Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

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Papers

Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

Week Month Quarter All

Newest Most relevant

Papers

arXiv cs.CVSep 26
From Feed-Forward to Flow: Unifying Reconstruction and Generation Is Easier Than You Think
Haoru Wang, Qianfan Shen, Kai Ye, Wenzheng Chen, Baoquan Chen
Reconstruct where the images provide evidence, and generate where they do not: recent success of spatial world models such as Atlas (World Labs Team, 2026) highlights the value of unifying reconstruction and generation in one model. Yet the two have long lived in separate paradigms with distinctive failure modes: feed-forward reconstruction averages ambiguity into blur, while conditional generation invents plausible but scene-inconsistent detail. In this work, we present a unified flow-based formulation for reconstruction and generation, where a shared clean-target predictor performs direct reconstruction at its single-step endpoint and unfolds conditional generation through multi-step flow. A controlled toy study reveals the mechanism: with a single step, the predictor collapses to the conditional mean just like feed-forward methods, favoring consistency over diversity. With multi-step inference, the fidelity of generated details grows with context richness: closer observations reduce ambiguity and yield better-matched details. We further instantiate the formulation in appearance and geometry 3D tasks. JiT-LVSM improves perceptual and distributional quality in novel view…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 26▲ 7
The Extender: A Log-Structured Transformer
Jakob Eriksson
We introduce the Extender, a log-structured variant of the standard Transformer architecture. In a standard Transformer, each layer communicates with subsequent layers exclusively via the residual $\mathbf{h}$, a superposition channel. The Extender adds a concatenation channel $\mathbf{x}$: each layer $\ell$ emits both a residual update $δ_\ell$ which is added to $\mathbf{h}$, and a much smaller extension $ε_\ell$ which is appended to $\mathbf{x}$. While both the FFN and $\mathbf{q}$ see $\mathbf{h}$, the attention $\mathbf{kv}$ projections take only $\mathbf{x}$ as input. As a result, the fully extended $\mathbf{x}$ contains the complete input for the $\mathbf{kv}$ projections of all layers, reducing the persistent attention memory footprint from $2Ld_{model}$ to $\sum|ε_\ell|$. We find that with $|ε_\ell|=32$, the Extender matches Transformer accuracy on short-context (CORE) tasks at 199M-924M parameters, and exceeds Transformer accuracy on long-context (RULER) workloads, again at 924M parameters. For our 1664-wide, 924M model, the Extender's persistent attention memory footprint is $104\times$ smaller than MHA. The memory savings grow with model width.
PDF
arXiv cs.CLSep 26
How Far Do Persona Effects Generalize in Language Models?
Yufan Zhou, Yuxuan Liu, Enze Ma, Lyumanshan Ye, Zhongqi Yue +4
Persona prompts ask language models to answer as particular kinds of people. We test whether relationships learned from these effects predict responses to new questions and remain useful across models and prompts. Across 57 attributes, three behavioral domains, and seven pairs of open 7 to 9B checkpoints, persona effects can be predictable without being portable. Separate attribute and task gains improve prediction beyond shared scaling significantly in OLMo-3 and Qwen2.5, with the most robust evidence in OLMo-3. In that model, target refitting significantly outperforms gains borrowed from each of the other six pairs. Across model transfers, borrowed gains with one amplitude underperform shared scaling in most directions; allowing two target parameters removes the significant losses but yields no significant benefit over target shared scaling. After rewording, refitting significantly outperforms reuse with one amplitude in all six tested pairs, while changes of examples or country context often preserve reuse value. In the tested prompt transfers, regularized updates outperform both reuse strategies in median at 64 target questions per attribute. A separate survey comparison…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Readout is not Recovery: Dissociating Coordinate Emission from Visual-Corruption Repair in Vision-Language Models
Drandreb Earl Juanico
VLM bounding-box localization is both language generation and spatial commitment. Parseable fields such as bbox_2d make localization easy to score, but dimensions that emit coordinate tokens need not repair localization after visual evidence is damaged. We study this readout/recovery separation in Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct on single-object COCO grounding. We compare clean coordinate-token readout rankings with corruption-derived repair rankings, using object-mask endpoint replacement for recovery and clean-input flooring for depth localization. In Qwen3-VL, coordinate-token rankings are inert through layer 24, load-bearing from layers 32-35, and peak at layer 34; corruption-derived rankings harm layers 16-24 but become beneficial near layer 35/final. A Kimi-VL-A3B diagnostic shows a matching output-proximal transition despite a different box format. Object-mask recovery separates rank budgets: $k=250$ shows necessity, $k=500$ shows Top-$k$ restoration above random, and $k=d/2$ is largely capacity-driven. Partial-occlusion sweeps reveal that high-overlap coordinate-token sets can hurt at $k=1000$ and help mainly at half-width, while population corruption-derived sets provide no…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Reuse or Relearn? A Spectral View of Earth Observation Foundation Models
Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Valerio Marsocci, Dominik J. Mühlematter, Dominik Senti, Konrad Schindler +1
Foundation models are rarely used as generic, frozen feature extractors; instead, they are fine-tuned for the target downstream application. This practice is particularly prevalent in Earth observation (EO), and it raises a question that downstream accuracy alone cannot answer: does fine-tuning reuse the pretrained representation, or does it relearn a new one? We study this with spectral diagnostics that compare a model before and after adaptation, quantifying how well its dominant singular subspaces are preserved, how broadly the weight update is distributed, and how large it is. Using natural image models such as CLIP and DINO as a reference, we find that, under the evaluated fine-tuning settings, EO models undergo far larger, higher-rank updates and retain much less of their pretrained structure, so their downstream performance is often obtained with substantial changes to the pretrained weight structure. The diagnostics further provide insight into how cheaply a model can be adapted: where the pretrained subspaces are preserved, adapting a small fraction of the parameters can match full fine-tuning, and where they are not, it can fall behind. More broadly, foundation models,…
PDF
arXiv cs.SDVoice AISep 26
SAGE: Semantic Audio Generative Encoder
Francesco Brigante, Luca Cerovaz, Davide Marincione, Giorgio Strano, Luca Zhou +2
Audio autoencoders compress waveforms into compact latent representations that serve as the interface between raw audio and downstream models. Current systems navigate a three-way trade-off between reconstruction quality, semantic structure of the latent space, and inference speed, typically favoring one or two of these at the expense of the others. This paper introduces SAGE, Semantic Audio Generative Encoder: a compact variational autoencoder, trained solely on publicly available music, that shapes its latent by distilling embeddings from a pretrained audio-text model. This 105M-parameter model runs at the inference cost of Stable Audio Open and reaches the listening-test quality of SAME-L, an autoencoder 8x larger and 4x slower, while surpassing both on objective perceptual and distributional metrics of reconstruction. Furthermore, it sets the state of the art on all nineteen probing tasks of latent semantics, in domain and out of domain. These results establish SAGE as a lightweight audio autoencoder that strikes the best balance of the three-way trade-off among those we evaluate, combining high reconstruction fidelity, state-of-the-art semantic structure, and fast inference.
