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Friday 24 July

Artificial Intelligence

Learning as Reasoning Unfolds: Progressive Rollout Allocation for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Heyang Jiang, Henry Liu and Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a highly effective framework for improving LLM reasoning, with methods such as GRPO among its most successful instantiations. However, GRPO relies on repeated generation of long chain-of-thought rollouts. Training time scales with the number of rollouts, a large fraction of which are uninformative. Thus, GRPO is computationally expensive and unstable. To mitigate this, existing approaches either generate a larger pool of rollouts and filter the most informative prompts, or leverage historical signals for filtering at later stages of training. These strategies offer modest performance gains, but slow down the overall process. To address this, we propose VarIance Guided Online Rollout allocation (VIGOR) which instead of allocating a fixed rollout budget per example, begins with a small number of rollouts for all examples in a batch and iteratively allocates additional rollouts to those with the highest group reward variance until a fixed total rollout budget is reached. Theoretically, we show that under RLVR, reward variance controls the gradient magnitude, and derive VIGOR's closed-form speedup ratio over GRPO, which grows with refinement rounds under Pareto-distributed reward variance. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and coding tasks show that VIGOR reaches target accuracy with up to 2.3$\times$ fewer rollouts on math, reaches GRPO's final coding full pass rate with 1.49$\times$ fewer rollouts, and improves the coding average test pass rate by 3.4 points.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

From Perturbation Correction to Geometry-Aware Sampling: Sharpness-Guided Equilibrium Sampling for Balanced Flat Minima in Long-Tailed Learning

Jiaxin Deng and Junbiao Pang

Long-tailed learning couples two sources of poor generalization: head classes dominate training exposure, while under-represented classes often converge to sharper regions of the loss landscape. Conventional re-sampling addresses the former without considering geometry, whereas existing long-tailed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) methods modify losses or perturbations only after biased mini-batches have been drawn. We introduce Sharpness-Guided Equilibrium Sampling (SGS), which treats the sampling distribution as an active control variable for optimization geometry. SGS dynamically adjusts subsequent mini-batches by increasing the sampling probability of less frequently sampled classes while suppressing classes with large SAM-induced loss changes, using only cumulative class counts and EMA sharpness estimates obtained from the standard SAM update, without class-wise perturbations or additional backward passes. We characterize this sampling process through a continuous-time stochastic differential equation and a sampling-dependent PAC-Bayes analysis, explaining how frequency-sharpness feedback can move training toward a more balanced flatness profile. On CIFAR-100 LT with an imbalance ratio of 100, SGS-SAM improves Focal-SAM by 10.85 points in tail accuracy and 3.56 points overall. On ImageNet-LT, it improves ImbSAM by 6.59 points on tail classes and 1.20 points overall. Its training time is only $1.02\times$ that of vanilla SAM. Beyond these gains, SGS establishes a sampling-side route to loss-landscape control, suggesting that future long-tailed methods can jointly regulate data exposure and optimization geometry rather than treating either as fixed.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.DC

Unified Static-Dynamic Pruning for Efficient LLM Inference

Jinhyeok Kim, Yejoon Lee and Jaeyoung Do

The increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) has magnified the computational and memory bottlenecks of autoregressive decoding, where low compute intensity and bandwidth-bound kernels dominate inference cost. Weight pruning offers a promising remedy, but existing methods remain confined to either static pruning (SP), which permanently removes redundant weights but lacks adaptivity, or dynamic pruning (DP), which adapts to input sparsity but introduces runtime irregularity. This paper presents SPDP, a unified sparse-inference framework that integrates unstructured SP with input-adaptive DP for efficient LLM inference on GPUs. SPDP co-designs a new Tiled-Column-wise Bitmap Compressed (Tiled-CBC) format and two complementary GPU kernels: (1) a CUDA-core spMspV kernel featuring Hybrid Activation-aware Dynamic Shared-Memory Bitmap Decoding (HAD-SMBD) for fine-grained, runtime activation skipping, and (2) a Tensor-Core SpMM kernel optimized for prefill computation. This joint format-kernel design harmonizes static and dynamic sparsity, maintaining bandwidth-efficient memory access and high compute intensity under both phases of LLM inference. Comprehensive evaluations on inference-optimized GPUs demonstrate that SPDP achieves 1.24x-1.37x average speedup (up to 2.51x) over state-of-the-art sparse frameworks such as SpInfer, while matching perplexity with up to 25% higher sparsity. SPDP advances the inference efficiency-quality Pareto frontier, showing that unified static-dynamic pruning can deliver substantial throughput and performance-per-watt improvements in large-scale LLM serving.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

J-CoT: Chain-of-Thought in J-Space

Junde Wu, Jiayuan Zhu, Fengling Liu et al. (+2 more)

