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 do not reliably measure how agents execute complex, stateful, or open-ended digital work, making progress hard to track.

  • 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 effective reinforcement learning.

  • 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.CROct 6

  HE-OFT: Privacy-Preserving One-Shot Federated Fine-Tuning under Homomorphic Encryption

  Halil İbrahim Kanpak, Sinem Sav, Alptekin Küpçü

  Many organizations adapt large pretrained models to their own tasks by fine-tuning on private data. Several of these parties often hold data for the same task and wish to fine-tune a model together without pooling that data. Federated learning (FL) enables joint fine-tuning, but reconstruction attacks on shared intermediate values (the model or its gradients) remain a privacy risk. A one-shot protocol that exchanges one encrypted contribution exposes no intermediate value. Such a protocol still gives the trained model to every participant, which is not permitted where the model is a regulated or proprietary asset. We present HE-OFT, the first cryptographically secure one-shot federated fine-tuning protocol in which no party receives the trained model. Each client fine-tunes a low-rank adapter and a classifier head on a frozen public backbone and keeps the adapter. The client uploads one encrypted head displacement, which the server combines under multiparty CKKS and never decrypts. A quorum of clients returns only the predicted label to the querier. On four text classification tasks and one vision task, HE-OFT reaches 61 to 79 per cent accuracy, against 20 to 48 per cent for a…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  MASC: A Multi-Agent Self-Calibration Framework with Latent Construct Alignment for Consistent Client Role-Playing in Psychological Counseling

  Shixin Peng, Kun Jiang, Jiaxing Zheng, Qihao Yang, Jingying Chen

  Large language models are increasingly used to simulate clients for counselor training and psychological counseling research, but reliable simulation requires clients to remain psychologically coherent across extended interactions. Existing role-playing methods largely rely on static profile prompts and may exhibit persona drift, unrealistic cooperativeness, or inconsistent psychological states, communicative actions, and emotions. Existing evaluations also lack a unified testbed for both stable client characteristics and evolving psychological dynamics. We propose MASC, a Multi-Agent Self-Calibration framework with latent construct alignment for consistent client role-playing in psychological counseling. MASC combines construct-guided generation, collaborative refinement, consistency verification, and memory-based revision in a closed calibration loop that detects and corrects inconsistencies as dialogue unfolds. We further introduce CRPC-Bench, a benchmark covering session-level profile information and Big-Five personality traits, as well as turn-level psychological state, communicative action, and emotion expression. CRPC-Bench contains 38 motivational interviewing client…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.ITOct 6▲ 2

  Task-Sufficient Contraction: Source Selection for Machine Information Interfaces

  Joss Armstrong

  A declared task can sometimes certify a reduced source before a downstream encoder, codebook, rate, distortion target, or optimizer is chosen. This paper studies when one such reduction preserves the complete downstream problem family, a property termed Task-Sufficient Contraction. The reduced source is fixed by the task before the later operating point is selected. An exact contraction allows the later problem to be solved on that source with the same result as if the full source had been retained. For a machine with a fixed set of possible actions and a fixed loss, the paper identifies a consumer-specific source by merging states only when every available action has the same regret in both. For finite action sets, replacing the richer source by this reduced source preserves the complete one-step rate-regret curve, even though the reduction is fixed before the distortion target is chosen. A second result gives an exact characterization for quadratic loss on affine feasible-action sets: the canonical reduced source is the projection onto the directions in which feasible actions can differ. Under a fixed energy budget, this becomes centered load, while retaining only the optimal…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  LeanPlan: Optimal Planning with LLM-Generated Heuristics and Admissibility Proofs

  André G. Pereira, Augusto B. Corrêa, Felipe Meneguzzi, Jendrik Seipp

  Frontier large language models (LLMs) can generate heuristic functions that guide search to achieve state-of-the-art performance in satisficing planning, where any plan is acceptable. However, these heuristics are not guaranteed to be admissible and can lead to suboptimal plans. We introduce LeanPlan, the first planning system that finds optimal plans with LLM-generated heuristics whose admissibility is machine-checked. Given a domain description and training tasks, an agentic loop uses planner feedback to iteratively improve a reusable domain-specific heuristic, its admissibility proof and the required domain assumptions. LeanPlan implements the heuristic, its proof and an efficient planner with machine-checked grounding and search in Lean 4. We evaluate LeanPlan on ten domains from the International Planning Competition and three new domains, using test tasks with up to 57 times as many objects as the training tasks. With GPT-5.6 Sol in the agentic loop, we successfully generate heuristics and admissibility proofs for all these domains. With the resulting heuristics, LeanPlan usually expands fewer states than the state-of-the-art Scorpion planner and solves more tasks overall.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6▲ 4

