Research

• Dynamic model and policy routing for general-purpose AI1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Balancing performance and computational cost across diverse tasks and modalities is critical for scalable AI systems.

  • Route Anything: A Study of Model and Policy Routing for General-Purpose AI Systemsraises · addresses
• Cross-repository consistency in coding agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Real-world software development often requires coordinated changes across interdependent repositories, which current agents struggle to maintain.

  • CrossSWE: Benchmarking Cross-Repository Joint Development for Coding Agentsraises
• Efficient long-video generation with consistent quality1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Real-time streaming video generation demands continuous output without quality degradation or camera drift.

  • Wave Forcing: Towards Speed-of-Light Streaming Video Generationraises · addresses
• Local decision-making for reasoning compression1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Reducing inference costs without sacrificing accuracy requires models to know when to stop reasoning.

  • Think Less, Locally: Local Preference Learning for Reasoning Compressionraises · addresses
• Unified taxonomy and coordination for agentic systems1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Fragmented terminology and rapid growth in agentic systems hinder systematic understanding and collaboration.

  • Advances in Agentic Computer Graphicsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.SDSep 30

  Ghost in the Encoder: Decodable Artist Identity Representations in Lyrics-to-Song Generation

  Arhan Vohra, Choenden Kyirong, Laura Ibáñez-Martínez, Martín Rocamora

  Text-to-song generation models can be prompted to imitate specific artists or regurgitate entire songs from their training data. Although these phenomena have been documented behaviorally on small datasets, little is known about the internal representations that may give rise to them. Prior interpretability work on generative audio has focused on locating semantic concepts such as genre or time signature within model activations. In this work, we show that a trained model can be probed for linearly decodable representations of artist identity from song lyrics alone, without any additional identifiers. Through a controlled case study of ACE-Step 1.5 spanning 2,000 songs across 100 artists, we demonstrate that the artist associated with a given set of lyrics can be identified within the model's internal activations, and that this conditioning signal propagates from the lyric encoder to the diffusion backbone during inference. These findings indicate that lyrics constitute an artist-level conditioning channel not addressed by prompt-side replication safeguards. More broadly, our work highlights how latent-space analysis can be used to audit what generative music models have…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 30

  RankEvolve: A Reliable Multi-Agent Auto-Research Harness for Evolving Ranking Models

  Zheng Chen, Linfeng Liu, Hong Li, Hong Yan

  Auto-research agents, LLM systems that propose, implement, train, and evaluate model changes across iterations, promise to automate applied ML's experimental loop. Over long horizons, execution accuracy is a binding constraint: a change can silently leak held-out data, omit normalization, disconnect a gradient, or leave a train/eval flag unwired, invalidating expensive runs and compounding error across iterations. We present RankEvolve, an auto-research framework for evolving generative ranking models. An Executable Operating Protocol (EOP) declares phases, gates, branches, and loops, and the runtime enforces the compiled state machine. A meta-meta-harness composes complete black-box coding-agent products, including Claude Code and Codex, as execution-graph nodes that review and repair one another's work. In a budget-matched evaluation, heterogeneous composition raises all-oracle execution accuracy from the best single-product baseline of 45.8 percent to 62.5 percent (paired +16.7 points, 95 percent CI [6.6, 26.7]) while achieving a 10.4 percent silent critical-defect rate. An implemented knowledge layer carries findings, including negative results, across iterations. In a…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Hyperbolic Prototype Routing for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning

  HongWei Zhao, Rui Liu, Yong Chen

  Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new classes while preserving prior knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning with pre-trained models enables CIL with minimal parameter updates, but existing approaches still suffer from catastrophic forgetting caused by cumulative interference and suboptimal module-sample matching at inference. We propose Hyperbolic Prototype Routing (HyPro), a rehearsal-free framework for continual learning. HyPro allocates a dedicated LoRA-Expert module to each incremental task for isolated representation learning, then projects routing features onto a Poincare ball and performs geodesic nearest-prototype matching for reliable task-level discrimination. Extensive experiments on standard CIL and Few-Shot CIL benchmarks show that HyPro consistently improves average and final-stage accuracy over strong baselines.