AIMultimodal80PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Adaptive Consistency Graph for Long-Horizon Agents
Jiecong Wang, Hao Peng, Zhanyi Wang
Large language model agents can often make reasonable local decisions on short tasks, yet their performance degrades when success requires long sequences of dependent actions and tool calls. During execution, task requirements, historical evidence, and the current execution state may gradually become disconnected, so later decisions can drift from the original objective. We study this problem by introducing the Adaptive Consistency Graph (ACG) for long-horizon execution. ACG incrementally organizes execution evidence and its provenance in a persistent graph, then constructs a temporary requirement-centered view for each decision under a bounded context budget. Rather than replacing the base agent's planner or tool executor, ACG provides a structured and traceable context view for each decision. In the matched evaluation, ACG improves GPT-5.6-luna's average success from 44.5\% with ReAct to 50.2\%, with the largest gain on BrowseComp-Plus (73.5\% versus 62.4\%). We further analyze trajectory structure and inference cost to characterize this improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunsaijc/Adaptive-Consistency-Graph.
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Action Shaping: Policies Absorb What They Can Express
Yanjun Chen, Jinghan Wang, Xiaoyu Shen, Wenjie Li, Wei Zhang
Reward shaping has a theorem: a potential-based term can be removed without changing the optimal policy. The same practice on the action channel, an offset added in training and dropped at deployment, has no theorem. Nothing cancels an action offset, so the correction is kept at deployment or removed without a guarantee. We call it action shaping and state its principle. A trainable policy absorbs an offset its own output layer can reproduce exactly, which is what we mean by express; what is absorbed can be removed with the return intact. Its minimal instance is a zero-initialized linear head behind a learnable gate, added to an actor that trains through a learned action-value function, with no penalty or schedule. The gate rises and then falls on its own, for deterministic and stochastic actors alike, and on 20 tasks removing the head costs almost nothing. The condition is exact reproduction, not capacity: a nonlinear head with more parameters is not absorbed, and in a paired control, one linear path added to a nonlinear base head restores absorption. Exact reproduction gives the loss a flat direction that gradient noise drifts along, and the offset's amplitude indicates, before…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
CUA-Sandbox: Efficient Environments for Computer-Use Agent Reinforcement Learning
Xin Yan, Zhengbo Jiao, Jiaqi Liu, Zhenglin Wan, SiYuan Ma +9
Reinforcement learning enables computer-use agents to improve through interaction with real software environments, including websites and desktop applications. However, conventional deployments replicate an initialized runtime for each independent rollout, even when trajectories use the same software, incurring repeated memory and initialization costs as the number of parallel environments grows. Does an independent computer-use environment require an independent execution runtime? Our key observation is that trajectories require independent mutable state, while initialized application runtimes can be reused across concurrently evolving environments, making state the natural unit of environment independence. Guided by this observation, we introduce CUA-Sandbox, which separates private state capsules from shared runtimes through state-scoped execution and transactional lifecycle operations, including resets and branches, while retaining the original software interfaces and task evaluators. Experiments show comparable or improved task success relative to Docker, while substantially reducing rollout and resource costs. CUA-Sandbox achieves up to a 6.20x increase in rollout…
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arXiv cs.AISep 26
Retrospective Distillation Attribution via Normalized Response Similarity
Minwoo Jang, Jaechang Kim, Minhyeon Oh, Jeongyeon Hwang, Jungseul Ok
Model distillation transfers capabilities through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on teacher responses, often collected from commercial APIs, raising questions of model provenance. Existing distillation attribution methods have been largely evaluated on students immediately after the SFT step. However, a distilled model may undergo further SFT, preference optimization, or reinforcement learning before release, while an auditor may lack access to the pre-distillation checkpoint required by reference-based attribution. To close this gap, we propose SCOUT, an output-only method that aggregates recurring *syntactic patterns* into candidate profiles, filters low-contrast patterns, and calibrates student--candidate distances against inter-candidate distances. SCOUT supports attribution and abstention using only current texts, without model weights, token likelihoods, or historical checkpoints. Auditing publicly released descendants of distilled models spanning diverse post-training objectives, SCOUT consistently identifies the distillation source. Furthermore, tracing teacher-associated *syntactic signatures* along training trajectories reveals that they emerge during distillation and…
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arXiv cs.MASep 26
