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ByteTrail · AI and developer-tools intelligence
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Fields · this week
All fields1989Multimodal421AI agents376Frontier LLMs248Inference & serving179Teacher policy distillation138Medical image segmentation116Physics informed neural105Supervised & diffusion models73Voice AI46Forecasting time40Machine learned interatomic32Remote sensing31Electrocardiogram ecg27Federated learning24Deepfake detection23All 25 fields

Open problems across fields

  • Lack of benchmarks for agent harness reliability1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Existing benchmarks focus on model capabilities rather than the reliability of the systems that support agent operation.

    • Trial by Trace: Benchmarking AI Agent Harnesses for Reliability and Failure Attributionraises · addresses
  • Unclear net value of agent memory1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Dedicated memory systems often underperform naive retrieval, making their benefits uncertain.

    • Memory Tax: Dissecting the Net Value of Agent Memoryraises · addresses
  • Token collapse in graph soft prompting1 paper raises it · 0 address it

    Graph-specific tokens become indistinguishable, failing to convey intended relational information.

    • On the Token Collapse Phenomenon in Textual Graph Soft Promptingraises
  • Poor trajectory supervision for tool-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Successful trajectories may lack compositional coverage or decision grounding, limiting agent learning.

    • Trajectory2Gym: Decision-Grounded Compositional Interaction Synthesis for Tool-Use Agentsraises · addresses
  • Uneven evaluation of coupled agent-world model systems1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

    Separate evaluation of agents and world models fails to predict their joint performance or sustained learning.

    • Dual Exam: Controlled Evaluation of Multimodal Agents and World Modelsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

Rising research topics

  • Channel state information13+44.4%
  • AI tutors13+18.2%
  • Anomaly detectors190.0%
  • Multimodal emotion7−12.5%
  • Character recognition OCR9−18.2%
  • Physics informed neural105−28.6%
  • Machine learned interatomic32−31.9%
  • Medical image segmentation116−35.2%

Papers

  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    WorldFact-Bench: Beyond Image-Internal Plausibility to Image-World Consistency

    Zhuohong Chen, Zhengxian Wu, Yunyao Yu, Hangrui Xu, Zijian Yu +5

    Advances in image generation have made visual authenticity increasingly difficult to assess. Although image forensics now examines both generation artifacts and higher-level visual inconsistencies, a plausible image can still contradict real-world facts or rules. We introduce WorldFact-Bench to evaluate image-world consistency from a single image, without a predefined claim or verification target. The benchmark contains 1,274 source-aligned real-fake pairs across four verification regimes and ten semantic domains. Each pair introduces a specific, evidence-supported factual conflict while seeking to preserve non-target content and visual plausibility. Images are evaluated independently, and pair accuracy requires both members of a pair to be classified correctly. We further propose PERSIST-Agent, which organizes iterative verification around a persistent state linking candidate facts, visual observations, evidence, and verification statuses. This state guides subsequent inspection and retrieval while retaining unresolved candidates. With backbone weights fixed, harness self-optimization refines the agent's prompts and execution rules through validation feedback. Experiments reveal…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 8

    RAG-Stress: Probing the Limits of Evidence Reliance in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang +1

    Following retrieved evidence does not guarantee factual correctness: misleading evidence can induce a model to replace an answer it previously gave correctly. Standard accuracy measures obscure this behavior by combining answer replacement with preexisting errors. We introduce RAG-Stress, a controlled diagnostic protocol for examining the limits of evidence reliance in retrieval-augmented generation. The protocol holds the question and reference answer fixed, edits one assertion to support a designated incorrect answer, and crosses two source priority policies with three positions of the answer span within the evidence text. We measure misleading rate (MR) on each model's subset of questions answered correctly without retrieval, alongside clean accuracy on the full evaluation set. We evaluate fifteen systems spanning API models, open models, and search agents trained with reinforcement learning on TriviaQA-RC, HotpotQA, and SearchQA, with additional English and Chinese MedQA evaluations. Instructions that prioritize documents consistently produce higher MR than those permitting reliance on prior knowledge. Averaged over models and positions, the gap ranges from 10.9 to 13.5…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    MATE4D: Matrix-Guided Editable 4D Generation from a Single Image

