Research

• Interface lock-in in multimodal spatial reasoning1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Specializing a model on one spatial task (e.g., side detection) degrades performance on others (e.g., distance estimation), limiting general spatial intelligence.

  • ChronoReplay: One Answer Interface Is Not Enough for Streaming Spatial Intelligenceraises · addresses
• Lack of unified evaluation for work agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks fail to measure reliable work execution across tools, workflows, and open environments, hindering progress in agent systems.

  • Work Agents: Systems, Capabilities, and Optimizationraises · addresses
• Memory tax in long-horizon agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Dedicated memory systems often underperform naive retrieval, as reorganizing information can obscure evidence and reduce net value.

  • Memory Tax: Dissecting the Net Value of Agent Memoryraises · addresses
• Credit assignment in diffusion language models1 paper raises it · 2 address it

  Iterative denoising in DLMs makes it hard to attribute rewards to individual tokens, limiting reinforcement learning effectiveness.

  • DTCA: Denoising Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Modelsraises · addresses
  • Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agentsaddresses
• Grounded significance testing for temporal hypotheses1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Language models assert temporal patterns without rigorous statistical validation, risking incorrect conclusions in high-stakes domains like healthcare.

  • Testimony from Timelines: Evidence-Grounded Significance Testing of Temporal Clinical Hypothesesraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  From Prompts to Trees: Effective LLM-Guided Tree Generation for Few-Shot Tabular Classification

  Yue Qiu, Zekang Du, Yiqun Diao, Bingsheng He, Qinbin Li

  While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich world knowledge and impressive generalization capabilities, their direct application to tabular data classification is hindered by high inference costs and limited interpretability. In contrast, decision trees are fast and transparent but often underperform in low-data regimes. In this work, we propose a novel framework that bridges these paradigms by distilling LLM knowledge into interpretable decision trees under a few-shot learning setting. Instead of directly prompting the LLM to generate full trees, which is often unstable and inefficient, we develop a three-stage paradigm that prompts the LLM to generate rules and organize the rules into a tree. Experiments on multiple real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and interpretability with significantly lower prompting overhead compared to existing baselines.

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• arXiv cs.SEOct 7

  Why Software Engineering Is Indispensable in the Age of Coding Agents

  Alfonso Fuggetta

  Can AI make Software Engineering (SE) -- the discipline -- obsolete? And can it make software engineers -- the professionals -- redundant? This paper argues that the rise of capable AI coding agents makes SE and software engineers essential, not obsolete: the missing foundation without which AI-assisted development produces misleadingly plausible, unverifiable, and ultimately untrustworthy software. Three structural properties of large language models (probabilistic generation, agnosticism, and semantic statelessness) create a structural vacuum that no amount of training can eliminate. Filling it requires four knowledge levers: methodological knowledge, domain knowledge, design choices, and process choices. All four must be reified as persistent artifacts, and each requires the software engineer as methodologist, mediator, and custodian.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  Masked Feature Encoding for Large-Scale Whole Slide Image Representation

  Haoyu He, Basile Tessier-Cloutier, Yang Wang, Mahdi S. Hosseini

  Whole slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology follows a multiple instance learning (MIL) pipeline where patch embeddings are extracted independently and aggregated for slide-level prediction, but within-slide variance from staining, scanner, and local texture can overwhelm the discriminative signal. We propose Masked Feature Encoding for Multiple Instance Learning (MFE-MIL), a feature-space masking framework that trains a lightweight MLP adapter jointly with a window-based masked reconstruction branch and a MIL classification head. The two objectives are complementary. Classification guides the adapter to suppress within-slide patch variance, while window-based masked reconstruction provides an auxiliary regularizer for the adapted features without using patch coordinates, coordinate graphs, or segmentation preprocessing. The raster patch-extraction order is used only as a weak implicit prior. At inference, the decoder is removed, leaving only the adapter and MIL head. Across CAMELYON16/17, PANDA, and TCGA-BRCA with four diverse encoders, MFE-MIL improves ACC/F1 for nearly all tested aggregator-encoder settings and AUC in most, outperforms coordinate-based spatial…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Evaluating Sequence Assembly Strategies for Differentially Private Synthetic Time-Series Forecasting

