Research

• Reliable request execution in streaming video generation1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Models often fail to follow incremental user requests while maintaining state consistency in real-time video generation.

  • StreamEval: Evaluating Interactive Streaming Video Generation Modelsraises
• Calibration and contrast-group accuracy in decision models1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Aggregate accuracy hides failures on controlled variations and unreliable confidence estimates in decision-making systems.

  • DecisionPivot: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Decision Models in LLM Systemsraises
• Length generalization in state tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Models struggle to maintain accuracy on problems much longer than their training data without explicit progress alignment.

  • PAR: Progress-Aligned Recurrence for Length Generalization in State Trackingraises · addresses
• Token collapse in graph soft prompting1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Graph-specific tokens lose discriminative power, reducing the method to a generic prompt with no graph information.

  • On the Token Collapse Phenomenon in Textual Graph Soft Promptingraises
• Coupled evaluation of multimodal agents and world models1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Separate evaluation of agents and world models fails to predict success when they are combined in real-world tasks.

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

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.ROOct 10

  ToF-Wheel Odometry: Navigating Degeneration of Localization With Limited Sensing Capabilities

  Xu Yang, Wenhao Li, Zhengyu Wei, Zening Li, Longxiang Huang +1

  Wheel odometry provides an efficient motion prior for ground robots but is prone to transient violations such as wheel slip or terrain-induced tilt. In filtering-based odometry, these violations frequently trigger divergence when they coincide with constrained geometric observability (e.g., featureless corridors). We address this challenge by proposing ToF-Wheel Odometry (TWO), a tightly-coupled filtering framework that integrates wheel kinematics with geometric constraints from Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras. The primary contribution of this work is a degeneracy-aware, directional covariance-shaping strategy that replaces heuristic online covariance tuning with geometry-conditioned inflation. The core idea is to infer process noise from geometric corrections with a strict reliability check. We decompose the posterior-to-prior correction into a wheel-explainable subspace and an orthogonal remainder. The process covariance is anisotropically adjusted according to the observability of the ToF update: if the geometry is degenerate in non-kinematic directions, the remainder is suppressed as sensor noise; if the geometry is distinct, it is admitted as a valid kinematic violation.…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 10

  Attribute-Centric Vision-Language Alignment for Fine-Grained Gait Understanding

  Saihui Hou, Chenye Wang, Wenpeng Lang, Qiannan Guo, Zhengxiang Lan +3

  Walking sequences reveal human-interpretable attributes related to body structure, posture, and motion. Gait attribute recognition provides a concrete route to fine-grained gait understanding by predicting these attributes. However, existing benchmarks provide limited fine-grained annotations, while classifier-based gait attribute recognition methods typically represent candidate classes through learned output weights rather than directly matching visual evidence with textual class representations. To address the annotation gap, we present RA-GAR, a large-scale, richly annotated multimodal benchmark for gait attribute recognition, containing 1,001 subjects, 242,729 walking sequences, and annotations for 15 static and motion gait attributes. We further propose Gait-VL, an attribute-centric vision-language alignment framework that recognizes gait attributes by matching attribute-specific multi-frame visual evidence with textual class prototypes. On the visual side, attribute-specific learnable queries aggregate RGB features across spatial locations and frames into per-attribute visual embeddings. On the language side, diverse descriptions expanded by a large language model are…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 10

  Flow-Support-Weighted Proposals for Test-Time Verified VLA Policies

  Chen Zhao, Zipeng Ye, Haitao Shen, Guanlin Li, Yuchen Xie +1

  Test-time sampling promises to turn one action prediction into a set of distinct executable candidates that a verifier can choose among. Downstream fine-tuning works against that promise. A vision-language-action model trained to solve one task distribution concentrates its flow-matching decoder around the dominant demonstrated action, so repeated samples differ only marginally and the verifier receives many copies of one decision. We call this proposal contraction and identify it as a key constraint on test-time scaling: repeated samples can remain highly redundant as the candidate budget grows. Action Dynamic Sampling (ADS) alleviates the constraint on the proposal side, during training. At each training step, ADS integrates $K$ additional trajectories from the current policy under fresh base noise, scores each by the flow support along its path with a Hutchinson trace estimator, and corrects the policy's local action distribution toward this weighted set through a detached finite-set KL term. Training cost rises; deployment cost is unchanged. Across simulation and four physical-robot tasks, ADS raises proposal spread without the success penalty that Gaussian perturbation…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 10