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Symbolic Discovery for Financial Fundamental Analysis
Kelvin J. L. Koa, Filip Orestav, Shengqiong Wu, Michael J. Wooldridge, Ke-Wei Huang
While symbolic regression (SR) has been successfully used in science to discover new equations, its use in financial valuation is hindered by several limitations. Whereas the natural sciences provide objectively correct relationships, financial valuation constitutes a distinct class of symbolic discovery problems, as it admits multiple valid perspectives, operates under non-stationary market conditions, and involves noisy, continuous performance signals. In this work, we propose Multi-Agent Fundamental Analysis with Symbolic Adaptive learning (MUFASA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework for symbolic discovery in finance. MUFASA introduces (1) disentangled equation discovery via specialized agents representing distinct valuation perspectives, (2) a meta-coordinator that performs hierarchical-level reasoning over market context information, and (3) a memory mechanism that reasons over statistical performance summaries (e.g., accuracy, stability, and tail risk) to guide learning under noisy feedback. Experiments across datasets from multiple countries show that MUFASA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the valuation task compared to classical finance methods, financial large…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
Fractal Cross Product: Theory, Differentiable Implementation and Application to Medical Image Analysis
Noaman Khan, Nihad Hadj Sahraoui, Samir Brahim Belhaouari
The magnitude of the generalized Euclidean cross product is a Gram volume whose degree under common scaling is fixed by the integer dimension of the spanning frame. We formulate a generalized Fractal Cross Product (FCP) as a nonlinear radial deformation with a prescribed positive degree $D$, which may be non-integer. The scalar construction applies in any ambient dimension $m\geq k$, while its canonically oriented vector form requires codimension one. It recovers the classical generalized cross product exactly at $D=k$ and retains orthogonality, alternation, rotation equivariance, and $D$-homogeneity, but is generally not multilinear. For exact self-similar frame systems, the construction also obeys a scale-balance law at the similarity dimension. We derive a differentiable, dimensionless image response and a non-circular empirical accumulation exponent obtained by regressing raw angular Gram responses across patch widths. Binary64 calculations recover the finite-frame identities to roundoff, while raster experiments recover the Sierpiński-triangle value 1.5849625 at three resolutions. In five-seed medical-imaging comparisons, FCP-centered fusion increased mean area under the…
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arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Benchmarking EEG Foundation Models at Scale: Lessons from 20,000 Evaluations
Zhige Chen, Shu Peng, Chengxuan Qin, Rui Liu, Rui Yang +2
Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (FMs) promise transferable neural representations, yet their advantages over strong supervised baselines and their prospects for further scaling remain unclear. To address these questions, we introduce EEG-Arena, an open-source benchmark covering 30 EEG FMs and 25 supervised baselines evaluated on 57 downstream tasks from 23 public datasets. Through more than 20,000 evaluations across five experimental protocols, we assess downstream performance, pretraining benefits, model size scaling, pretraining data scaling, and robustness to channel configuration. We find that (1) EEG FMs outperform strong task-specific supervised baselines on most evaluated tasks, particularly under non-bipolar settings; (2) compared with architecture-matched supervised training from scratch, pretraining improves both early optimization and final downstream performance, with larger and more consistent gains as more labeled downstream data become available; (3) existing EEG FMs do not exhibit a consistent positive relationship between parameter count and downstream performance; (4) under a fixed architecture, increasing the pretraining data scale yields…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
LoCoVSR: Local Context Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Video Super-Resolution
Matan Ben Chorin, Michael Elad
Video super-resolution (VSR) is an ill-posed inverse problem that aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) video from a noisy, low-resolution (LR) version of it. We present LoCoVSR, a diffusion-based VSR framework that leverages pixel-space denoising diffusion probabilistic models. LoCoVSR integrates the Diffusion Posterior Sampling technique with spatio-temporal context learning, operating in a moving-average form. A localized window of adjacent LR frames is used for recovering each center frame, while applying a shared noise trajectory across all frames. The localized windowing enables processing of long videos without length limitations, supports parallel inference, and prevents error accumulation that may occur in recursive processing. Unlike prior methods, LoCoVSR offers a simple yet very effective VSR solution, avoiding explicit optical flow estimation, or information loss caused by latent space processing. Trained on the VFHQ face dataset, LoCoVSR achieves accurate, temporally consistent and high-quality upscaling with competitive results against recent diffusion-based VSR approaches.