  Guoxiong Long, Huizhen Huang, Qikun Cai, Tao Huang, Chen Hou

  Differentially private time-series generators commonly produce fixed-length synthetic windows, whereas downstream forecasting models often require long continuous training sequences. How these windows are assembled after generation can therefore alter the effective synthetic data presented to a forecaster, even when the trained generator remains unchanged. We study this post-generation sequence assembly process by systematically varying overlap rates and window-weighting schemes and evaluating the resulting sequences in terms of boundary continuity, statistical and temporal fidelity, and Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real (TSTR) forecasting utility. Across four types of public datasets (ETTh1, ETTm1, Weather, and Appliances) and five forecasting models, the results reveal a clear forecaster-dependent assembly principle: downstream TSTR utility is jointly shaped by the forecaster, overlap rate, and window-weighting scheme, leading to distinct assembly preferences across forecasting models. Increased overlap generally improves boundary continuity, but improvements in continuity or individual fidelity diagnostics do not consistently reduce forecasting error, indicating that these…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Finite-Sample Approximation of Hessian-Guided Perturbed Wasserstein Gradient Flows

  Ryotaro Kawata, Atsushi Nitanda, Taiji Suzuki

  Wasserstein gradient flow extends gradient descent to probability measures. Its Hessian-guided perturbed variant (PWGF) adds Gaussian perturbations to escape saddle points in nonconvex problems. We investigate when its approximation by finitely many interacting particles remains accurate over growing time horizons. Our analysis retains the curvature accumulated along the population-driven reference path: negative curvature can amplify approximation errors, while subsequent positive curvature can damp their influence. This captures favorable scenarios in which temporary instability is compatible with accurate tracking over growing horizons. Under regularity assumptions and a prescribed common perturbation schedule, we prove particle and objective-value tracking bounds on a high-probability event for reference paths satisfying explicit conditions on accumulated curvature. To handle state-dependent Gaussian jumps, we construct a population-first coupling that preserves the reference particles' conditional independence and reduces jump errors to covariance comparison. We verify the conditions in a variance-plus-cosine model, where curvature recovery yields a growing-horizon tracking…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 7

  RoBART: Bayesian Additive Regression Trees with Tree-Specific Rotations

  Jeongung Heo, Seonghyun Jeong

  Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) can require many splits to approximate boundaries misaligned with the predictor axes. RoBART assigns each tree a rotation shared by all internal nodes, retaining axis-aligned splits in rotated coordinates and constant leaves. We jointly propose a Givens rotation sequence and cutpoints on the resulting grid by Metropolis-Hastings and establish reversibility with respect to the conditional posterior with leaf means integrated out. For additive functions with component-specific rotations and anisotropic Hölder smoothness, we prove posterior contraction in empirical $L_2$ distance and for the noise standard deviation. Under the stated prior, design, and grid conditions, with fixed numbers of predictors, trees, and components and no more components than trees, the rate is a sum of componentwise rates determined by smoothness and the number of rotated coordinates used. We also establish a posterior contraction lower bound showing that there exist functions for which RoBART adapts to the intrinsic dimension but axis-aligned BART does not.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Edge Accuracy Is Not Enough: Why Dynamics-Learned Structure Fails to Transfer to Inverse Problems

  Nicholas Tan Jerome, Fangnian Wang

  A natural strategy for inverse problems with scarce labelled data is to transfer relational structure learned from abundant forward-simulation data. We show this strategy fails systematically, even when it satisfies the standard theoretical justification for why structure should help. We prove that approximate structure provides estimation-error benefits whenever the edge error satisfies $Δ< n^2 - kn$, reducing sample complexity from $O(n^2)$ to $O(kn+Δ)$. Structure learned via Neural Relational Inference (NRI) from dynamics prediction satisfies this condition, yet on a source-localisation task across 180 CFD-simulated hydrogen-leak scenarios and 180 acoustic scenarios, it degrades performance by 116% and 201% relative to a flexible, task-optimised attention baseline, while a physics-based prior (Green's function) degrades by only 69-72%. Four independent lines of evidence show this is not a tuning failure: NRI improves only 0.5% when given 18x more training data (versus 16.6% for the task-optimised baseline, $p<0.001$); performance is insensitive to the NRI edge threshold across a wide range; the dynamics-learned graph overlaps the task-optimal graph on only 6% of edges; and two…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  OrthoGen: A Generative Orthogonal Learner for Time-Varying Treatments

  Tomàs Garriga, Valentyn Melnychuk, Konstantin Hess, Eduard Serrahima de Cambra, Axel Brando +2

