Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Improving adaptability of models to new tasks and environments without task-specific fine-tuning is critical for scalable embodied intelligence.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in agentic systems2 papers raise it · 1 addresses it

  High computational and time costs limit practical deployment of agentic systems for real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
  • PremiseCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of Human and AI Peer Reviewsraises · addresses
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Robustness to irreversible failures and accurate state tracking are essential for reliable embodied control.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning benchmarks1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current benchmarks often fail to ensure models use necessary audio-visual evidence, weakening evaluation reliability.

  • EvaOmni: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Audio-Visual Reasoningraises · addresses
• Length generalization in sequential state tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Models struggle to maintain performance on problems much longer than their training data, limiting scalability.

  • PAR: Progress-Aligned Recurrence for Length Generalization in State Trackingraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Training & fine-tuning42+90.9%
• AI safety29+61.1%
• Federated learning53+39.5%
• Quantum machine learning29+38.1%
• Computer vision29+31.8%
• Evals60+25.0%
• Code models13+18.2%
• Forecasting time88+10.0%

• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Structure-Aware Spatial Kernels for Gaussian Process Distributed Port-Hamiltonian Systems

  Tianyi Yang, Thomas Beckers

  Gaussian process distributed port-Hamiltonian systems (GP-dPHS) enable data-driven modeling of distributed dynamical systems while preserving their physical structure. However, standard stationary kernels can be inefficient for spatially heterogeneous systems because they neither exploit known input invariances nor reflect structured spatial dependencies. We address this limitation with a structure-aware kernel design that removes irrelevant state coordinates and decouples state and spatial dependencies through a tensor-product covariance. This modular construction allows qualitative knowledge of spatial heterogeneity to be incorporated by selecting an appropriate spatial kernel without requiring an analytical description of the underlying profile. Numerical experiments on a nonlinear string with periodic, smoothly varying, and semi-piecewise stiffness profiles demonstrate that structural decoupling consistently improves reconstruction accuracy, while profile-matched spatial kernels yield substantially larger gains in force-field and trajectory reconstruction.

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• arXiv q-bio.NCOct 15

  Alignment of visual brain encoding models with individual perceptual similarity judgments

  Daniel Chong, Haomiao Chen, Keith W Jamison, Raja Marjieh, Ilia Sucholutsky +2

  Encoding models that predict brain activation responses to images have traditionally been trained to maximize accuracy when predicting observed brain data. However, their internal representations may not reflect individual human perception. In this work, we investigate whether we can fine-tune brain encoding models to better align their representations with individuals' similarity judgments. Using similarity judgments of 100 images from 8 participants in the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), we adapt a generic human similarity judgment model (DreamSim) separately for each participant to obtain personalized perceptual similarity models. These models are then used to obtain subject-specific similarity structure across images in their encoding model training sets. We fine-tune each participant's baseline encoder in two conditions, aligning its representations with either generic or personalized similarity judgments, with the same initialization and objective. We find that baseline brain encoders reflect within-subject perceptual similarity more strongly than measured fMRI responses and preserve intersubject correlations present in measured fMRI, but fail to reflect those of human…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 15

  Repairing LLM-Generated Specifications with Deterministic Diagnosis

  Giovanni Vaccarino, Emanuele La Malfa, Dehai Min, Hanrong Zhang, Pier Luca Lanzi +4

  Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as formalizers: given a reasoning problem expressed in natural language, they produce a formal specification that a symbolic solver can then solve, with guarantees relative to that specification. Many specifications are runnable yet semantically wrong, encoding incorrect constraints, domains, objectives, predicates, or goals, and solver-error feedback dries up once execution succeeds. Purely LLM-based diagnosis, lacking a formal ground truth, often fails to spot these errors, and its ungrounded critiques cause regressions in 11.8% of initially correct specifications in our experiments. We propose DRAGO, a repair framework that replaces this ungrounded critique with deterministic, formalism-specific diagnosis, and retains a rewrite only when the diagnosed error weight strictly decreases under a reference-free acceptance predicate. Across five benchmarks spanning logical reasoning (SMT-LIB2), constraint programming (MiniZinc), and planning (PDDL), DRAGO cuts regressions by nearly an order of magnitude, to 1.3%, while improving answer accuracy by 12.9 percentage points over zero-shot formalization and 8.7 percentage points over…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Who Do Perspectivist Models Predict Well? Annotator Agreement, Sparsity, and Performance