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arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Predicting the Financial Impact of Supply Chain Risk for Major AI-Related Semiconductor Firms: A Heterogeneous Graph Patch Transformer Approach
Jianna Hur, Sagar Samtani
Modern semiconductor production relies on a globally distributed, multi-tier supply chain in which financial stress at one firm spreads with a delay and eventually affects the revenue, inventory, and profitability of the companies that design AI chips. Most firms see only their direct partners, and prior predictive research has mainly targeted market-based risk measures, so few tools forecast how supply chain stress will appear in reported financials. In this study, we propose a heterogeneous graph patch transformer that forecasts these quarterly changes one and two quarters ahead. Learning from a 15,186-company network over 60 quarters, the proposed model fuses quarterly fundamentals with macro-trade, event, and disaster signals through learned gates, carries risk across supplier, customer, ownership, and headquarters relations through typed, direction-specific propagation, and encodes the propagated histories with patch-based tokenization. In preliminary experiments on 116 focal semiconductor firms, the proposed model achieves the lowest error on every target at both horizons, and its profitability advantage widens at the two-quarter horizon. These forecasts can help supply…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
AnesTRACE: Benchmarking Intraoperative Anesthesia from Multimodal Perception to Multi-step Decision-Making
Ziwei Huang, Qi Gao, Zhe Ji, Yuanyuan Yao, Fengjiang Zhang +3
Intraoperative anesthesia requires systems to interpret evolving multimodal evidence, recommend timely management, and revise decisions as patient states change, yet existing benchmarks usually isolate perception or single-point reasoning. We introduce AnesTRACE, an evaluation suite comprising AnesTRACE-Bench and AnesTRACE-Eval. Built from public perioperative datasets with anesthesiologist annotation, AnesTRACE-Bench evaluates Intraoperative Perception, Single-point Anesthesia Decision-Making, and Multi-step Anesthesia Decision-Making. AnesTRACE-Eval assesses open-ended responses through anesthesiologist-defined criteria for Clinical Correctness, Evidence Grounding, Task Completeness, and Safety, with Temporal Consistency for multi-step decisions; its domain-specific evaluator is trained by supervised fine-tuning and preference alignment on expert-reviewed judgments. Across more than 30 models, fine-grained visual grounding and intervention selection remain difficult: the leading model reaches only 32.2 mIoU for TEE visual grounding and retains a 17.5\% Major/Critical Safety Error Rate in multi-step management. Evaluator alignment with anesthesiologists improves across both…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
Gradient-Guided Decoupled Adaptation for Geospatial Vision-Language Models
Dongdong Wang, Deepak Balakrishnan, Ravi Srinivasan, Shenhao Wang
Existing geospatial vision-language models (Geo-VLMs) typically optimize diverse geospatial tasks through a unified multi-task adaptation paradigm without explicitly accounting for the heterogeneous optimization characteristics. Our empirical observations reveal heterogeneous gradient characteristics across tasks, including vision-language differences, intra-branch gradient relationships, and task interference, which hinder effective multi-task optimization. Motivated by these observations, we propose Gradient-Guided Decoupled Adaptation (G2DA), a gradient-aware optimization framework for multi-task Geo-VLM learning. G2DA first partitions tasks into vision- and language-centric groups through gradient-guided cross-modal decoupling. It then constructs modality-specific curricula based on task gradient similarity and employs bidirectional rehearsal to mitigate the recency effects introduced by sequential optimization. We evaluate G2DA on three Geo-VLM benchmarks using six InternVL3 and Qwen3.5-VL variants, along with GeoChat and GeoLLaVA. Across all 24 benchmark-model combinations, G2DA consistently outperforms representative baselines, improving over the strongest competitor by…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
REALIS: A Curated Dataset for Studying the Challenges of AI Image Detection
Aleksandr Gushchin, Khaled Abud, Georgii Bychkov, Ekaterina Shumitskaya, Artem Filippov +3
AI-generated image detectors are often evaluated on benchmarks where real and synthetic images differ in content, quality, or generation artifacts, allowing models to rely on dataset-specific cues and fail on unfamiliar generators or processed images. Existing datasets provide limited support for evaluating these challenges jointly across diverse visual content. We introduce REALIS, a dataset of 1.43 million real and synthetic images generated by 42 modern text-to-image models, including the latest proprietary systems such as Nano Banana 2. REALIS combines prompts derived from real images, quality filtering, and stratified sampling to reduce class-specific shortcuts while preserving content diversity. We further introduce REALIS-Expert, a stress-test subset for high-quality synthetic images, where real and generated samples are selected with closely matched semantic and visual characteristics. We also propose a robustness protocol covering 35 transformations at five severity levels to analyze detector behavior under image processing. Based on REALIS, our benchmark evaluates pretrained detectors, fine-tuned models, and zero-shot vision-language models under generator and…
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arXiv cs.SISep 26
Plan-to-Synthesis: Cross-City Human Mobility Generation via Semantic Latent Flow Matching
Zhoufu Wang, Baoshen Guo, Zhiqing Hong, Junyi Li, Kailai Sun +4
Human mobility generation aims to synthesize realistic point-of-interest (POI) visitation trajectories and has become an important tool for travel behavior modeling, transportation management, and urban planning. Existing diffusion-based methods achieve high fidelity but require per-city generation, given the inherent heterogeneity of geospatial locations and POI categories, while large language model-based methods generalize across cities but remain too costly at scale, especially for long-horizon trajectory generation. To address this, we propose SeMoFlow, a Semantic human Mobility generation framework based on latent Flow matching. We first encode heterogeneous POIs from different cities into a shared cross-city representation space via hierarchical Semantic IDs, where shared prefixes capture transferable semantics, and successive codes progressively refine the representation toward individual POIs. Building on the semantic IDs, SeMoFlow follows a plan-to-synthesis hierarchical generation paradigm, in which an autoregressive planner generates coarse-grained semantic and recurrence patterns, and a flow matching realizer synthesizes fine-grained suffix latents. The generated…
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arXiv cs.AISep 26
SkillVine: Agent Skill Evolution via Branching Exploration
Kaiwei Liu, Jiqian Dong, Liran Dong, Shuai Mao, Mingming Zhao +5
Agent skills encapsulate reusable procedural knowledge that enables LLM agents to perform tasks, and they can be improved automatically using trajectories from interactions with the environment. This is the classic problem of skill evolution. Existing approaches predominately follow a linear evolution paradigm, in which updates are sequentially applied to the latest skill-library version. As a result, they inevitably fall into local optima, leaving many promising evolution paths unexplored. We propose SkillVine, an automatic skill-evolution framework that formulates skill evolution as a graph search problem and employs a branching exploration strategy. Equipped with a trunk-branch collaborative searching mechanism, an intelligent parent-node selector, and an adaptive-granularity update rule, SkillVine achieves a balance between exploration and exploitation. We evaluate SkillVine on 5 benchmarks with two LLMs. Results show that SkillVine discovers better skill-library versions along branches than along the linear trunk and achieves the best test performance in nine of ten benchmark-model combinations.
