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.

• Quantum machine learning33+43.5%
• Spiking neural networks8+33.3%
• Character recognition OCR43+30.3%
• Speech emotion19−9.5%
• Voice AI63−16.0%
• Channel state information16−20.0%
• Molecular property prediction43−20.4%
• Multimodal424−21.5%

• arXiv cs.CVAI safetySep 30

  Persistent Watermarking of Text-to-Image Models

  Dixi Yao, Kaiwen Chen, Tahseen Rabbani, Tian Li

  Text-to-image (T2I) generation is gaining increasing popularity with the general public, motivating the development of reliable mechanisms for copyrighting such models given their expensive training costs. An adversary may obtain and reuse a pretrained T2I model without authorization, and then serve a modified version through an API service. Such modifications may arise from ordinary downstream adaptation or deliberate attempts to erase ownership, including input-prompt preprocessing, model fine-tuning, and output post-processing. From the model owner's perspective, a key challenge is therefore to embed trigger data that remain persistent under such changes while preserving the model's normal image-generation capabilities. In this work, we propose a contrastive-style watermarking objective with a term that explicitly encourages the watermarked model to behave differently from the original model on trigger inputs. Experiments show substantially stronger trigger-data persistence than prior methods across a wide range of downstream modifications and deliberate attempts to weaken the watermark, resulting in higher detection rates, often approaching 100% TPR@FPR<$10^{-4}$.

  AIImage & video generation70PDF

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  Beyond the Sycophancy Score: How Task, Model, and Pressure Shape LLM Yielding

  Guang Yang, Homa Hosseinmardi, Fengchen Liu, Amir Ghasemian

  Large language models (LLMs) often abandon a correct answer, or endorse a user's position, once the user pushes back. This behavior, called sycophancy, is usually reported as a single rate per model, which says little about when it happens or how a user can avoid it. We study the conditions that produce it with 103,939 graded replies from ten configurations: eight LLMs with reasoning disabled, and two of them again with maximum reasoning, all facing the same 200 items, 13 pressure conditions, and four-turn conversations, with every reply labeled by two independent LLM judges. We find that the dominant factors are how costly it is for the model to verify the user's claim, and whether a trained guardrail covers it. Removing this task factor from a logistic model costs 0.485 of McFadden $R^2$, against 0.139 for model family and 0.009 for pressure tactic. Anchored facts are almost never conceded (1.3%), while adoption on logic puzzles rises with the number of clues needed to refute the pushed answer. Personal choices are endorsed in 77.0% of conversations. Most concessions on hard items come from models that cannot reliably solve them; models that can solve them rarely give the…

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• arXiv cs.SESep 30

  From Verification Failures to Reusable Guidance for Coding Agents

  Yuqing Zhai, Xiaohong Chen, Lingming Zhang, Sriram Vishwanath, Grigore Rosu

  Coding agents need to establish that a program satisfies a specification and that the specification captures the requested behavior. We study how expert diagnosis of verification failures can become reusable guidance for this work. Our approach combines executable language definitions in the K framework with a kit of procedures for constructing specifications, repairing proofs, and auditing their adequacy. A human-guided development campaign on HumanEval, a benchmark of 164 Python programming tasks, achieves a 164/164 success rate with the semantics and the kit, measured by final AI audit Pass verdicts after two targeted repairs. To examine whether auditing detects problems that successful proofs leave unresolved, we construct 12 author-reviewed pairs of clean and defective packages. Every package passes its K proofs, and completed audits identify all defects and accept all clean packages. We then use KleverBench to test specification and proof construction for 31 programs with changed operator meanings. Comparisons with complete acceptance rules and equally long generic advice yield mixed results across two model and budget settings, motivating further work on selecting useful…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  Frame Differential On-Policy Self-Distillation for Video Reasoning

  Haiying He, Xin Zheng, Shaoli Hu, Shijun Xiao, Xuanhe Liu +2

  Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the reasoning ability of multimodal language models through verifiable rewards and increasingly fine-grainedvisual or temporal credit assignment. In video reasoning, however, current RL methods typically train with a fixed sparse frame budget: increasing the number of frames makes autoregressive rollouts expensive, while too few frames may miss temporally localized events and fine-grained visual details. We present \textbf{Frame Differential On-Policy Self-Distillation (FD-OPSD)}, which transfers the useful evidence of dense frame observations to a sparse frame policy during RL training. FD-OPSD compares the policy's token level preferences for the same sampled response under sparse and dense views, and distills the resulting frame differential signal without an external teacher or dense autoregressive rollout. The method preserves sparse-frame rollouts and leaves inference unchanged. Across Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3-VL-4B on six video reasoning benchmarks, FD-OPSD yields higher overall average performance than the strongest corresponding GRPO, T-GRPO, or Video-KTR baselines across the 16, 32, and 64 frame evaluation settings.…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 30