    Xiaotian Chen, Dongfu Yin

    Generative models have rapidly pushed content creation be-yond 2D imagery toward dynamic 3D and 4D scene synthesis. Yet pro-ducing realistic and temporally stable 4D content from a single image is still difficult because one view provides limited structural cues and weak motion evidence. We introduce MATE4D, a framework that converts one input image into editable dynamic 4D content. Our method constructs a spatio-temporal multi-view image matrix with text-guided background manipulation, delivering coherent supervision over viewpoint, appear-ance, and motion. These synthesized observations are used to optimize 3D Gaussian primitives, which are then animated through a lightweight deformation module to form a 4D representation. The resulting scenes preserve geometry more faithfully, maintain smoother temporal behavior, and keep background edits more consistent, reducing context ambiguity and motion artifacts. Experiments on Objaverse-XL and Diffusion4D show that MATE4D outperforms strong baselines in visual quality, effi-ciency, and controllability, supporting practical AR/VR content creation.

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Registration: A Comprehensive Review, Challenges and Prospects

    Zhiqiang Han, Yuanxin Ye, Qiuyun Wu, Jinhao Chen, Bai Zhu +1

    Multimodal remote sensing image registration is a crucial prerequisite for the collaborative processing and downstream application of remote sensing data, such as image fusion, change detection, and target recognition. However, significant variations in radiometry, geometry, scale, viewpoint, and time often exist between multimodal images. These differences, driven by varying sensor geometries, physical radiation mechanisms, imaging platforms, and environmental disturbances, pose severe challenges to achieving high-precision, robust registration. This paper systematically reviews the progress of mainstream multimodal remote sensing image registration methods. Based on their registration pipelines, existing approaches are categorized into three main types: region-based, feature-based, and deep learning-based methods. We detail the core principles, representative algorithms, advantages, and limitations of each category. Additionally, we summarize publicly available multimodal image datasets in the remote sensing domain, analyzing their specific characteristics and applicable scenarios. Finally, we highlight current bottlenecks in high-precision registration research and outline…

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  • arXiv cs.ROOct 8

    Higher-Order Action Supervision Makes A Strong Policy Class

    Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang +1

    Modern data-driven decision-making methods, such as imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved great success in solving many complex tasks. However, these methods often suffer from serious control instability and robustness issues when applied in real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous driving, posing notable challenges for their practical deployment. We argue that this instability issue stems largely from their limitations in solely supervising and optimizing zeroth-order actions (i.e., the action labels), failing to account for higher-order action dynamics and temporal consistency. In this paper, we show that simultaneously supervising both zeroth- and first-order actions can dramatically enhance policies' performance and control robustness. To achieve this, we introduce a novel and elegant loss scheme supported by formal theoretical guarantees that can equip any off-the-shelf policy model (e.g., deterministic, stochastic, or flow policies) with the capability for higher-order action supervision, without requiring any structural modifications. Moreover, our proposed method can serve as a lightweight plug-and-play module that…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    IntactWorld: Joint World Modeling with Intact Features

    Boming Tan, Xiangdong Zhang, Yan Xia, Qi Zhu, Deyi Ji +2

    While recent video generation models synthesize highly realistic visuals, they lack a genuine understanding of intrinsic real-world logic. Existing methods attempt to understand the world by internalizing diverse world knowledge, yet constrained by computational overhead or dimensionality alignment, their learning processes inevitably compress features, causing a severe loss of structural information. To address this, we propose \textbf{IntactWorld}, a \textbf{Joint World Modeling Architecture} utilizing uncompressed \textbf{Intact Features}. Since data naturally reside on a low-dimensional manifold within a high-dimensional space, predicting the flow velocity $v$ within this uncompressed high-dimensional space induces a severe manifold gap. To successfully eliminate this optimization bottleneck, our framework instead predicts the clean feature $x_0$ at intermediate layers. Furthermore, to mitigate the computational overhead of incorporating complete world knowledge, we introduce a \textit{Full-to-Compact Training Paradigm}. By replacing raw full features with highly refined CLS tokens, this paradigm enables efficient single-branch guidance, reducing spatial memory consumption by…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    VAMR: Multi-Question Agentic Reasoning for Efficient Long-Form Video Understanding

