Research

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Research

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

Week Month Quarter All

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Papers

arXiv cs.LGSep 28
Instance-Adaptive Prompts as Context for Time-Series Foundation Models
Zehao Xiao, Shifeng Xie, Lei Zan, Jianfeng Zhang, Lujia Pan +3
Longer histories can improve time-series foundation models (TSFMs), but require substantially higher inference cost. We therefore ask whether contextual information can be provided more efficiently through a compact set of learned token embeddings. We introduce PaCTS, which generates a small set of instance-adaptive latent prompts in the form of continuous embedding tokens conditioned on the visible context. These prompts serve as compact context surrogates for frozen TSFMs. PaCTS constructs them from instance-specific global statistics and further refines them with segment-level temporal information, capturing both global characteristics and local temporal variations. The prompt module is jointly trained and deployed across heterogeneous time series with the frozen backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of prompts as context, consistently improving forecasting across context lengths and model architectures. With a shorter input context, PaCTS can outperform the same frozen backbone using double context while requiring substantially less inference computation. Compared with weight-space adaptation methods, PaCTS achieves stronger improvements and better…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
BEHAVE: Functional Behavior Modeling Enables Self-Improving Agents for Hardware Design and Verification
Yuheng Wu, Berk Gokmen, Sujeeth Jinesh, Lauren McLane, Aarav Wattal +3
Developing agents for hardware design and verification requires reliable correctness feedback. As a hardware specification may permit correct implementations with different latencies, matching design and reference outputs cycle by cycle can reject valid designs. To address this, we introduce BEHAVE, an agentic framework for multi-turn joint hardware design and verification through functional behavior modeling. We define Behavior IR to express task functionality as executable behavior models without prescribing implementation timing beyond the specification. The agent iteratively develops a register-transfer-level (RTL) design and a behavior model as the design's verification reference. Our evaluator, BEHAVE-Sim, checks both artifacts separately against a hidden golden behavior model using input stimuli generated by random sampling and solver-guided search. BEHAVE thus supports power, performance, and area (PPA) exploration across task-permitted latencies and microarchitectures. During training, the same evaluator provides verifiable reinforcement learning (RL) rewards from specification-behavior pairs without reference RTL. For self-improvement, the agent continually searches for…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 28
Projective Normal Fields: A Convex Optimization Method for Constructing Smooth UDFs
Jiayi Kong, Chen Zong, Fei Hou, Junhui Hou, Wenping Wang +1
Constructing a smooth approximation of an unsigned distance field (UDF) from a raw point cloud is challenging because the input provides neither surface connectivity nor consistently oriented normals. Methods that directly learn a scalar UDF must also handle its non-differentiability on the zero level set and weak supervision away from the samples, which can lead to unstable optimization and spatial artifacts. We introduce Projective Normal Fields (PNFs), an orientation-free representation and convex optimization framework for estimating bidirectional normals from point positions alone. Each normal axis is encoded by a rank-one projector, which is invariant to normal reversal. We relax the non-convex set of hard projectors to its convex hull: the symmetric positive-semidefinite matrices with unit trace. Each soft tensor defines a local quadratic distance model and retains the relative weights of candidate normal axes. We estimate a coherent PNF by combining local tangent-plane fitting, soft-PCA anchoring, and overlap regularization on a fixed neighborhood graph. With positive anchoring weights, the objective is strongly convex and admits a unique global minimizer. Principal…
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arXiv cs.CLSep 28
TQTS-Bench: A Multi-Syntax Benchmark for Text-to-Query over Time-Series Databases
Fei Lyu, Zhiyi Peng, Jiaming Liu, Yixuan Yang, Changjian Chen +3
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language querying over relational databases, yet their ability to query time-series databases (TSDBs) remains largely unassessed. Existing benchmarks fail to adequately capture the non-unified query syntaxes, diverse application domains, and unique time-specific query intents inherent to TSDBs. To address this gap, we introduce TQTS-BENCH, a multi-syntax benchmark for evaluating text-to-query capabilities over TSDBs. TQTS-BENCH contains 6,125 high-quality question-answering (QA) pairs spanning 97 TSDBs, 23 distinct query syntaxes, 22 application domains, and 4 types of time-specific query intents. It is constructed through a human-centric AI-assisted workflow, where all QA pairs are carefully reviewed and revised by domain experts to ensure quality and correctness. Extensive evaluations of advanced LLMs and state-of-the-art text-to-query methods reveal challenges in querying TSDBs. Even the best-performing model evaluated, Claude-Opus-5, achieves only 48.98% execution accuracy, while humans reach 87.34%. Error analysis reveals that this performance gap mainly stems from the heterogeneous query syntaxes across…
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arXiv cs.ROSep 28
CoHuB: A Simulation Benchmark for Multi-Humanoid Collaboration
Hyunjin Park, Jebeom Chae, Minwoo Park, Sunghyun Park, Hanjun Yoo +9
Many physical tasks in human environments require collaboration, from assisting a partner to jointly manipulating an object. Yet, existing humanoid benchmarks largely focus on single-humanoid skills and lack evaluation of multi-humanoid collaboration under egocentric visual observations. We introduce CoHuB (Collaborative Multi-Humanoid Benchmark), a simulation benchmark for multi-humanoid collaboration under egocentric visual observations. CoHuB provides 10 tasks, eight with two humanoids and two with three humanoids, spanning diverse collaboration patterns. We also provide synchronized demonstrations collected through a multi-operator VR teleoperation pipeline, in which each operator controls one humanoid from its egocentric view. Experiments with representative visuomotor policies reveal substantial challenges across different forms of coordinated perception and control. CoHuB provides a foundation for developing and evaluating multi-humanoid collaboration policies.