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• arXiv cs.CRSep 30

  Speculative Safety Honeypot: Toward Proactive Defense Against Multi-turn Agent Attacks

  Zezhong Wang, Xueyang Tang, Rui Lian, Yang Lou, Heqing Huang

  As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in complex environments, multi-turn interaction attacks have become a significant security challenge. Existing detection methods typically rely on historical context. However, this retrospective logic struggles to identify deep malicious intents that are split across turns to hide future risks. Inspired by speculative decoding, we propose the Speculative Safety Honeypot (SSH) framework. SSH uses a multi-agent simulation system composed of small LLMs to build an action-level speculate-and-verify workflow. In the speculation stage, SSH predicts future behaviors of the target agent and asynchronously builds a trajectory tree to expose potential risks in advance. In the verification stage, the system uses the target agent's real actions to calibrate and prune the trajectory tree, effectively reducing false positives. As a plug-and-playable component, SSH provides existing detectors with rich decision redundancy beyond the current interaction slice. By judging risk based on the evolution of the entire trajectory tree rather than a single point in time, the system reduces the reliance on the absolute precision of individual…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  Learning Normal Diffusion Dynamics for Backdoor Defense in Text-to-Image Models

  Junjian Li, Xiaolong Liu, Peng Sun, Liantao Wu, Linghan Chen +2

  Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the secure deployment of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. Existing defenses typically detect backdoors from specific abnormal patterns in internal representations, which may limit their generalizability with the emergence of increasingly diverse attack mechanisms. In this paper, we study backdoor defense of T2I diffusion models from a transition-dynamics perspective. We observe that benign diffusion trajectories exhibit structured and timestep-dependent transition patterns from cross-attention, latent and noise spaces, whereas backdoor attacks tend to induce deviations from such normal evolution. Motivated by these observations, we propose Normal Diffusion Dynamics Learning (NDDL), a novel backdoor defense framework that learns the normal transition dynamics of diffusion trajectories utilizing only benign samples. NDDL constructs compact multi-space trajectory representations and trains a timestep-conditioned dynamics model to predict the diffusion evolution. In the inference phase, deviations between the observed and predicted transitions are exploited to quantify dynamics inconsistency for backdoor detection. NDDL further enables…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Learning Reliable GUI Agents under Imperfect Priors

  Bo Han, Qianyi Wang, Shuai Liu, Xiong Zifan, Changqiao Wu +7

  GUI agents built on large language and vision-language models still struggle on unseen applications and complex multi-step tasks, as completing real GUI tasks depends on app-specific, temporally volatile operational knowledge that is scarce in pretraining corpora. Retrieval-augmented execution offers a natural remedy but faces two coupled bottlenecks: knowledge at scale is hard to acquire, and self-collected priors inevitably drift from the live environment due to version updates, promotions, ads, A/B tests, and personalization. We therefore argue that GUI agents should not pursue perfect knowledge but learn to act correctly under imperfect priors, and propose our framework that couples knowledge acquisition with noise-robust utilization: a structured exploration strategy traverses interactive elements, builds a UI state-transition graph, and synthesizes (task, trajectory) pairs via a VLM without human annotation; a noise-aware training strategy, grounded in a taxonomy of real GUI drift patterns, injects five types of realistic errors into self-explored trajectories to teach the agent to assess prior reliability before acting. Experiments on physical devices and online emulator…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Specificity-Aware Diffusion Steering via Variance-Reduced Sequential Monte Carlo

  Luran Wang, Linrui Ma, Hannes Stärk, Regina Barzilay

  Inference-time steering enables pretrained diffusion models to satisfy new constraints without full retraining. However, specificity-aware generation is difficult: repelling samples from a negative reference distribution can also erode the positive distribution where the two overlap. The key challenge is to suppress negative mass while minimally distorting the positive distribution. We address this problem by formulating specificity-aware steering as a target-design problem and deriving a target distribution from an overlap-based objective. The resulting target keeps the desired reference distribution only in regions where it is sufficiently preferred over the undesired reference distribution, giving a likelihood-ratio interpretation of specificity. To sample from the corresponding time-dependent target path, we develop a Sequential Monte Carlo sampler with a variance-minimized local proposal. We further introduce a practical fixed-noise optimization procedure with the Jacobian--vector products with the desired and undesired score fields. Experiments on synthetic task, class-contrastive generation, text-to-image tasks and peptide-MHC (p-MHC) binder show that the proposed method…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 30

  Growing an Agent/Prover Interface: Evolutionary Tool Design for Cost-Efficient Theorem Proving in Rocq and Lean