    Runquan Gui, Hanzhu Chen, Zehao Wang, Hanxin Zhu, Xin Li +1

    Long-form video understanding often involves multiple questions about different aspects of the same recording. Yet existing video agents typically process each question through an isolated tool-use trajectory. This repeatedly restarts video exploration and memory construction, missing opportunities to acquire evidence jointly and progressively build a shared understanding that supports the complete question set. We introduce \textbf{VAMR} (\textbf{V}ideo \textbf{A}gent for \textbf{M}ulti-Question \textbf{R}easoning), which coordinates all questions about a video through one shared tool-use trajectory. At each round, a persistent policy model can invoke tools for one or more unresolved questions and submit answers for questions with sufficient evidence. Question-conditioned visual perception retrieves fine-grained clues for several questions in one call, while layered multi-question memory integrates reusable context into a shared video story and preserves separate evidence for individual questions. After supervised fine-tuning initializes this interaction protocol, we propose question-horizon policy optimization (\qhpo) to optimize shared trajectories in which questions progress…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 8

    SACQ: Structured Decoding with Memory-Conditioned Refinement for Long-Horizon Forecasting

    Guo Cheng, Zhengzhuo Xu, Chenchen Jing, Jingyi Hou

    Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) models predominantly employ patch-based encoders terminated by a flatten readout head that maps the entire encoded historical memory to all future steps through a single shared projection. This implicit coupling of future positions obscures position-specific historical-to-future alignment and amplifies sensitivity to corrupted inputs and extreme supervision noise. We present SACQ, a plug-in structured prediction head that replaces flatten readout while keeping the encoder unchanged. SACQ adopts a two-stage decoding pipeline: it first establishes a coarse patch-grid forecast scaffold, then refines each future position through cross-attention over historical memory and merges the attention-derived correction with the coarse scaffold via a learned per-patch gate. To stabilize optimization under long horizons and noisy labels, we further propose a batch-adaptive scaled log-cosh loss that automatically calibrates robustness to the current residual scale, suppressing outlier gradients while preserving MSE-like sensitivity for typical errors. SACQ attains top-tier test MSE/MAE across PatchTST, DLinear, and patch-Mamba backbones with only modest…

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  • arXiv cs.ROOct 8

    PMTRM: Pseudo-Memory Temporal Re-encoding Module for Embodied Policy Learning

    Changchuan Yang, Haoxuan Xu, Wenbo Chen, Shuai Ren, Jianlong Zheng +3

    Robotic manipulation often contains repeated motions whose local observations look similar at different phases. When these phases require different actions, a policy that relies mainly on the current observation may repeat completed motions or switch phases at the wrong time. To address this phase ambiguity, we present the Pseudo-Memory Temporal Re-encoding Module (PMTRM), a lightweight plug-in module with only 7.61M parameters that encodes a bounded history of executed states and actions into a latent sequence for existing policies. To help distinguish phases, a temporal heterogeneity objective penalizes positive similarity between distant positions in this sequence, while anchor and reconstruction losses preserve information needed for action prediction. The reconstruction decoder is used only during training, leaving the temporal re-encoder to supply history to the policy at inference. We train the module progressively on synthetic sequences and robot data, then jointly with the policy, using temporal masking to accommodate partial histories. This integration retains the original action head and action space and adds auxiliary losses to the original policy loss. Experiments…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 8

    PIVOT: Perplexity-Informed KD-to-RL Transition Scheduling for Vertical-Domain Few-Shot Distillation