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arXiv cs.CVSep 28
When VLMs Trust Context: Evaluating Scene Text Recognition under Misleading Context
Yuxing Cheng, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
Vision-language models (VLMs) can read text in natural scenes, but their predictions may be influenced by the surrounding context. When the printed text conflicts with what the scene suggests, a model may return a more plausible word instead of the shown text. We introduce SceneFaith, a benchmark of 781 generated scene images for studying this behavior. Each output is classified as Literal, Canonical, or Other, separating faithful transcription from context-consistent rewriting and ordinary recognition errors. Across 15 models from seven families, all models show rewriting on clear images, with rates ranging from 8.45\% to 58.51\%. Controlled experiments further show that surrounding context matters: removing surrounding scene information reduces rewriting and improves literal accuracy, while changing the scene around the same text patch can also change model outputs. Moreover, weakening the target text with blur increases rewriting. These results show that reliable scene-text recognition requires VLMs to balance visual character evidence with contextual information, preserving clear text while using context mainly when the visual evidence is uncertain.
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arXiv cs.LGSep 28
Replication Failure and Trivial Baselines in Road-Level Crash Prediction
Maurya Patel
Graph neural networks are increasingly applied to road-level crash prediction, but the stability of their reported gains has received little scrutiny. We independently reconstruct the data pipeline of a recent uncertainty-aware model and evaluate eleven of its design decisions across three London boroughs under an expanding-window protocol. Four survive replication on a second borough; seven do not, and four of those reverse sign rather than attenuate. Multi-seed evaluation is decisive: one effect reverses sign between random seeds within a single borough, and the reference architecture exhibits per-borough seed spreads of up to 35.7 points against 4 points for ours. We further compare both networks against a parameter-free baseline that ranks segments by cumulative past crash count. At matched history depth our model is statistically indistinguishable from that baseline ($-0.90$ points, $p=0.61$), and the reference architecture loses to it on 18 of 18 held-out windows ($-17.37$, $p<10^{-6}$). Sweeping the baseline's lookback horizon shows it spans 22.71% to 83.94% accuracy on that variable alone, and that every published figure in this line of work is matched by the baseline at…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
Applying Language Models in Clinical Medicine: Recent Trends and Perspectives
Erik Aerts
The use and applicability of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical research and clinical practice has received increasing attention in the literature over recent years. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has expanded discussions in regards to applications of AI within healthcare. While traditional deep learning based AI applications in medicine have often focused on specific and defined tasks, LLMs offer broader capabilities and flexibility in working with available data,. At the same time of writing, the integration of LLMs into medical settings raises important questions regarding their reliability, accuracy, transparency, safety, and appropriate role in a medical setting. This text presents and discusses recent talks and articles concerning the application of LLMs in medicine, with particular emphasis on their potential utility in research and clinical practice. It considers both the opportunities offered by these technologies and the challenges associated with their implementation, aiming to provide a perspective on the current and emerging role of LLMs within the medical field.
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
Page-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for EvalLLM 2026: A Five-Variant Study on French PDFs
Abdelhak kelious
We study retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for questions about French PDF documents when both the answer and its supporting document pages are evaluated. Five system variants add dense retrieval, rank fusion, reranking, and query decomposition to a BM25 baseline. On 595 challenge questions, the complete system scores 0.4450 MRR@10 and 0.4013 Recall@10, compared with 0.3430 and 0.2994 for BM25. Dense retrieval alone and a simple lexical--dense fusion both underperform BM25. Reranking improves the hybrid system, whereas adding query decomposition produces the largest further gain, with higher latency and more detected output artifacts. The complete system slightly exceeds the reported anonymous overall mean on two answer metrics but falls below it on most page-retrieval metrics. These results identify accurate page selection, rather than semantic retrieval in isolation, as the main opportunity for improvement in this setting.
