Research

• Dynamic model and policy routing for general-purpose AI1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Balancing performance and computational cost across diverse tasks and modalities is critical for scalable AI systems.

  • Route Anything: A Study of Model and Policy Routing for General-Purpose AI Systemsraises · addresses
• Cross-repository consistency in coding agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Real-world software development often requires coordinated changes across interdependent repositories, which current agents struggle to maintain.

  • CrossSWE: Benchmarking Cross-Repository Joint Development for Coding Agentsraises
• Efficient long-video generation with consistent quality1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Real-time streaming video generation demands continuous output without quality degradation or camera drift.

  • Wave Forcing: Towards Speed-of-Light Streaming Video Generationraises · addresses
• Local decision-making for reasoning compression1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Reducing inference costs without sacrificing accuracy requires models to know when to stop reasoning.

  • Think Less, Locally: Local Preference Learning for Reasoning Compressionraises · addresses
• Unified taxonomy and coordination for agentic systems1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Fragmented terminology and rapid growth in agentic systems hinder systematic understanding and collaboration.

  • Advances in Agentic Computer Graphicsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.AIOct 1

  A Deterministic and Auditable AI Security Risk Assessment Framework with ATLAS Aligned Executable Rules and Formal Verification

  Yixuan Huang, Basel Halak, Boojoong Kang

  Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly deployed in high impact and safety critical settings, yet security assessment remains difficult to reproduce and defend under audit. Existing approaches often rely on narrative checklists or assessor driven scoring, and they lack an explicit, machine evaluable mapping from observable engineering artefacts to stable technique level outcomes. We present an evidence driven AI security assessment framework that operationalises assessment as a deterministic decision function. The framework normalises heterogeneous artefacts into a project independent Control ID taxonomy scored on a bounded four level ordinal scale, compiles technique level predicates from a pinned MITRE ATLAS snapshot via an explicit mitigation to control mapping, and outputs technique indexed feasibility and impact levels with traceable links back to the triggering evidence. We package all normative choices as a versioned assessment policy object to support repeatable reassessment across snapshots. To ensure semantic correctness, we formally verify boundedness, totality, ordered semantic consistency, and monotonicity of the compiled evaluator over the full declared…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 1

  Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models into Efficient Predictors

  Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo

  Tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve strong predictive performance through in-context learning, yet repeatedly conditioning on labeled data makes inference expensive. Knowledge distillation can reduce this cost by transferring their predictive ability to lightweight, dataset-specific students. However, the dependence of TFM predictions on both a labeled context and a query introduces two design questions: how to construct teacher supervision and whether expanding query coverage improves distillation. We examine these questions across two TFMs and both neural and tree-based students, and derive an effective distillation recipe. The recipe uses the full labeled training set as teacher context and trains students solely on teacher predictions for observed and synthetic queries. On TabArena, the resulting students outperform their supervised trained tuned-and-ensembled counterparts by 57-98 Elo points. Applied unchanged to TALENT, the same recipe improves matched default students on 236-258 of 300 datasets and reduces median primary error by 4.0-6.4%. The distilled students also achieve median inference speedups of 3.0-21.6 times over their teachers, offering a practical…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 1

  MWOP: Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning for Efficient MLLMs

  Xudong Wang, Hao Wu, Haozhe Hu, Peiran Yin, Xinghao Chen +3

  Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) incur substantial inference costs when processing long visual-textual sequences. While existing operation compression methods exploit modality-level redundancy, they largely treat computation within attention heads and shared feed-forward network (FFN) channels as unified units, leaving finer-grained redundancy underexplored. We find that redundancy varies both across modality-interaction paths within the same attention head and across visual and textual executions of the same FFN channel. Based on these findings, we propose Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning (MWOP), which independently prunes visual-to-visual (V2V), text-to-visual (T2V), and text-to-text (T2T) attention paths within each layer, and separately selects FFN channels for visual and textual inputs. A first-order Taylor criterion guides the pruning process, with FFN importance re-evaluated after attention pruning and LoRA-based recovery training. To translate the resulting fine-grained sparsity into practical acceleration, we further develop path-sparse Triton attention kernels and compact visual-side FFN execution. MWOP preserves the token sequence while reducing…

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• arXiv cond-mat.stat-mechOct 1

