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%
• Computer vision29+31.8%
• Evals60+25.0%
• Federated learning46+21.1%
• Code models13+18.2%
• Quantum machine learning24+14.3%
• Image & video generation20+5.3%

• arXiv cs.IROct 16

  When Does Evidence-Graph Structure Predict Answer Correctness? Label-Free Abstention for Structured Retrieval

  Anjan Goswami

  Retrieval systems return scored answers, but a high score does not show that an answer should be trusted. The proposed training-free abstention method applies the boundary cut to the selected evidence in an evidence graph. The signal is the weighted cut between selected and unselected candidates and requires no correctness labels or confidence-model training. On MemoryAgentBench (MAB) FactConsolidation multi-hop, with unresolved queries ranked last for every selector, it raises area under the precision-coverage curve from 0.736 for the best score baseline to 0.785 (+0.049, 95% CI [+0.008, +0.092]); under the native evaluation, where score baselines keep their unresolved values, the gap is +0.108. A zero-cut subset contains 71 of 400 queries at 100% observed precision. In this pipeline, the subset corresponds to structural closure; controlled analyses attribute much of the remaining separation to resolution status, with little benefit from continuous edge weights. Across external benchmarks, usefulness varies with graph construction, edge semantics, and relation; typed structure alone does not ensure useful confidence. A supervised gradient-boosted selector achieves 0.814 versus…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  Frame-Consistent Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Unposed Images

  Viruthshaan Vinasirajan, Ranga Rodrigo

  Feed-forward Gaussian models have made novel view synthesis almost instantaneous. Feed-forward methods predict Gaussians directly, either in two stages or in a single merged pass. Using two separately trained models is attractive because each can specialize in its own objective: one for accurate pose estimation and the other for high-quality reconstruction, rather than forcing a single jointly trained network to compromise between the two. A natural instantiation pairs a frozen pose estimator, VGGT, with a frozen reconstruction backbone, TokenGS. Prior work, such as VGGT-X and 3R-GS, also adopts a two-stage design, but attributes the resulting quality degradation to noisy pose estimates and introduces learned refinement. We show that this is not the primary source of the problem. Through per-camera analysis across 107 scenes from two datasets, DL3DV and MipNeRF360, using COLMAP poses as the reference, we find that the rotation error after alignment is small (median 1.6 degrees), whereas the translation scale is offset by a large, dataset-consistent factor. Controlled ablations over 140 DL3DV scenes show that the primary obstacles are two integration failures rather than pose…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Where Research Ideation Begins: Forward-Citation Supervision for Actionable Limitation Generation

  Liyang Zhao, Yong Cao, Haibin Ling

  Automated research ideation has advanced rapidly, with multi-agent workflows that generate whole research ideas end to end. These frameworks leave largely unexamined the step that seeds a good idea: identifying an actionable limitation from literature. In this paper, we focus on this first step in the research ideation pipeline. Starting from a pilot study, we find that as large language models (LLMs) scale from 0.6B to 32B parameters, they become far better at recognizing which limitation later work addressed, but no better at generating one, suggesting that the bottleneck lies in the supervision signal rather than model capacity. We therefore construct ActLim-Bench from forward citations, yielding 18,279 evidence-linked supervision triples with human verification. On this signal, we propose a three-stage post-training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, verifier-filtered rejection-sampling fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with the verifier as an online dense reward. Experimental results show that our method achieves the highest recall score compared to existing methods among all frontier models. We further show that our generated limitations are preferred in 64.9% of…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Do Knowledge and Reasoning Oriented Benchmarks Induce Stable Representation Signatures in LLMs?

  Parsa Rahimi, Azim Dehghani Amirabad

  Internal signatures could support monitoring, adaptive computation, and mechanistic analysis, but benchmark prompts can be separable without any shared computational distinction. We test whether a prespecified knowledge/reasoning label defines a reusable internal signature in five contemporary 7B to 31B models. We treat the \textbf{task} as the unit of inference probes hold out complete tasks, labels are permuted across tasks, and the best layer and stream are reselected for every permutation. Raw probes recover an eight-versus-eight-subject MMLU partition in all five models (macro-F1 $0.78$--$0.81$), but prompt text predicts it nearly as well: under an identical probe configuration, the activation advantage is only $0.017$--$0.070$ macro-F1 and is not significant. At the prespecified $0.01$ level, lexical adjustment removes significance while the adjusted states still identify individual subjects, and the selected site changes across task panels and selection rules. Additionally, two released base-training trajectories show no common direction. These pooled layerwise measures recover the task label but identify no transferable knowledge/reasoning signature at the tested…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16▲ 16