  Sensor-Language-Action Models

  Yuekai Xu, Zitao Shuai, Yuzhe Yang

  Sensors are useful not only for understanding the world but also for deciding what to do next. Existing sensor models however largely stop at perception: they recognize states or predict outcomes, leaving actions modeled separately through task-specific and often closed label spaces. We introduce Sensor-Language-Action (SLA) modeling, a framework that connects multimodal sensor observations, natural language, and actions within a unified model. SLA uses language as a semantic interface between sensing and acting, allowing heterogeneous actions to be represented, predicted, and explained while remaining grounded in the underlying sensor evidence. We build a large-scale SLA benchmark consisting of datasets that span more than 116,000 individuals, 79 sensor modalities, and 60 action groups, together with a multi-faceted captioning pipeline that aligns user context, sensor dynamics, and action evidence. Building on this framework, we present OpenSLA, a unified SLA model for hierarchical action prediction, state understanding, and action explanation. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks in clinical prediction, operating rooms, and metabolic health verify its superior performance…

  Code
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  OSFP4: Joint Optimization of Diagonal Smoothing and Block Scales for NVFP4 Quantization

  Neriah Ben David, Ori Meir, Or Ordentlich

  NVFP4 is an attractive datatype for large language model (LLM) inference, offering compact storage and native tensor-core acceleration. However, preserving accuracy using NVFP4 requires careful quantization. In this work we develop a novel quantization scheme called Optimized Smoothing and Scaling for NVFP4 (OSFP4). For each linear projection it uses a diagonal smoothing matrix whose entries are optimized to minimize the squared matrix-product quantization error under NVFP4, taking into account the rounding procedure that is used (either round-to-nearest, or GPTQ-style successive interference cancellation). This requires performing joint optimization on the smoothing entries as well as the block scales, which is facilitated by analyzing a multiplicative-dither FP4 quantizer instead of the fixed deterministic one. Experiments show that OSFP4 achieves the highest average accuracy among the evaluated competitors in the corresponding quantization settings, while retaining approximately 94-97\% of vendor NVFP4 prefill throughput on the measured workloads. Our code is available in https://github.com/neriahbd/OSFP4

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  TSRN-RTVD: Real-Time Video Deblurring System

  Nikita Alutis, Danila Evsyukov, Egor Chistov, Mikhail Voronin, Evgeney Bogatyrev +1

  As video capture moves to handheld and edge devices, motion blur from camera shake has become a pervasive degradation that lowers perceptual quality and harms downstream vision tasks. The strongest deblurring networks recover impressive detail, yet they remain computationally heavy and overwhelmingly complex, so their quality comes at a cost that consumer hardware cannot pay in real time. This gap between restoration quality and on-device speed is exactly what makes real-time deblurring difficult. We developed and implemented TSRN-RTVD, an efficient video deblurring system that explicitly reconstructs the underlying camera trajectory during exposure and uses the recovered motion to guide restoration. This approach turns the physical cause of blur into a signal that drives sharpening. Our system runs on a single consumer GPU and restores the video at 30 FPS while reaching 30.08 dB PSNR on the GoPro dataset. We demonstrate TSRN-RTVD on consumer devices with interactive side-by-side visualization of the blurry input and the deblurred output, live throughput, and an on-screen view of the recovered camera trajectory. Demo video is available at https://youtu.be/3alMwVrVALU.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  Confidence-Ordering Reversal under Contextual Priors in Neural Decoding

  Xinyu Zhang, Sichao Liu

  Contextual priors improve neural-to-language decoding by reshaping candidate scores. However, confidence is read from the same reshaped scores, so the errors a prior leaves behind can become more confident with no change in accuracy to reveal it. We study how a prior shapes confidence in speech retrieval on MEG-MASC and MOUS using local decoding scores, a contextual prior combined by additive shallow fusion, and the fused top-two margin as confidence. Among initially incorrect predictions, we find a confidence-ordering reversal: a larger margin makes a repair more likely when the correct candidate starts near the top of the local ranking, but less likely when it starts lower. On MEG-MASC, pooled correctness AUROC is 0.87, yet AUROC separating repairs from residual errors falls from 0.70 at initial ranks 2-3 to 0.39 at ranks 21-50. Errors starting beyond rank 20, inside the reversed region, make up 46.6% of all post-fusion errors. We propose a score-level account: a repair must first close the correct candidate's initial deficit, limiting its final margin, whereas a residual error can build a large margin between two incorrect candidates. A causal intervention that changes only…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv stat.MLOct 6

