Research

• Compositional coverage and decision grounding in trajectory supervision1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current tool-use trajectories often lack multi-step dependencies and justified actions, limiting effective agent learning.

  • Trajectory2Gym: Decision-Grounded Compositional Interaction Synthesis for Tool-Use Agentsraises · addresses
• Benchmarking agent harness reliability and failure attribution1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks focus on model capabilities, neglecting the evaluation of agent harnesses and their reliability.

  • Trial by Trace: Benchmarking AI Agent Harnesses for Reliability and Failure Attributionraises · addresses
• Compositionality of RAG pipeline components1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Isolated gains in RAG components do not necessarily compose, and optimizing one metric can hurt another.

  • Retrieval Augmented Generation Compositionalityraises · addresses
• Token collapse in graph soft prompting1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Graph-specific tokens in textual graph soft prompting become indistinguishable, failing to convey graph content.

  • On the Token Collapse Phenomenon in Textual Graph Soft Promptingraises
• Label-free monitoring in self-supervised learning1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Standard signals like loss and feature statistics fail to detect encoder degradation in self-supervised training.

  • Improving Signals, Declining Encoder: A Known-Answer Test of Label-Free Monitoring in Self-Supervised Learningraises

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Anomaly detectors24+71.4%
• Channel state information15+36.4%
• AI tutors15+36.4%
• Character recognition OCR12+20.0%
• Multimodal emotion8+14.3%
• Physics informed neural131−11.5%
• Machine learned interatomic37−14.0%
• Multimodal526−26.0%

• arXiv cs.AIOct 9

  A Local Agentic AI Framework to Generate Edge Case Scenarios for Safety Assurance

  Victoria J. Hodge, Colin Paterson, Rob Alexander

  Generating edge case scenarios is crucial for training, testing and safety assuring autonomous systems. This identifies hazardous failures to increase system reliability and robustness, ensures the system can still function safely on the boundaries of its operational design domain and learns the expected system behaviour for these edge cases. The rapid advancement in the generation and analysis capabilities of language models (LMs) has expanded their applicability and recent work has investigated LM scenario generation. However, many recent approaches rely on human-in-the-loop or rule-based strategies. This restricts the LM's ability to generate diverse and edge case scenarios; the long tail of the distribution. Our work uses local LMs in a laptop-based agentic AI framework for adaptive scenario generation. This is cheap, fully-controlled, ensures data privacy and security. It uses think, act, observe, update, and continue loops with lightweight JSON encoding to generate scenarios. We use the system requirements, system description and environment description as knowledge bases in contextual prompts for an LM to ensure scenario realism. A second, independent LM critiques each…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cond-mat.dis-nnOct 9

  On physical implementability of reinforcement-learning-driven reasoning

  Eiji Konishi

  In the machine learning community, the reinforcement-learning-driven reasoning process has been intensively studied since around 2025. In this article, we present a negative result on the hardware implementation of this reinforcement-learning-driven reasoning process in a physical neural network model in the presence of a reward external potential energy for a given reward. In this hardware implementation, the existence of a chain of thought in dynamics contradicts the Lyapunov stability of the system.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv quant-phOct 9

  Harmonic analysis and circuit approximation of Sobolev functions on quantum input spaces

  Philipp Schmocker

  We derive approximation rates for Sobolev functions defined on the complex unit sphere and complex projective space, representing quantum states, and on the special and projective unitary groups, representing quantum unitary operations. By using harmonic analysis on compact groups and compact homogeneous spaces, we characterize the corresponding Peter--Weyl decompositions and Sobolev spaces via irreducible representations and the Laplace--Beltrami operator. Combining spectral truncation with finite-depth quantum-circuit approximation, invoking the Solovay--Kitaev theorem, we establish quantitative rates that separate the spectral truncation error from the circuit approximation error.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CLOct 9

  A Better Metric Will Not Save You: What You Compare Beats How You Compare It

  Noureddine Khaous, Guillaume Wisniewski

  Representational similarity measures (RSA, CKA, Procrustes) are chosen for the transformations they treat as irrelevant, and all of them take the set of conditions as given. That set is fixed by two decisions, which inputs are admitted and how they are grouped, both taken before the matrix a measure operates on exists: no invariance property reaches them. We measure what they are worth where the arrangement the conditions ought to have is known independently of the systems compared, the acoustic organisation of vowels, across fifteen languages and twenty-seven representations. Changing which categories are compared, at a fixed number of them, moves the gap between two representations by more than twice the effect being measured, while changing how many moves it not at all. In this setting rankings of models are identified under these choices, and rankings across languages are not.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 9