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Papers

arXiv cs.CVSep 26
From Feed-Forward to Flow: Unifying Reconstruction and Generation Is Easier Than You Think
Haoru Wang, Qianfan Shen, Kai Ye, Wenzheng Chen, Baoquan Chen
Reconstruct where the images provide evidence, and generate where they do not: recent success of spatial world models such as Atlas (World Labs Team, 2026) highlights the value of unifying reconstruction and generation in one model. Yet the two have long lived in separate paradigms with distinctive failure modes: feed-forward reconstruction averages ambiguity into blur, while conditional generation invents plausible but scene-inconsistent detail. In this work, we present a unified flow-based formulation for reconstruction and generation, where a shared clean-target predictor performs direct reconstruction at its single-step endpoint and unfolds conditional generation through multi-step flow. A controlled toy study reveals the mechanism: with a single step, the predictor collapses to the conditional mean just like feed-forward methods, favoring consistency over diversity. With multi-step inference, the fidelity of generated details grows with context richness: closer observations reduce ambiguity and yield better-matched details. We further instantiate the formulation in appearance and geometry 3D tasks. JiT-LVSM improves perceptual and distributional quality in novel view…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 26▲ 7
The Extender: A Log-Structured Transformer
Jakob Eriksson
We introduce the Extender, a log-structured variant of the standard Transformer architecture. In a standard Transformer, each layer communicates with subsequent layers exclusively via the residual $\mathbf{h}$, a superposition channel. The Extender adds a concatenation channel $\mathbf{x}$: each layer $\ell$ emits both a residual update $δ_\ell$ which is added to $\mathbf{h}$, and a much smaller extension $ε_\ell$ which is appended to $\mathbf{x}$. While both the FFN and $\mathbf{q}$ see $\mathbf{h}$, the attention $\mathbf{kv}$ projections take only $\mathbf{x}$ as input. As a result, the fully extended $\mathbf{x}$ contains the complete input for the $\mathbf{kv}$ projections of all layers, reducing the persistent attention memory footprint from $2Ld_{model}$ to $\sum|ε_\ell|$. We find that with $|ε_\ell|=32$, the Extender matches Transformer accuracy on short-context (CORE) tasks at 199M-924M parameters, and exceeds Transformer accuracy on long-context (RULER) workloads, again at 924M parameters. For our 1664-wide, 924M model, the Extender's persistent attention memory footprint is $104\times$ smaller than MHA. The memory savings grow with model width.
PDF
arXiv cs.CLSep 26
How Far Do Persona Effects Generalize in Language Models?
Yufan Zhou, Yuxuan Liu, Enze Ma, Lyumanshan Ye, Zhongqi Yue +4
Persona prompts ask language models to answer as particular kinds of people. We test whether relationships learned from these effects predict responses to new questions and remain useful across models and prompts. Across 57 attributes, three behavioral domains, and seven pairs of open 7 to 9B checkpoints, persona effects can be predictable without being portable. Separate attribute and task gains improve prediction beyond shared scaling significantly in OLMo-3 and Qwen2.5, with the most robust evidence in OLMo-3. In that model, target refitting significantly outperforms gains borrowed from each of the other six pairs. Across model transfers, borrowed gains with one amplitude underperform shared scaling in most directions; allowing two target parameters removes the significant losses but yields no significant benefit over target shared scaling. After rewording, refitting significantly outperforms reuse with one amplitude in all six tested pairs, while changes of examples or country context often preserve reuse value. In the tested prompt transfers, regularized updates outperform both reuse strategies in median at 64 target questions per attribute. A separate survey comparison…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Readout is not Recovery: Dissociating Coordinate Emission from Visual-Corruption Repair in Vision-Language Models
Drandreb Earl Juanico
VLM bounding-box localization is both language generation and spatial commitment. Parseable fields such as bbox_2d make localization easy to score, but dimensions that emit coordinate tokens need not repair localization after visual evidence is damaged. We study this readout/recovery separation in Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct on single-object COCO grounding. We compare clean coordinate-token readout rankings with corruption-derived repair rankings, using object-mask endpoint replacement for recovery and clean-input flooring for depth localization. In Qwen3-VL, coordinate-token rankings are inert through layer 24, load-bearing from layers 32-35, and peak at layer 34; corruption-derived rankings harm layers 16-24 but become beneficial near layer 35/final. A Kimi-VL-A3B diagnostic shows a matching output-proximal transition despite a different box format. Object-mask recovery separates rank budgets: $k=250$ shows necessity, $k=500$ shows Top-$k$ restoration above random, and $k=d/2$ is largely capacity-driven. Partial-occlusion sweeps reveal that high-overlap coordinate-token sets can hurt at $k=1000$ and help mainly at half-width, while population corruption-derived sets provide no…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Reuse or Relearn? A Spectral View of Earth Observation Foundation Models
Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Valerio Marsocci, Dominik J. Mühlematter, Dominik Senti, Konrad Schindler +1
Foundation models are rarely used as generic, frozen feature extractors; instead, they are fine-tuned for the target downstream application. This practice is particularly prevalent in Earth observation (EO), and it raises a question that downstream accuracy alone cannot answer: does fine-tuning reuse the pretrained representation, or does it relearn a new one? We study this with spectral diagnostics that compare a model before and after adaptation, quantifying how well its dominant singular subspaces are preserved, how broadly the weight update is distributed, and how large it is. Using natural image models such as CLIP and DINO as a reference, we find that, under the evaluated fine-tuning settings, EO models undergo far larger, higher-rank updates and retain much less of their pretrained structure, so their downstream performance is often obtained with substantial changes to the pretrained weight structure. The diagnostics further provide insight into how cheaply a model can be adapted: where the pretrained subspaces are preserved, adapting a small fraction of the parameters can match full fine-tuning, and where they are not, it can fall behind. More broadly, foundation models,…
PDF
arXiv cs.SDVoice AISep 26
SAGE: Semantic Audio Generative Encoder
Francesco Brigante, Luca Cerovaz, Davide Marincione, Giorgio Strano, Luca Zhou +2
Audio autoencoders compress waveforms into compact latent representations that serve as the interface between raw audio and downstream models. Current systems navigate a three-way trade-off between reconstruction quality, semantic structure of the latent space, and inference speed, typically favoring one or two of these at the expense of the others. This paper introduces SAGE, Semantic Audio Generative Encoder: a compact variational autoencoder, trained solely on publicly available music, that shapes its latent by distilling embeddings from a pretrained audio-text model. This 105M-parameter model runs at the inference cost of Stable Audio Open and reaches the listening-test quality of SAME-L, an autoencoder 8x larger and 4x slower, while surpassing both on objective perceptual and distributional metrics of reconstruction. Furthermore, it sets the state of the art on all nineteen probing tasks of latent semantics, in domain and out of domain. These results establish SAGE as a lightweight audio autoencoder that strikes the best balance of the three-way trade-off among those we evaluate, combining high reconstruction fidelity, state-of-the-art semantic structure, and fast inference.