  Minimax rates for learning spectral Barron functions by deep ReLU neural networks

  Songqiu Ma, Yunfei Yang

  We study how well deep neural networks approximate and learn spectral Barron functions. Recent studies have shown that these function classes can be efficiently approximated by shallow neural networks without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. We complement these results by providing new approximation bounds for deep networks with ReLU activation and establishing the minimax rates for learning these function classes. Specifically, we show that $d$-dimensional spectral Barron functions with smoothness index $s>0$ can be approximated by deep ReLU neural networks with approximation rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}} (S^{-\frac{1}{2}-\frac{s}{d}})$, where $S$ denotes the number of nonzero parameters in the network. Using this approximation result, we further show that deep ReLU neural networks can learn spectral Barron functions in a fast rate $n^{-\frac{d+2s}{2d+2s}}$ with $n$ training samples. Finally, we prove that this convergence rate is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors.

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Synchronous Multi-view Neural Diffusion

  Yongquan Shi, Weijun Huang, Yueyang Pi, Wendi Zhao, Yiqing Shi +1

  Multi-view learning seeks to learn more comprehensive representations by exploiting the complementarity and consistency across diverse modalities or views. However, existing multi-view fusion strategies treat intra- and inter-view fusion as independent stages, without simultaneously considering the evolution within views and the dependency across views. Such an asynchronous fusion paradigm inevitably constrains cross-view interactions due to conflicting view-specific structural inductive biases. As a result, information flow is prone to distortion and compression along intermediate pathways, confining the model to learn within a restricted solution space. To address this, we propose Synchronous Multi-view Neural Diffusion (SynMDiff), which conceptualizes the multi-view feature space as a unified dynamical system driven by a diffusion process. By modeling the diffusion flow across arbitrary dyadic feature interactions in a joint space, SynMDiff enables the concurrent and adaptive intra- and inter-view information fusion. While a direct implementation of this synchronized mechanism incurs prohibitive computational costs, we further introduce an energy-based topological sampling…

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• arXiv cs.ROSep 30

  Make Code as Policy Great Again: Frontier Agents Write, Call, and Evolve Robot Tools

  Shijia Ge, Alex Zhou, Jianshu Zeng, Yexing Wan, Di Wu +10

  Frontier models can control robots, but reasoning through every reach, grasp, and retreat makes manipulation slow and token-intensive. We revisit code as policy with a different division of labor: models build executable tools, code handles multi-phase motions, and models decide what to do next. We introduce URAI (Universal Robot-Agent Interface), which couples a programming agent that constructs robot tools with an execution agent that uses them in a feedback loop. The programming agent writes reusable and task-specific tools from task intent and refines them through execution feedback and human guidance. The execution agent selects and parameterizes these tools from current observations; each call runs a complete motion locally before returning control to the agent. Unlike delegating subsequent decisions to a generated program, this design retains model-level decision-making between tool executions. Validated tool revisions persist across episodes without updating foundation-model weights, and a shared GUI and API make the same tools available to humans and agents. Across five RoboDojo tasks and four frozen execution agents, URAI raises aggregate success from 18.0% to 53.0%…

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  Evidence First, Arithmetic Second: A System Report and Failure Analysis for DocSem

  Divya Godara, Sachin Gupta

  EVICALC, our system for the DocSem shared task, achieved 8.61% joint accuracy on 1,730 tasks in the official final test evaluation. It reads a PDF, selects a passage, asks a language model to write an arithmetic expression, and evaluates that expression in local code. Saved intermediate results support inspection of failures. A separate public-validation run achieved 92.17% answer accuracy and 1.00 evidence F1. The configurations and metrics differ, so these scores are not a controlled comparison. Our manual, post-hoc analysis is descriptive: in one inspected case, optical character recognition (OCR) and block grouping merged the relevant passage into another block, and the system answered from unrelated text. An exploratory study of reading page images on 100 documents returned evidence identifiers for only 22 documents. These descriptive findings motivate further evaluation; they do not establish the causes of the overall score.