    Heng Li, Yong Zhang, Ning Cheng, Zhigen Li, Yun Zhu +3

    Vertical-domain few-shot classification remains challenging for small language models, as limited supervision makes it difficult to acquire domain-specific decision knowledge. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) can improve teacher-guided adaptation by supervising student-generated rollouts, while GRPO-based reinforcement learning can further refine downstream predictions. However, existing KD-to-RL pipelines typically rely on globally fixed transition schedules, ignoring that different samples may require different amounts of teacher-guided acquisition before reward-driven refinement. We propose PIVOT (Perplexity-Informed Transition Optimization), a dynamic transition framework that routes samples between OPD and GRPO according to teacher-evaluated sequence perplexity. PIVOT moves low-perplexity samples to GRPO for reward-driven refinement while keeping high-perplexity samples under OPD for continued domain knowledge acquisition. Experiments on Banking77 and HWU64 show that PIVOT consistently outperforms continued OPD and globally synchronized OPD$\rightarrow$GRPO baselines under the same number of post-warm-up student optimization steps, achieving stronger downstream performance and…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 8

    CARE: A Lightweight Plug-in Gated Correction and Uncertainty-aware Module for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

    Guo Cheng, Changlong Lv, Jingyi Hou

    Multivariate long-horizon forecasting is critical to electricity load scheduling and traffic flow management, and to financial risk control. Existing deterministic backbones output a single trajectory, masking heterogeneous prediction difficulty across horizons and channels and providing no localized reliability signal. We present CARE (Corrective branch with Aligned context and Relative-error Estimation), a lightweight plug-in that enhances any deterministic forecaster without architectural redesign. Operating in parallel with the base model, CARE resamples historical context to match the forecast horizon, learns residual correction patterns from this aligned history, and applies scale-aware bounded updates modulated by per-coordinate sigmoid risk gates. A multi-objective loss jointly optimizes forecast accuracy, residual tracking, risk alignment, and base-model anchoring. Across eight benchmarks with three representative backbones, CARE improves accuracy with marginal parameter and latency overhead. Its risk gates reliably identify high-error regions: on Weather, the highest-gate tertile exhibits nearly four times the error of the lowest-gate tertile, offering planners an…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 8

    RideBench: A Large-Scale Exogenous-Aware Benchmark for Ride-Hailing Time Series Forecasting

    Shengsheng Lin, Jing Hu, Zhengyang Hu, Jiazheng Sun, Zichun Cao +6

    We release Ride-Hailing, a large-scale ride-hailing time series dataset synthesized from DiDi's marketplace data across 200 spatial areas. Ride-Hailing spans four consecutive years at half-hourly granularity and covers three representative exogenous scenarios: Weather Disturbance, Holiday Effect, and Large-scale Event Impact. Built upon Ride-Hailing, we introduce RideBench, a comprehensive benchmark for exogenous-aware ride-hailing forecasting, covering both regular week-ahead forecasting and long-horizon 8-week-ahead forecasting with up to 2,688 prediction steps. RideBench evaluates over 30 representative forecasting methods, including endogenous-only models, exogenous-aware models, and time series foundation models. Our results show that future-known exogenous variables provide clear benefits in regular week-ahead forecasting, especially under weather, holiday, and large-scale event (e.g., major sporting events and concerts) scenarios. However, current exogenous-aware models still struggle to fully capture disturbance-induced pattern changes under complex external contexts. For long-horizon forecasting, existing models cannot simultaneously achieve low pointwise errors,…

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  • arXiv cs.CROct 8

    Characterizing Statistical Separability in TP-CRIV for Probabilistic AI Models

    Teruki Sano, Minoru Kuribayashi, Masao Sakai, Shuji Isobe, Eisuke Koizumi +2

    Third-party challenge-response identity verification (TP-CRIV) enables an independent verifier to assess whether a claimant possesses a model identical to a remotely deployed model without directly accessing the reference model. However, for probabilistic AI models, repeated executions of the same query may produce different outputs and therefore different verification observations. This raises the question of how such stochastic evidence should be accumulated and how much evidence is required for reliable verification. In this work, we characterize statistical separability in TP-CRIV of probabilistic AI models. Specifically, we relate challenge-wise behavior of matching and non-matching provers to verification-level separability. The characterization explicitly describes how the numbers of independent challenges and repeated responses affect detection performance and enables the verification budget required for a target AUC to be estimated. We instantiate the proposed characterization for LLMs using open-ended challenges. The experiments demonstrate matching-non-matching separation, close agreement between theoretical and empirical AUCs, and consistent estimates of the minimum…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    AutoAdapt: Reliable Few-Shot Adaptation under Clinical Distribution Shifts