  GraftOOD: Grafting Out-of-Distribution Exemplars into Advantage-Weighted Rectification for Video Reward Optimization

  Zheming Fu, Ruizhe He, Wenbin Ning, Xiaoxiao Ma, Xuan Yang +5

  Video reward optimization can increase proxy rewards while reducing video dynamics, a mismatch we identify as \emph{motion collapse}, including under a video-level motion-quality reward. We propose \textbf{GraftOOD}, which replaces part of the online rollouts in selected prompt groups with out-of-distribution video exemplars. A shared velocity-regression objective combines group-relative reward rectification with sequence-level exemplar supervision, requiring neither exemplar generation trajectories nor an additional supervised-loss coefficient. We characterize its pointwise optimal field as a source-posterior-weighted combination of the two source-specific target fields. We construct \textbf{GraftSet-Video}, containing 9,588 format-matched exemplars for 2,397 prompts, to supply external supervision. On Wan2.1-1.3B, GraftOOD raises Dynamic Degree from 4.86 to 44.41 relative to reward-only FlowAWR, while HPSv3 decreases from 8.10 to 7.32 and VisionReward remains close. At the main setting, GraftOOD leads nine of ten metrics among three exemplar-augmented methods. Ablations of exemplar frequency and within-group count reveal dynamics--reward trade-offs rather than uniform gains…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 9

  A Real-World CAD Segmentation Benchmark: Comparing Rule-Based and Learning-Based Approaches through Hole Detection

  Kai Schütte, Edgar Heinert, Matthias Rottmann

  CAD segmentation datasets are predominantly synthetic or automatically labelled, leaving it unclear how well existing methods transfer to real-world engineering tasks. Fastener-relevant hole detection represents one such task, requiring human annotation and exhibiting greater geometric complexity than commonly used benchmarks. We address this gap through three main contributions. First, we develop two task-specific rule-based methods, one graph-wire-search and one multi-view based, and complement them with a human-annotated benchmark dataset derived from engineering CAD data that also enables training of UV-Net and AAGNet, representative learning-based approaches for B-Rep segmentation. Second, we conduct an extensive experimental study including parameter optimisation, evaluation on our benchmark dataset, cross-domain generalisation on a synthetic dataset, and an assessment of the feasibility of the approaches at varying dataset sizes and IoU thresholds. Third, we provide evidence-based insights into the strengths and limitations of different approaches: rule-based methods generalise well without training data, with the graph-wire-search method favouring recall and the…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CVOct 9

  When MLLMs miss what humans read: diagnosing and learning to read squint text

  Chen Peng, Shan Huang, Jianbo Huang, Linrui Qin, Qibo Sun +1

  Multimodal LLMs can fail to read text embedded in an image's coarse structure (text a human recovers by squinting) and report that no text is present. We name this class Squint Text and study it as a recognition deficiency, motivated by cases from a production moderation pipeline. We introduce SquintBench, comprising 1076 production-derived moderation images, and SquintCtrl, a controlled synthetic suite for mechanism diagnosis. Frozen-weight analysis shows that hidden text leaves a coarse signal while glyph identity is weakly represented; identity becomes substantially more accessible when the correct spatial regions are supplied, implicating spatial selection as a major bottleneck. Suppressing high-frequency content also improves reading at a fixed visual-token budget, while visual token count may also contribute. These findings motivate Squint OPSD: a frozen teacher receives a downscaled view and the ground-truth transcription as privileged context, and its token-level distributions supervise a student along on-policy trajectories. At inference, the student reads the original image alone. Squint OPSD reaches 88.61 ANLS on SquintBench, versus 26.50 for the unadapted backbone,…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 9