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
Before the Token Commits: Trajectory-Level Benchmarking of Visual Hallucinations in Diffusion VLMs
Yadong Wang, Siping Yue, Yu Tian, Chuanxing Geng, Xiang Chen
Multimodal diffusion language models generate responses by iteratively unmasking tokens, making each answer the endpoint of a multi-step trajectory rather than an immediate commitment. Hallucination benchmarks built for autoregressive models evaluate only the final output, and therefore cannot determine whether an unsupported claim in diffusion VLMs appears late or has already stabilized before any answer token is revealed. We introduce DynaHall, a trajectory-level benchmark of annotation-backed binary visual propositions covering object existence, counting, attributes, and relations, with controlled hard negatives graded by visual prior. DynaHall is paired with a commitment-aware protocol that records the intermediate answer tendency at every unmasking step alongside the committed output. Across five diffusion VLMs from three architecture families, visual hallucination is settled before commitment: an unsupported answer is already the preferred state while the answer position is still masked, and later unmasking steps rarely reverse it, so the failure is not introduced at the write step. This holds across decoding schedules, answer formats, and open-ended generation. DynaHall…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
When Do Model Internals Help? Exploring the Role of Representation Engineering in LLM Safety
Tianyi Guan, Jianhui Chen, Liangming Pan
Reliable AI safeguards require both control mechanisms that reduce unsafe behavior and monitoring mechanisms that detect safety risks during model interactions. Established behavioral safeguards include alignment methods that optimize model outputs and text monitors that assess interaction text. Representation engineering instead reads or modifies internal model states, but the relative strengths of these approaches remain unclear because they are often evaluated under different settings. We present a matched evaluation across two tracks. For safety control, we compare DPO, a behavioral alignment method, with three representation steering methods across robustness, practicality, and granularity. DPO provides the strongest overall control and generally improves with increasing training data, although its safety can degrade after subsequent benign fine-tuning. Representation steering remains competitive primarily in low-data settings, particularly with high-quality contrastive data. For safety monitoring, we compare representation probes with fine-tuned and open-weight text monitors across full-response detection, early detection, and computational cost. Specialized text monitors…
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arXiv cs.CLSep 28
Reference-Grounded Data Curation for Instruction-Following Thai-English Machine Translation
Thodsaporn Chay-intr, Krittapad Harnchang, Mahannop Thabua, Kobkrit Viriyayudhakorn, Thanaruk Theeramunkong
Instruction-following machine translation (IF-MT) requires respecting prompt-level rules on terminology, formatting, and register. Rule compliance typically trades off against translation quality, a tension that general-purpose IF data augmentation methods do not address. We propose Reference-Grounded Data Curation, a two-phase pipeline that extracts every supervised constraint from a reference translation that already satisfies it, ensuring feasibility by construction. Phase 1 applies Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) scoring to retain the hardest-but-learnable instances from an English-Thai parallel pool. Phase 2 extracts constraints from each reference target and keeps only generations satisfying every constraint, yielding the 1.97M-record Grounded dataset. We fine-tune open-weight bases on Grounded to produce ChindaMT, a Thai-English translation family at 4B, 2B, and 0.8B parameters. Under length-controlled pairwise judging, ChindaMT outperforms or matches every same-size baseline at every tier on both plain translation and under explicit rules, reaching up to a 68.4% win rate against the strongest baseline. The recipe transfers cleanly across Qwen generations. We…
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arXiv cs.CLSep 28
LongPuzzleBench: Evaluating GUI Agents on Long-Horizon Visual Puzzles
Bingo Zhang, Haochuan Lu, Zongjie Li, Genjian Li, Ari Yu Zhang +1
GUI agents need long-horizon visual reasoning: they must interpret a changing interface while keeping a multi-step plan viable as earlier actions constrain later ones. Existing benchmarks evaluate grounding, computer use, and game play, but rarely test whether agents stay coherent across long chains of coupled decisions. Long-horizon visual puzzles expose this capability directly: a legal move that looks like progress can make the puzzle unsolvable, and the loss shows only several moves later. We introduce LongPuzzleBench, 114 levels in six puzzle games played through native GUI actions, where one objective can take a human over a thousand actions on persistent boards and dead ends go unannounced. With Native GUI Actions alone, the strongest agents solve most objectives, but success falls sharply on harder, longer boards: seven of ten general-purpose agents solve nothing harder than Medium, and none completes Bolt Unscrew Hard, which a human solves along with every other objective. Code Execution CUA does not close this gap, and its scores mix visual solving with algorithmic search. Controlled diagnostics trace these failures to one limitation that neither rules, state hints, nor…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
Privacy-Preserving Full-Body Meshing from mmWave Radar via Mesh Foundation Model Supervision
Shuxing Zhang, Yongquan Ni, Zhenyu Ding, Yawen Lin
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-preserving human perception, but the extreme sparsity of point clouds from commercial single-chip sensors (mean ~6.5 points/frame; ~28% empty frames) has confined prior art to body-part keypoints or discrete action classification. We present a cross-modal teacher-student framework that lifts commercial radar to full-body, per-frame, metric 3D mesh reconstruction with per-joint uncertainty. Three innovations: (1) a mesh-foundation-model teacher - SAM 3D Body produces whole-body MHR ground truth (70 joints, 18,439 mesh vertices) from a single RGB frame with zero training, slashing annotation cost by orders of magnitude; (2) StudentPoseFormer - set encoding with masked attention pooling, a temporal Transformer, and a CVAE multi-hypothesis head that outputs both the pose mean and per-joint variance, honestly reporting where the radar cannot see; and (3) a multi-stage ground-truth quality pipeline (confidence gating, depth validation, temporal smoothing, bone-length consistency, bad-frame rejection) plus systematic information-lever ablations. On the public MM-Fi benchmark (same TI IWR6843 sensor, cross-subject), our full configuration…
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arXiv cs.MASep 28
VehicleArena: A Realistic Urban Environment for Multi-Agent Driving
Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Jiazheng Zhou, Mianqiu Huang, Yining Zheng +2
