints cap how far systems can scale. In this work, we propose Request-Oriented Compute Sharing (ROCS), a modeling and inference paradigm that exploits a unique property of recommendation inference: each user request is evaluated against many candidates, while request-side features are shared across candidates. ROCS defers request-candidate interactions as late as possible, isolates candidate-dependent representations, and evaluates substantial portions of the model once per request rather than once per candidate, significantly improving inference efficiency while maintaining or improving prediction quality. To realize this paradigm, we develop Generalized Layer Masking (GLM) to enforce candidate isolation in feature-interaction architectures, and Deep Cross Attention (DCA) to extend request-oriented sharing to sequence architectures. To support efficient GPU deployment, we co-design In-Kernel Broadcast Optimization (IKBO) that significantly accelerates ROCS model execution. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ROCS consistently improves the quality-efficiency tradeoff across recommendation backbones. On production-scale workloads, ROCS achieves up to a 3x QPS improvement on retrieval models without quality degradation and a 0.5% relative LogLoss improvement with a 50% QPS gain on a short-form video ranking model. ROCS has been deployed across large-scale recommendation systems spanning ads and organic surfaces, retrieval and ranking stages, and more than two orders of magnitude in inference complexity, delivering significant online gains at reduced infrastructure cost. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

MedXplore: Towards Reliable and Unbiased Generalized Category Discovery in Medical Imaging

Authors: Jianwei He, Kailin Lyu, Junhao Dong, Long Xiao, Wenjie Hou, Jingze Lu, Di Wu, Lin Shu, Jie Hao

Abstract: Deep learning has shown strong potential in medical image analysis, but most existing methods rely on large-scale annotations and a closed-world assumption that rarely holds in clinical practice. Although Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) has advanced rapidly on natural images, it remains underexplored in medical imaging. To address this issue, we propose MedXplore, a unified framework for reli… ▽ More Deep learning has shown strong potential in medical image analysis, but most existing methods rely on large-scale annotations and a closed-world assumption that rarely holds in clinical practice. Although Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) has advanced rapidly on natural images, it remains underexplored in medical imaging. To address this issue, we propose MedXplore, a unified framework for reliable and unbiased medical GCD, optimizing from both perceptual and decision levels. Specifically, at the perceptual level, taking a frequency domain perspective, Frequency-SNR Adaptive Attention and Consistency (FAAC) performs learnable full-spectrum filtering and global-local energy contrast activation to not only highlight local abnormal signals relative to the global context, but also provide reliable semantic anchors for patch consistency learning. At the decision level, Adaptive Cosine-Angular Margin (ACAM) adjusts angular margins using semantic difficulty and feature confidence to balance intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Together, the two modules improve lesion-sensitive representation learning and mitigate old-class bias. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show an average \textbf{8.5\%} gain in \textit{All} accuracy over the strongest competing methods. On Kvasir, MedXplore reduces false-old errors from 14.50\% to 0.80\%, demonstrating strong robustness under severe old-new ambiguity. △ Less

Submitted 29 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: accepted by ACM MM 26

Collusion with Competitive Marginals: Price-Level Audits Are Blind by Construction

Authors: Xin Xu, Chengrui Wu, Jiayu Lu, Kaizhen Tan, Siru Tao, Hanzhe Hong

Abstract: Empirical work on algorithmic collusion asks one question of the data: are prices supracompetitive? We show this can be answered "no" by a conspiracy that is nonetheless profitable. Consider bidding agents that couple only through the joint distribution of their unexplained bid components, leaving every agent's own bid law exactly at the competitive law. Any test whose input is a single agent's pr… ▽ More Empirical work on algorithmic collusion asks one question of the data: are prices supracompetitive? We show this can be answered "no" by a conspiracy that is nonetheless profitable. Consider bidding agents that couple only through the joint distribution of their unexplained bid components, leaving every agent's own bid law exactly at the competitive law. Any test whose input is a single agent's price or bid history then has power exactly equal to its false-positive rate, for every coupling strength up to comonotonicity. The published detection methodology is therefore blind to this conduct by construction rather than underpowered, and no sample size repairs it. Three empirical results follow. First, the mechanism appears in real language-model agents: twenty models from nineteen independent developers, three deployment prompts each, show residual correlation of $+0.053$ between two deployments of one model against $+0.0001$ across models, with a 95% interval clustered by developer of $[0.030, 0.078]$, under an auditor that sees every order feature and is fitted out of sample. Second, the coupling falls monotonically as sampling temperature rises ($p=0.002$), turning a deployment parameter into a candidate mitigation. Third, on 24 days of Ethereum block-building auction data covering 77,684 bids from 39 bidders, the honest population of bidder pairs is itself so dependent that a screen held at a 5% false-positive rate must sit above a floor of $+0.50$ to $+0.81$, which is 20 to 32 times the family-wise sampling threshold and does not fall as the audit window grows. Since lawful multi-identity operation and conspiracy are behaviourally indistinguishable here, the tractable regulatory target is not detection but counting: resolving 40 bidding identities into 23 operators raises the Herfindahl index by 247.5%, and adding behavioural clusters from public bid streams reaches 324.5%. △ Less