  Remembering What Matters for Long-Horizon Robotic World Models

  Hao Wu, Tianyu Shao, Shengju Qian, Yizhou Zhao, Fan Zhang +8

  Autoregressive robot video world models based on discrete visual tokens remain unreliable over long rollout horizons. Retaining the entire generated history does not necessarily improve prediction quality. We investigate a possible memory-role conflict in Full Context decoding: persistent scene information, recent visual-action states, and stale generated history compete for attention despite their different predictive roles. This perspective motivates ReCAP (Receding Context with Anchor Preservation), a training-free context-scheduling method for long-horizon robot video world models. ReCAP keeps the pretrained tokenizer, world model, and visual decoder frozen. It preserves the initial scene anchor and a contiguous window of recent complete visual-action blocks while evicting older generated history. The schedule preserves within-block structure and temporal order, requires no additional modules or parameter updates, and bounds active-context growth independently of rollout length. We evaluate ReCAP on RT-1, BridgeV2, LIBERO-90, and CALVIN using frozen autoregressive world models. Across evaluated environments and horizons, ReCAP improves visual fidelity, action-conditioned…

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• arXiv cs.IROct 10

  Fine-Tuning Strategy, Not Just Data: A Statistically Rigorous Audit of Gender and Stereotypical Bias in Embedding Models for HR Recommendation Systems

  Ekta Yadav

  Embedding models underpin modern job-candidate matching: resumes, job descriptions, and queries are encoded as dense vectors, and recommendations come from nearest-neighbor retrieval over that space. Any social bias in the embeddings therefore feeds directly into HR recommendations. We audit six multilingual sentence-embedding models (LaBSE- and E5-family, both public and custom fine-tuned) using Bias-in-Bios (occupational gender bias) and StereoSet (stereotypes across profession, race, gender, and religion). We treat statistical validity as a first-class concern: we identify a non-independence error in a naive significance test, where pooling non-independent pairwise similarities inflated a trivial 0.0046 mean difference to $p \approx 0$, and replace it with a profession-level paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test, individual-resampling bootstrap confidence intervals, and permutation tests for StereoSet. Under the corrected methodology, knowledge-distillation (KD) fine-tuning of E5-Base significantly increases measured bias on Bias-in-Bios ($Δ= -0.177$, $p < 10^{-8}$; more negative means more bias), although this measure is sensitive to global embedding geometry. The KD result is…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 10

  Uniform Information Density-Based Preference Optimization

  Yongyuan Li, Yang Xu

  To enable large language models to generate outputs that align with human preferences, optimization algorithms based on the comparison between chosen and rejected output pairs have been developed and been proven effective. Some recent endeavors have utilized certain linguistically-derived assumptions about the preference pairs to guide the design of more precise optimization directions. However, human preferences are complex and hard to measure by simplistic criteria, and it is important to incorporate broader and more sophisticated insights about preferred vs. not-preferred language. In this study, we adopt a well-established psycholinguistic theory, Uniform Information Density, to develop a novel preference optimization algorithm, UIDPO. The basic assumption is that humans prefer to produce language in which information is uniformly distributed, because uniformity induces less cognitive processing effort. To implement this idea into the algorithm, we derive a compound metric for information uniformity by combining the global standard deviation and the local second-order difference, and integrate it to the objective of preference optimization. We compare UIDPO with SimPO, a…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 10

  Iterate on an LLM, Serve on an SLM

  Keegan Wang

  As frontier LLMs gain more capabilities, the cost to run them also goes up. At the same time, small language models (SLMs) also gain more capabilities but have largely been able to keep their cost stable, offering 5-40 times cheaper inference for the narrow, repetitive subtasks that agents decompose work into. However, the standing limiting factor is getting the correct behavior out of a small model in a fast, efficient, and economical way. Unfortunately, in most cases, zero-shot small models fail narrow production tasks. Furthermore, retraining one every time the behavior changes is too slow to iterate on. We propose doing both in sequence. First, develop the desired behavior in prompt space, on a frontier model, with immediate feedback from live traffic. Then, once the behavior converges, distill the recorded production behavior (not synthetic imitations of it) into an SLM through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We show a proper use case of this method through a scheduling agent for home-care agencies that fans out a single yes/no safety decision per caregiver-shift pair on GPT-5.4-nano. A LoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B trained on 11.6k recorded production decisions reaches 0.913 agreement,…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 10