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• arXiv physics.med-phSep 30

  An Uncertainty-Guided Digital Twin Framework for Online Adaptive Proton Therapy in Head and Neck Cancer: A Feasibility Study

  Yizhou Wu, Ryan J. Sanford, Huiqiao Xie, Jie Ding, Shupeng Chen +10

  Objective: Head and neck (HN) proton therapy spans six to seven weeks of anatomical change, while offline replanning takes about a week. We present an uncertainty-guided digital twin (UGDT) framework that forecasts treatment-day anatomy before treatment and evaluate whether it generates online adaptive proton therapy (APT) plans of clinical quality. Approach: A library of 302 longitudinal deformations from 88 previously treated HN patients was transported onto each new patient's treatment planning CT (TPCT) using two-step multi-atlas deformable image registration (DIR) built on a pretrained CT foundation model, generating about 284 predicted CTs (pdCTs) with contours per patient. Dispersion of propagated clinical target volume (CTV) contours defined a patient-specific robust margin. In ten patients, the quality assurance CT (QACT) triggering a replan represented treatment-day anatomy, and the physician-approved replan was the baseline. The pdCT most similar to the QACT (pdCT-H) and one from the lowest quartile (pdCT-L) were planned to within about 5% of baseline plan quality, forward-calculated on the QACT, and reoptimized to generate online APT plans. Main results: pdCT plans…

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• arXiv cs.IRSep 30

  RouteRec: Behavior-Guided Sparse Routing for Sequential Recommendation

  Junyeong Song, Jaemin Yoo

  Sessionized interaction histories contain behavioral patterns that can improve sequential recommendation. However, existing models process all sessions through the same parameterized blocks, regardless of their behavioral differences. Mixture of Experts (MoE) enables conditional computation, but it leaves open what should guide expert allocation. We propose RouteRec, a sequential recommender that uses observed session behavior as the routing criterion. RouteRec summarizes four types of behavioral evidence from sessionized histories: interaction tempo, item-group focus, repetition and carryover, and popularity tendency. It uses these cues to route computation at macro, mid, and micro scopes. Cue-derived scores first select expert groups; within each selected group, the current backbone state then refines expert selection. Across six public datasets and 18 dataset-metric combinations, RouteRec ranks first in 12 and second in three, yielding the best overall average rank of 1.61 compared with 4.11 for the next-best baseline. Additional analyses suggest that the behavioral cues guide expert allocation beyond added capacity and produce routing patterns aligned with observed behavior.…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 30

  C-STRIDE: An Observation-Driven AI Digital Twin for Predicting Basin-Wide Flood Fields from Sparse Stream-Gauge Histories

  Yanjie Tong, Phillip Si, Yuan Qiu, Peng Chen

  Emergency managers need to know where floodwater is, how deep it is, and how it will change over the coming hours across an entire river basin. During a flood, however, real-time measurements come from only a handful of stream gauges, and high-resolution hydrodynamic models are too costly to rerun each time new data arrive or to run as large ensembles. We present C-STRIDE, an observation-driven AI digital twin that turns short records from a few stream gauges, together with terrain and rainfall, into basin-wide maps of water depth and extends these predictions up to a day ahead. It is trained on simulations from a calibrated two-dimensional hydrodynamic model and needs no separate data-assimilation step. In the Des Plaines River basin near Chicago, six gauges inform predictions over 4.2 million 30-m grid cells. Terrain improves the predictions most, rainfall keeps errors from growing over longer horizons, and together they reduce errors by about 40% compared with gauge records alone. When future rainfall is known, errors remain near 15% one day ahead, compared with nearly 40% without rainfall. Given real instead of simulated gauge records, the model shifts its predictions toward…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  When Integral Meets Decomposition: A Signal-Level Self-Supervised Feature Decompose Paradigm for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