  London Lowmanstone, Vaagishwaran Sivakumar, Anwesha Samaddar, Akul Mundada, Harnoor Kaur +1

  Successful completion of perspectivist natural language processing (NLP) annotation tasks requires algorithms to be aligned across diverse perspectives in order to predict how different humans will rate text. This work studies how the performance of such algorithms varies for annotators who behave differently than others, either by providing annotations that diverge from others' responses or by providing fewer annotations altogether. To aid with characterizing model performance, we curate the largest collection to date of perspectivist NLP datasets with ordinal annotations. After evaluating multiple classes of perspectivist algorithms across each of the datasets, we model the relationship between individual annotator idiosyncrasy and algorithm performance. In general, we find that algorithms perform better on annotators who tend to agree with others, but that annotator response rate does not have a statistically significant positive correlation with algorithm performance.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 15

  Seeing Seizures: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Video and EEG Deep Learning for Automated Rodent Seizure Detection and Severity Grading

  Alloy Das, Shreyan Ganguly, Nyzil Massey, Hung Phi Doan, Zhanhong Jiang +2

  Manual annotation of synchronized video and EEG recordings is a bottleneck in preclinical seizure research. We present an empirical study of seizure detection and behavioral severity grading using 24,131 paired clips from 601 sessions across 20 rats in a soman-induced epilepsy model. Ten video architectures and seven single-channel EEG models are evaluated independently on binary detection and three- and five-class severity tasks. In the session-exclusive reference comparison, R(2+1)D-18 and GRU achieve detection macro-F1 scores of 0.968 and 0.974, respectively; for five-class grading, the corresponding scores are 0.657 and 0.560. Subject-exclusive evaluation reduces five-class macro-F1 to 0.475 for video and 0.404 for EEG, highlighting the difficulty of grading unseen animals. Temporal-sampling experiments demonstrate the value of multiple frames, while detection performance varies relatively little across the evaluated video architectures. A separate video-only binary-detection evaluation on RodEpil achieves a mean seizure-class F1 of 0.979 after uniform re-encoding to reduce identified class-correlated encoding cues. The study characterizes existing models for behavior-defined…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Coverage Cliffs in Off-Policy Quantile Certification

  Pauline Bourigault, Emmanuelle Bourigault

  We study when logged contextual-bandit data can certify an upper tail quantile for a policy selected from the same sample. We construct a PAC-Bayes Bernstein lower-confidence envelope for the target cumulative distribution function (CDF), simultaneous over a predeclared threshold grid and all data-dependent posteriors. The resulting procedure, TailCert, uses the envelope's first crossing of level p to return an atom-safe upper confidence bound on the selected posterior's pooled p-quantile (or inconclusive). It can also be used to select a policy under a certified tail constraint. The concentration ingredients are standard; the main theoretical contribution is a matched finite-class certification boundary comparing full logs with their joint weighted CDF indicators at a fixed threshold. On an explicit rare-action class, the required sample size grows linearly with the overlap factor W, logarithmically with policy-search and confidence complexity, and quadratically with the inverse CDF safety margin; the upper and lower bounds agree up to constants in the stated regime. On this class, the CDF reduction hides which actions exceeded the budget; retaining action counts restores the…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Deterministic Bounds on Accuracy and Stability of Metric-Space Regression and Classification