  Estimating conditional distributional potential outcomes (CDPOs) over time is important in medicine (e.g., to estimate patient-specific risks under different treatment sequences). However, this task is challenging because of time-varying confounding, yet existing adjustment strategies for this task are limited. In this paper, we aim to learn CDPOs under time-varying treatments using flexible generative models. Our contributions are two-fold. (1) We introduce a tailored adjustment strategy for our setting, namely, generative recursive g-computation. Our adjustment strategy recursively propagates full conditional outcome distributions rather than conditional means, modeling the variables of interest directly rather than full trajectories. Building on our adjustment strategy, we formulate simple generative learners for CDPO estimation. However, these learners can be sensitive to nuisance estimation errors, which motivates an orthogonal learner. (2) We thus introduce OrthoGen, a Neyman-orthogonal and doubly robust generative learner. Importantly, we show that OrthoGen further achieves rate double robustness and quasi-oracle efficiency under suitable conditions. Our learners are…

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• arXiv cs.SDOct 7

  CARES: A Controlled Synthetic Benchmark of Speaker Reactions to Sound

  Marcel Gibier, Thomas Thebaud, Olivier Boëffard, Jean-François Bonastre

  Automatic audio scene description turns a recording into a text account of a situation. One difficulty is deciding which elements of the audio should be kept, since a description cannot include them all. Annotators disagree about this, making a ground truth hard to obtain. In this work, we first define the ground truth, then generate the data. We focus on audio events and define sound salience with a simple rule: a sound is salient when a speaker audibly reacts to it. For scale and variety, a controlled set of scenarios fixes the ground truth, and a language model writes the dialogues. The resulting corpus, CARES, contains 10,000 two-speaker scenes. We then benchmark six audio-language models on three tasks: identifying the scene, tagging the sounds present, and classifying reactions. We show that these models hear the sounds but miss how the speakers react to them.

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• arXiv math.GTOct 7

  Computations of the slice genus and the unknotting number of links via machine learning

  Yutong Dai, Oliver Hayman, András Juhász, Ludovico Morellato

  Links are disjoint unions of circles smoothly embedded in $S^3$. We use reinforcement learning and Bayesian optimisation to obtain new upper bounds on several link invariants that are not known to be algorithmically computable: the slice genus and the unknotting number for links, and the strong slice genus for algebraically split links. We also compute lower bounds using known invariants. Combining the upper and lower bounds, we obtain new exact values in many cases. Our unknotting agents can reproduce the non-additivity of the unknotting number for several counterexamples due to Brittenham and Hermiller, in some cases finding new unknotting trajectories.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  How to train your model organism

  Xilin Wang, David Bau, Byron C. Wallace

  Model organisms of alignment-relevant behaviors (e.g., backdoors, sycophancy, spurious correlations) have emerged as a key tool for evaluating whitebox interpretability techniques. We argue that the prevailing practice of training model organisms to a single objective of installing the target behavior is insufficient and propose validating model organisms with respect to three objectives with associated metrics: target-behavior installation, general-capability preservation (i.e., parametric knowledge, chat quality), and output naturalness (i.e., CoT and activations). We re-visit two publicly released organism suites using this validation framework and show that (1) chat quality and CoT naturalness degrade substantially across training recipes, and (2) validation metrics predict how well interpretability methods recover the installed behavior, e.g., a logit lens readout covaries with an organism's general capabilities. We introduce a multi-objective training approach based on model merging to train more realistic model organisms. Finally, on a new suite of model organisms targeting demographic biases in clinical reasoning, we compare training recipes and find that DPO training…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 7

  GAGR-Lab: Evaluating Joint Spatial-Geometric and Analytic Function Reasoning

  Jingyao Zhang, Yun Li, Lu Han

  Joint spatial-geometric and analytic function reasoning requires translating a perceived spatial configuration into a symbolic function whose executed curve satisfies geometric constraints. We present GAGR-Lab, a framework for measuring this capability through Cartesian game scenes, explicit function semantics, and authoritative Rust trajectory execution. It distinguishes spatial perception, metric grounding, geometric relations, function interpretation, function construction, and constrained synthesis. We specify four configurable scene-difficulty presets and a prospective 24-cell diagnostic design, while reporting only the subset actually evaluated. A bounded pilot of one hosted model (Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct) using two API credentials as execution replicas yields 72 balanced games with 432 attempts, 429 valid provider responses, and no target hits; exploratory ordinary-function prompt variants also fail to hit, while the structured localization interface yields no scoreable outputs. A privileged analytic search control independently succeeds on 600 directional cases from 300 generated scenes, with exact repeatability and 1,200 successful vertical-reflection or…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Robust Decentralized Fairness Auditing