  SqueezeBench: Saturation-Resilient Evaluation of Mathematical Capability

  Pablo Manrique, Hai Xia, Stefan Szeider

  AI systems are making rapid progress in mathematics, but this progress is hard to measure. Benchmarks of solved problems saturate, and in benchmarks of open problems each problem can be resolved for the first time only once. We present SqueezeBench, a benchmark that is resilient to saturation: a success raises the bar instead of removing the problem. Each problem fixes an integer function $f(n)$ whose values are known only for small $n$, and the benchmark keeps a lower and an upper record on it. A record is a computable Lean function with a machine-checked proof that it bounds $f$. A submission proposes a new function and proves that it bounds $f$, that it is no worse than the current record at any $n$, and that it is strictly better at some $n$. Once accepted, it becomes the record that the next submission has to beat. The system thus chooses the bound as well as its proof, and it may improve the record at a single $n$ or its growth rate. At every $n$, the gap between the two records shows how far the certified bounds are from determining $f(n)$. Every proof is checked by two independent Lean kernels, so no referee needs to check the mathematics. The checks also reject a…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.CLOct 9

  Towards Enriching Design-Time Models with Evidence from Simulation and Operational Activities

  Barbara da Silva Oliveira, Julien Deantoni, Nicolas Ferry

  Cyber-Physical Systems are developed through multiple model based activities, comprising several stages of development. As the development progresses through simulation, experimentation, and operation, observations of system execution may reveal missing, uncertain, or invalid design knowledge. The path from execution results to persistent design-time enrichment, however, is often implicit. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing an evidence driven workflow for systematically transferring knowledge produced during simulation and operation back into design-time models. We demonstrate the workflow using an Influence Model, a design-time artefact used to represent how design artefacts and environmental factors jointly affect system response properties, using a sign-following robot use case. We show how simulation evidence can enrich Influence Models by supporting participant pruning decisions, interaction characterisation, influence-function abstraction, and validity-scope information. The application demonstrates the feasibility of the workflow for simulation-based evidence and its potential benefits to improve design-time reasoning and feedback in subsequent development…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 9

  Agentic Large Language Models

  Max van Duijn, Michiel van der Meer, Aske Plaat, Niki van Stein

  Large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm. Their ability to communicate with us in our own language, and to reason about our world, has made them a favorite tool for writing, answering questions, and much more. Their answers already influence our decisions and our actions. What would happen if LLMs themselves could act in the world directly? What would happen if LLMs could interact with each other? Agentic LLMs combine the power of large language models with the ability to act in the real world. In this book we will discuss how agentic LLMs work, how they act, how they interact, and what this means for us, as users.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.SDOct 9

  Oído: Open-Vocabulary Speech Recognition on a $5 Microcontroller without a Neural Accelerator

  Daniel Varela Sánchez, Guillermo Martín-Coello Juárez

  Speech recognition on low-cost microcontrollers is, in practice, limited to keyword spotting or a fixed list of commands. We present Oído, an inference engine that runs open-vocabulary English speech recognition entirely on an ESP32-S3 (240 MHz dual-core Xtensa LX7, 512 KB of SRAM, 8 MB of PSRAM, 16 MB of flash, no neural accelerator). Oído executes a 13M-parameter Conformer-CTC model with int8 weights, per-frame dynamic int8 activations and int8 attention on the chip's SIMD instructions, with a schedule designed around flash and PSRAM bandwidth. On LibriSpeech test-clean/test-other the on-device arithmetic reaches 3.70%/8.23% word error rate (WER), within 0.12 points of full precision, and 3.33%/7.15% with an on-chip 1.3M-parameter language model; a transducer head gives 2.99%/6.67% and an int4 variant fits in 8.3 MB. This is 2.3-2.8x fewer errors than the vendor's recognizer on the same chip, and fewer than Whisper tiny.en and Moonshine tiny in full precision on a laptop, including in real noise and reverberation. Measured on a physical board, the firmware runs at 1.97x the duration of the audio on one core, with transcripts identical to an instruction-exact emulator: accurate,…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv stat.MLOct 9