Real-world embodied agents often pursue independent objectives within a shared physical environment, where their actions can alter the conditions faced by others. Existing benchmarks, however, typically assume shared goals or explicitly prescribed interaction protocols, leaving such emergent physical coupling underexplored. We introduce VehicleArena, a 3D urban-driving benchmark for studying independently operating agents in a dynamic shared world. In VehicleArena, LLM-controlled agents must fulfill evolving passenger requests while navigating complex traffic, and each agent's driving decisions can reshape traffic flow, delays, risks, and subsequent observations for surrounding agents. The benchmark provides 112 evaluation tasks spanning single-agent and multi-agent driving. Across nine evaluated models, the highest arrival rates reach only 65.0% on single-agent tasks and 65.6% on multi-agent tasks, while strong passenger-request or cabin scores do not reliably translate into successful trip completion. Moreover, in matched multi-agent runs, every tested focal policy reduces the arrival rate of surrounding vehicles relative to the simulator's native traffic controller, revealing…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 28
Beyond Reconstruction Loss in Post-Training Quantization: Balanced Fitting for Large Vision-Language Models
Minchan Kang, Kyeonghye Park, Seungyeon Sa, Seoyoung Cho, Daeshik Kim +1
Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of large vision-language models (LVLMs), but is typically calibrated on a small set while expected to generalize across diverse downstream tasks. Although recent PTQ methods for LVLMs incorporate sensitivity signals, they still minimize reconstruction loss with respect to the full-precision model, potentially over-preserving FP behavior and calibration-specific bias. Rather than treating quantization solely as an error to be minimized, we observe that it can also provide beneficial regularization for certain layers and modalities. Motivated by this observation, we propose Balanced Fitting, a quantization effect-based framework that balances precision and regularization beyond reconstruction-based optimization. By measuring layer- and component-wise quantization effects for weights, vision activations, and text activations, Balanced Fitting combines fine-grained fitting for sensitive components with coarser fitting to exploit potential regularization benefits. Experiments on multiple LVLMs show that our method consistently outperforms prior PTQ approaches under both weight-only and weight-activation quantization, while…
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arXiv cs.CESep 28
KT-EGO: A Knowledge Transfer Assisted Efficient Global Optimization Algorithm for Solving High-Dimensional Expensive Black-Box Problems
Qineng Wang, Liming Song, Yun Chen, Guangjian Ma, Zhendong Guo +1
Many engineering problems involve optimizing a high-dimensional expensive black-box (HEB) design space. To solve such problems efficiently, we propose a knowledge transfer assisted efficient global optimization (EGO) algorithm, labeled as KT-EGO, which extends the EGO algorithm for solving problems over higher dimensions (i.e., $d>20$). Specifically, the original design space is divided into several low-dimensional subset design spaces. More importantly, in order to extract information from the subset design spaces to accelerate the progress of full optimization, we propose a surrogate-based data fusion strategy in KT-EGO. And further, a searching strategy with an adaptive variable range is devised to enhance the exploitation of promising areas. To show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, it is compared against the state-of-the-art algorithms over 12 benchmark functions and a 28-dimensional engineering optimization for the design of compressor blade, which fully validates the effectiveness of the KT-EGO for solving HEB problems.
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arXiv cs.DBAgentsSep 28
WeaveData: A Multimodal Data Analysis System with Self-Critiquing and Self-Evolving LLM Plans
Min Jia, Shihao Zhou, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu +7
Multimodal data analysis, which answers questions over relational tables, text, and images, has attracted growing attention in the data management community. Large language models (LLMs) enable such analysis in natural language by generating analysis plans over relational and semantic operators. However, LLM-generated plans are error-prone: a plan may silently compute something other than what was asked, fail during execution, or return a result that misses the question. This paper presents WeaveData, a multimodal data analysis system with self-critiquing and self-evolving LLM plans. First, WeaveData generates a typed logical plan for each question and critiques it step by step before execution, and it checks the executed result against the question afterwards. Second, WeaveData evolves a plan that fails or misses the question: it diagnoses the failure with the actual data, reuses the results that remain valid, and accumulates planning experience for later questions. Third, WeaveData grounds planning in a metadata knowledge graph of all modalities, clarifies ambiguous questions with the user, and backs every model judgment with evidence in an interactive notebook. We demonstrate…
AIMultimodal70PDF
arXiv cs.CVMultimodalSep 28
PanoVLN: Towards Effective Panoramic Vision-and-Language Navigation
Zhen Wang, Changpeng Wang, Zhe Liu, Zhangyang Qi, Yuxiang Lu +3
Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced vision-and-language navigation (VLN), enabling models to predict navigation actions from visual observations and language instructions. In this work, we explore VLN with panoramic observations and introduce PanoVLN. The motivation is straightforward: more complete visual context should enable better-informed navigation decisions. For example, a panorama can reveal a passage outside a perspective camera's field of view, allowing the model to identify the intended route without additional exploration. However, we find that simply replacing perspective images with panoramas yields only limited gains. Our diagnosis suggests that fully exploiting wider visibility requires modifications to action prediction, training supervision, and visual representation. First, wider visibility supports longer-horizon action planning. We make the model predict longer action sequences, enabling larger turns and subsequent movement from a single panorama. Specifically, we introduce a confidence-guided execution (CGE) strategy that dynamically determines how many predicted actions to execute before replanning. Second, wider visibility also brings more…
AIRobotics70PDF
arXiv stat.MLSep 28
Statistical Benefits of Fine-Tuning from Pretrained Initialization in Diagonal Linear Networks
Alexandre Declèves, Etienne Boursier, Nicolas Flammarion
Adapting pretrained models to downstream tasks with limited data has become a central paradigm in modern deep learning. Yet, despite its widespread practical success, how fine-tuning leverages information from pretraining remains poorly understood theoretically. We study fine-tuning from pretrained weights through the lens of sparse linear regression and two-layer diagonal linear networks. In our setting, pretraining provides information through the support (and signs) of the initialization predictor, which may contain coordinates relevant to the downstream task. We show how pretrained information reshapes the implicit bias and training dynamics, and can thereby reduce the sample complexity of recovering the target parameters and support. In particular, for a clean initialization with correctly inherited signs, we show that the required sample size is comparable to that of a weighted Lasso estimator that explicitly exploits the pretrained support through a suitably chosen regularizer. Our results thus show how information encoded in pretrained weights can be implicitly exploited by gradient-based fine-tuning, reducing the amount of data needed to recover a downstream task.