AIMultimodal80PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Adaptive Consistency Graph for Long-Horizon Agents
Jiecong Wang, Hao Peng, Zhanyi Wang
Large language model agents can often make reasonable local decisions on short tasks, yet their performance degrades when success requires long sequences of dependent actions and tool calls. During execution, task requirements, historical evidence, and the current execution state may gradually become disconnected, so later decisions can drift from the original objective. We study this problem by introducing the Adaptive Consistency Graph (ACG) for long-horizon execution. ACG incrementally organizes execution evidence and its provenance in a persistent graph, then constructs a temporary requirement-centered view for each decision under a bounded context budget. Rather than replacing the base agent's planner or tool executor, ACG provides a structured and traceable context view for each decision. In the matched evaluation, ACG improves GPT-5.6-luna's average success from 44.5\% with ReAct to 50.2\%, with the largest gain on BrowseComp-Plus (73.5\% versus 62.4\%). We further analyze trajectory structure and inference cost to characterize this improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunsaijc/Adaptive-Consistency-Graph.
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
Action Shaping: Policies Absorb What They Can Express
Yanjun Chen, Jinghan Wang, Xiaoyu Shen, Wenjie Li, Wei Zhang
Reward shaping has a theorem: a potential-based term can be removed without changing the optimal policy. The same practice on the action channel, an offset added in training and dropped at deployment, has no theorem. Nothing cancels an action offset, so the correction is kept at deployment or removed without a guarantee. We call it action shaping and state its principle. A trainable policy absorbs an offset its own output layer can reproduce exactly, which is what we mean by express; what is absorbed can be removed with the return intact. Its minimal instance is a zero-initialized linear head behind a learnable gate, added to an actor that trains through a learned action-value function, with no penalty or schedule. The gate rises and then falls on its own, for deterministic and stochastic actors alike, and on 20 tasks removing the head costs almost nothing. The condition is exact reproduction, not capacity: a nonlinear head with more parameters is not absorbed, and in a paired control, one linear path added to a nonlinear base head restores absorption. Exact reproduction gives the loss a flat direction that gradient noise drifts along, and the offset's amplitude indicates, before…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 26
CUA-Sandbox: Efficient Environments for Computer-Use Agent Reinforcement Learning
Xin Yan, Zhengbo Jiao, Jiaqi Liu, Zhenglin Wan, SiYuan Ma +9
Reinforcement learning enables computer-use agents to improve through interaction with real software environments, including websites and desktop applications. However, conventional deployments replicate an initialized runtime for each independent rollout, even when trajectories use the same software, incurring repeated memory and initialization costs as the number of parallel environments grows. Does an independent computer-use environment require an independent execution runtime? Our key observation is that trajectories require independent mutable state, while initialized application runtimes can be reused across concurrently evolving environments, making state the natural unit of environment independence. Guided by this observation, we introduce CUA-Sandbox, which separates private state capsules from shared runtimes through state-scoped execution and transactional lifecycle operations, including resets and branches, while retaining the original software interfaces and task evaluators. Experiments show comparable or improved task success relative to Docker, while substantially reducing rollout and resource costs. CUA-Sandbox achieves up to a 6.20x increase in rollout…
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arXiv cs.AISep 26
Retrospective Distillation Attribution via Normalized Response Similarity
Minwoo Jang, Jaechang Kim, Minhyeon Oh, Jeongyeon Hwang, Jungseul Ok
Model distillation transfers capabilities through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on teacher responses, often collected from commercial APIs, raising questions of model provenance. Existing distillation attribution methods have been largely evaluated on students immediately after the SFT step. However, a distilled model may undergo further SFT, preference optimization, or reinforcement learning before release, while an auditor may lack access to the pre-distillation checkpoint required by reference-based attribution. To close this gap, we propose SCOUT, an output-only method that aggregates recurring *syntactic patterns* into candidate profiles, filters low-contrast patterns, and calibrates student--candidate distances against inter-candidate distances. SCOUT supports attribution and abstention using only current texts, without model weights, token likelihoods, or historical checkpoints. Auditing publicly released descendants of distilled models spanning diverse post-training objectives, SCOUT consistently identifies the distillation source. Furthermore, tracing teacher-associated *syntactic signatures* along training trajectories reveals that they emerge during distillation and…
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arXiv cs.MASep 26