  Sayan Biswas, Jade Garcia Bourrée, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Palak, Martijn de Vos

  Emerging legislation requires large language models (LLMs) to be audited for compliance with regulatory standards, particularly fairness. Such black-box audits typically assume a single auditor with access to a large, representative set of queries. In practice, it can be difficult for an auditor to obtain such a query set, but multiple auditors can together cover the relevant demographic groups by auditing the LLM collaboratively with their individual query sets. However, relying on multiple auditors raises a fundamental trust problem, as they may act on behalf of the LLM provider to portray a misleading appearance of fairness, i.e., fairwashing. We propose Auditopus, a novel approach for robust decentralized fairness auditing. In Auditopus, auditing proceeds in rounds without a central server. In each round, every auditor issues a fixed number of queries to the LLM, and sends only cumulative statistics vectors of its query results to other auditors instead of sensitive queries in clear. The fairness of the audited LLM is then estimated by aggregating all the vectors. We show theoretically and empirically that even a single adversarial auditor in the network can steer this…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  VolCo: Volumetric Contact for High-Fidelity Human Grasp Generation

  Zhuo Chen, Yihua Cheng, Aleš Leonardis, Hyung Jin Chang

  Accurate contact modeling is fundamental to understanding hand-object interaction, yet existing contact representations are typically restricted to object surfaces and rely on hand-crafted rules to recover contact details, leading to severe penetrations and implausible results. To better exploit the rich detail in motion-capture data, we introduce Volumetric Contact (VolCo), a representation that expands surface points to a set of 3D volumetric grids. VolCo encodes 3D contact that allows precise hand part recovery, and is organized in an inherent hierarchy: local contact details within each volume and global hand geometry across all volumes. Our framework, VolCoDiff, employs two modules to capture local and global features following this hierarchy. For local contact details, we use a 3D variational autoencoder to model the possible hand configurations conditioned on the local object signed distance field (SDF). For global hand geometry, we design a prior-guided diffusion model that learns the distribution of compressed latent features aggregated from the volumetric grids. We evaluate our method on two benchmark datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in penetration…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 7

  HuLiGen: Human LiDAR Generation from Parametric Body Models

  Salma Galaaoui, Nermin Samet, David Picard

  LiDAR point clouds of humans are extremely expensive to collect and annotate, thus represent a scarce resource that hinders the development of human analysis using this modality. To alleviate this scarcity, prior work relies on simulated human LiDAR, but such samples do not fully reflect the geometry and sensing characteristics of real observations. In contrast, we introduce HuLiGen, a generative model that generates human LiDAR point clouds from a parametric body model, using a point transformer trained with a flow-matching objective. We show that our generated point clouds are closer to the real capture distribution. Using HuLiGen to generate synthetic data, we propose a synthetic-only pretraining scheme for LiDAR-based HPE that achieves state-of-the-art performance, with even larger gains in low-annotation and low-data regimes, where MPJPE is reduced by up to 50%. Code, models and generated samples are available at https://github.com/valeoai/HuLiGen.

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 7

  Broadly Applicable Approximate MCMC for Switching Stochastic Differential Equations Using Uniformization and Time-Conditioned Factorized Neural Likelihood Estimation

  Shion Hosoda, Michiaki Hamada

  Switching stochastic differential equations (SSDEs) describe continuous-time dynamics whose parameters switch according to a latent regime process that follows a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). By allowing dynamics to change between regimes, SSDEs represent heterogeneous system behavior and have been applied across diverse fields. However, Bayesian inference for SSDEs remains difficult, and existing SSDE inference methods have limited applicability, with restrictions such as noise-free observations, univariate states, linear drift, or state-independent diffusion. In this study, we propose an approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler for SSDEs using uniformization and factorized neural likelihood estimation (FNLE), a simulation-based inference method. Uniformization provides an exact representation of the CTMC but requires SDE transition densities over arbitrary time intervals. We approximate these densities by training a time-conditioned FNLE model. The resulting sampler is broadly applicable to SSDEs without requiring analytically tractable transition densities. In synthetic-data experiments, our method recovered regime paths and parameters for three SSDE models for…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 7

  Universal Local Error and Realized Amplification for the First-Order EDM Predictor