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Papers

arXiv cs.LGSep 28
Instance-Adaptive Prompts as Context for Time-Series Foundation Models
Zehao Xiao, Shifeng Xie, Lei Zan, Jianfeng Zhang, Lujia Pan +3
Longer histories can improve time-series foundation models (TSFMs), but require substantially higher inference cost. We therefore ask whether contextual information can be provided more efficiently through a compact set of learned token embeddings. We introduce PaCTS, which generates a small set of instance-adaptive latent prompts in the form of continuous embedding tokens conditioned on the visible context. These prompts serve as compact context surrogates for frozen TSFMs. PaCTS constructs them from instance-specific global statistics and further refines them with segment-level temporal information, capturing both global characteristics and local temporal variations. The prompt module is jointly trained and deployed across heterogeneous time series with the frozen backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of prompts as context, consistently improving forecasting across context lengths and model architectures. With a shorter input context, PaCTS can outperform the same frozen backbone using double context while requiring substantially less inference computation. Compared with weight-space adaptation methods, PaCTS achieves stronger improvements and better…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 28
BEHAVE: Functional Behavior Modeling Enables Self-Improving Agents for Hardware Design and Verification
Yuheng Wu, Berk Gokmen, Sujeeth Jinesh, Lauren McLane, Aarav Wattal +3
Developing agents for hardware design and verification requires reliable correctness feedback. As a hardware specification may permit correct implementations with different latencies, matching design and reference outputs cycle by cycle can reject valid designs. To address this, we introduce BEHAVE, an agentic framework for multi-turn joint hardware design and verification through functional behavior modeling. We define Behavior IR to express task functionality as executable behavior models without prescribing implementation timing beyond the specification. The agent iteratively develops a register-transfer-level (RTL) design and a behavior model as the design's verification reference. Our evaluator, BEHAVE-Sim, checks both artifacts separately against a hidden golden behavior model using input stimuli generated by random sampling and solver-guided search. BEHAVE thus supports power, performance, and area (PPA) exploration across task-permitted latencies and microarchitectures. During training, the same evaluator provides verifiable reinforcement learning (RL) rewards from specification-behavior pairs without reference RTL. For self-improvement, the agent continually searches for…
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 28
Projective Normal Fields: A Convex Optimization Method for Constructing Smooth UDFs
Jiayi Kong, Chen Zong, Fei Hou, Junhui Hou, Wenping Wang +1
Constructing a smooth approximation of an unsigned distance field (UDF) from a raw point cloud is challenging because the input provides neither surface connectivity nor consistently oriented normals. Methods that directly learn a scalar UDF must also handle its non-differentiability on the zero level set and weak supervision away from the samples, which can lead to unstable optimization and spatial artifacts. We introduce Projective Normal Fields (PNFs), an orientation-free representation and convex optimization framework for estimating bidirectional normals from point positions alone. Each normal axis is encoded by a rank-one projector, which is invariant to normal reversal. We relax the non-convex set of hard projectors to its convex hull: the symmetric positive-semidefinite matrices with unit trace. Each soft tensor defines a local quadratic distance model and retains the relative weights of candidate normal axes. We estimate a coherent PNF by combining local tangent-plane fitting, soft-PCA anchoring, and overlap regularization on a fixed neighborhood graph. With positive anchoring weights, the objective is strongly convex and admits a unique global minimizer. Principal…
PDF
arXiv cs.CLSep 28
TQTS-Bench: A Multi-Syntax Benchmark for Text-to-Query over Time-Series Databases
Fei Lyu, Zhiyi Peng, Jiaming Liu, Yixuan Yang, Changjian Chen +3
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language querying over relational databases, yet their ability to query time-series databases (TSDBs) remains largely unassessed. Existing benchmarks fail to adequately capture the non-unified query syntaxes, diverse application domains, and unique time-specific query intents inherent to TSDBs. To address this gap, we introduce TQTS-BENCH, a multi-syntax benchmark for evaluating text-to-query capabilities over TSDBs. TQTS-BENCH contains 6,125 high-quality question-answering (QA) pairs spanning 97 TSDBs, 23 distinct query syntaxes, 22 application domains, and 4 types of time-specific query intents. It is constructed through a human-centric AI-assisted workflow, where all QA pairs are carefully reviewed and revised by domain experts to ensure quality and correctness. Extensive evaluations of advanced LLMs and state-of-the-art text-to-query methods reveal challenges in querying TSDBs. Even the best-performing model evaluated, Claude-Opus-5, achieves only 48.98% execution accuracy, while humans reach 87.34%. Error analysis reveals that this performance gap mainly stems from the heterogeneous query syntaxes across…
PDF
arXiv cs.ROSep 28
CoHuB: A Simulation Benchmark for Multi-Humanoid Collaboration
Hyunjin Park, Jebeom Chae, Minwoo Park, Sunghyun Park, Hanjun Yoo +9