  Zeyu Wang, Jiayu Wang, Haiyu Song, Haoran Duan

  Multimodal image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a high-quality fused image and support downstream tasks. Recently, feature decomposition has become an important paradigm by separating source images into common and modality-specific unique features. However, existing methods lack clear supervision because ground-truth (GT) decomposition feature maps are unavailable. They usually combine multiple image-level metrics as losses, which are inherently incomplete and may conflict since each pixel couples attributes such as texture, edge, and contour. To address this, we propose a 1D signal-level self-supervised feature decomposition paradigm. Our core insight is to reformulate feature decomposition from unclear 2D image-level supervision into an integral-driven 1D signal-level optimization problem. This objective-level reformulation uses the 1D signal form to compute the integral constraint. The decomposer is optimized by the integral area between common and original signals, enabling more stable optimization with a clear optimization objective. Our model follows a two-stage SSL framework. Stage I designs dual pretext tasks for…

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  The Invisible Language Tax: Token Premiums of French and Regional Languages in 2026 LLM Tokenizers, and a French-Optimized Prototype

  Thomas Serval

  LLM services are billed per token and context windows are measured in tokens, yet the number of tokens needed for the same content varies across languages. We measure this token premium on seven tokenizers of widely used 2026 models (OpenAI o200k, Llama 3, Qwen3, DeepSeek V3/V4, Gemma 3, Mistral Tekken, and the Claude generation-5 tokenizer via Anthropic's counting API) on NTREX-128 (124 non-English reference translations) and on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for regional languages. French requires 31% to 58% more tokens than English, whereas Simplified Chinese ranges from 5% fewer to 40% more and is cheaper than French on six of the seven tokenizers. Regional and overseas languages of France pay roughly 1.6 to 3.3 times the English count. We discuss how history re-sending, tiered pricing and fixed context windows amplify the absolute gap in agentic use. In a controlled experiment (BPE, Europarl, 50k vocabulary), adding French to tokenizer training data quickly reduces the premium, with diminishing returns and a growing cost for English. Finally, we present Baracoda FR v1.2, a byte-level BPE prototype with Tekken's vocabulary size. On a final test of six corpora never…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Not all solutions are created equal: An analytical dissociation of functional and representational similarity in deep linear neural networks

  Lukas Braun, Erin Grant, Andrew M. Saxe

  A foundational principle of connectionism is that perception, action, and cognition emerge from parallel computations among simple, interconnected units that generate and rely on neural representations. Accordingly, researchers employ multivariate pattern analysis to decode and compare the neural codes of artificial and biological networks, aiming to uncover their functions. However, there is limited analytical understanding of how a network's representation and function relate, despite this being essential to any quantitative notion of underlying function or functional similarity. We address this question using analysable two-layer linear networks and numerical simulations in non-linear networks. We find that function and representation are dissociated, allowing representational similarity without functional similarity and vice versa. Further, we show that neither robustness to input noise nor the level of generalization error constrain representations to the task. In contrast, networks robust to parameter noise have limited representational flexibility and must employ task-specific representations. Our findings suggest that representational alignment reflects computational…

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  Settle: Learning When to Stop Reasoning

  Ryan Brown, Zihao Fu, Chris Russell

  Reasoning models often continue generating after their answers have settled. Settle learns when to stop from answer stability in completed traces. It trains the existing end-of-reasoning token while keeping other predictions close to the base model, and requires only ordinary decoding at inference. On MATH-500 with Qwen3-4B, Settle reduces token count by 40% with a 0.5-percentage-point decrease in accuracy. It gains 6.16 percentage points over supervised fine-tuning on the same traces shortened at their first stable answer, at nearly identical token counts. Its stopping score predicts whether a correct answer will remain correct. Settle extends the accuracy-token-count Pareto frontier of the evaluated stopping methods.

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  When Clipping Reverses Correction: Failure Dynamics of Pointwise Forward-KL On-Policy Self-Distillation

  Di Huang, Hao Li, Yixin Chen, Fuhai Li

  On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own generated responses using feedback from the same model conditioned on privileged information. On mathematical reasoning, the original OPSD study finds that stylistic tokens can dominate the training signal over math-related tokens, and that pointwise clipping of the forward KL objective stabilizes training. Pointwise clipping caps each vocabulary-wise forward KL term at a fixed threshold before summing over the vocabulary. Follow-up studies have adopted this clipping, but its effect on training has not been directly examined. In matched training runs differing only in whether clipping is applied, we observe that clipped runs produce substantially more repetitions that persist to the end of the response than their unclipped counterparts. We trace this failure to the clipped objective. We prove that the clipped objective can fail to correct the student toward the teacher and can instead push clipped and unclipped token probabilities away from its teacher. Our training runs agree with this analysis: inside repetitions, the clipped student places less probability than its teacher on leaving the repetition, and more on…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Anchoring Adversarial Trajectories to Data Manifolds: A Bilevel Transfer Optimization Framework