  Jules Viennot, Guillaume Baudart, Marc Lelarge

  Recent achievements in AI-assisted mathematics require intensive interaction of agents with proof assistants to generate machine-checked proof certificates. Agents interact with proof assistants such as Rocq or Lean through an interface that controls what the agent receives from the prover and the cost of these interactions. Today, these interfaces are adapted from tools designed for humans and not optimized for agents. We propose an evolutionary method where a frontier model incrementally proposes new features and only keeps the ones that improve the overall performance of smaller models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by growing, on a curated set of mathematical problems, ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE, a new MCP server for the Rocq prover. On the held-out test split of miniF2F-Rocq, an agent equipped with ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE outperforms both the baseline that only exposes the Rocq compiler and an established MCP server, across four models from two families, in success rate, cost per solve, and time per solve. Although evolved for Rocq, the resulting server transfers to Lean, improving cost and time per solve on a subset of PutnamBench. We release ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE and its port to…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  Comparative study of adapting pre-trained models for driving behavior video captioning

  Sayak Mallick, Philipp Geiger, Augustin Kelava

  This report examines and compares some of the many fine tuning and prompting methods existing, applying them within the domain of autonomous driving. The idea is to compare these methods by adapting a Large Language Model (LLM) on a video dataset. LLM's have become extremely good at achieving a good understanding of different forms of data and this study aims to induce a low dimensional understanding of driving situations into our primary test model SpaceTimeGPT. Experiments on BDD-X (Berkeley DeepDrive eXplanation) dataset demonstrate good performance of the full fine tuning framework on some automatic metrics, and in some metrics, it even surpasses the baseline. We also try Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and prompt engineering on VideoLLaVA model and discuss its limitations.

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Forking: Sudden Overfitting Under Replay

  Shanbin Yu, Shaoyang Guo, Haoran Zhao, Danni Yu, Ziming Liu

  This paper studies forking, a generalization failure discovered in NanoGPT autoresearch. Under data replay, models with an over-encoding n-gram memory branch show a sharp separation of training and validation loss at epoch boundaries, resembling the shape of forks. We study this phenomenon in a controlled vanilla NanoGPT setting and reproduce it in a DeepSeek-style model with Engram. Mechanistically, repeated updates sharpen the continuations observed in training while suppressing the probability of unseen continuations, whose loss grows with each pass. The n-gram module creates weakly interacting context-specific subspaces, amplifying this effect. Low-frequency contexts contribute most of the gap, whereas larger training budgets and heavily crowded tables suppress it. We also observe forking in short-budget, heavily repeated SFT and RL-like regimes. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) Forking reveals yet another curious phenomenon in deep learning, in addition to grokking and double descent. (2) Forking is an unexpected and unpleasant by-product of tricks proposed by autoresearch agents. While these agents produce an enormous number of results that seem useful, we…

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• arXiv cs.CYSep 30

  A Reusable Semantic Web Framework for Evidence-Grounded Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments under the EU AI Act

  Faith Olopade, Delaram Golpayegani, David Lewis

  The EU AI Act (Art. 27) requires deployers of high-risk AI systems to conduct Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments (FRIAs) before deployment, yet the evidence needed for credible assessments is fragmented across incompatible incident repositories, risk vocabularies, and legal texts. We present a reusable Semantic Web-based framework that consolidates this evidence for two high-risk public sector categories: employment and worker management (Annex III(4)) and access to essential public services (Annex III(5)(a)). A curated 150-record corpus is annotated along four axes using keyword, LLM, and hybrid methods and serialised as a SPARQL-queryable knowledge graph of 1,351 RDF triples. Five FRIA demonstration scenarios surface 103 records (68.7% coverage). Evaluation against a 69-record gold standard reveals that LLM-assisted classification of the employment domain achieves only $κ= 0.045$, a cautionary result for automated fairness-related evidence retrieval in this domain. All artefacts are released openly to support adoption by regulators, national authorities, and SMEs.

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  CATCH: A Controllable Analysis Testbed for Reward Hacking in Coding RL

  Shouli Wang, Yanfeng Jia, Zhihao Ou, Zitao Su, Ruize He +4

  During reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), large language models (LLMs) can exploit loopholes in their environments to obtain high rewards without improving the intended capabilities, i.e., reward hacking. Despite its risks to training efficiency and safety, monitoring and mitigating reward hacking during training remain challenging, which is limited by a lack of testbeds that reproduce hacking and reliably identify it. We introduce CATCH, a controllable testbed for studying reward hacking in coding RL. CATCH deliberately exposes environmental loopholes and provides execution-based gold labels by comparing success under a vulnerable evaluator with task correctness under an independent audit. It also can control the model's initial hacking tendency through supervised fine-tuning data mixtures and the difficulty of earning rewards through reward designing, enabling systematic comparisons of hacking dynamics and interventions. Experiments show that CATCH can produce diverse RL training trajectories with clear reward hacking, and analyses demonstrate that both initial models and reward difficulties shape the emergence of reward hacking. We further evaluate the…