Submitted 28 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures, includes technical appendix

Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions for Action Recognition

Authors: Tianci Wu, Siqi Cao, Guangming Zhu, Jiang Lu, Siyuan Wang, Longfei Zhang, Jincai Huang, Jun Sheng, Liang Zhang

Abstract: Action recognition in complex scenes often involves multiple concurrent fine-grained actions, making it challenging to model internal action structures. Most existing methods rely on holistic representations, which are insufficient for capturing subtle interactions and fine-grained semantics. While recent prompt-based approaches introduce disentanglement, they lack explicit semantic guidance, and… ▽ More Action recognition in complex scenes often involves multiple concurrent fine-grained actions, making it challenging to model internal action structures. Most existing methods rely on holistic representations, which are insufficient for capturing subtle interactions and fine-grained semantics. While recent prompt-based approaches introduce disentanglement, they lack explicit semantic guidance, and methods based solely on visual or structured cues remain coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions (KDA), which leverages fine-grained semantic knowledge to enhance action representations and enable more precise disentanglement. Specifically, we use Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose action labels into atomic actions, providing explicit spatial-temporal semantics. A Knowledge Injection Module (KIM) first integrates atomic action knowledge into video features. Based on this enhanced representation, a Knowledge Disentanglement Module (KDM) further disentangles atomic action knowledge to produce more precise semantic guidance for action disentanglement. A Knowledge Disentanglement Loss (KD Loss) is introduced to encourage clearer disentanglement of knowledge components within KDM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KDA improves feature discriminability and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-label action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, KIM and KDM can be readily integrated into other methods, demonstrating strong generality. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; v1 submitted 27 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: ACMMM 26

GAUGE: Grading Agent-Built Financial Models Without a Golden Answer

Authors: Jiacheng Lu, Sinuo Wang, Wentao Zhao, Rui Sun, Cheng Hua, Tao Song, Hui Cai, Beidi Luan, Zhengze Wu, Lingjing Teng, Yijia He, Jing Li, Daxin Jiang, Zuo Bai, Haibing Guan

Abstract: Financial models combine public disclosures with analyst assumptions to produce forecasts and valuations. While some components can be checked mechanically, forecasts, discount rates, and target prices often admit multiple reasonable answers. Existing benchmarks nevertheless tend to grade such outputs against a single expert reference. Using independently built analyst models for the same companie… ▽ More Financial models combine public disclosures with analyst assumptions to produce forecasts and valuations. While some components can be checked mechanically, forecasts, discount rates, and target prices often admit multiple reasonable answers. Existing benchmarks nevertheless tend to grade such outputs against a single expert reference. Using independently built analyst models for the same companies, we find that across 108 directed pairs covering 65 companies, the median single-reference score is 0.33, 92.6% score below 0.70, and no same-vintage pair agrees on implied price within 10%. Point-tolerance grading can therefore penalize disagreement already present among professionals. We introduce GAUGE, a benchmark for evaluating agent-built valuation models against observed analyst practice rather than a single point answer. GAUGE uses 1,001 vendor-classified analyst workbooks and a 196-task evaluation set, with a three-layer observed-practice envelope, 56 auditable facets, eight validity gates, and deterministic structural checks. We validate the benchmark with a 55-participant known-groups study, company-grouped cross-fitting, and judge-stability audits. On the failure-aware score $φ_0$, senior analysts average 88.3, juniors 66.0, and finance students 43.2. Across 24 agents and 1,011 scored generations, the best agent scores 53.4, above the student mean but below every senior and most juniors. It passes 93% of mechanical facets and 78% of judgment facets, with a fleet-median gap of 26 points. Current agents are substantially stronger at model construction than valuation judgment. We release the methodology, a gated de-identified data tier, a controlled training split, a versioned 48-task evaluation core, and a withheld refresh pool. △ Less

Submitted 27 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 35 pages, including appendices. Code, benchmark materials, and evaluation artifacts will be publicly released

TCellAlign: Cross-study T-cell Populations Alignment with Nomenclature-Guided Multi-Agent Workflow

Authors: Pengyu Xie, Rongjia Zhou, Zhilin Ou, Junyuan Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Xiaobo Sun, Jiaying Lu, Wenjing Ma