  Yaohua Liu, Yifan Guo, Jiaxin Gao

  A key bottleneck in adversarial transfer is a trajectory-level geometric disconnect: ambient gradients often drift away from the intrinsic data manifold, causing surrogate-specific overfitting. To rectify this, we propose Manifold Anchored Bilevel Transfer (MABT), a unified framework that anchors adversarial trajectories to the shared semantic subspace. MABT introduces a relaxed manifold-anchoring operator as a semantic rectifier to suppress off-manifold noise. With this constraint, we cast transfer attack generation as a distributional bilevel optimization problem that learns a geometry-aligned initialization by minimizing expected transfer risk under a surrogate uncertainty distribution. We further develop a Hessian-free solver with linear-time complexity to handle the resulting hierarchy. Experiments demonstrate improved transferability for 10 baseline attackers across 28 attack configurations, diverse victim architectures, and defense mechanisms.

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Smaller Models, Better Rejects: Preference Distillation Scaling

  Rui Cai, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Jincheng Cao, Han Yu +13

  Preference distillation typically treats a teacher response as preferred and the student's own response as rejected. This assumes that self-generated failures are the most informative negatives and that rejects must come from a model at least as large as the student, making generation costly at scale. We find neither assumption holds: across students from 7B to 72B, smaller frozen models generate rejects with less inference compute yet train stronger students than self-generated rejects, before and after sequence-level knowledge distillation, on code generation and mathematical reasoning. To explain this result, we derive a finite-horizon utility bound for Direct Preference Optimization in a linearized feature model. The bound characterizes favorable reject distributions and motivates three interventions. First, mixing rejects from smaller and student-scale models improves performance as the smaller model's share increases. Second, reassigning rejects to other prompts and shuffling their code tokens still outperform length-matched gibberish, showing that task structure contributes to reject utility. Third, selecting candidates with lower likelihood under the reference policy…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  MeshOctave: Vertex Split-and-Rewire Cascades for Native Mesh Generation

  Junkai Lin, Tianhao Zhao, Hang Long, Huipeng Guo, Jielei Zhang +8

  Generating compact, artist-style meshes with explicit topology typically relies on autoregressive models which incur prohibitive sequential per-token costs, or continuous flow models that depend on heuristic connectivity decoders. Next-scale generation paradigms offer a compelling alternative by enabling parallel intra-scale token prediction and coarse-to-fine refinement from global structure to local topology; yet, existing methods derive hierarchical scales via progressive mesh simplification and invert them sequentially. This eliminates intra-scale parallelism and scales generation steps linearly with face count. In this paper, we propose MeshOctave, which instead defines scale through dyadic spatial grid resolutions, framing coarsening as a deterministic collapse that merges vertices sharing a voxel cell and inherits connectivity. Its inverse operation, split-and-rewire, determines which octant sub-vertices are instantiated for each coarse face and resolves local connectivity using discrete structural tokens. These per-face operations require no serialization, each scale transition is modeled as an unordered set that adds one bit of coordinate precision, naturally supporting…

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• arXiv cs.ROSep 30

  Sparse-WAM: Accelerating World Action Models via Action-Guided Sparse Imagination

  Xinling Xie, Haodong Wang, Jiazhi Mi, Zhiming Liu, Zicong Hong +6

  World-action models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video models to improve generalization in robot control by jointly predicting future visual states and actions. This capability comes at a substantial inference cost, as dense future-frame tokens are repeatedly processed during denoising. Prior methods address this by token pruning that prioritizes visual fidelity to reduce denoising costs in video diffusion models. However, these methods do not use action relevance to determine which future-frame tokens to retain during joint denoising in WAMs. In this paper, we propose Sparse-WAM, a training-free framework for action-guided sparse imagination that selectively processes future-frame tokens to accelerate WAM inference. We observe substantial overlap in the spatial distribution of attention from action tokens to future-frame tokens (action-to-future attention) between consecutive denoising steps, despite continued updates to the future representations. Motivated by this, we develop Action-Guided Token Selection to retain frame-specific action-relevant regions together with cross-frame context. However, a naive implementation can incur attention-scoring and token-packing overhead that…

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