  How Many Independent Samples Does a Satellite Image Contain? Generalization Bounds for Spatially Dependent Data

  Robin Young

  Machine learning classifiers for remote sensing imagery are typically evaluated as though every pixel were an independent sample. Spatial autocorrelation violates this assumption, since neighboring pixels carry redundant information which inflates sample sizes. How many independent samples does a satellite image actually contain? For an $n \times n$ image whose spatial correlation persists over a range of $r$ pixels, the effective sample size is $Θ(n^2/r^2)$, not $n^2$. We prove this as a finite-sample upper bound for classifiers on spatially correlated data, and show via a matching lower bound that the rate is tight, and no algorithm can do better. We extend the results to images with directional correlation and spatially varying correlation structure. Our result justifies spatial cross-validation since block holdout with separation proportional to the correlation range achieves optimal generalization guarantees, while random holdout can underestimate confidence interval widths by a factor proportional to $r$. We validate the theory on synthetic data and satellite image tiles from three sensors (Landsat 8, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1).

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.ROOct 6

  VOMMI: Collecting and Leveraging Portable Demonstrations for Mobile Manipulation

  Yutian Zhang, Xingrui Xiong, Siyuan Ma, Yang Li, Jiawen Wen +10

  Portable mobile-manipulation demonstrations can help alleviate data scarcity for embodied intelligence, but obtaining reliable, low-cost, and robot-free motion supervision from RGB observations remains challenging. Existing approaches often rely on teleoperation or specialized devices equipped with additional sensing hardware, while directly using estimated visual odometry (VO) trajectories can introduce inconsistencies due to accumulated drift and imperfect motion supervision. We present the Visual-Odometry-Conditioned Mobile Manipulation Interface (VOMMI), a portable demonstration collection and learning framework that connects portable RGB demonstrations to vision-language-action (VLA) post-training through offline trajectory reconstruction and online visual-motion conditioning. VOMMI synchronizes body and hand views to capture navigation context and local object interactions without requiring human-robot kinematic correspondence calibration. R2-VO refines offline demonstration trajectories using sparse geometric anchors and produces causal local-motion tokens over multiple prediction horizons for online policy conditioning. An action-group residual adapter incorporates these…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  Quantum Entangled Multimodal Fusion Networks (QEMFN): Resource-Aware Hybrid Vision-Language Fusion via Trainable Entanglement

  Srikar Alla, Ali Shiri Sichani, Chi-Ren Shyu

  Multimodal vision-language systems typically fuse image and text embeddings through classical operators such as concatenation, attention, bilinear pooling, or tensor interactions. We propose Quantum Entangled Multimodal Fusion Networks (QEMFN), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that introduces parameterized entanglement as a structured inductive bias for multimodal fusion. Pretrained visual and textual features are projected into compact latent spaces, encoded as angle-parameterized quantum states, processed through intra-modal and paired cross-modal entangling circuits, and measured to produce fused representations for retrieval. Under matched parameter budgets and identical frozen CLIP backbones, QEMFN outperforms classical fusion baselines on COCO-5k and Flickr30k, including multilayer perceptron, tensor fusion, FiLM, cross-attention, compact transformer, and a dequantized paired-topology analogue. An ablation suite isolates the quantum module's contribution from the surrounding classical projections, and quantum-centric analyses report Meyer-Wallach entangling capability, expressibility, gradient variance against barren-plateau bounds, and entropy-performance correlation…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6▲ 156

  Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?

  Yibo Li, Jinhang Qiu, Zhi Zheng, Qianyun Guo, Jiaying Wu +2

  Learning from experience is essential for LLM agents to adapt to unfamiliar and dynmaic environments. Evaluating this ability is therefore important for understanding how effectively agents acquire and use new knowledge. Existing benchmarks have sought to evaluate this ability, but they primarily evaluate tasks whose rules are provided in the instructions or already familiar to pretrained models, making it difficult to distinguish learning from interactions from reasoning with existing knowledge. To address this, we introduce Learn2Play Bench, a benchmark of newly designed text-based games, whose rules are novel or counterintuitive, requiring agents to acquire knowledge through interaction rather than rely solely on pretrained knowledge. These games provide reproducible feedback and automatic scoring, enabling controlled evaluation of learning across repeated attempts. We also vary game instances to test whether agents can apply what they have learned to new situations. Therefore, we evaluate how backbone models, self-evolving methods, and agent harnesses affect agents' learning ability, revealing three findings: (1) Experience retention: Retaining complete records of actions and…