  Towards Looped Models Done Right, Part I: Topology, Input Injection, Recurrent-State Design

  Benhao Huang, Chufan Shi, Junlin Chen, Shicheng Wen, Zhengzhong Liu +2

  Looped language models reuse physical Transformer blocks across logical depth, but established architectures entangle recurrence placement, input injection, and recurrent state organization. We isolate these axes in models trained from scratch at matched parameter scale, logical depth, and token budgets, and then test whether the resulting design principles transfer to resident- and active-parameter-matched Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. The prelude-recurrent block-coda sandwich architecture consistently improves performance on context extraction and reasoning-intensive tasks. Input injection primarily enhances knowledge retrieval and context utilization, whereas random initialization and separate H/L recurrent states provide mixed or negative returns. Taken together, these results favor the Huginn-style design: at the 730M-parameter and 336B-token scale, the complete Huginn architecture outperforms Ouro across all ten benchmarks. The advantages of Huginn over Ouro transfer to MoE models. At the 8BA0.8B (32BA3B when unrolled) scale trained on 500B tokens, Huginn outperforms Ouro on nearly all benchmarks spanning knowledge, reasoning, and coding, while also exhibiting more…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.SEOct 16

  VulnSAGE: Adjudicating SAST Reports by Connecting LLM Reasoning to Program Structure

  Jinbao Chen, Zixiang Zhou, Yu Zhang, Yihong Wu

  Static Application Security Testing (SAST) reports flag operations whose safety depends on project-specific context, and maintainers must decide which reports describe real defects. Large language models (LLMs) can interpret this context, but adjudicating a report with them requires the decisive code, which often lies far from the reported line, and a decision basis that program analysis can check. We present VulnSAGE, an adjudication system for SAST reports that connects LLM reasoning to program structure in both directions. Its report-centered slicer recovers the dependencies of the reported operation together with the program structure that explains them, such as the caller object on which a helper acts. CLAIM, an intermediate representation for report judgments, records each model interpretation as a semantic fact that cites the program relations it assumes. Program analysis checks these premises, and the verdict follows from the facts whose premises hold. Both mechanisms share a program graph, which lets the model cite the code it reads and lets the checker query those citations. Statically supported true positives then guide proof-of-concept generation and runtime…

  PDF
• arXiv stat.MLOct 16

  Distinguishability and Recovery for a Doubly Sparse Spiked Wigner Model

  Ioana Dumitriu, JD Flynn, Zhichao Wang

  We study distinguishability and recovery of a sparse rank-one signal in a spiked Wigner model with independently sparse noise through a variety of algorithms and parameter regimes. The signal and noise have separate sparsity parameters, while the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) remains of constant order as the matrix size grows. For sub-Gaussian noise and spikes whose nonzero coordinates are bounded away from zero, a leave-one-out quadratic thresholding procedure (a generalization of Ding et al., 2024) identifies the support. Sign synchronization yields exact recovery for a Rademacher spike, and spectral refinement yields strong recovery. The quadratic thresholding search parameter gives an explicit tradeoff between signal sparsity, noise sparsity, and computational cost. We also study extensions to sub-Gaussian spike priors through diagonal and quadratic thresholding. For Rademacher spikes with continuous nonzero noise, we develop an identical search algorithm that exploits unblurred signal entries, the existence of which permits distinguishability; connectivity of the graph they reveal provides a sufficient condition for exact recovery. These guarantees do not require moment…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.CROct 16

  ECHO: Replacing the Compliance Proxy with Response Harmfulness in Optimization-Based Jailbreak Attack

  Yuanwei Wu, Lingdong Huang, Yunlong Mao, Kanye Ye Wang, Jingyu Hua +1

  Despite extensive safety alignment, large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing optimization-based attacks share a single objective: maximize a token-level proxy of victim compliance---such as the likelihood of an affirmative prefix---computed on the prompt rather than the decoded reply. This proxy cannot distinguish a cautious hedge from a fully actionable harmful answer, leaving the search blind to what the model actually says. We propose ECHO (Evaluation-Conditioned Harmfulness Optimization), which replaces the compliance proxy with response-level, continuous harmfulness scores from HarmSig, a 1.7B regressor grounded in actual harmful capability. ECHO couples HarmSig with five word-level perturbation operators and Keyword-Anchored Beam Search with global top-m memory, under a strict black-box threat model. Across five open-weight victims on AdvBench, ECHO achieves up to 0.898 StrongREJECT mean score and 89.23% HarmBench success. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/STANWYW/echo.

  PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  ASE: Attribution-Guided Semantic Evolution for Time Series Forecasting

  Yuxuan Zheng, Zhaoyang Li, Purui Liu, Hengbo Xiao, Guannan He

  External text can supply predictive information absent from numerical histories, but its value depends on how it is represented, combined and deployed. We present Attribution-guided Semantic Evolution (ASE), a modular framework for constructing textual factors, evaluating their conditional contribution, and deploying validation-selected numerical--textual predictors. ASE supports task-specific implementations with lexical measurements, semantic primitives or evolved event/state factors, coupled to suitable numerical experts. Its feedback-based implementation uses conditional refitting diagnostics to guide factor revision and combination search. We evaluate ASE on the four text-associated TESS datasets and dynamic CSI 300 stock ranking. The four forecasting implementations obtain test MSEs of 0.001041, 0.022439, 0.333115 and 1.8150, each below the corresponding published TESS score. On CSI 300, the frozen text-fusion implementation improves mean RankIC by 0.000642 over its numerical expert and by 0.000701 over matched shuffled text, with positive differences in all five seeds. Controlled text perturbations support functional reliance on text correspondence, while incumbent…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Causal Value Attribution of Marketing Labels in LLM-Generated Ads: A Deconfounder Approach

  Danhong You, Wei Jiang, Zhiqiang, Zheng

  As AI-generated content becomes commoditized, economic value increasingly shifts from final artifacts to the upstream expertise used to specify inputs that steer LLM generation. Yet organizations lack methods for valuing this expertise and identifying which individual skills or configurations causally improve performance. This study examines generative marketing, where structured expert labels serve as skill primitives conditioning LLM-generated advertisements. Estimating their causal effects is difficult because outcomes reflect stochastic LLM mediation, high-dimensional label interactions, and multimodal confounding. This study proposes D-VAE (Deconfounder Variational Autoencoder), a counterfactual-inference framework integrating a multi-treatment deconfounder with causal representation learning. D-VAE recovers causally disentangled expert-labeling logic and derives PAC-based bounds on omitted-variable bias from single-treatment confounders. Applied to 29,177 foundation-makeup ad creatives, D-VAE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks. A field experiment shows that recommended configurations increase engagement by 32.7% and perform statistically indistinguishably from human…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.PLOct 16

  Arbitrary Functors as Modalities in a Linear Calculus

  Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Andreas Abel

  We study modalities in the linear lambda calculus, by interpreting them as endofunctors in monoidal closed categories. We support functors that do not distribute over products, including (co)monads. We also support arbitrary natural transformations as conversion between modalities. We provide a generic categorical semantics, which we then specialise to a sound and complete resource semantics. We use this resource semantics to derive normalisation by evaluation. Along the way, we describe several applications of such models. This work aims at providing a foundation for future programming languages with modalities. The paper is backed by a mechanisation in Agda.

  PDF
• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  Semantic-Critical Regions for Video-to-Audio Generation

  Yun Fang, Wei Guo, Zhuonan Liang, Heng Wang, Weidong Cai

  In real-world videos, sound events are often associated with localized and fine-grained visual cues, such as object motion, object-part dynamics, contact events, and interactions between objects. Existing video-to-audio (V2A) methods employ implicit conditioning based on global visual representations or explicit control derived from temporal and spatial cues. However, subtle sound-producing and sound-indicative interactions remain insufficiently captured, leaving room for more precise visual conditioning of sound-event semantics and temporal dynamics. Motivated by this observation, we refer to regions containing such sound-relevant visual evidence as Semantic-Critical Regions (SCRs) and introduce SCR-V2A, a V2A generation framework that explicitly localizes and encodes SCRs as fine-grained visual guidance for audio generation. Specifically, we first identify SCRs through sound-related visual localization. We then transform the localized regions into a control representation through adapter-based dual visual encoding, which jointly captures global visual context and fine-grained sound-relevant evidence. The representation is used to condition a downstream audio generation model.…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Adaptation of Computer Use Agents to New Software with User Manuals