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• arXiv math.STSep 30

  WEIRDO: WEak resIdual Regularized DOob's h-transform diffusion alignment

  Denis Suchkov

  We study the problem of estimating the guidance that steers the distribution learned by a diffusion generative model toward a tilted target $q_0 \propto w\,p_0$ at inference time. Relying on the stochastic optimal control approach, we observe that the exact drift correction is the gradient of the logarithm of Doob's $h$-function, and we study the problem of estimating it from a sample. In the present paper, we assume that the score of the pretrained model is available, that the tilting weight is bounded and positive, and that the reference distribution has a bounded support, no smoothness of the weight is required. Introducing a penalized least-squares risk in which the penalty is the residual of the space-time harmonicity equation satisfied by the $h$-function, measured in a dual Sobolev norm, we derive high-probability bounds on the squared error of the resulting guidance estimate. Since the penalty vanishes at the target, the estimator is free of regularization bias, and in favourable scenarios its rate of convergence is faster than the minimax rate of estimating first-order derivatives of a smooth regression function. Assuming that $w$ is bounded and positive with…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 30

  Lens Flare Removal and Reconstruction

  Tarun Yenamandra, Jonathon Luiten, Daniel Cremers, Nathan Matsuda

  The presence of lens flares in images can significantly reduce the quality of downstream application results for tasks such as 3D scene reconstruction. This is because lens flares are a property of the camera imaging system, and not a part of the underlying scene being modeled. There are previous methods that tackle the removal of small flares focused around a light source. However, existing methods struggle with large flares, such as those that fill the entire image. In this work, we compile a novel dataset for large-flare removal, combining publicly available real-world data with a procedural generation pipeline. We fine-tune a diffusion-based model on our dataset to remove complex, large lens flares. On the other hand, lens flares remain effective artistic tools, widely used in the media. While there are ways to simulate 2D flares, representing and reconstructing lens flares consistently across multiple views has not yet been explored. To achieve this, we introduce a flare representation model that leverages the symmetry of lens flares about the camera's principal point. We propose a computational pipeline to jointly optimize this flare model and a Gaussian splatting model…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 30

  Mitigating Representation Gaps in Amortized Bayesian Inference with Auxiliary Supervision

  Hans Olischläger, Svenja Jedhoff, Šimon Kucharský, Aayush Mishra, Stefan T. Radev +1

  Casting Bayesian inference as a neural network optimization problem targeting an amortized posterior is attractive, as it extends to otherwise intractable statistical models and offers near instantaneous inference for new datasets after prepaying the training cost. Although theory guarantees faithfulness under ideal convergence, practical amortized inference still requires iterating over architectures and optimization choices and ultimately ``satisficing'' under finite simulation, compute, and time budgets. Even the best-performing solution may thus retain avoidable representation gaps that typically require problem-specific fixes. Here, we propose a generic alternative which improves training dynamics with auxiliary guidance losses applied to internal representations. Specifically, we show how such guidance leads to faster convergence when training data is abundant and to better performance when it is scarce. We formalize representation gaps as getting stuck in a local optimum at the information bottleneck between the parts of the network tasked with feature learning and those tasked with conditional distribution learning, and offer a generic diagnostic to separate summary…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes

  Yuche Gao, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Anish Dhir, Bernhard Schölkopf +1

  Causal foundation models (CFMs) amortise causal inference over priors of synthetic structural causal models (SCMs), predicting the effect of an experiment on a specific variable. However, observational data alone may leave multiple causal models compatible with available evidence, while experimental data with interventions on exactly the variable of interest might be unavailable. This work studies CFMs as a method to combine finite observational and surrogate-interventional datasets in order to predict a target conditional interventional distribution (CID) more accurately than with observational data alone. We first formalise the conceptual benefits of surrogate experiments. Building on this analysis, we introduce \textsc{Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes} (\emph{CIDER-FM}), a causal foundation model that uses an intervention-aware representation and hierarchical three-axis attention to exchange information across variables, samples, and experimental regimes. We evaluate CIDER-FM against a wide range of baselines across diverse synthetic graph and mechanism families, as well as on both simulated and real-world data from Causal Chambers. Our…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 30