  Code
• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  Mathematical Proof Assistants for Teaching Logic: The LogiKEy Methodology

  Christoph Benzmüller, David Fuenmayor, Luca Pasetto

  We report on an approach to teaching logic to mixed groups of computer science, mathematics, and philosophy students, based on the logico-pluralistic LogiKEy methodology, used for more than a decade in courses, summer schools, and tutorials. LogiKEy uses classical higher-order logic (HOL) as a universal metalogic in which object logics, classical and non-classical alike, are encoded by defining their semantics; through these semantical embeddings a single proof assistant (e.g. Isabelle/HOL), with its automated theorem provers and (counter-)model finders, becomes one environment in which students learn, experiment with, and compare logics. After making the pedagogical case for proof assistants in the logic classroom, we present a graded sequence of classroom examples, each transition motivated by a limitation of the preceding representation, by a need for more explicit modelling resources, or by a new application. A liars-and-truth-tellers puzzle leads from propositional to modal logic; the Wise Men puzzle leads on to dynamic epistemic logic; Boolos's curious inference illustrates what a higher-order meta-logic buys, even for automated proof search; Chisholm's paradox takes the…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  RACE-FPP: A Robust AI-assisted Characterisation Enhancement for Fringe Projection Profilometry

  Osman Ali, Xiangjun Kong, Tibebe Yalew, Waiel Elmadih, Samanta Piano

  Fringe Projection Profilometry (FPP) requires precise system characterisation to achieve reliable three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions; however, characterisation accuracy strongly depends on robust checkerboard feature localisation, which can deteriorate under challenging imaging conditions such as lens blur and characterisation target orientations. Existing deep learning-based corner detectors are typically assessed using detection metrics and camera reprojection error alone, without considering their wider impact on projector characterisation, camera-projector stereo characterisation consistency, or overall measurement accuracy. In this work, we introduce a complete FPP characterisation pipeline that incorporates deep learning-based corner detection into the standard camera characterisation workflow. We also characterise the projector by sampling phase values at the centres of the white squares in the characterisation target. Rather than treating corner detection as an isolated task, the proposed framework explicitly analyses how localisation errors propagate throughout the entire FPP characterisation chain. Performance is evaluated using detection metrics (e.g., precision…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv stat.MLOct 6

  Anytime-valid simulation-based hypothesis testing

  Patrick Forré, Lydia Brenner

  For a given data distribution $(X_t)_{t \in \mathbb{N}} \sim Q$ i.i.d., we investigate the hypothesis testing problem: $H_0: Q = P_0$ vs. $H_1: Q = P_1$, for two different model probability distributions $P_0$ and $P_1$. In contrast to the standard setting, where analytic densities $p_0$ and $p_1$ are given, here, we consider the density-free setting, where we only have access to i.i.d. simulations $(Z^0_t)_{t \in \mathbb{N}} \sim P_0$ and $(Z^1_t)_{t \in \mathbb{N}} \sim P_1$. For this simulation-based hypothesis testing setting, we construct an e-test martingale, resulting in a sequential test with anytime-valid type-I error guarantees, approximate growth optimality, geometrically decaying type-II error bounds, and asymptotic power one. Most ingredients used in our constructions are variants of well known concepts. The value of this paper lies in the compact presentation of an effective, anytime-valid solution for the density-free simulation-based sequential hypothesis testing case.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv stat.MLOct 6

  Trust-Region Optimization for Smooth Potential-Interaction Energies in Wasserstein Space

  You Wan, Ting Gao, Jinqiao Duan

  Finding low-energy configurations of interacting particles and approximating probability distributions lead to the minimization of potential-interaction energies in Wasserstein space. These energies can be nonconvex, making it important to exploit second-order information while controlling the reliability of local approximations. We study trust-region optimization of smooth potential-interaction energies on the Wasserstein space of probability measures with finite second moment. The method uses a quadratic model along pushforward curves, an $L^2(ρ)$ step radius, and a Steihaug-Toint subsolver with an explicit self-adjoint second-variation operator. A ratio test determines acceptance and guides the radius update. Under a lower energy bound and globally bounded Hessians of the potential and interaction kernel, we prove that the objective is nonincreasing, the Wasserstein-gradient norms converge to zero, and an $\varepsilon$-stationary iterate is reached within $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ total outer trials, including rejected trials. If the potential is quadratically coercive, every weak accumulation point is stationary. The analysis applies to arbitrary initial measures with finite…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CLOct 6

  STRUCTURALCOST: A controlled reading time dataset for modeling human sentence processing difficulty