Many physical tasks in human environments require collaboration, from assisting a partner to jointly manipulating an object. Yet, existing humanoid benchmarks largely focus on single-humanoid skills and lack evaluation of multi-humanoid collaboration under egocentric visual observations. We introduce CoHuB (Collaborative Multi-Humanoid Benchmark), a simulation benchmark for multi-humanoid collaboration under egocentric visual observations. CoHuB provides 10 tasks, eight with two humanoids and two with three humanoids, spanning diverse collaboration patterns. We also provide synchronized demonstrations collected through a multi-operator VR teleoperation pipeline, in which each operator controls one humanoid from its egocentric view. Experiments with representative visuomotor policies reveal substantial challenges across different forms of coordinated perception and control. CoHuB provides a foundation for developing and evaluating multi-humanoid collaboration policies.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 28
When VLMs Trust Context: Evaluating Scene Text Recognition under Misleading Context
Yuxing Cheng, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
Vision-language models (VLMs) can read text in natural scenes, but their predictions may be influenced by the surrounding context. When the printed text conflicts with what the scene suggests, a model may return a more plausible word instead of the shown text. We introduce SceneFaith, a benchmark of 781 generated scene images for studying this behavior. Each output is classified as Literal, Canonical, or Other, separating faithful transcription from context-consistent rewriting and ordinary recognition errors. Across 15 models from seven families, all models show rewriting on clear images, with rates ranging from 8.45\% to 58.51\%. Controlled experiments further show that surrounding context matters: removing surrounding scene information reduces rewriting and improves literal accuracy, while changing the scene around the same text patch can also change model outputs. Moreover, weakening the target text with blur increases rewriting. These results show that reliable scene-text recognition requires VLMs to balance visual character evidence with contextual information, preserving clear text while using context mainly when the visual evidence is uncertain.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 28
Replication Failure and Trivial Baselines in Road-Level Crash Prediction
Maurya Patel
Graph neural networks are increasingly applied to road-level crash prediction, but the stability of their reported gains has received little scrutiny. We independently reconstruct the data pipeline of a recent uncertainty-aware model and evaluate eleven of its design decisions across three London boroughs under an expanding-window protocol. Four survive replication on a second borough; seven do not, and four of those reverse sign rather than attenuate. Multi-seed evaluation is decisive: one effect reverses sign between random seeds within a single borough, and the reference architecture exhibits per-borough seed spreads of up to 35.7 points against 4 points for ours. We further compare both networks against a parameter-free baseline that ranks segments by cumulative past crash count. At matched history depth our model is statistically indistinguishable from that baseline ($-0.90$ points, $p=0.61$), and the reference architecture loses to it on 18 of 18 held-out windows ($-17.37$, $p<10^{-6}$). Sweeping the baseline's lookback horizon shows it spans 22.71% to 83.94% accuracy on that variable alone, and that every published figure in this line of work is matched by the baseline at…
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 28
Applying Language Models in Clinical Medicine: Recent Trends and Perspectives
Erik Aerts
The use and applicability of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical research and clinical practice has received increasing attention in the literature over recent years. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has expanded discussions in regards to applications of AI within healthcare. While traditional deep learning based AI applications in medicine have often focused on specific and defined tasks, LLMs offer broader capabilities and flexibility in working with available data,. At the same time of writing, the integration of LLMs into medical settings raises important questions regarding their reliability, accuracy, transparency, safety, and appropriate role in a medical setting. This text presents and discusses recent talks and articles concerning the application of LLMs in medicine, with particular emphasis on their potential utility in research and clinical practice. It considers both the opportunities offered by these technologies and the challenges associated with their implementation, aiming to provide a perspective on the current and emerging role of LLMs within the medical field.
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 28
Page-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for EvalLLM 2026: A Five-Variant Study on French PDFs
Abdelhak kelious
We study retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for questions about French PDF documents when both the answer and its supporting document pages are evaluated. Five system variants add dense retrieval, rank fusion, reranking, and query decomposition to a BM25 baseline. On 595 challenge questions, the complete system scores 0.4450 MRR@10 and 0.4013 Recall@10, compared with 0.3430 and 0.2994 for BM25. Dense retrieval alone and a simple lexical--dense fusion both underperform BM25. Reranking improves the hybrid system, whereas adding query decomposition produces the largest further gain, with higher latency and more detected output artifacts. The complete system slightly exceeds the reported anonymous overall mean on two answer metrics but falls below it on most page-retrieval metrics. These results identify accurate page selection, rather than semantic retrieval in isolation, as the main opportunity for improvement in this setting.