  Learning ab initio phase-field models

  Mengyi Chen, Peichen Zhong, Zihan Zhang, Qianxiao Li

  Simulating microstructure evolution requires quantum-mechanical accuracy and mesoscopic reach in length and time scales, a combination that no current method achieves. Classical phase-field models provide this reach, but their accuracy is limited by phenomenological free energies and mobilities. Here we develop a framework for learning ab initio phase-field models, where the mesoscopic equation is not postulated but derived from a Mori-Zwanzig projection of molecular dynamics onto species-density fields under explicit assumptions. The nonlocal free energy and mobility left unspecified by this equation are parametrized by neural networks and learned from short molecular dynamics trajectories generated with machine-learning interatomic potentials of ab initio accuracy. We demonstrate the framework on an iron-boron melt and on hydrogen-helium mixtures under planetary conditions. For iron-boron, the model shows that the melt at the FeB$_4$ composition is spinodally unstable at ambient pressure but stabilized at 10 GPa, offering a thermodynamic rationale for why FeB$_4$ has been synthesized only under high pressure. For hydrogen-helium, the model predicts the immiscibility boundary…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 1

  Generalization Is Stability, Not Accuracy: Multi-Axis Evaluation of LLMs

  Nagham Omar, Mahmoud Jabarin, Maya Rozenshtein, Rom Himelstein, Avi Mendelson +1

  Generalization in large language models (LLMs) is the ability to produce consistent and semantically stable outputs when the same input is expressed in different ways. Existing work typically evaluates generalization through aggregate accuracy on a single prompt format, task, or set of variations, which conflates robustness with overall benchmark performance. In this work, we show generalization evaluation at the level of individual examples, across multiple input variants, and across different aspects of model behavior, focusing on variability rather than reducing performance to a score that can be improved through narrow training or other ways that obfuscate generalization evaluation. Following this view, we introduce the Stability-Aware Generalization Objective (SAGO), a framework that measures how much model behavior changes for the same input under different variations and benchmarks, capturing variability across several dimensions including generation consistency, internal activations, confidence, and response mirroring. We show that many commonly used models exhibit statistically significant and consistent generalization instability: no model generalizes uniformly,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 1

  SHAMS: An Audio-Grounded Pronunciation Benchmark for Levantine Arabic

  Ben Sapirstein, Roy Mattar, Guy Mor-Lan, Ahlam Mohamed, Letizia Cerqueglini +1

  Levantine Arabic (LA) is spoken by tens of millions of people, creating a pressing need for shared benchmarks to evaluate LA speech-language technologies. Evaluating such technology is particularly challenging given LA's internal diversity and its opaque and non-standardized orthography. We present SHAMS (SHami Annotated Multi-dialect Speech), a benchmark comprising 1,300 utterances drawn from open audio corpora, balanced across five LA varieties (Urban and Rural Palestinian, and Urban Jordanian, Lebanese, and Syrian). Each utterance is represented across four aligned tiers: audio, unvocalized orthography, diacritized text, and phonetic transcription. This structure supports evaluation of various downstream tasks such as diacritization, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, automatic speech recognition, and audio-to-phoneme, grounded in audio and stratified by variety. We benchmark open and proprietary models across these tasks to demonstrate the utility of this benchmark for measuring progress across LA. We release SHAMS at https://shams-nlp.github.io .

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 1

  Least-time Gradient Flow

  Alessandro Betti, Marco Gori, Stefano Melacci, Jinwei Zhao

  Prescribing the speed of gradient flow on the risk itself, by the dynamics $\dot w=-u(E(w))\nabla E(w)/\abs{\nabla E(w)}^{2}$, makes the risk $e(t)=E(w(t))$ obey $\dot e=-u(e)$ exactly, whatever the landscape~$E$; the time needed to reach zero risk from $e_0$ is $\int_0^{e_0}\dd e/u(e)$. Minimizing this time alone is ill posed, and we study the regularized problem $\inf\{\int_0^{e_0}(\tfrac\lambda2\abs{u'}^{2}+1/u)\,\dd e:\ u\in H^{1}(0,e_0),\ u\ge0,\ u(0)=0\}$, $λ>0$. We prove that the minimizer exists, is unique, and is a linearly scaled cycloid, and we show that the optimal rate behaves like $u^{*}(e)\sim(9/(2λ))^{1/3}e^{2/3}$ near zero risk: the exponent $2/3$ is the one found in \cite{betti2026holder} by a power-law ansatz, and it lies in the Hölder window $(\tfrac12,1)$ where the arrival is in finite time with vanishing weight speed. The proof follows the classical route: existence by the direct method, uniqueness by strict convexity, positivity of the minimizer away from the origin, and the explicit integration of the Euler-Lagrange equation.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 1