  CB-Agent: Concept-Based In-Context Learning for Sequential Action Selection

  Qingyue Zhang, Huaze Tang, Minyu Zhang, Yuxiang Yan, Wenbo Ding +1

  In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models to use demonstrations without updating their parameters. For interactive agents, demonstrations are trajectories of reasoning, actions, and observations that illustrate how to complete a task. Reusing demonstrations in new situations is challenging: directly inputting full trajectories consumes limited prompt space and constrains the overall effectiveness, while natural-language summaries require the agent to translate general guidance into specific action choices. Therefore, we study whether expert action choices can directly supervise a reusable scoring rule. We propose CB-Agent, which extends concept-based ICL to sequential action selection. We extract environment-action decisions from expert trajectories and fit a concept vector by maximum likelihood to model the conditional distribution over candidate actions given the context. This model combines the concept with frozen language-model features and priors. During ReAct interaction, the agent uses this distribution to select environment actions without including demonstrations in the action-scoring context. Across TextWorld, ALFWorld, and ScienceWorld, CB-Agent achieves…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 10

  Learning after Execution with Action-Specific Credit

  Yufeng Tian, Jiahao Tang, Minghao Wu

  Execution is often used as terminal feedback: it scores a generated program, but the resulting state is not used for another learning action. Learning after execution instead uses the execution result as an intermediate state that supports an additional learning interaction for the same policy. This creates a credit-assignment problem because the two actions share the same final objective but play different roles in the trajectory. Accordingly, action-specific credit assigns the initial action credit from the final trajectory outcome and the corrective action credit for improvement over the intermediate state. Image-to-TikZ serves as an executable visual testbed for this setting. On 945 held-out examples, learning after execution strengthens the shared policy under single-call inference and also produces a post-execution corrective capability. Single-call render success reaches 92.70\%, compared with 88.25\% for continued single-stage GRPO after the same number of additional training iterations. This corrective capability is not reproduced by continued single-stage training and depends on the intermediate state. Alternative credit definitions also induce different group-relative…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 10

  Reward-Aligned Distillation

  Yilan Chen, Zian Su, Manish Prajapat, Dingmin Wang, Rein Houthooft +2

  Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but remains computationally expensive and sample inefficient. On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher, yet standard OPD distills every token regardless of whether the teacher's preference actually improves task reward. Existing token-selection methods rely on proxies such as uncertainty or teacher--student divergence, which need not identify reward-improving supervision. We introduce Reward-Aligned Distillation (RAD), a bilevel framework that weights distillation signals based on their predicted effect on the student's post-update reward. RAD differentiates through a temporary optimizer step to score each token's supervision, then updates the token weights by projected ascent from the initial token weights. The resulting weights can strengthen, suppress, or reverse individual distillation-gradient contributions. At a matched training-response budget, RAD improves mean accuracy on six competition-math benchmarks over the strongest baselines by 6.5 percentage points for Qwen3-1.7B (non-thinking) and 2.5 points for…

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• arXiv cs.DCOct 10

  Dissecting the Carbon-SLO Tension in Geo-Distributed LLM Serving

  Burak Topcu, Musa Cim, Zuhal Ozturk, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir

  Large Language Model (LLM) inference is driving a growing share of datacenter carbon emissions. Although carbon-aware scheduling can reduce these emissions in geo-distributed datacenters by exploiting the spatiotemporal variations in grid carbon intensity, the latency-sensitive nature of LLM serving constrains this design space. While prior studies investigate the carbon savings achievable through spatial scheduling, they oversimplify the dynamics of modern inference engines, such as queueing and continuous batching, which strongly shape inference latency. We address this issue by designing and evaluating a latency-centric, geo-distributed inference simulator, calibrated with hardware-grounded latency and power measurements, that reproduces these dynamics and enables the study of carbon savings under strict service-level objectives (SLOs). We then formulate a series of SLO- and carbon-aware schedulers of increasing sophistication, from per-request heuristics to batch-level optimization: (i) a greedy heuristic, (ii) an integer linear programming (ILP)-based scheduler jointly assigning batches of requests, (iii) an iterative ILP-based solution projecting its own assignments back…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 10

  PsyMemBehav: Psychology-Informed and Memory-Grounded Two-Level Identity-to-Action Reasoning for Social-Media Behavior Simulation

  Wenji Zhang, Xilong Cheng, Yunxiao Qin, Mai Tu, Tongye Zhu +6

  Large language models (LLMs) support social simulation, but faithfully reproducing real users requires grounding both structured platform decisions and language in sparse, noisy behavioral evidence. We introduce PsyMemBehav, which maps psychology-informed profiles and retrieved memories to target-first platform behavior through two-level identity-to-action reasoning. To support this approach with comprehensive behavioral traces, we construct a dataset PsyMemBehav-bench from 5.57M observed behaviors of 5,862 real users (approximately 950 per user) across Reddit, Bluesky, and Twitter. Each recorded engagement is modeled as target selection followed by Comment, Like, or Repost and optional response generation. PsyMemBehav combines 41-dimensional user descriptors, top-5 BM25 memories, reverse-CoT supervision, and rubric-guided DPO over complete reasoning-action trajectories. Experiments show that PsyMemBehav 27B ranks first in 11 of 12 reported individual-level metrics, improving average response quality over GPT-5.4 from 54.28 to 59.68 (9.95% relative), and obtains the lowest group-level MAE (0.081) and MSE (0.009) among simulated systems. These results support evidence-grounded…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 10