Abstract: Cell type standardization plays a central role in integrating biological knowledge across single-cell studies. While standardized resources (e.g., Cell Ontology, Nomenclature Frameworks) provide unified vocabularies of cell populations, scientific publications and public datasets continue to use heterogeneous study-specific labels, making cross-study comparison difficult even when biologically equ… ▽ More Cell type standardization plays a central role in integrating biological knowledge across single-cell studies. While standardized resources (e.g., Cell Ontology, Nomenclature Frameworks) provide unified vocabularies of cell populations, scientific publications and public datasets continue to use heterogeneous study-specific labels, making cross-study comparison difficult even when biologically equivalent cell populations are described. In this work, we are the first to formulate this challenge as an evidence-grounded cell population alignment problem and propose TCellAlign, a multi-agent framework that includes literature retrieval, information extraction, nomenclature-guided label alignment, and evidence-based adjudication. This modular design preserves the original terminology and supporting evidence reported by each study while producing standardized labels that can be compared across studies. We further construct a manually validated benchmark dataset linking study-specific labels, CZ CELLxGENE annotations, and standardized T-cell nomenclature across 44 manually curated, published studies (including over seven million cells) spanning four biological categories: healthy, cancer, infectious disease and inflammatory diseases. Across the evaluated tasks, TCellAlign achieves stronger semantic agreement than ontology-based baselines and maintains transcriptomic coherence with both open-source and closed-source large language models (LLM) backbones. By connecting literature, datasets, and expert's nomenclature, TCellAlign enables consistent interpretation of T-cell subtypes and states across studies, facilitating biological knowledge integration and the development of future foundation models built upon standardized cellular representations. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; v1 submitted 27 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Toward Automated Detection of Documentation Inconsistencies in Electronic Health Records

Authors: Jian Lu, Panyu Chen, Miriam Treggiari, Robert Blessing, Danyang Zhuo, Chunhua Weng, William W. Stead, Anru R. Zhang

Abstract: Objective: To characterize the kinds of internal documentation inconsistencies a general-domain large language model (LLM) can surface from real-world discharge summaries, and to identify recurring failure modes that limit reliability at scale. Materials and Methods: We applied a two-stage LLM pipeline---open-ended candidate identification (Gemini 2.5 Pro) followed by context-grounded verificati… ▽ More Objective: To characterize the kinds of internal documentation inconsistencies a general-domain large language model (LLM) can surface from real-world discharge summaries, and to identify recurring failure modes that limit reliability at scale. Materials and Methods: We applied a two-stage LLM pipeline---open-ended candidate identification (Gemini 2.5 Pro) followed by context-grounded verification (Gemini 2.5 Flash)---to 3,000 randomly sampled MIMIC-IV-Note discharge summaries. A subset of the pipeline output was then reviewed manually by clinical experts. Results: Our pipeline surfaced 3,460 candidate inconsistencies, affecting 69.7% of admissions. Representative examples spanned demographics, allergies, procedures, diagnoses, laboratory, medications, and care-planning domains, with direct implications for clinical reasoning or patient safety. Expert review also revealed recurring failure modes that arise when verification requires temporal reasoning, evolving-diagnosis context, or knowledge of outpatient-prescribing conventions the model does not natively possess. Discussion: Detection is highly context-dependent: many flagged pairs require anchoring each statement to its source section and clinical domain, then assessing whether the conflict reflects a true contradiction or missing context. We propose a graded ontology spanning strict contradiction and ambiguity, with a schema characterizing each flagged case by category, section, domain, and inconsistency axis. Conclusion: This formative study establishes a methodological foundation and conceptual framework to guide subsequent validated, large-scale EHR-inconsistency analysis. △ Less

Submitted 24 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction

Authors: Shing Ho J. Lin, Wenzhao Zheng, Dong Zhuo, Yuqi Wu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Abstract: Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motion as independent point-wise displacements, ignoring the structured nature of physical motion. However, real-world object… ▽ More Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motion as independent point-wise displacements, ignoring the structured nature of physical motion. However, real-world objects usually obey rigid-body kinematics, and points thus usually move collectively, not in isolation. Motion itself possesses geometric structure: physical objects undergo a set of rigid-body transformations governed by SE(3), rather than unstructured point-wise displacements. Building on this insight, we propose SM4RT, a Structured Motion 4D Reconstruction Transformer for end-to-end 3D reconstruction and structured motion perception. SM4RT introduces Structure-of-Motion to represent scene dynamics, where scene motion is decomposed into a compact set of motion bases, each represented as a temporal sequence of 6D twists in SE(3). Dense scene motion is then recovered by sparse, time-shared per-pixel assignment weights over these bases, ensuring points on the same object share a common rigid-body motion trajectory. SM4RT introduces a parallel motion geometry encoder and decoder that jointly infer 3D geometry, world-coordinate motion, and scene kinematic structure in a single forward pass from monocular RGB video. SM4RT achieves strong motion reconstruction performance while preserving the geometric structure of scene motion. △ Less