  Why Does Train-Validation Separation Emerge? Update-Pressure Density Dynamics in Pretrained Backbones

  Yuchen Li, Mingyu Du, Zongqi Fan, Ken-Tye Yong, Nguyen H. Tran

  Train-validation separation is the evolving difference between performance on observed training examples and a finite held-out validation set. We propose a dynamic structural account of how this gap develops during adaptation of pretrained models: continued fitting can shift update demand from broadly reusable support toward narrower support with weaker held-out transfer. A conditional local model links this shift to increasing heterogeneity in gradient allocation and train-validation separation. Fixed training probes make this structural evolution observable without validation examples entering the readouts; held-out performance is used separately to evaluate its relation to the gap. In a constructed hierarchy implemented with a residual multilayer perceptron (ResMLP), increasing the target share of example-private features from $p=.3$ to $.5$ to $.7$, while preserving the relative mixture $1{:}2{:}3{:}4$ among the four shared feature levels, increases the final mean accuracy gap from $.185$ to $.331$ to $.527$ across five runs per condition. Masked-input losses measured separately on training and validation examples expose the corresponding transfer asymmetry. The natural…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 1

  SpikeMoE: Brain-Inspired Competitive Routing for Flexible Spiking Mixture-of-Experts

  Xiaoli Liu, Yujie Liang, Jialin Li, Chenxiao Dou, Malu Zhang

  Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) enable event-driven computation through biologically inspired dynamics at the neuronal scale, while Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) perform conditional computation through expert selection at the model scale. Integrating their strengths offers potential for flexible neural architectures. A key challenge, however, lies in designing an expert selection mechanism based on spiking activity. To address this, we introduce a spike-based k-WTA Router inspired by competition-inhibition observed in the hippocampal CA1 region. The router incorporates lateral inhibition and refractory period to select Top-K experts according to discrete spike counts. Building on this, we present SpikeMoE, a framework that integrates neuronal-scale spiking dynamics with model-scale expert selection. To address incomplete multisensory inputs in multimodal tasks, we further equip SpikeMoE with a two-stage missing-modality modeling module that combines empirical prototypes from an observed-modality pool with modality-specific learnable embeddings to construct missing-modality representations. Experiments on vision, language, and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that SpikeMoE achieves…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 1

  Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief States

  Yu Luo, Jiamin Jiang, Yimin Zuo, Xidao Wen, Rongchen Gao +7

  Large language model (LLM) agents can now undertake increasingly complex tasks, but the way they organize interaction history into memory does not ensure a coherent understanding of the current world. We introduce PoS, an inference-time framework that constructs and continually maintains explicit belief states as the agent's decision context. Each belief combines an estimate of the current world state with unresolved task requirements, making explicit what the agent still needs to learn and accomplish. To keep this belief reliable and actionable, PoS validates its consistency and monitors task progress to detect Belief Trapping, where the agent continues to act without making meaningful progress toward the goal. Recovery is then tailored to both the trapping pattern and the type of unresolved task requirement. Experiments on four benchmarks spanning execution and diagnosis show that PoS achieves the highest overall performance on every benchmark with all three LLM backbones. Ablations demonstrate the importance of consistency validation and recovery, while context-scaling experiments show resilience to context growth. Together, these results support belief construction and…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 1

  Optimal Transport Meets Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

  Yujie Zhu, Charles A. Hepburn, Matthew Thorpe, Giovanni Montana

  Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms frequently compare probability distributions, such as state visitation distributions induced by policies and experts, action distributions from learned policies and offline datasets, or transition distributions from learned models and environments. However, commonly used divergences may become ineffective when these distributions overlap weakly, which is frequently encountered in imitation learning, offline RL, and deployment under distribution shift. Optimal transport (OT) offers an alternative by measuring the cost of \emph{moving} probability mass from one distribution to another under a ground cost that encodes task geometry. This survey covers how OT is used inside RL objectives and algorithms. For each method, we identify: the role OT plays, the distributions compared, the OT formulation used, and the treatment of temporal structure. Beyond categorising existing methods, we discuss the motivations behind different OT choices, practical considerations such as cost design and computational challenges, and highlight open problems including scalable trajectory-level transport, principled handling of mass mismatch, and theoretical analysis…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 1