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Symbolic Discovery for Financial Fundamental Analysis
Kelvin J. L. Koa, Filip Orestav, Shengqiong Wu, Michael J. Wooldridge, Ke-Wei Huang
While symbolic regression (SR) has been successfully used in science to discover new equations, its use in financial valuation is hindered by several limitations. Whereas the natural sciences provide objectively correct relationships, financial valuation constitutes a distinct class of symbolic discovery problems, as it admits multiple valid perspectives, operates under non-stationary market conditions, and involves noisy, continuous performance signals. In this work, we propose Multi-Agent Fundamental Analysis with Symbolic Adaptive learning (MUFASA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework for symbolic discovery in finance. MUFASA introduces (1) disentangled equation discovery via specialized agents representing distinct valuation perspectives, (2) a meta-coordinator that performs hierarchical-level reasoning over market context information, and (3) a memory mechanism that reasons over statistical performance summaries (e.g., accuracy, stability, and tail risk) to guide learning under noisy feedback. Experiments across datasets from multiple countries show that MUFASA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the valuation task compared to classical finance methods, financial large…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
Fractal Cross Product: Theory, Differentiable Implementation and Application to Medical Image Analysis
Noaman Khan, Nihad Hadj Sahraoui, Samir Brahim Belhaouari
The magnitude of the generalized Euclidean cross product is a Gram volume whose degree under common scaling is fixed by the integer dimension of the spanning frame. We formulate a generalized Fractal Cross Product (FCP) as a nonlinear radial deformation with a prescribed positive degree $D$, which may be non-integer. The scalar construction applies in any ambient dimension $m\geq k$, while its canonically oriented vector form requires codimension one. It recovers the classical generalized cross product exactly at $D=k$ and retains orthogonality, alternation, rotation equivariance, and $D$-homogeneity, but is generally not multilinear. For exact self-similar frame systems, the construction also obeys a scale-balance law at the similarity dimension. We derive a differentiable, dimensionless image response and a non-circular empirical accumulation exponent obtained by regressing raw angular Gram responses across patch widths. Binary64 calculations recover the finite-frame identities to roundoff, while raster experiments recover the Sierpiński-triangle value 1.5849625 at three resolutions. In five-seed medical-imaging comparisons, FCP-centered fusion increased mean area under the…
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arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Benchmarking EEG Foundation Models at Scale: Lessons from 20,000 Evaluations
Zhige Chen, Shu Peng, Chengxuan Qin, Rui Liu, Rui Yang +2
Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (FMs) promise transferable neural representations, yet their advantages over strong supervised baselines and their prospects for further scaling remain unclear. To address these questions, we introduce EEG-Arena, an open-source benchmark covering 30 EEG FMs and 25 supervised baselines evaluated on 57 downstream tasks from 23 public datasets. Through more than 20,000 evaluations across five experimental protocols, we assess downstream performance, pretraining benefits, model size scaling, pretraining data scaling, and robustness to channel configuration. We find that (1) EEG FMs outperform strong task-specific supervised baselines on most evaluated tasks, particularly under non-bipolar settings; (2) compared with architecture-matched supervised training from scratch, pretraining improves both early optimization and final downstream performance, with larger and more consistent gains as more labeled downstream data become available; (3) existing EEG FMs do not exhibit a consistent positive relationship between parameter count and downstream performance; (4) under a fixed architecture, increasing the pretraining data scale yields…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
LoCoVSR: Local Context Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Video Super-Resolution
Matan Ben Chorin, Michael Elad
Video super-resolution (VSR) is an ill-posed inverse problem that aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) video from a noisy, low-resolution (LR) version of it. We present LoCoVSR, a diffusion-based VSR framework that leverages pixel-space denoising diffusion probabilistic models. LoCoVSR integrates the Diffusion Posterior Sampling technique with spatio-temporal context learning, operating in a moving-average form. A localized window of adjacent LR frames is used for recovering each center frame, while applying a shared noise trajectory across all frames. The localized windowing enables processing of long videos without length limitations, supports parallel inference, and prevents error accumulation that may occur in recursive processing. Unlike prior methods, LoCoVSR offers a simple yet very effective VSR solution, avoiding explicit optical flow estimation, or information loss caused by latent space processing. Trained on the VFHQ face dataset, LoCoVSR achieves accurate, temporally consistent and high-quality upscaling with competitive results against recent diffusion-based VSR approaches.