  Chulhoon Yoon, Kyungri Park, Jinyeong Yun, Daeyun Jeong, Sukmin Yun +1

  Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have significantly improved the ability to operate real-world software through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) using visual observations and natural language instructions. However, maintaining strong performance on unseen applications remains challenging, as practical tasks often require long-horizon procedural knowledge and application-specific operation patterns. In addition, constructing executable tasks and collecting corresponding trajectories for training still heavily rely on human-annotated data, incurring substantial cost. In this paper, we propose MAGE (Manual-augmented computer use AGent Execution and learning), a framework that leverages user manuals as a scalable source of procedural knowledge to improve both inference and training. During execution, MAGE retrieves task-relevant manual content and uses a planner to generate explicit procedural guidance for CUAs. To further account for the discrepancies between manuals and actual GUI environments, such as version differences or user settings, MAGE also adapts the agent policy through environment interaction. During training, MAGE converts manuals into executable…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  "Deep lifts": Neural networks can generalize even with the dumbest optimizer

  Sunil Madhow, Yu-Xiang Wang

  Given a labeled dataset $\{(x_i, y_i)\}_{i = 1}^n$, consider drawing a parameter vector $\hatθ$ uniformly at random from those that interpolate the data within a width-$W$ depth-$D$ ReLU architecture with continuous weights bounded within $[-M, M]$. We study the generalization properties of $\hatθ$ in the case where the dataset can, in fact, be explained by a smaller $w$-by-$d$ ReLU network. Despite the obliviousness of the selection rule for $\hatθ$, it adaptively generalizes at the rate $\tilde O\left(\frac{wdWD}{n}\right)$, rather than being governed by the VC dimension of the full $W$-by-$D$ hypothesis class. The reason is due to a particular inductive bias in ReLU networks: the $w$-by-$d$ parameter *witnesses* an exponential volume of $W$-by-$D$ interpolating parameters, which dwarfs the volume of poorly generalizing parameters (conditioned on interpolation). We explicitly construct this set of near-equivalent $W$-by-$D$ parameters by a proof technique called *deep lifting*, and then tie the achievable volume to stability properties of the $w$-by-$d$ witness. Examples show that these techniques allow us to convert approximation-theoretic results into generalization…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  A Minimal ReLU Classifier on Non-Linearly Separable Data: Convergence and Implicit Bias at and beyond the Edge of Stability

  Quan Nguyen, Robin Yadav, Param Mody, Mark Schmidt

  Gradient descent (GD) with large learning rates can successfully optimize neural networks even though classical smoothness-based learning rate conditions are violated. Yet theory for this regime largely covers linear models or linearly separable data. We analyze a minimal setting outside both regimes. Specifically, a two-neuron ReLU network trained with logistic loss on 1D non-linearly separable data. The objective is nonconvex and nonsmooth, and GD exhibits edge-of-stability (EoS) behavior. We identify an active cone in parameter space that contains every perfect classifier, where the problem becomes piecewise logistic regression with a varying effective dataset. Within this cone, we prove a finite-time loss bound for constant learning rates and show that GD converges in direction to an explicit max-margin vector, while the orthogonal component converges to the unique minimizer of a non-strongly convex potential. We further establish catapult results where exponentially small loss is reached after a single loss spike. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive schedule that lets learning rates grow to infinity without leaving the active cone. We prove that this schedule achieves a loss…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Efficient CPU-GPU collaborative MoE inference via Adaptive Expert Assignment

  Wenhui Lv, Yunming Liao, Hongli Xu, Yang Xu, Junhao Cheng

  Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models reduce inference computation through sparse expert activation, but their large expert memory footprint often exceeds GPU capacity, making expert offloading necessary for memory-constrained inference. However, existing systems typically handle GPU-missed experts by either transferring them to the GPU, incurring substantial PCIe transfer latency, or executing them on the CPU, making the slower CPU computation the bottleneck. To address these limitations, we present \method, a CPU-GPU collaborative MoE inference system that adaptively assigns these missed experts to the CPU or GPU for efficient execution. By exploiting differences in expert token-loads, \method selectively transfers high-load experts to the GPU while executing low-load experts on the CPU. To minimize inference latency, \method adaptively adjusts expert assignments to balance the CPU computation path against the GPU transfer-and-computation path, allowing both execution paths to complete as early as possible. Extensive experiments on three representative MoE LLMs show that \method improves prefill speed by up to 51.9\% and decode throughput by up to 39.5\% over the strongest baseline…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  BRICE: Brain-inspired Recurrent Illusory Contour Encoder for Point Cloud Completion