  Localisation-Aware Uncertainty for Pretrained Object Detection

  Charmaine Barker, Daniel Bethell, Simos Gerasimou

  Reliable uncertainty estimation is essential for deploying object detectors when distribution/covariate shift and adversarial attacks may occur. Existing approaches often require detector retraining, architectural modification, or repeated inference, which may be infeasible or incur significant overheads. We introduce a lightweight post-hoc evidential meta-model that learns when object localisations should be considered uncertain while keeping the base detector frozen. Our approach automatically identifies localisation-relevant features and uses saliency-guided modification to construct an increasingly challenging curriculum. Detection-level targets combine localisation error, modification level, and prediction instability to guide an evidential meta-model to estimate uncertainty for each predicted bounding box. Our approach requires no changes to the detector and preserves its original localisation outputs. Across adversarial attacks and evaluated strengths, GRACE improves TP-FP AUROC by 22% relative to the strongest comparator in some cases while maintaining in-distribution detection performance.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 1

  Smoother Flow Matching via Contrastive Trajectory Repulsion

  Ziqi Jiang, Zhenqi He, Long Chen

  Trajectory crossing remains a critical bottleneck in Flow Matching (FM), and previous works typically view these crossings from a theoretical optimization perspective causing velocity averaging. They attempt to address it indirectly by post-hoc distillation or endpoint coupling, without explicitly regulating the intermediate trajectories. In this paper, we introduce a new network learning perspective: crossing points inherently induce large local Lipschitz constants in the target velocity field, leading to two drawbacks. First, high Lipschitz constants correspond to high-frequency signals in the velocity field that neural networks struggle to fit due to spectral bias. Second, they also imply drastic velocity variations, leading to severe numerical integration errors in few-step inference. To alleviate this, we propose CoFlow, a framework that introduces the contrastive learning paradigm into FM to explicitly repel trajectories during training, thereby lowering the local Lipschitz constants of the velocity field. Specifically, we formulate CoFlow from a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) perspective by injecting a repulsive drift term. This drift actively guides the forward…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 1

  Contrastive Attention Mitigates Spectral Bias in Spiking Transformers

  Xiaoli Liu, Malu Zhang, Yang Yang

  Spiking Transformers merge the energy-efficiency of spiking neural networks (SNNs) with the representational power of self-attention, creating a promising architecture for high-performance, energy-efficient computation. However, a performance gap persists versus its counterparts in artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike prior works attributing this to binary activations, we reveal that both spiking neurons and spiking self-attention (SSA) act as low-pass filters through multiscale spectral analysis. This characteristic leads to the dissipation of high-frequency components. To address this issue, we propose the Spiking Contrastive Attention (SCA) paradigm, which draw inspiration from the edge-detection and differential sensing properties of biological visual system. By extracting contrast prototypes via global contrastive aggregation and applying local differential refinement, SCA effectively enhances high-frequency information. Extensive experiments show that SCA is a general module that consistently boosts Spiking Transformers across image classification, semantic segmentation, and event-based tracking. Furthermore, it achieves lower complexity, offering superior efficiency…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 1

  Reusing Past Samples in Proximal Policy Optimization: When and How Does It Help?

  Alessandro Montenegro, Riccardo Venturelli, Marco Mussi, Matteo Papini, Alberto Maria Metelli

  Among on-policy deep reinforcement learning methods, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard, due to its consistently strong empirical performance across diverse application domains. However, on-policy methods are inherently sample inefficient: fresh data collected under the current policy is used for just a few updates before being discarded. Off-policy methods avoid this inefficiency via experience replay, achieving notable sample efficiency gains, but at the cost of training instabilities or extensive tuning. This motivated the rise of hybrid strategies that augment PPO with off-policy data reuse. Existing sample-reuse variants of PPO demonstrated improved sample efficiency over vanilla PPO, yet a systematic study of when reuse helps, in which scenarios, and to what extent remains missing. In this work, we study the effectiveness of sample reuse in PPO by instantiating two variants within a multiple importance weighting framework. Both retain the core PPO mechanics, reusing only samples from a window of recent iterations, thereby isolating the effect of data reuse from other factors. The variants, termed wPPO-U and wPPO-BH, employ vanilla importance…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 1