  Nina Nusbaumer, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Corentin Bel, Christophe Pallier, Guillaume Wisniewski +1

  We introduce STRUCTURALCOST, a self-paced reading dataset of 475 participants and 40,800 observations isolating the processing cost of long-distance subject-verb dependency resolution. We replicate a low-powered psycholinguistic finding at NLP scale, namely that human reading times at the main verb increase with dependency length, driven by syntactic embedding beyond linear distance. Different language models -- spanning n-gram models, SSMs, and transformers -- partially mirror this graded difficulty profile, yet underestimate the integration cost humans incur, with a gap that persists across architectures and model sizes. This suggests these models capture the predictive component of human processing but not the full integration cost that working memory imposes. STRUCTURALCOST provides data needed to drive progress toward evaluating the cognitive plausibility of language models.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CEOct 6

  Tool-calling retrieval versus vector RAG for a small Greek--English knowledge base: accuracy and robustness to how users type Greek

  Nikolaos D. Tantaroudas, Ilias Karachalios, Andrew J. McCracken

  Assistants grounded in a small, frequently edited knowledge base can retrieve through tool calls to a live data interface or through vector retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We compare the two on KyGround, a benchmark of 198 questions drawn from the published records of a Greek--English agricultural platform on Kythera, Greece, with answers verified automatically against the records and each question posed in up to nine forms, including Greek without accents, in capitals and in three Latin-script (Greeklish) schemes. With Claude Haiku 4.5 as router and answer model, a reconstruction of the platform's tool agent answered 71.6\% of canonical Greek questions correctly and vector RAG 95.3\% (difference $-23.6$ percentage points, 95\% CI $-33.1$ to $-15.1$). Letting the router write the vector query changed nothing, and placing the whole knowledge base of about 26,000 tokens in the prompt reached 99.3\%. The tool agent's losses arose in retrieval. Its literal searches returned nothing when the router's arguments did not occur verbatim in a record, for example when it transliterated Greek into Latin script or combined words that occur in a record but not as one phrase, and the…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.LGOct 6

  Finding the Heads and the Neurons Responsible for Network Information Retrieval in Language Models

  Md Abdul Kadir, Md Mohasin Hossain, Daniel Sonntag

  We ask whether specific attention heads, and more finely specific neurons inside those heads, are responsible for recognizing that a language model's context contains network infrastructure information (a hostname paired with its IP address), and whether that responsibility can be validated causally rather than by correlation alone. At the head level the answer is yes, across five models spanning three architecture families: in every model, a small set of heads (1 to 9 out of 128 to 1152 candidates), found by causal ablation screening and tested for selectivity against matched negative and context-free controls, supports a detector with 99.5--100\% held-out accuracy. We then ask whether a head's responsibility concentrates into one neuron or stays spread across its dimensions; this is model-specific. In one model, the top head's signal concentrates into a single neuron, found independently by both a causal intervention and a correlational ranking, which agree exactly (AUC = 1.000, matching the full head). In another, the single clean head works as a whole (AUC = 1.000) but the best causally ranked neuron inside it does not (AUC = 0.665), so the responsibility there is spread…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  MacJEPA: Missingness-Robust Audio-Visual Recognition from Untrimmed Egocentric Videos

  Souptik Sen, Zahra Ahmadi

  Audio-visual models improve egocentric action recognition by exploiting complementary cues, yet typically assume that both streams remain available at inference. Existing missing-modality methods operate on trimmed, single-event clips in which a stream is entirely present or absent, whereas real sensors fail and recover within long, untrimmed observations. We redefine egocentric modality missingness as temporally localized sensor outages within untrimmed, multi-event observations, with whole-clip absence as the limiting case. We introduce \textbf{MacJEPA}, a missing-modality-robust \textbf{Ma}sked-\textbf{c}ontext query \textbf{JEPA} that recognizes visual actions and acoustic events from supplied interval queries over audio-visual context. Window-local modality dropout simulates these sensor outages during training. MacJEPA further repurposes masking in JEPA from a self-supervised pretext into a supervised robustness objective, aligning masked and clean latent representations of both multimodal content tokens and the task-conditioned queries. All objectives are optimized jointly with recognition in a single stage, requiring no test-time adaptation. Across Epic-Kitchens-100 and…

  PDF

  Summarize this

• AI tutors14+7.7%
• Character recognition OCR100.0%
• Supervised & diffusion models89−16.0%
• Electrocardiogram ecg33−19.5%
• Stochastic gradient descent23−25.8%
• Channel state information10−28.6%
• Remote sensing33−31.2%
• Inference & serving182−34.1%