Submitted 24 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/SM4RT

Deconstructing Off-Policy Ratios: Entropy-Scaled Trust Regions for Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Guanqun Zhao, Zijun Xie, Binbin Zheng, Enlei Gong, Jiafeng Lu, Yehan Yang, Aoqi Hu, Zeyu Chen

Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse. Existing methods typically retain or discard tokens based solely on the magnitude of their importance ratios, applying the same threshold… ▽ More Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse. Existing methods typically retain or discard tokens based solely on the magnitude of their importance ratios, applying the same threshold uniformly across token positions. In this work, we reveal that the natural scale of the importance ratio varies systematically with token entropy. Under asynchronous dynamics, this entropy-ratio scaling dictates two distinct phenomena: at low entropy, the inherent train-inference discrepancy is drastically amplified into substantial sampling noise; at high entropy, in-flight weight updates naturally induce pronounced, legitimate exploratory deviations. Consequently, magnitude-only correction inadvertently admits the amplified noise while strictly masking out the essential exploration triggered by in-flight updates. To address this, we propose the Entropy-Scaled Trust Region (ESTR), which scales each token's off-policy deviation by its local entropy, requiring no auxiliary forward passes or explicit version-switch detection. Across long-horizon agentic tasks and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ESTR consistently outperforms existing asynchronous methods and achieves the best train-inference consistency. It reaches $37.34$ avg@1 on BrowseComp-Plus and $95.69$ on multi-turn GSM8K, matching synchronous GRPO while achieving a $2.6\times$ speedup. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; v1 submitted 24 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

InnoText: A Unified Model for Visual Text Generation and Editing

Authors: Haowei Liu, Runze He, Jian Lu, Ao Ma, Run Ling, Ke Cao, Jiasong Feng, Wei Feng, Shuo Lu, Yexing Xu, Yun Wang, Jing Wang, Zhanjie Zhang

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable success in high-fidelity image synthesis, yet their application to visual text generation and editing remains relatively underexplored. Unlike general image generation, visual text tasks demand precise structural regularity and legibility, which may pose additional challenges for small-scale text and non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. Existing UNe… ▽ More Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable success in high-fidelity image synthesis, yet their application to visual text generation and editing remains relatively underexplored. Unlike general image generation, visual text tasks demand precise structural regularity and legibility, which may pose additional challenges for small-scale text and non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. Existing UNet-based models often struggle to produce clear and coherent text, while DiT-based models, though more expressive, are typically limited to a single task, which may lead to redundant training pipelines, inconsistent visual styles, and reduced cross-task generalization. To address these challenges, we propose InnoText, a unified DiT-based framework capable of performing both text generation and editing within a single model. We introduce a Font Size-Aware Modulation (FSAM) module to enhance representations across font scales, a Small-Character Aware Augmentation strategy to improve fine-grained fidelity, and a Task-Specific Region Weighted Loss for adaptive optimization. To support training and evaluation, we also construct a high-quality bilingual (English-Chinese) visual text dataset covering diverse fonts, sizes, and backgrounds. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior generation accuracy and editing quality, producing visually appealing and realistic text images. △ Less

Submitted 24 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Accepted by ECCV 2026

Enough is as good as a feast: A Comprehensive Analysis of How Reinforcement Learning Mitigates Task Conflicts in LLMs

Authors: Zixuan Ren, Jinliang Lu, Junhong Wu, Yang Zhao, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Chengqing Zong

Abstract: Model merging plays a crucial role in consolidating multiple specialized models into a single, unified model, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has primarily focused on developing strategies to enhance merging performance with the trained models, while the impact of training paradigms, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), on the… ▽ More Model merging plays a crucial role in consolidating multiple specialized models into a single, unified model, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has primarily focused on developing strategies to enhance merging performance with the trained models, while the impact of training paradigms, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), on the effectiveness of model merging remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically explore the merging behavior of RL-trained LLMs compared to those trained with traditional SFT. Through comprehensive evaluations across five representative tasks, we find that RL significantly reduces task conflicts and results in less performance degradation after merging, making RL-trained models particularly well-suited for this process. To unearth the reasons behind the superior suitability of RL for model merging, we conduct extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses. Our findings highlight three key factors: (1) On-policy training data in RL control the gradient updates in a smaller magnitude, reducing the risk of overwriting existing knowledge for other tasks in the model. (2) The RL optimization objective, which favors ``\textit{enough is as good as a feast}", progressively reduces the magnitude and the number of conflict parameter updates as the model converges. (3) Joint optimization of positive and negative examples in RL steers the model towards an unbiased task-specific parameter subspace, ensuring robust performance while further preventing parameter conflicts. △ Less

Submitted 24 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Published in ICLR 2026