PDF
arXiv cs.AISep 28
Before the Token Commits: Trajectory-Level Benchmarking of Visual Hallucinations in Diffusion VLMs
Yadong Wang, Siping Yue, Yu Tian, Chuanxing Geng, Xiang Chen
Multimodal diffusion language models generate responses by iteratively unmasking tokens, making each answer the endpoint of a multi-step trajectory rather than an immediate commitment. Hallucination benchmarks built for autoregressive models evaluate only the final output, and therefore cannot determine whether an unsupported claim in diffusion VLMs appears late or has already stabilized before any answer token is revealed. We introduce DynaHall, a trajectory-level benchmark of annotation-backed binary visual propositions covering object existence, counting, attributes, and relations, with controlled hard negatives graded by visual prior. DynaHall is paired with a commitment-aware protocol that records the intermediate answer tendency at every unmasking step alongside the committed output. Across five diffusion VLMs from three architecture families, visual hallucination is settled before commitment: an unsupported answer is already the preferred state while the answer position is still masked, and later unmasking steps rarely reverse it, so the failure is not introduced at the write step. This holds across decoding schedules, answer formats, and open-ended generation. DynaHall…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
When Do Model Internals Help? Exploring the Role of Representation Engineering in LLM Safety
Tianyi Guan, Jianhui Chen, Liangming Pan
Reliable AI safeguards require both control mechanisms that reduce unsafe behavior and monitoring mechanisms that detect safety risks during model interactions. Established behavioral safeguards include alignment methods that optimize model outputs and text monitors that assess interaction text. Representation engineering instead reads or modifies internal model states, but the relative strengths of these approaches remain unclear because they are often evaluated under different settings. We present a matched evaluation across two tracks. For safety control, we compare DPO, a behavioral alignment method, with three representation steering methods across robustness, practicality, and granularity. DPO provides the strongest overall control and generally improves with increasing training data, although its safety can degrade after subsequent benign fine-tuning. Representation steering remains competitive primarily in low-data settings, particularly with high-quality contrastive data. For safety monitoring, we compare representation probes with fine-tuned and open-weight text monitors across full-response detection, early detection, and computational cost. Specialized text monitors…
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arXiv cs.CLSep 28
Reference-Grounded Data Curation for Instruction-Following Thai-English Machine Translation
Thodsaporn Chay-intr, Krittapad Harnchang, Mahannop Thabua, Kobkrit Viriyayudhakorn, Thanaruk Theeramunkong
Instruction-following machine translation (IF-MT) requires respecting prompt-level rules on terminology, formatting, and register. Rule compliance typically trades off against translation quality, a tension that general-purpose IF data augmentation methods do not address. We propose Reference-Grounded Data Curation, a two-phase pipeline that extracts every supervised constraint from a reference translation that already satisfies it, ensuring feasibility by construction. Phase 1 applies Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) scoring to retain the hardest-but-learnable instances from an English-Thai parallel pool. Phase 2 extracts constraints from each reference target and keeps only generations satisfying every constraint, yielding the 1.97M-record Grounded dataset. We fine-tune open-weight bases on Grounded to produce ChindaMT, a Thai-English translation family at 4B, 2B, and 0.8B parameters. Under length-controlled pairwise judging, ChindaMT outperforms or matches every same-size baseline at every tier on both plain translation and under explicit rules, reaching up to a 68.4% win rate against the strongest baseline. The recipe transfers cleanly across Qwen generations. We…
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arXiv cs.CLSep 28
LongPuzzleBench: Evaluating GUI Agents on Long-Horizon Visual Puzzles
Bingo Zhang, Haochuan Lu, Zongjie Li, Genjian Li, Ari Yu Zhang +1
GUI agents need long-horizon visual reasoning: they must interpret a changing interface while keeping a multi-step plan viable as earlier actions constrain later ones. Existing benchmarks evaluate grounding, computer use, and game play, but rarely test whether agents stay coherent across long chains of coupled decisions. Long-horizon visual puzzles expose this capability directly: a legal move that looks like progress can make the puzzle unsolvable, and the loss shows only several moves later. We introduce LongPuzzleBench, 114 levels in six puzzle games played through native GUI actions, where one objective can take a human over a thousand actions on persistent boards and dead ends go unannounced. With Native GUI Actions alone, the strongest agents solve most objectives, but success falls sharply on harder, longer boards: seven of ten general-purpose agents solve nothing harder than Medium, and none completes Bolt Unscrew Hard, which a human solves along with every other objective. Code Execution CUA does not close this gap, and its scores mix visual solving with algorithmic search. Controlled diagnostics trace these failures to one limitation that neither rules, state hints, nor…
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arXiv cs.AISep 28
Privacy-Preserving Full-Body Meshing from mmWave Radar via Mesh Foundation Model Supervision
Shuxing Zhang, Yongquan Ni, Zhenyu Ding, Yawen Lin
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-preserving human perception, but the extreme sparsity of point clouds from commercial single-chip sensors (mean ~6.5 points/frame; ~28% empty frames) has confined prior art to body-part keypoints or discrete action classification. We present a cross-modal teacher-student framework that lifts commercial radar to full-body, per-frame, metric 3D mesh reconstruction with per-joint uncertainty. Three innovations: (1) a mesh-foundation-model teacher - SAM 3D Body produces whole-body MHR ground truth (70 joints, 18,439 mesh vertices) from a single RGB frame with zero training, slashing annotation cost by orders of magnitude; (2) StudentPoseFormer - set encoding with masked attention pooling, a temporal Transformer, and a CVAE multi-hypothesis head that outputs both the pose mean and per-joint variance, honestly reporting where the radar cannot see; and (3) a multi-stage ground-truth quality pipeline (confidence gating, depth validation, temporal smoothing, bone-length consistency, bad-frame rejection) plus systematic information-lever ablations. On the public MM-Fi benchmark (same TI IWR6843 sensor, cross-subject), our full configuration…
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arXiv cs.MASep 28
VehicleArena: A Realistic Urban Environment for Multi-Agent Driving
Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Jiazheng Zhou, Mianqiu Huang, Yining Zheng +2