  Nina Maria Gottschling, Jakob Gawlikowski, Michele Caprio

  Data-driven approaches often face ambiguity in datasets due to sensor or target noise, insufficient information, and noise in the input data. While best-fit machine learning methods can accommodate such noise through uncertainty estimates, they are prone to overfitting and it is challenging to quantify ambiguity of the relation between inputs and targets. We introduce a geometric framework that quantifies this ambiguity through the average kernel size, computed with data-dependent, i.e. model-independent, feasible sets derived from worst-case input and target noise. The framework provides computable, deterministic, non-asymptotic bounds on the best achievable empirical error and accuracy for a finite, constructed dataset, independent of the predictive model class, and applies to regression and classification with pseudo-metric input spaces and metric target spaces. The ambiguity of the input-target relation implies three consequences: an empirical error floor, an accuracy-stability trade-off, and, under standard probabilistic assumptions, a strictly positive distribution-training error gap when training below the accuracy bounds. Under standard Borel assumptions for Euclidean…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 15

  Micro-Localization: High-Precision Mobile Robot Localization Using Microscopic Ground Texture

  Aaron Wilhelm, Marina de Albuquerque Marcon, Emith Uyanwatte, Nils Napp

  We demonstrate high-precision global localization using natural ground texture viewed through microscope optics, achieving localization in the tens-of-micrometers regime. For the planar ground texture localization problem considered here, we relate optical magnification and image-space localization uncertainty to physical localization precision. Leveraging this relationship, we then develop a microscope-based localization system that addresses the calibration, camera-modeling, and focus challenges introduced by high-magnification imaging. We evaluate this system across several surface textures using a calibrated precision gantry. Across 1,007 held-out queries per surface, the system localizes every query and achieves translation RMSEs of 28$-$73 $μ$m. Independent photometric registration agrees with the feature-based localization estimates to within approximately 9 $μ$m RMSE. We further demonstrate localization on a low-cost mobile robot using the gantry-collected maps, and also show that the system can resolve micrometer-scale displacement caused by thermal expansion. These results show that microscopic natural surface texture can bring mobile localization into a precision…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 15

  FRACTAL: A Self-Similar Multi-Agent Orchestration Architecture with Formal Communication, Convergence, and Depth Bounds

  Ohad Dan, Abhinav Taliyan

  We present FRACTAL, a self-similar multi-agent architecture for recursive goal decomposition, in which the same five-component organizational pattern -- Orchestrator, Ensemble, Knowledge Ledger, Decision Maker, Meta-Observer -- recurs at every level of a decomposition tree. We make four formal contributions: (1) a communication bound showing intra-node cost is linear in ensemble size and round count (O(kr)) under a two-phase blind-proposal/stress-test protocol, versus quadratic cost for free-form debate, with an explicit, stated assumption on fixed evaluator count; (2) a two-mode orchestration criterion separating generative and evaluative phases via a measurable diversity-saturation threshold; (3) a supermajority convergence guarantee with explicit probability bounds at stated agreement levels, and a formal depth bound under an operationalized goal-complexity measure; (4) a Bayesian inter-layer escalation mechanism unifying hysteresis and contract-breach signaling under one posterior update. We illustrate the architecture's execution qualitatively on a worked example and a multi-layer case study; we do not report quantitative performance claims in this paper, and we explicitly…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 15

  When Plans Change, Remember: Replanning-Guided Visual Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

  Victoria Smelova, Daniil Kazachkov, Georgiy Kazantsev, Iuliia Tsvetkova, Egor Cherepanov +4