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arXiv cs.LGSep 26
Predicting the Financial Impact of Supply Chain Risk for Major AI-Related Semiconductor Firms: A Heterogeneous Graph Patch Transformer Approach
Jianna Hur, Sagar Samtani
Modern semiconductor production relies on a globally distributed, multi-tier supply chain in which financial stress at one firm spreads with a delay and eventually affects the revenue, inventory, and profitability of the companies that design AI chips. Most firms see only their direct partners, and prior predictive research has mainly targeted market-based risk measures, so few tools forecast how supply chain stress will appear in reported financials. In this study, we propose a heterogeneous graph patch transformer that forecasts these quarterly changes one and two quarters ahead. Learning from a 15,186-company network over 60 quarters, the proposed model fuses quarterly fundamentals with macro-trade, event, and disaster signals through learned gates, carries risk across supplier, customer, ownership, and headquarters relations through typed, direction-specific propagation, and encodes the propagated histories with patch-based tokenization. In preliminary experiments on 116 focal semiconductor firms, the proposed model achieves the lowest error on every target at both horizons, and its profitability advantage widens at the two-quarter horizon. These forecasts can help supply…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
AnesTRACE: Benchmarking Intraoperative Anesthesia from Multimodal Perception to Multi-step Decision-Making
Ziwei Huang, Qi Gao, Zhe Ji, Yuanyuan Yao, Fengjiang Zhang +3
Intraoperative anesthesia requires systems to interpret evolving multimodal evidence, recommend timely management, and revise decisions as patient states change, yet existing benchmarks usually isolate perception or single-point reasoning. We introduce AnesTRACE, an evaluation suite comprising AnesTRACE-Bench and AnesTRACE-Eval. Built from public perioperative datasets with anesthesiologist annotation, AnesTRACE-Bench evaluates Intraoperative Perception, Single-point Anesthesia Decision-Making, and Multi-step Anesthesia Decision-Making. AnesTRACE-Eval assesses open-ended responses through anesthesiologist-defined criteria for Clinical Correctness, Evidence Grounding, Task Completeness, and Safety, with Temporal Consistency for multi-step decisions; its domain-specific evaluator is trained by supervised fine-tuning and preference alignment on expert-reviewed judgments. Across more than 30 models, fine-grained visual grounding and intervention selection remain difficult: the leading model reaches only 32.2 mIoU for TEE visual grounding and retains a 17.5\% Major/Critical Safety Error Rate in multi-step management. Evaluator alignment with anesthesiologists improves across both…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
Gradient-Guided Decoupled Adaptation for Geospatial Vision-Language Models
Dongdong Wang, Deepak Balakrishnan, Ravi Srinivasan, Shenhao Wang
Existing geospatial vision-language models (Geo-VLMs) typically optimize diverse geospatial tasks through a unified multi-task adaptation paradigm without explicitly accounting for the heterogeneous optimization characteristics. Our empirical observations reveal heterogeneous gradient characteristics across tasks, including vision-language differences, intra-branch gradient relationships, and task interference, which hinder effective multi-task optimization. Motivated by these observations, we propose Gradient-Guided Decoupled Adaptation (G2DA), a gradient-aware optimization framework for multi-task Geo-VLM learning. G2DA first partitions tasks into vision- and language-centric groups through gradient-guided cross-modal decoupling. It then constructs modality-specific curricula based on task gradient similarity and employs bidirectional rehearsal to mitigate the recency effects introduced by sequential optimization. We evaluate G2DA on three Geo-VLM benchmarks using six InternVL3 and Qwen3.5-VL variants, along with GeoChat and GeoLLaVA. Across all 24 benchmark-model combinations, G2DA consistently outperforms representative baselines, improving over the strongest competitor by…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 26
REALIS: A Curated Dataset for Studying the Challenges of AI Image Detection
Aleksandr Gushchin, Khaled Abud, Georgii Bychkov, Ekaterina Shumitskaya, Artem Filippov +3
AI-generated image detectors are often evaluated on benchmarks where real and synthetic images differ in content, quality, or generation artifacts, allowing models to rely on dataset-specific cues and fail on unfamiliar generators or processed images. Existing datasets provide limited support for evaluating these challenges jointly across diverse visual content. We introduce REALIS, a dataset of 1.43 million real and synthetic images generated by 42 modern text-to-image models, including the latest proprietary systems such as Nano Banana 2. REALIS combines prompts derived from real images, quality filtering, and stratified sampling to reduce class-specific shortcuts while preserving content diversity. We further introduce REALIS-Expert, a stress-test subset for high-quality synthetic images, where real and generated samples are selected with closely matched semantic and visual characteristics. We also propose a robustness protocol covering 35 transformations at five severity levels to analyze detector behavior under image processing. Based on REALIS, our benchmark evaluates pretrained detectors, fine-tuned models, and zero-shot vision-language models under generator and…
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arXiv cs.SISep 26
Plan-to-Synthesis: Cross-City Human Mobility Generation via Semantic Latent Flow Matching
Zhoufu Wang, Baoshen Guo, Zhiqing Hong, Junyi Li, Kailai Sun +4
Human mobility generation aims to synthesize realistic point-of-interest (POI) visitation trajectories and has become an important tool for travel behavior modeling, transportation management, and urban planning. Existing diffusion-based methods achieve high fidelity but require per-city generation, given the inherent heterogeneity of geospatial locations and POI categories, while large language model-based methods generalize across cities but remain too costly at scale, especially for long-horizon trajectory generation. To address this, we propose SeMoFlow, a Semantic human Mobility generation framework based on latent Flow matching. We first encode heterogeneous POIs from different cities into a shared cross-city representation space via hierarchical Semantic IDs, where shared prefixes capture transferable semantics, and successive codes progressively refine the representation toward individual POIs. Building on the semantic IDs, SeMoFlow follows a plan-to-synthesis hierarchical generation paradigm, in which an autoregressive planner generates coarse-grained semantic and recurrence patterns, and a flow matching realizer synthesizes fine-grained suffix latents. The generated…
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arXiv cs.AISep 26
SkillVine: Agent Skill Evolution via Branching Exploration
Kaiwei Liu, Jiqian Dong, Liran Dong, Shuai Mao, Mingming Zhao +5
Agent skills encapsulate reusable procedural knowledge that enables LLM agents to perform tasks, and they can be improved automatically using trajectories from interactions with the environment. This is the classic problem of skill evolution. Existing approaches predominately follow a linear evolution paradigm, in which updates are sequentially applied to the latest skill-library version. As a result, they inevitably fall into local optima, leaving many promising evolution paths unexplored. We propose SkillVine, an automatic skill-evolution framework that formulates skill evolution as a graph search problem and employs a branching exploration strategy. Equipped with a trunk-branch collaborative searching mechanism, an intelligent parent-node selector, and an adaptive-granularity update rule, SkillVine achieves a balance between exploration and exploitation. We evaluate SkillVine on 5 benchmarks with two LLMs. Results show that SkillVine discovers better skill-library versions along branches than along the linear trunk and achieves the best test performance in nine of ten benchmark-model combinations.
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