  FrameFold: Response-Guided KV Cache Consolidation for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

  Muyu Liu, Mingming Liu, Hong Gu, Yuyao Zhang, Qin Lu

  In autoregressive video generation, retaining all historical key-value (KV) states increases memory usage and per-step attention costs as videos grow longer. A fixed cache budget bounds these costs but raises the challenge of preserving historical content that supports consistent, high-quality generation. Existing methods control cache size through history selection or consolidation, yet deciding what to retain and how to limit the loss of useful content remains a shared challenge. Our analysis shows that spatial queries depend on different historical content and that higher current attention coverage does not necessarily yield better long-video quality. We introduce FrameFold, a training-free KV cache consolidation method that compares the content retrieved by the same recent historical queries before and after merging to guide both representative construction and merge selection. Exploiting temporal redundancy between adjacent historical entries, FrameFold merges their KV states into shared representatives while retaining complete spatial grids. It fits value-merging coefficients in closed form by matching conditional attention responses, then selects the merge with the lowest…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 10

  Strong Gaussian Approximation of Constant Learning Rate SGD: Bias and Trajectory Inference

  Joseph Keslin, Wei Biao Wu

  This paper develops strong Gaussian approximations (KMT type) for constant learning rate stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We work with heavy tailed noise and assume that the number of iterates grows and the learning rate shrinks simultaneously. Our work constructs simple Gaussian processes on the same space and bounds, in probability, the maximum difference between the SGD errors and their respective limits. While there exist central limit theorems for constant rate SGD centered at the optimum, these only provide individual iterate inference. By contrast, our quenched KMT approximations allow for finite sample, simultaneous, whole-trajectory-level inference and imply stochastic process convergence (Functional Central Limit Theorems (FCLTs)). For accumulated errors centered at the true optimum, we first obtain a KMT-type approximation bound when the learning rate scales as $γ_n=\frac{c}{\sqrt n}+o(n^{-1/2})$ for a constant $c \in \mathbb{R}^+$ and $n$ iterations. The result reveals a trade off between controlling the bias of SGD and the initialization effect, with no learning rate scaling generally making both contributions vanish in the accumulated error limit. To eliminate…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 10

  Chunk-wise Model-based Policy Optimization

  Weixi Song, Donglin Wang, Yong-Lu Li

  Model-based reinforcement learning has shown superior sample efficiency by leveraging the learned latent dynamics either in the form of derivative-free planning/imagined rollout training or dynamics gradient-based policy updates. While these approaches achieve comparatively fast learning, they all suffer, to varying degrees, from issues of recurrent compounding errors, high inference-time latency, and instability in backward propagation through time (BPTT). In this work, we propose a model-based RL approach that uses the chunk world model as a differentiable training-time evaluator to optimize the chunk actor without recurrent model invocation. Through the collaborative chunk-wise prediction of the world model and policy, we can generate H-step hypothetical rollouts in a single forward pass and directly optimize value expansion, avoiding the costly and unstable BPTT. We evaluate our method on 19 challenging high-dimensional humanoid tasks from HumanoidBench and deploy our method to the real-world for quadruped bipedal walking. Project Website: https://song-wx.github.io/cmpo.github.io/

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 10

  PGSB: Pretrained-Guided Shared Basis for LoRA Model Merging

  Muqing Liu, Chongjie Si, Zhuoya Liu, Yuheng Jia

  Large pretrained models have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, yet adapting them to multiple downstream tasks remains challenging: full fine-tuning is costly, while maintaining separate task-specific models is storage-inefficient and fails to produce a unified multi-task model. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient alternative for Model Merging by representing each task adaptation as a low-rank update over frozen pretrained weights. However, existing LoRA merging methods often treat task-specific updates as directly comparable objects and merge them in their original low-rank parameter spaces. This overlooks two key factors: which update directions provide reliable shared support across tasks, and how these directions should be re-parameterized with respect to the pretrained weights before merging. To address this limitation, we propose Pretrained-Guided Shared Basis (PGSB), a two-stage framework for LoRA model merging. PGSB first identifies shared directions among task-specific LoRA updates, and then re-parameterizes these directions using their interaction with the pretrained weights, producing a more suitable basis for merging. Extensive experiments…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 10