  Referential Uncertainty in Human--AI Collaboration

  Christian Poelitz, Finale Doshi-Velez, Siân Lindley

  Effective human-AI collaboration requires partners to establish references through interaction, which becomes fragile when descriptions are ambiguous, similar referents compete, or partners see different things. We study referential uncertainty - uncertainty over which candidate object a description refers to - in a collaborative puzzle task where a human Helper instructs an AI Worker to place pieces. The Worker must identify and communicate its uncertainty, and the Helper must recognize and act on it. We show that a separately elicited belief distribution over candidate pieces is better calibrated (ECE 0.15) and better discriminates correct from incorrect placements (AUROC 0.65) than raw action-token probabilities, which are severely overconfident (0.97 mean confidence, ECE 0.44). Across three frontier vision-language models (GPT-4.1, GPT-5, GPT-5.5), this elicited uncertainty rises predictably with instruction vagueness, but not with competing referents in context, even when those increase errors. The models seldom externalize it, asking for clarification on only 3.5-16.7% of turns. In a controlled human study (N=210), participants given only the Worker's default message accept…

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 30

  Spike-driven Vision-Language-Action Model

  Shuai Wang, Malu Zhang, Mingquan Liu, Weihui Dai, Dehao Zhang +4

  Vision-language-action (VLA) models bridge multimodal understanding and robotic control, advancing the dominant paradigm for embodied intelligence. However, most existing models rely on large Transformers, whose latency and energy costs hinder deployment on resource-constrained platforms. Through sparse event-driven computation, spiking neural networks offer a promising paradigm for high-performance and energy-efficient computing. Here, we propose the first Spike-driven VLA framework enabling end-to-end direct training for robotic manipulation, which mainly comprises three core components. First, we develop spiking visual and instruction encoders for multimodal perception, encoding visual observations and language instructions into sparse, reliable spike representations for subsequent cross-modal fusion. Then, we introduce Multi-Winner Spike Fusion for instruction-guided scene understanding, using bidirectional top-$k$ winner-take-all spike routing to suppress background interference and yield fused memory. Finally, we propose a Spike Action Chunking Transformer that incorporates spiking cross-attention over the fused memory and the current robot state, enabling efficient…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Interpretable Synthetic Medical Tabular Data Generation for Clinical Decision Support Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

  Michael Vasilakakis, Dimitris K. Iakovidis

  Synthetic medical tabular data generation has become essential for developing and validating computer-based medical systems (CBMSs) when real clinical data is restricted due to privacy, ethical, or data availability limitations. Existing probabilistic and deep generative models often lack interpretability and fail to preserve clinically meaningful dependencies, limiting their suitability for safety-critical applications. This paper proposes a novel application of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) in a framework for synthetic medical tabular data generation with explicit causality and privacy preservation. Clinical features are described using linguistically interpretable fuzzy sets, and inter-feature dependencies are encoded as FCM edge weights computed from fuzzy set intersections. Synthetic patient records are generated by propagating randomly initialized linguistic activation vectors through the FCM until convergence, followed by defuzzification to produce clinically coherent numerical values. The approach natively handles mixed data types, and domain constraints common in health records. Experimental evaluation on UCI medical benchmark datasets demonstrates competitive performance…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 30

  Can Domain Generalization be Guaranteed in Small-Sample Learning?

  Hong Zheng

  The small-sample learning problem remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning because limited training data lead to unstable model estimation and generalization. Structural Risk Minimization (SRM) has long been regarded as a principled solution under the classical i.i.d. assumption. However, domain generalization (DG) violates this assumption, leaving the theoretical role of SRM in DG largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we establish the first theoretical guarantees for SRM in DG under mild assumptions. Specifically, based on the concept of stability, we derive learning consistency and generalization error bounds and prove that these bounds become tight when the hypotheses satisfy the stability condition. Building upon this, under a specific hypothesis space assumption, we establish stability, learning, and generalization bounds for SRM. We further discuss the applicability of these bounds to deep learning. This work establishes theoretical foundations for SRM under distribution shifts and sheds light on the design of robust DG algorithms in small-sample scenarios.

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• Spiking neural networks10+66.7%
• Character recognition OCR39+21.9%
• Speech emotion19+5.6%
• Anomaly detectors26+4.0%
• Robotics182−7.6%
• Quantum machine learning26−10.3%
• Forecasting time119−11.2%
• Voice AI59−19.2%