  Long-horizon, multi-stage Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often require visual information that is no longer present in the current observation. Retaining the complete observation history is computationally expensive and highly redundant, motivating selective visual memory. We introduce RePlanMem-VLA (Replanning-Guided Keyframe Memory for VLA), which turns a policy's own plan revisions into an online memory-write signal. Under receding-horizon execution, consecutive action chunks predict some of the same future actions. RePlanMem-VLA treats unusually large disagreement between these temporally aligned predictions as evidence of a task-relevant event. We first compare 35 disagreement measures across single-task autoregressive decoder-only and Flow-Matching Transformers trained from scratch, then validate the selected signals on pretrained OpenVLA-OFT and $π_{0.5}$ policies over MIKASA-Robo-VLA tasks. The resulting detectors achieve ROC-AUC of 0.981-0.997. We then use the selected signals in RePlanMem-VLA to trigger updates to a bounded visual memory, with a robot-masked write filter suppressing redundant frames. In the evaluated memory-retention experiments, RePlanMem-VLA…

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• arXiv cs.CYOct 15

  Generative AI Produces and Transmits Beauty Bias

  AJ Alvero, Deepak Varuvel Dennison, Alexandra Crespin, Heeyon Kim, Alejandra Regla-Vargas +3

  Societies reward people judged to be attractive by standards intertwined with gender and race. In this paper, we examine if and how generative AI may contribute to these dynamics. We audited 27 text-to-image generators released between 2022 and 2026 using simple prompts that never mention attractiveness or beauty, analyzing 51,300 generated faces and 160,196 photographs of real people across primary and supplementary comparisons. We used three automated measures and collected ratings from 550 human raters on a subset of images. Nearly all generators produced faces scoring above photographed faces under automated measures, and human raters judged the outputs of all 23 generators as significantly more attractive than photographed faces, even after correction for multiple comparisons. When focusing our analysis on gender, we find that 37% of female-prompted generated faces outscored the median professional fashion model. Across racial, ethnic, and national categories, groups associated with darker skin tones tended to receive lower attractiveness scores than groups associated with lighter skin tones. In a preregistered hiring simulation experiment (N = 570), exposure to AI-generated…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 15

  CFC26: Building Evaluations for Deployment in Sonar-Based Fish Counting

  Madison Van Horn, Suzanne Stathatos, Sevan Brodjian, Justin Kay, Kai Van Brunt +4

  Accurate counts of fish populations are essential for monitoring ecosystems and making decisions for conservation, harvest limits, and river management. In many field deployments, these counts are obtained from sonar videos that experts must inspect manually, making large-scale monitoring slow, expensive, and difficult. Automated counting systems have been proposed as a scalable alternative, but so far this promise has been difficult to realize in deployment. Developing evaluations that better reflect real-world deployment conditions will help close this gap and drive improvements in counting performance in practice. To achieve this, we propose Caltech Fish Counting 2026 (CFC26), a new dataset with improved evaluation protocols that simulate deployment to seen and novel rivers, testing in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance. We expand the CFC22 dataset to eleven deployment locations across nine Pacific salmon river systems from Alaska to Northern California, capturing a broader geographical and ecological range of data. We additionally introduce two new evaluation metrics for counting, nMNE and nMANE, that mirror the operational workflow that experts use and help…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Cultural (In)Competence: Investigating Culture-Specific Stereotype Detection Capabilities of LLMs

  Maximilian Spliethöver, Jannes Lötfering, Dominik Bachmann, Alexander Espig, Willem Zuidema +2

  Stereotypes are subjective constructs that are mediated by the cultural context in which they are viewed. Successfully modeling them thus also requires cultural competence. When using large language models (LLMs) for stereotype-related tasks, such as their detection, it is therefore crucial that models can access relevant cultural knowledge and adjust responses accordingly. Since LLMs have shown disparities in what cultural knowledge is available to them, their capacity regarding stereotypes may also be disparate across languages and cultural contexts (e.g., for non-English languages or for non-US contexts). In this paper, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of LLMs for culture-specific stereotype detection across three factors: (1) the prompting language, (2) the instruction tuning language, and (3) the fine-tuning dataset size. We conduct experiments for US, Dutch, and Chinese cultural contexts. Our results suggest that LLMs do not reliably account for cultural contexts and overpredict the presence of stereotypes. Non-English prompts seem to improve consideration of cultural context and thus lead to more effective predictions. Moreover, we find that additional…