  Adversarial Gradient Forcing for Robust Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generation

  Chenxi Xia, Yixuan Xu, Shan Liu, Jiapeng Wang, Maohua Li +5

  Autoregressive video generation models generate videos sequentially, with each new block conditioned on previously generated blocks. By training on the model's own rollouts, Self Forcing and its follow-up methods substantially mitigate exposure bias caused by the mismatch between training- and inference-time history distributions. However, these models still suffer from error accumulation during long-horizon generation. We identify a key underlying limitation: the model remains highly sensitive to errors in its generated history, allowing small deviations to be amplified through subsequent generations. We refer to this underexplored problem as the local history robustness gap. To address this gap, we introduce Adversarial Gradient Forcing (AGF), a framework designed to improve the robustness of few-step autoregressive video models to perturbations and accumulated errors in their own generated histories. AGF uses distribution matching gradients from future block predictions to select adversarial perturbations of self-generated histories. It then jointly trains the generator on the original and perturbed histories to improve the robustness of future generation. Extensive…

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• arXiv cs.SEOct 10

  LASER: Defeasible Certificate Search for Long-Range Protocol Dependencies

  Zihan Tang, Huibiao Zhu

  Protocol specifications rarely justify executable behavior in one place: a transition may inherit its source state from a remote control block, name its events only by number, and remain subject to a later correction. Recovering the nearby clause is therefore insufficient; the system must assemble a source-linked certificate and determine whether any stronger rule applies. We introduce LASER, a proof-carrying search method for sparse, defeasible protocol evidence. LASER represents missing support and unresolved corrections as explicit obligations, searches typed evidence routes, and lets an occurrence-aware symbolic checker alone decide whether a certificate warrants, refutes, or leaves a behavior unresolved. On 91 BehaviorCheck families under a matched 2K budget, LASER improves Joint Edge+Proof over the strongest local reader on two model families ($Δ=+.132$, $p=.017$; $Δ=+.198$, $p<.001$) while cutting false discoveries by 2--3$\times$. Controlled replays attribute the gain and its limits: neither reference routing nor deterministic citation expansion alone exceeds the local baseline; whole-document reading (29--65K tokens), two-round iterative retrieval, and even oracle…

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• arXiv cs.IROct 10

  LLM-based User-Product Relevance Evaluation for Dynamic Product Advertising

  Wen Zhang, Xiao Bai, Hsiang-wei Chao, Mengfan Zhu, Tong Zhao +7

  Dynamic Product Advertising (DPA) retrieval systems are a core component of modern e-commerce advertising; however, their evaluation remains challenging. Conventional offline engagement metrics are limited by sparse, biased feedback, while online evaluation is costly and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a user--product relevance metric for offline evaluation of DPA retrieval systems. The metric first compresses the engagement history into a compact set of intent representatives via Semantic-ID-grouped, event-stratified segmentation, then assesses the relevance of a recommended product to each individual intent and aggregates them as a user-level relevance score, yielding a stable and interpretable measure of retrieval quality. To compute this metric at scale, we leverage large language models (LLMs) as semantic relevance judges, capturing nuanced functional and semantic relationships that heuristic methods often miss. We propose an agentic, human-aligned prompting framework that generates multi-category relevance guidelines and distills teacher-model judgments into an efficient student model for scalable evaluation. The resulting metric strongly correlates with offline…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 10

  Active Neural Matter: A Finite-Window Response Framework for Physical Systems and Distributed AI Workflows

  Tianchi Chen, Shihua Yu

  Physical systems and distributed AI workflows can retain past information, receive delayed feedback and combine conflicting signals. These features pose a common modeling problem: determining what information about past interactions a state must retain to account for future responses. Active Neural Matter (ANM) addresses this problem through a finite-window response framework. Forward analysis uses each system's dynamics to predict state and output responses to perturbations, separating propagation from output sensitivity. Inverse analysis tests whether a candidate state retains enough information for these responses. With the system and future inputs or interaction rules fixed, distinguishable responses from histories assigned the same state identify distinctions the representation must preserve. Their distributional separation gives a lower bound on the worst-case error of approximating behavior from that state. Uncertainty bounds distinguish rejection, support within a fixed tolerance on tested comparisons, and unresolved cases. Delayed-consensus simulations check analytical predictions of response amplitude and phase over a narrow range of delays; flocking illustrates…

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• Anomaly detectors28+115.4%
• AI tutors15+36.4%
• Multimodal emotion8+14.3%
• Channel state information14−12.5%
• Physics informed neural128−19.0%
• Forecasting time54−19.4%
• Medical image segmentation148−22.5%
• Machine learned interatomic39−23.5%