Chain-of-thought prompting improves language-model reasoning by carrying intermediate states across successive computation steps. However, relying on natural language as the only recurrent interface is overly restrictive, since many transient computations do not need to be fully verbalized. Existing latent-reasoning methods remove this constraint by recurrently propagating continuous hidden states. However, these methods pass a dense hidden vector as a whole, without an explicit mechanism for selecting and organizing the information needed by the next reasoning step. This motivates an intermediate interface that remains linguistically grounded without requiring a decoded sentence. We introduce J-CoT, a recurrent reasoning framework built on J-space, a vocabulary-indexed coordinate system within the model's hidden representations. Within each cycle, the model computes in its full hidden space. At the cycle boundary, J-CoT expresses the intermediate state as vocabulary-indexed coefficients, carries these coefficients forward as a J-thought, and maps them back into the model's hidden representation for the next cycle. J-CoT therefore requires neither a fluent intermediate rationale nor recurrence over the complete hidden state. Under matched backbone and inference settings, J-CoT-Zero matches or exceeds the strongest evaluated latent-reasoning baseline on every benchmark, while J-CoT-Train obtains the highest score across the evaluated mathematical, scientific, coding, and structured path-reasoning tasks.
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All authors Junde Wu, Jiayuan Zhu, Fengling Liu, Minhao Hu, Jiazhen Pan

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Teaching LLMs to Self-Evolve: Cultivating Core Meta-Skills with Reinforcement Learning

Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen et al. (+1 more)

Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains. We hypothesize that the success of such evolution frameworks hinges on meta-skills, such as self-reflection with environment feedback, that enable effective multi-round refinement, yet are largely neglected by traditional post-training. To bridge this gap, we present MetaEvolve, a framework designed to develop these meta-skills via a data synthesis pipeline, evolution-aware reinforcement learning (RL), and inference-time evolutionary search. Concretely, we ground MetaEvolve in coding, where program execution provides natural, continuous reward signals beyond binary correctness. Building on these signals, we synthesize evolution trajectories as training data, each containing a current program, its fitness score (combining correctness and efficiency), and a history of prior attempts, and train the model via RL with verifiable rewards derived from test case execution. By training on large-scale code data, we aim to inspire generalizable domain-agnostic meta-skills that can transfer broadly to open-ended problems where such rich training signals are scarce. Across seven coding benchmarks, MetaEvolve outperforms the strongest baseline by 10.01% absolute on in-distribution tasks and 24.12% on out-of-distribution tasks. On open-ended algorithm optimization problems entirely outside the training domain, it further achieves a 46.9% relative improvement. These results demonstrate that explicitly cultivating self-evolution meta-skills offers a principled path toward more capable and autonomously self-evolving AI.
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All authors Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

TextSLIP: Text Self-Supervised CLIP for Medical Report Generation

Haoyu Jiang and Ziping Cong

Automating radiology report generation is important for improving reporting consistency and clinical workflows . While Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (CLIP) has advanced medical vision language modeling, existing CLIP-style approaches may still provide insufficient fine-grained semantic supervision for complex report generation. Standard CLIP primarily optimizes cross-modal alignment, without explicitly structuring the textual embedding space that guides visual representation learning. To address this limitation, we propose TextSLIP, a general medical vision-language pretraining framework that augments CLIP with intra-modal text contrastive learning. By improving textual embedding discriminability through self-supervised augmented text pairs, TextSLIP is designed to provide finer-grained linguistic supervision to the visual encoder. As an initial validation, we pretrain TextSLIP on a curated dataset of 7 million brain MRI image-text pairs and fine-tune the pretrained visual encoder within a report generation architecture. In controlled comparisons with CLIP-style baselines, TextSLIP shows consistent improvements on report generation metrics. Ablation studies further suggest that text-side self-supervision contributes to the observed gains. These results indicate that text-level contrastive learning is a promising direction for improving medical visual-textual alignment, while broader validation across additional medical domains remains an important next step.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

ACME: A Multi-Cultural, Multi-Embodiment Social-Navigation Dataset

Shashank Rao Marpally, Allan Wang, Atharva Ghotavadekar et al. (+35 more)

Understanding how robots and humans move in shared spaces is essential for designing effective social robot navigation policies and predicting human behavior. However, existing datasets often lack the diversity needed to capture differences in culture, geography, and human-robot interaction-factors that strongly shape appropriate social behavior. To address this gap, we introduce ACME: A Cross-cultural, Multi-Embodiment dataset for social navigation. A large-scale data collection effort across 8 sites in 5 countries, using 7 robot embodiments, ACME is a large and diverse multi-modal dataset aimed at advancing social navigation research, providing 29.35 hours of onboard robot data and 43.5 hours of overhead pedestrian tracking data. Unlike prior datasets, it focuses on capturing goal-driven social navigation behavior in complex social scenarios with explicit robot-crowd interaction through robot speech. To facilitate learning navigation policies and predicting pedestrian trajectories, ACME provides 3D and 2D scene features, odometry, interaction information, and human-annotated pedestrian trajectory labels. We make ACME easy to use by providing both human-readable data for each sensor modality as well as raw binary data. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that our dataset captures more challenging scenarios and a broader distribution of pedestrian behavior than previous datasets.
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All authors Shashank Rao Marpally, Allan Wang, Atharva Ghotavadekar, Renato Alexandre Ribeiro, Nhat Le, Pilar Bachiller-Burgos, Pranav Goyal, Subham Agrawal, Yasuhiro Nitta, Howard Ziyu Han, Daeun Song, Masaki Kuribayashi, Kohei Uehara, Xiyue Wang, Yangzhe Kong, Duc M. Nguyen, Amirreza Payandeh, Gerardo Pérez-González, Alejandro Torrejón-Harto, Jeeho Ahn, Tisha Jain, Andrew Stratton, Elvin Yang, Jorge de Heuvel, Nico Ostermann-Myrau, Sai Anudeep Sajja, Mithilya Raj, Daisuke Sato, Gaston Rouquette, Nikolas Martelaro, Maki Sugimoto, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Maren Bennewitz, Aaron Steinfeld, Xuesu Xiao, Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Harold Soh