    Song Wang, Jie Peng, Davis Hobley, Zachary Plotkin, Tianlong Chen

    Large pretrained clinical models provide a practical way to reuse learned prior knowledge across hospitals by adapting models to them. In practice, a target hospital may only have a small labeled patient cohort, a setting commonly referred to as few-shot adaptation. This requires making multiple decisions, such as which pretrained model to adapt, how much of the model to update, and which patients to use. Nevertheless, this process faces two primary challenges. First, the best adaptation strategy varies across clinical tasks. Second, evaluating and comparing candidate strategies becomes unreliable due to the small patient cohort. In this work, we introduce AutoAdapt with two core designs to deal with these challenges. The Adapter defines an extensible space of adaptation recipes, and the Automator forms a weighted recipe combination from evidence within the adaptation patients. We propose a reliability rule to ensure that only the most effective strategy on most available patients will be selected. These selected strategies then form a combination for effective few-shot adaptation. We conduct extensive experiments across critical care, emergency care, and diagnostic datasets, and…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    VGGTWorld-VLA: Intent-Conditioned 3D World Evolution for Autonomous Driving

    Zhaoyang Liu, Kun Jiang, Ziying Song, Diange Yang

    VGGT provides a strong foundation for geometry-centric world models by recovering unified 3D scene geometry from visual observations. Although recent extensions enable temporal 3D prediction, their future evolution remains weakly conditioned on driving intentions and actions, limiting their ability to model alternative action-dependent futures. We propose VGGTWorld-VLA, an intention-conditioned extension of VGGT-World for controllable 3D world evolution in autonomous driving. First, we introduce an action--semantic conditioning mechanism that injects complementary driving semantics and ego-motion representations into the future-token stream, enabling different future geometry predictions for the same observed scene under alternative ego actions. Second, we develop a geometry--language--action bridge that adapts historical geometry, VLA semantic features, and maneuver and trajectory representations for joint conditioning of future geometry prediction. We evaluate future geometry prediction on NAVSIM, while conditioning ablations further examine the contributions of semantic and action information. Compared with the baseline, our method demonstrates competitive geometry prediction…

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 8

    LadderEdit: Edit-Level Residual Compression for Memory-Efficient Lifelong Editing of LLMs

    Xiaobing Yu, Peijie Qiu, Jin Yang, Xuanzhao Dong, Weiwei Ma +3

    Lifelong editing of LLMs requires storing thousands of edits after acquisition. A widely used family of approaches attaches one LoRA adapter per edit, which preserves behavior but grows linearly in storage. To address this challenge, we propose LadderEdit, a method that compresses each LoRA adapter after it is acquired. Each edit is first stored at low rank as a cheap sketch. We then check whether this sketch still satisfies the rewrite, generalization, and locality contract on probe prompts. Edits that pass keep the sketch; those that fail are promoted to a higher rank along a ladder until the contract is met. Because every edit retains some representation, coverage is maintained, and only hard edits consume more rank. Across ZsRE, CounterFact, and WikiBigEdit benchmarks on LLaMA-3-8B, Mistral-7B, and Qwen2.5-7B, LadderEdit tracks exact LoRA storage at 5.2x less memory and remains effective at 50,000 sequential edits.

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  • arXiv cs.CLOct 8

    Local Prototype Reconstruction for Text-Compatible Speech-to-LLM Bridge Pretraining