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• arXiv cs.SEOct 15

  SIEVE: A Parameterized GitHub Corpus Builder for Software Engineering Research

  Musfiqur Rahman, Mahi Begoug, Emad Shihab

  Software engineering research increasingly relies on large, richly annotated corpora of real-world code. Still, researchers typically assemble these with ad-hoc scripts or static, pre-built datasets that offer no control over corpus composition. This leaves a gap for a reusable tool that goes below the repository level and builds annotated, function- and class-level code corpora under researcher-specified criteria. We present SIEVE (Software Ingestion & Extraction for Verifiable Evaluation), an open-source, parameterized GitHub corpus builder that, unlike repository-level mining tools, works at code granularity: it locates individual functions, methods, and classes in repositories and extracts them as records, giving direct control over corpus construction based on several criteria, including widely used programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++), repository quality, and creation date. To support software engineering research and LLM evaluation on real-world code, SIEVE extracts CodeSearchNet- and OpenClassGen-compatible records, each annotated with 22 structural metrics and AST-derived features, and optionally with a CodeBERT-based P(AI-generated) score (F1=0.9478,…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  On the SPOT: Enhancing Speculative Decoding for Diffusion Language Models via Commit-Order Prediction

  Eliezer Shlomi, Eliron Rahimi, Avi Mendelson, Chaim Baskin

  Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel text generation, but in practice face an unresolved speed-quality trade-off. Exact decoding fills in only one masked position per model pass, while faster multi-token decoding schemes are lossy. Speculative decoding is the standard lossless acceleration for autoregressive models. However, it does not transfer directly to DLMs, which must choose both what to generate and where. We show that this order is the missing piece: the model's own predictions from the previous pass already give the right token at 92-100% of positions, but not which position comes next. Based on this observation, we introduce Speculating Positions Order Trajectory (SPOT), which learns to predict this order. A 0.62M-parameter model reads only the target's output distributions and proposes a tree of candidate continuations, and the target verifies all of them in a single pass by checking whether each equals its own next state. On the verification side, our analysis shows that prior block-diffusion verification approaches either assume $T=0$ or a sequential proposal interface. To support tree-based speculation at any temperature, we propose using coupled-noise…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  HeRE: A Novel Benchmark for Hebrew Relation Extraction via LLM-Guided Denoising of Knowledge Graph Alignments

  Ron Keinan, Amir David Nissan Cohen, Reut Tsarfaty

  While LLMs demonstrate strong capabilities in English Relation Extraction (RE) tasks, a significant gap remains in assessing their RE performance in low-resource languages, due to a lack of standardized benchmarks. Creating native, language-specific annotated RE benchmarks is expensive and requires human expertise, while relying on translation yields suboptimal, inaccurate datasets that introduce English-centric biases. To tackle this, we propose a scalable, language-agnostic methodology to create RE data by denoising naturally occurring yet noisy alignments of knowledge bases and corresponding texts. We define a proper alignment via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) task, where a relation triplet is entailed by an input text. We empirically assess five denoising strategies, and demonstrate that multilingual models outperform language-specific models in the few-shot LLM setting, while Hebrew-specific encoders remain competitive under NLI fine-tuning and are strongest in the label-free cross-training setting. We further find that prompting in the native language achieves performance on par with or slightly exceeding English prompts, confirming that the pipeline operates naturally…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 15