  Yunlei Wang, Dawei Li, Xue-song Tang

  Mainstream point cloud completion methods are unanimously based on deep learning architectures. On one hand, these methods tend to repetitively stacking attention modules to enhance network performance, which drifts away from the neat design of unified and interpret-able networks; on the other hand, nearly all existing architectures rely solely on feed-forward connections to propagate information, neglecting feedback from deeper layers. The recurrent neural architecture, formed by feedforward-feedback loops, have shown its ability to generate Illusory Contours (ICs) in the V1 brain region of mammals; and ICs are essentially a completion mechanism of the brain for visual information. Motivated by this, we design a Brain-inspired Recurrent Illusory Contour Encoder (BRICE) to "imagine" what is missing in the incomplete 3D point clouds. Building upon the foundation model of Predictive Coding (PC), the plug-and-play nature enables BRICE to be seamlessly integrated into mainstream point cloud completion baselines. Experimental results show that BRICE can enhance various completion baselines on different 3D datasets such as MVP2K, PCN, and PlantPCom. Our code:…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  Controlling the Diversity-Quality Trade-Off of LLMs by Merging Models Before and After Alignment

  Yasuaki Sumita, Tomoharu Iwata, Toshiyuki Tanaka

  Alignment is known to change the output characteristics of large language models (LLMs). Base models tend to generate more diverse outputs, whereas aligned models tend to produce higher-quality outputs. The appropriate balance between the two depends on the task. Existing methods either require costly fine-tuning or, like temperature sampling, mainly improve lexical diversity rather than semantic diversity. We introduce a depth-aware FrankenMerging approach for controlling the diversity--quality trade-off between an aligned model and its base model without additional training. This approach combines the lower layers of an aligned model with the higher layers of its base model based on the hypothesis that lexical diversity is more closely associated with lower layers and semantic diversity with higher layers. Experiments showed that varying the number of layers taken from each model adjusts both diversity and quality. In most cases, the merged models exhibited higher semantic diversity than the aligned model, and at some split positions, they showed higher lexical diversity than both original models. They also demonstrated a better diversity--quality trade-off than temperature…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  A Label Noise Robust Algorithm for Graph Data using Neighborhood Label Distribution

  Pintu Kumar, Nandyala Hemachandra

  Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on graph-structured data. However, their success heavily relies on the availability of clean labels, an assumption that often fails in real-world scenarios. The learnability of GCNs is intrinsically linked to the neighborhood structure of nodes, making it critical to understand how this structure changes in the presence of label noise. In this work, we investigate how the neighborhood label distribution of a node changes under label noise. We mathematically derive that label noise smooths this distribution, which inherently increases its entropy and severely decreases interclass distinguishability. To address this challenge, we propose Leave-one-out Entropy Node Screening (LENS), an end-to-end framework that identifies noisy nodes by measuring the reduction in neighborhood entropy when a specific node is removed. LENS further incorporates a relabeling mechanism to recover and preserve valuable feature information instead of entirely discarding the identified noisy nodes. Crucially, the end-to-end computational overhead of LENS is remarkably low. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our algorithm…

  PDF
• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  TALLOP: Joint Optimization of Local Training and Communication Compression for Time-Constrained Federated Learning

  Honoka Anada, Yafei Ou, Shinya Takamaeda-Yamazaki

  Minimizing the wall-clock time required to reach a target accuracy is crucial in federated learning (FL), where many applications require frequent model updates as data distributions evolve over time. Nevertheless, in heterogeneous environments, slow clients with limited computational and communication capabilities can delay global synchronization, forcing faster clients to wait and increasing the overall training time. To mitigate this straggler effect, recent studies have introduced per-round time constraints and adapted client workloads within the available time. However, these approaches primarily focus on local computation, whereas communication can become a major bottleneck in communication-limited environments, motivating the joint optimization of training workload and communication compression. Although previous studies have explored such joint optimization, determining an effective training--communication balance under a fixed per-round time budget remains challenging, as the resulting model performance depends on both training progress and compression-induced degradation. We therefore propose TALLOP, which jointly optimizes the local training workload and communication…

  PDF