    Xinnian Zhao, Chia-Hua Wu, Pu Wang, Hugo Van Hamme

    Speech-to-LLM systems often connect a frozen speech encoder to a frozen large language model (LLM) through a small trainable bridge. The bridge is usually treated as plumbing, but it in fact defines the geometry of the speech-to-LLM interface, and the pretraining objective decides whether that interface provides a reusable initialization for downstream tasks. We study a transferable bridge through two complementary properties: global alignment with the text side, and local lexical manifold compatibility, where bridge embeddings remain close to the frozen LLM's input-embedding neighbourhoods. We make this property measurable with a fixed, head-free, timestamp-free diagnostic that applies to any objective, and show that next-word prediction (NWP) and sentence-level contrastive pretraining do not fully capture token-level lexical compatibility. We then introduce Local Prototype Reconstruction (LPR), a lightweight training-only regularizer that requires each aligned bridge token to be reconstructable from a small neighbourhood of frozen LLM token embeddings, with a hard single-prototype anchor as its limiting case. On multilingual ASR and speech translation, LPR improves transfer,…

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  • arXiv cs.AIOct 8

    Social Pain Disrupts Emotion-Action Brain-State Dynamics in Adolescents with Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

    Ying Xu, Xiaojun Liang, Li Zhang, Yixuan Yuan, Gan Huang +2

    Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent among adolescents with depression, but the rapid brain-state dynamics linking social distress to maladaptive behavior remain unclear. We combine an experimental pain paradigm, electroencephalography (EEG) microstate analysis, and interpretable deep sequence modeling to investigate NSSI-related neurodynamics in 106 adolescents with depression, including 67 with NSSI (DN+) and 39 without NSSI (DN-), during social pain, physical pain, and resting-state conditions. A model integrating disease-specific, domain-adversarial, consistency, and contrastive learning captures higher-order dependencies in microstate sequences. Social pain yields the strongest NSSI discrimination, with 68.55% accuracy, outperforming the best baseline by 8.94% points. Model interpretation and conventional microstate analyses reveal weakened bidirectional transitions between MS3 and MS5 in DN+ adolescents during social pain. Source reconstruction associates MS3 with emotional/interoceptive processing and MS5 with action preparation, suggesting disrupted emotion-action coupling. Time-resolved analyses show greater early-to-middle action-state recruitment and later…

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  • arXiv cs.CVOct 8

    CARE: Constrained Attention Refinement for Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Teacher-Student Distillation

    Ruibo Wen, Hang Shao, Yiming Lei

    Fine-grained visual classification requires models to recognize subtle local traits while exposing the visual evidence behind their predictions. Class-specific attention pathways provide a natural basis for interpretable recognition, but their constrained prediction structure limits discriminative capacity and underuses intermediate representations from strong pretrained backbones. To address this problem, we propose CARE, a constrained attention refinement framework for interpretable fine-grained recognition via teacher-student distillation. CARE keeps the final prediction and explanation within a class-specific attention student, while introducing a training-only auxiliary query teacher that reads selected intermediate DINOv2 layers with learnable queries. The teacher fuses multi-level representations and transfers logit-standardized class-discriminative knowledge to the student. To further refine the explanation pathway, we design diversity and sparsity terms to regularize student attention heads, reducing redundancy and encouraging compact trait localization. Experiments on CUB, Oxford-IIIT Pet, Stanford Dogs, and Stanford Cars show that CARE achieves strong classification…

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  • arXiv cs.LGOct 8

    Do LLMs Learn from Rewards in Context? : Rethinking the role of reward in In-Context RL

    Minchan Kwon, Seunghee Koh, Sunghyun Baek, Minsung Bae, Junmo Kim

    LLM agents increasingly improve at inference time by accumulating experience in context rather than by updating parameters. This process is often described as in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL). Whether in-context learning (ICL) can actually play the role of RL, however, has not been tested. We study this question in its simplest form, direct ICRL, where the model conditions directly on raw trajectory-reward pairs, and ask whether the reward acts as a learning signal. Through controlled experiments on four benchmarks across six models, we find that the reward is read, but its effect is small: flipping, randomizing, or removing the reward leaves the improvement curve almost unchanged, and this holds even under meta-prompts that explicitly instruct the model to explore, exploit, or reason over rewards. Trajectories drive improvement, but not through their semantic content: shuffled or corrupted trajectories work as well as real ones. These patterns closely mirror those known in ICL, suggesting that direct ICRL is better understood as a special case of ICL than as inference-time RL. This reframing has implications for agent memory design: ICL factors such as input distribution…

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