  Learning by Compression: Risk Estimates Attain the Law-of-Large-Numbers Rate

  Simone Garatti, Marco C. Campi

  Compression schemes provide a general framework for deriving data-dependent risk bounds for learning algorithms. For learning rules based on preferent compression, existing results upper-bound the risk in terms of a sample-dependent complexity $\boldsymbol{k}$, defined as the cardinality of the compression augmented by the training examples on which the reconstructed hypothesis is inappropriate. These results, however, yield a margin of order $O(\sqrt{\ln N/N})$ above $\boldsymbol{k}/N$. In this paper, we establish that the logarithmic factor is not intrinsic. We prove that, for every fixed confidence level $1-δ$, the risk is bounded with probability at least $1-δ$ by $$ \frac{\boldsymbol{k}}{N} + O\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\right), $$ uniformly over all possible values of $\boldsymbol{k}$. Thus, risk estimates for learning algorithms based on preferent compression attain the same law-of-large-numbers rate as the empirical estimate of the probability of a fixed event. We also show that the leading term $\boldsymbol{k}/N$ is necessary and investigate its relation to the empirical risk. In particular, we identify regimes in which the empirical risk retains the $O(1/\sqrt{N})$…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv eess.ASOct 9

  Revisiting Accent Classification with DistilHuBERT: Speaker-Disjoint Evaluation and Cross-Corpus Generalization

  Xu He, Homayoon Beigi

  Recent accent classification systems can achieve high accuracy in standard in-corpus evaluations. However, when speakers overlap between the training and test sets, such results may overestimate model robustness compared with real-world deployment scenarios. This study revisits the robustness of DistilHuBERT-based accent classification by using L2-ARCTIC and multiple external English accent datasets. The comparison covers file-level and speaker-disjoint splits, along with balanced external-data training and teacher-student pseudo-labeling. The large performance gap between in-corpus and external evaluations suggests that file-level evaluation substantially overestimates performance, while speaker-disjoint evaluation can provide a more realistic estimate of the generalization to unseen speakers. In this study, models trained on external data alone do not reliably generalize to L2-ARCTIC. Among the tested configurations, balanced external-data training offers the most promising supervised setting. The pseudo-labeling experiments further indicate that confidence-based filtering alone is insufficient under domain mismatch. Overall, this study suggests that robust accent…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.MAOct 9

  Collective Autonomous Vehicle Routing Needs Social Awareness for Coexistence with Human Drivers

  Anastasia Psarou, Mikolaj Rams, Blazej Torbus, Rafal Kucharski

  Collective Autonomous Vehicle (AV) route choices in real-world traffic networks can create externalities for Human-Driven Vehicles (HDVs), as routes that benefit AVs may increase travel times for other road users. To address this, we introduce a social component, the marginal cost, to the selfish travel time AV reward. Marginal cost captures an AV's impact on other road users by comparing their travel times with those in a counterfactual simulation in which the AV is removed. We study AV route choice in mixed-autonomy traffic settings using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where AVs learn routing policies through repeated interactions with the traffic environment. Experiments on the real-world networks of Ingolstadt and Provins show that incorporating marginal cost into the AV reward not only limits the increase in HDV travel times and shortens AV travel times relative to selfish AV routing, but also improves overall system performance. In Ingolstadt, selfish routing of 40\% AVs increases the travel times of other vehicles by 1.7\%, and this drops to 1.1\% when the social reward is included. Interestingly, not only does overall system performance improve, but the AVs…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 9

  Rollout-Time Intervention: Unlocking Agentic Reinforcement Learning Beyond Policy Limits

  Xi Chen, Ruixue Ding, Zhigaoyuan Wang, Fanrui Zhang, Qiang Zhang +7

  Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) agents, enabling stronger reasoning, planning, and tool-use in interactive environments. However, existing agent RL methods remain fundamentally constrained by an on-policy reasoning bottleneck: when tasks exceed the model's current capability boundary, effective trajectories become extremely sparse and training often collapses. We introduce Rollout-Time Intervention (RTI), a technique designed to elicit successful trajectories beyond the policy's intrinsic exploration capacity. RTI operates by leveraging reward-side evidence (i.e., evaluation rubrics) during rollout to convert erroneous trajectories into successful ones, providing effective learning signals for tasks that the policy rarely solves on its own. Although intervention trajectories are inherently off-policy, we find that they can effectively guide policy optimization when trajectories with excessive distributional shifts are filtered out. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that RTI consistently outperforms RL baselines, enabling the post-trained policy to approach the performance of substantially…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.AIOct 9

  Local Diagnostics of Learned Event Representations for Anomaly Detection at the HL-LHC

  Donatella Genovese, Philip Ploner, Simone Scardapane, Stefano Giagu, Thea Klaeboe Aarrestad

  Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv cs.LGOct 9

  PPG-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for PPG Foundation Models