  AF-Muon: An AdamW-Free Muon Optimizer for Tied-Embedding Models

  Arash Lagzian, Paniz Halvachi, Junming Zhang, Zhouhan Lin, Dianbo Liu

  Muon improves large-scale training by applying a spectral-norm steepest-descent update to matrix parameters, but practical models also contain parameter blocks that do not fit dense-matrix geometry. One important case is the tied vocabulary table, which appears in language models and other token generators and can receive multiple structurally different gradient sources, from sparse input lookups to dense output-classifier updates. In the reference recipe these blocks are handed to an auxiliary AdamW optimizer, which restores second-moment state and updates the aliased table as a generic tensor. We propose AF-Muon, an AdamW-free extension of Muon that keeps the Muon matrix update for hidden weight matrices while using a support-aware finite-cap linear minimization oracle for tied vocabulary tables and an RMS-normalized update for one-dimensional auxiliary parameters. AF-Muon therefore trains every parameter class with a single first-moment buffer and no second-moment state, saving around 20% optimizer-state memory relative to Hybrid Muon in our benchmark. Across nine tied-token settings - decoder-only language models from 124M to 1B parameters, a fully shared T5-style…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 1

  LLM-Assisted Discovery of Typed Semantic Links for Ontology Network Construction

  Nouha Hayouni, Sheeba Samuel, Alsayed Algergawy

  Constructing typed, justified semantic links between ontologies is essential for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous and interdisciplinary knowledge domains. However, manually curating such links is difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end framework for ontology network construction that automates the discovery and generation of both intra-domain and inter-domain relationships. Our approach combines domain-adapted DistilBERT embeddings for dense contextual representation, clustering-based pre-filtering to reduce the candidate search space, and GPT-4o-driven relationship generation via iterative prompt engineering to produce semantically rich, interpretable links. Applied to ReproduceMeON - a network of 33 ontologies spanning machine learning, microscopy, computational science, and experimental workflow - the pipeline reduces approximately 800k raw concept pairs to 95k high-quality candidates. Human expert validation of 429 generated relationships by two independent annotators yields an overall precision of 80.19% (91.49% on high-certainty annotations) and an F1 of 0.890, with substantial inter-annotator agreement. Comparative experiments…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 1

  AiSearch: Interactive Multi-Modal Search with VLMs

  Ali Koksal, Mei Chee Leong, Vicky Sintunata, Ching Ling Chin, Wee Teck Fong

  Modern retrieval systems must both be automated and interactive, allowing users to search and refine results in real time. We present AiSearch, a flexible multimodal retrieval framework that leverages the zero shot capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) for natural language search over images and videos. AiSearch supports interactive search refinement through user feedback to tailor results to the user's intent, and allows visual benchmarking across multiple VLMs, enabling users to select the most suitable model for their task.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 1

  Supervising Sound Localization by In-the-wild Egomotion

  Anna Min, Ziyang Chen, Hang Zhao, Andrew Owens

  We present a method for learning binaural sound localization using egomotion as a supervisory signal. Over the course of a video, the cameras direction to a sound source will change as the camera moves. We train an audio model to predict sound directions that are consistent with visual estimates of camera motion, which we obtain using traditional methods from multi-view geometry. This provides a weak but plentiful form of supervision that we combine with traditional binaural cues. To evaluate this method, we propose a dataset of real-world audio-visual videos with egomotion. We show that our model can successfully learn from real-world data and that it performs well on sound localization tasks

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• arXiv cs.CROct 1

  Is it Possible to Generate Irreversible PolyProtected Templates from Face Embeddings using System-Specific Keys?

  Vedrana Krivokuća Hahn, Jérémy Maceiras, Sébastien Marcel

  This work aims to answer the question of whether it is possible to generate irreversible protected templates when the PolyProtect biometric template protection method is applied to face embeddings using system-specific keys (i.e., the same C and E parameters, which define the transform, are applied to all subjects' face embeddings), instead of the traditional subject-specific keys (i.e., each subject has their own C and E parameters). This is important for determining whether we can perform de-duplication of face identities in the PolyProtected domain, which is not possible in the subject-specific key scenario due to the clash with PolyProtect's unlinkability property (i.e., one could generate multiple protected templates belonging to the same identity, using different C and E parameters, such that those templates cannot be linked to each other). We present experiments (reproducible using our open-source code) to prove that there exist at least three ways of systematically selecting system-specific keys that produce irreversible PolyProtected templates: (i) from pre-selected subject-specific keys, (ii) by applying a previously proposed key selection algorithm to random vectors,…

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• Databases7+40.0%
• Programming languages100.0%
• Speech emotion12−7.7%
• Federated learning34−8.1%
• Anomaly detectors22−12.0%
• Algorithmic trading21−16.0%
• Forecasting time99−16.8%
• DevOps & cloud8−20.0%