  Nicolas Brosse, Arnak S. Dalalyan

  We analyze the first-order deterministic diffusion sampler of Karras et al. (2022), termed EDM, in 2-Wasserstein distance by separating two sources of error: local discretization error and its amplification by subsequent learned steps. We prove that local error admits a universal bound: for any data distribution with finite second moment, the one-step discretization error is quadratic in the step size, with an explicit constant that does not depend on the data distribution. Error propagation, in contrast, depends on the learned network. At high noise levels, we exploit the network parametrization of EDM to derive an explicit contraction criterion. At low noise levels, we measure propagation through the amplification realized on the distributions transported by the sampler; this realized amplification can be arbitrarily smaller than the worst-case Lipschitz constant. This analysis yields an $O(e^{Λ_K}/K)$ global discretization error for $K$ sampling steps, where $Λ_K$ is the low-noise log-amplification. Experiments on a one-dimensional Gaussian mixture show how measured amplification accounts for slower error decay on finite sampling grids. Diagnostics on a pretrained CIFAR-10…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 7

  Kinetic Langevin Meets Split Gibbs: Accelerated Posterior Sampling for Imaging Inverse Problems with Diffusion Priors

  Dai Hai Nguyen, Duc Dung Nguyen

  Split Gibbs sampling (SGS) is a popular framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian imaging inverse problems. It decouples a Gaussian data-fidelity term from a complex prior through an auxiliary variable, so the data variable is updated exactly and only the prior-side conditional is hard to sample. Existing samplers treat this conditional in one of two ways. Plug-and-play SGS runs a multi-step diffusion denoiser at every iteration, which is expensive and lacks non-asymptotic guarantees. Langevin-within-SGS takes cheap overdamped Langevin steps but needs many iterations. We propose RED-KLwSGS, which keeps the exact Gaussian update for the data variable and updates the auxiliary variable with underdamped (kinetic) Langevin diffusions driven by a one-shot denoising score, at the same per-iteration cost as Langevin-within-SGS. We prove non-asymptotic Wasserstein-2 convergence in continuous and discrete time for strongly log-concave priors. We also introduce Joint-RED-KLwSGS, which applies kinetic Langevin diffusions to both variables. Experiments with Denoising diffusion probabilistic models as diffusion priors on FFHQ and ImageNet datasets show faster convergence and high-quality…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 7

  Pre-training of Bayesian Optimization Algorithm through Bayesian Optimization

  Satoshi Katayama, Shoyo Hunt, Shintaro Masuda, Masayuki Karasuyama

  Bayesian optimization (BO) is widely used as a standard approach for expensive black-box optimization. However, BO algorithms often involve parameters that must be specified in advance, and their performance can strongly depend on these choices. We propose a framework for optimizing such parameters using sample paths drawn from a Gaussian process (GP) inferred from the information available at the start of BO. We use cumulative regret as the performance metric for a BO algorithm. By running the BO algorithm on the generated sample paths, we obtain an empirical estimate of its expected cumulative regret for a given parameter configuration. Optimizing this estimate allows us to identify parameter configurations that, given the currently available information, are expected to achieve low cumulative regret. Since this parameter optimization is itself a black-box optimization problem, we employ another BO procedure to solve it, which we refer to as outer BO. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively select parameter configurations that achieve strong performance among a range of candidate configurations.

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 7

  Agentic AI-Assisted Modeling for Production Scheduling: Assessment in Constraint Programming

  Ángel Sánchez-Fernández, Javier Pernas-Álvarez, Diego Crespo-Pereira

  Developing optimization models for production scheduling requires substantial expert effort. Research on large language models (LLMs) has followed two directions: specialized approaches for automated modeling, mostly for mixed-integer linear programming, which often rely on dedicated training or problem-specific architectures that limit industrial deployment; and agentic artificial intelligence for operational decision support, which generally assumes that the optimization model already exists. This study bridges both directions by assessing whether general-purpose LLMs, orchestrated as agents without task-specific training, can formulate and implement constraint programming models from natural-language problem descriptions. Singleagent and multi-agent architectures are integrated with a Model Context Protocol server that provides context-aware retrieval of solver documentation to mitigate hallucinations during implementation. Both are compared with a direct LLM baseline on six industry-oriented problems covering flow-shop, job-shop, flexible job-shop and resource-constrained warehouse scheduling, using three LLMs and assessing modeling accuracy, execution success, latency and…

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• AI tutors17+41.7%
• Character recognition OCR12+20.0%
• Channel state information14+7.7%
• Electrocardiogram ecg380.0%
• Supervised & diffusion models98−13.3%
• Machine learned interatomic38−15.6%
• Stochastic gradient descent26−21.2%
• Teacher policy distillation182−23.8%