  Arvasu Kulkarni, Mahir Jain, Aditya Ray Mishra, Sandeep Singh, Siddharth Panwar

  Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly recorded by wearable and clinical devices at enormous scale, and a growing number of PPG foundation models (FMs) have been developed to compute reusable representations for various downstream tasks. These models are difficult to compare: different evaluations use different datasets, task definitions, preprocessing, downstream heads, hyperparameter tuning, and baselines. We present PPG-Bench, a unifying open-source benchmark evaluating five public PPG FMs across nine open-access datasets and 26 tasks spanning cardiovascular state estimation, activity, sleep, screening, and identification. We evaluate models under four downstream regimes of increasing adaptability (linear probing, random forests, frozen MLP probes, and end-to-end finetuning), with model-specific hyperparameter optimization and subject-disjoint cross-validation. We also evaluate against three controls: random/constant baseline, a deterministic pulse-rate-variability (PRV) feature set, and a generic time-series FM (MOMENT). Across all 68 task-regime combinations, 35.3% show no meaningful FM advantage over the random/constant baseline, and in 83.8% no PPG-specific FM…

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv eess.SPOct 9

  CNN-Transformer with Sigmoid Label for High-Resolution Sub-Degree DOA Estimation

  Lifeng Wang, Xintong Li, Aifei Liu

  This paper addresses the grid quantization error of deep-learning (DL)-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Classification- based DOA methods discretize the continuous angular space into a grid, so that with a peak-based read-out, the accuracy and resolution are limited by the grid step and by the width of the label peak. To address this issue, we propose a sigmoid label that encodes the sources' DOAs as the sum of angle-shifted monotonic sigmoid functions. Differentiating the output of a CNN-Transformer network trained with the sigmoid label produces sharp spectral peaks at the source DOAs. Combined with a moderately refined grid step of 0.25 degrees, the CNN-Transformer with the proposed sigmoid label attains sub-degree accuracy and a 1-degree resolution, breaking the limit of the grid quantization error. Under the unified CNN-Transformer backbone, we compare the proposed Sigmoid label with the Gaussian label, the 0-1 hard label, and the binary cross-entropy (BCE) baseline. Numerical results demonstrate that the Sigmoid label attains the highest accuracy and superior resolution compared to other labels.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv eess.ASOct 9

  Does Financial Speech Need Continual Learning Regularization? A Study of EWC and mini-KFAC on Earnings Call ASR

  Thai Quoc On, Homayoon Beigi

  Earnings call transcription presents a realistic continual learning scenario where Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are updated with new recordings but risk catastrophic forgetting of previously learned financial speech patterns. Adapting Whisper-small from a general-domain speech corpus to the Earnings22 benchmark reveals the opposite: all evaluated methods exhibit improvement on held-out financial speech from the same domain during adaptation rather than forgetting. This task complementarity makes regularization counterproductive. Nevertheless, when regularization is warranted, a layer-wise mini-Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (mini-KFAC) approximation seems to achieve lower word error rates (WERs) and more stable optimization than standard diagonal Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). The results suggest that task complementarity should be assessed before applying continual learning constraints, and prefer mini-KFAC EWC over diagonal EWC when needed.

  PDF

  Summarize this
• arXiv eess.SPOct 9

  One Thing Leads to Another: The Essentials of Time Series Causal Discovery

  Kurt Butler, Damian Machlanski, Michael P. J. Camilleri, Zhihua Liu, Panagiotis Dimitrakopoulos +3

  Time series causal discovery --- the process of detecting causation between time series --- has its roots in signal processing research from over a half century ago. It has since received active and widespread interest, evolving into different forms across domains such as statistics, dynamical systems and machine learning. Entering this fragmented and constantly evolving research landscape can be daunting. This tutorial provides a unified overview of time series causal discovery across research communities. We introduce the key principles invoked by modern discovery methods, and we discuss their limitations and assumptions. We also discuss how discovery methods are evaluated, benchmarked and fine-tuned. We further discuss how causal discovery for time series is becoming crucial for downstream tasks in agriculture and Earth science, in healthcare, and in artificial intelligence systems. We believe that this tutorial will serve as a valuable resource in navigating the deluge of recent causality research, as well as an invitation to signal processing audiences to contribute to causal problems. To further help readers, we host a companion repository to link to useful code packages…

  PDF

  Summarize this