Real-world embodied agents often pursue independent objectives within a shared physical environment, where their actions can alter the conditions faced by others. Existing benchmarks, however, typically assume shared goals or explicitly prescribed interaction protocols, leaving such emergent physical coupling underexplored. We introduce VehicleArena, a 3D urban-driving benchmark for studying independently operating agents in a dynamic shared world. In VehicleArena, LLM-controlled agents must fulfill evolving passenger requests while navigating complex traffic, and each agent's driving decisions can reshape traffic flow, delays, risks, and subsequent observations for surrounding agents. The benchmark provides 112 evaluation tasks spanning single-agent and multi-agent driving. Across nine evaluated models, the highest arrival rates reach only 65.0% on single-agent tasks and 65.6% on multi-agent tasks, while strong passenger-request or cabin scores do not reliably translate into successful trip completion. Moreover, in matched multi-agent runs, every tested focal policy reduces the arrival rate of surrounding vehicles relative to the simulator's native traffic controller, revealing…
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arXiv cs.CVSep 28
Beyond Reconstruction Loss in Post-Training Quantization: Balanced Fitting for Large Vision-Language Models
Minchan Kang, Kyeonghye Park, Seungyeon Sa, Seoyoung Cho, Daeshik Kim +1
Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of large vision-language models (LVLMs), but is typically calibrated on a small set while expected to generalize across diverse downstream tasks. Although recent PTQ methods for LVLMs incorporate sensitivity signals, they still minimize reconstruction loss with respect to the full-precision model, potentially over-preserving FP behavior and calibration-specific bias. Rather than treating quantization solely as an error to be minimized, we observe that it can also provide beneficial regularization for certain layers and modalities. Motivated by this observation, we propose Balanced Fitting, a quantization effect-based framework that balances precision and regularization beyond reconstruction-based optimization. By measuring layer- and component-wise quantization effects for weights, vision activations, and text activations, Balanced Fitting combines fine-grained fitting for sensitive components with coarser fitting to exploit potential regularization benefits. Experiments on multiple LVLMs show that our method consistently outperforms prior PTQ approaches under both weight-only and weight-activation quantization, while…
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arXiv cs.CESep 28
KT-EGO: A Knowledge Transfer Assisted Efficient Global Optimization Algorithm for Solving High-Dimensional Expensive Black-Box Problems
Qineng Wang, Liming Song, Yun Chen, Guangjian Ma, Zhendong Guo +1
Many engineering problems involve optimizing a high-dimensional expensive black-box (HEB) design space. To solve such problems efficiently, we propose a knowledge transfer assisted efficient global optimization (EGO) algorithm, labeled as KT-EGO, which extends the EGO algorithm for solving problems over higher dimensions (i.e., $d>20$). Specifically, the original design space is divided into several low-dimensional subset design spaces. More importantly, in order to extract information from the subset design spaces to accelerate the progress of full optimization, we propose a surrogate-based data fusion strategy in KT-EGO. And further, a searching strategy with an adaptive variable range is devised to enhance the exploitation of promising areas. To show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, it is compared against the state-of-the-art algorithms over 12 benchmark functions and a 28-dimensional engineering optimization for the design of compressor blade, which fully validates the effectiveness of the KT-EGO for solving HEB problems.
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arXiv cs.DBAgentsSep 28
WeaveData: A Multimodal Data Analysis System with Self-Critiquing and Self-Evolving LLM Plans
Min Jia, Shihao Zhou, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu +7
Multimodal data analysis, which answers questions over relational tables, text, and images, has attracted growing attention in the data management community. Large language models (LLMs) enable such analysis in natural language by generating analysis plans over relational and semantic operators. However, LLM-generated plans are error-prone: a plan may silently compute something other than what was asked, fail during execution, or return a result that misses the question. This paper presents WeaveData, a multimodal data analysis system with self-critiquing and self-evolving LLM plans. First, WeaveData generates a typed logical plan for each question and critiques it step by step before execution, and it checks the executed result against the question afterwards. Second, WeaveData evolves a plan that fails or misses the question: it diagnoses the failure with the actual data, reuses the results that remain valid, and accumulates planning experience for later questions. Third, WeaveData grounds planning in a metadata knowledge graph of all modalities, clarifies ambiguous questions with the user, and backs every model judgment with evidence in an interactive notebook. We demonstrate…
AIMultimodal70PDF
arXiv cs.CVMultimodalSep 28
PanoVLN: Towards Effective Panoramic Vision-and-Language Navigation
Zhen Wang, Changpeng Wang, Zhe Liu, Zhangyang Qi, Yuxiang Lu +3
Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced vision-and-language navigation (VLN), enabling models to predict navigation actions from visual observations and language instructions. In this work, we explore VLN with panoramic observations and introduce PanoVLN. The motivation is straightforward: more complete visual context should enable better-informed navigation decisions. For example, a panorama can reveal a passage outside a perspective camera's field of view, allowing the model to identify the intended route without additional exploration. However, we find that simply replacing perspective images with panoramas yields only limited gains. Our diagnosis suggests that fully exploiting wider visibility requires modifications to action prediction, training supervision, and visual representation. First, wider visibility supports longer-horizon action planning. We make the model predict longer action sequences, enabling larger turns and subsequent movement from a single panorama. Specifically, we introduce a confidence-guided execution (CGE) strategy that dynamically determines how many predicted actions to execute before replanning. Second, wider visibility also brings more…
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arXiv stat.MLSep 28
Statistical Benefits of Fine-Tuning from Pretrained Initialization in Diagonal Linear Networks
Alexandre Declèves, Etienne Boursier, Nicolas Flammarion
Adapting pretrained models to downstream tasks with limited data has become a central paradigm in modern deep learning. Yet, despite its widespread practical success, how fine-tuning leverages information from pretraining remains poorly understood theoretically. We study fine-tuning from pretrained weights through the lens of sparse linear regression and two-layer diagonal linear networks. In our setting, pretraining provides information through the support (and signs) of the initialization predictor, which may contain coordinates relevant to the downstream task. We show how pretrained information reshapes the implicit bias and training dynamics, and can thereby reduce the sample complexity of recovering the target parameters and support. In particular, for a clean initialization with correctly inherited signs, we show that the required sample size is comparable to that of a weighted Lasso estimator that explicitly exploits the pretrained support through a suitably chosen regularizer. Our results thus show how information encoded in pretrained weights can be implicitly exploited by gradient-based fine-tuning, reducing the amount of data needed to recover a downstream task.
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