  Don't Retrain, Remix: Adaptation of Web Agents using Mixture Hypernetworks

  Md Farhan Ishmam, Minh Pham Dinh, Kenneth Marino

  The web is not static or uniform. Websites that serve the same purpose can look and navigate very differently. Even within a single site, successive redesigns can change how familiar features are presented and accessed. Humans adapt to this by recognizing familiar interaction patterns and reusing what they already know. We give web agents a similar ability with WebMix, a mixture hypernetwork that adapts them to unseen interfaces by composing previously trained low-rank adapters. WebMix begins with a bank of adapters trained on source interfaces. At deployment, a scout agent explores the target interface and summarizes its observations into a compact manual. A lightweight router uses this manual to predict mixing coefficients over the adapter bank, which combine the existing adapters into a new one for inference. Adapting to a new interface takes only a scouting run and a forward pass, without gradient updates on the target. With Qwen and Llama models, we evaluate domain transfer on TimeWarp and WebArena-Lite-v2, and version transfer on TimeWarp. In all three settings, WebMix matches or outperforms in-context learning and LoRA baselines, often matching the average success of…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 15

  Are Large Reasoning Models Good Everyday Reasoners? A Comparison with Non-Reasoning Models on Logical Reasoning Tasks

  Kentaro Ozeki, Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima +1

  Large reasoning models (LRMs) that leverage test-time computation achieve strong performance on mathematical and scientific benchmarks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, their ability to perform \textit{everyday logical reasoning}, which often departs from textbook formal logic, remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically evaluate how well reasoning models align with everyday reasoning patterns by introducing a benchmark based on linguistic and pragmatic reasoning phenomena. We also compare reasoning models with non-reasoning models under controlled prompting conditions. We find that, in many cases, (1) reasoning models show degraded performance in everyday reasoning when such reasoning deviates from formal logical rules, (2) some non-reasoning models with chain-of-thought prompting outperform comparable reasoning models in everyday reasoning, and (3) prompting with additional instructions provides limited control over reasoning behavior. These findings suggest that current reasoning models do not reliably capture everyday reasoning and point to limitations in post-training, motivating improved training objectives and evaluation across…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 15

  FlashControl: One-Step Controllable Generator via Distillation-Friendly Single-Stream Teachers

  Ngan Nguyen, Dung Nguyen, Quan Dao, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Minh Hoai +2

  Diffusion models have become a leading approach in visual generative modeling, particularly effective in text-to-image and controllable generation. Their main drawback is slow inference as it requires many sampling steps. While recent distillation methods enable one-step text-to-image generation, extending these techniques to controllable generation is still challenging. Existing controllable models, such as ControlNet, rely on dual-branch design that make distillation difficult. In this work, we adopt a simpler strategy. Instead of adding extra conditional branches, we finetune a selected subset of layers in the original text-to-image diffusion model to directly enable controllable generation. This results in DeltaControl, a single-flow, multi-step diffusion model capable of supporting spatial-condition generation while matching the performance of dual-branch approaches. Building on this teacher model, we further apply step-distillation to obtain FlashControl, a one-step model capable of spatial controllable generation with a single forward pass.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 15

  Pearl-Chat: Engineering a native Luganda language model from first principles in JAX and Flax NNX

  Wesley Kambale, Roland Sankara

  Autoregressive foundation language models predominantly target high-resource Indo-European languages, imposing computational and morphological penalties on under-represented African languages. Generic multilingual tokenizers routinely exceed fertility rates of 3.2 tokens per word on agglutinative Bantu languages, degrading context efficiency and inflating latency. We present Pearl-Chat, an 8,473,122-parameter ($\sim$8.5M) causal decoder-only transformer engineered for Luganda (Oluganda, ISO 639-2: lg), a low-resource Niger-Congo Bantu language spoken by over 10 million people in East Africa. Built from first mathematical principles in JAX and Flax NNX, Pearl-Chat uses explicit functional state decomposition (nnx.split and nnx.merge), deterministic resumable data streaming via Google Grain, and SPMD tensor parallelism using jax.sharding.Mesh. We introduce a byte-level byte-pair encoding (BPE) subword tokenizer trained from scratch on curated Luganda corpora ($V = 8,192$), achieving 4.88 characters per token compression and 1.60 tokens per word fertility, a two-fold compression improvement over LLaMA-3 (128K) and Gemma (256K). The model is trained with a two-stage curriculum: Stage…

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