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

MA-DAR: Manifold-Aligned Dynamic Adaptive Routing for Continual Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Xiangjun Shi, Chong Mu, Jinchuan Zhang et al. (+3 more)

Continual temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning aims to continuously incorporate newly emerging facts while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Replay-based continual learning has achieved promising performance by revisiting historical representations. However, existing methods primarily focus on what to replay, while largely overlooking how replayed representations should be integrated with current ones. Such direct integration often gives rise to two critical forms of representation conflict: norm domination and semantic blurring, ultimately degrading continual reasoning performance. To address these challenges, we propose MA-DAR (Manifold-Aligned Dynamic Adaptive Routing), a lightweight plug-and-play framework for replay representation fusion. MA-DAR first aligns replayed and current representations onto a shared manifold to alleviate distribution discrepancies. It then employs a dynamic gating mechanism to learn dimension-wise fusion weights, adaptively determining the contribution of replayed and current representations to the fused representation. Furthermore, a polarization regularizer encourages more decisive routing behaviors by discouraging ambiguous gating decisions, resulting in more stable and effective knowledge integration. Extensive experiments on four public continual TKG benchmarks demonstrate that MA-DAR consistently improves the performance of representative TKG encoders while remaining effective under different replay settings. Comprehensive ablation studies and visualization analyses further verify the effectiveness of manifold alignment and dynamic adaptive routing in mitigating representation conflicts and improving continual reasoning.
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All authors Xiangjun Shi, Chong Mu, Jinchuan Zhang, Lizong Zhang, Yuefeng He, Shang Liu

Artificial Intelligence

Semiotic logical hexagon theory for LLM logical reasoning

Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Zeliang Chen et al. (+2 more)

Large language models (LLMs) have become powerful tools for language understanding and logical reasoning. However, they still make mistakes when a problem requires both understanding meaning and following logic. A key reason is that natural-language statements often carry implicit semantic relations before any formal reasoning begins. If these hidden meanings are not properly organized, the model may reach incorrect conclusions even when the subsequent reasoning process appears logically valid. Existing methods improve reasoning through decomposition, symbolic translation, external solvers, or self-verification, but pay comparatively less attention to the semantic structure on which reasoning depends. In this paper, we further investigate how semantic organization influences logical reasoning in LLMs. To this end, we propose HexLogicAgent, a framework that first organizes the meaning of natural-language statements and then guides logical reasoning through structured verification. In our investigation, we also make two observations. First, incomplete semantic representations, rather than deductive inference itself, are a major source of logical reasoning failures in LLMs. Second, explicitly modeling the complete structure of semantic opposition substantially delays the degradation of reasoning performance as logical complexity increases. Experiments on challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that HexLogicAgent consistently improves reasoning reliability across multiple LLMs. The core idea is supported by a logical hexagon theory, which explains why a complete structure of opposing meanings is necessary for reliable reasoning.
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All authors Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Zeliang Chen, Junqing Yu, Zikai Song

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CE

Generalized Neural Operator for Parametric and Boundary-Value Problems

Ruoyan Li, Yizhou Sun and Wei Wang

Developing foundational neural simulators for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) requires robust generalization across diverse physical parameters and boundary conditions. However, current deep learning approaches largely face a structural trade-off between condition-agnostic deployment and physical fidelity. Purely data-driven operators infer the underlying physics implicitly and thus lack the explicit constraints needed to ensure physically valid solutions across varying domains, rendering the learning problem ill-posed. On the other hand, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) enforce rigorous physical constraints but necessitate costly, instance-specific optimization. Furthermore, the massive scale of emerging foundational operators has severely degraded their inference speeds, making them computationally uncompetitive with traditional numerical solvers. To address this bottleneck between condition-agnostic deployment, physical rigor, and inference efficiency, we propose a Generalized Neural Operator. By formalizing the classical conditions for well-posedness within neural operators, our framework demonstrates the theoretical benefits of explicitly conditioning on PDE parameters and boundary conditions. To implement this synthesis without compromising computational speed, we introduce three novel architectural components: a parameter-gated mixture of kernels for efficient parameter generalization, a generalized boundary transfer operator that projects arbitrary boundary constraints into a unified latent Dirichlet representation, and a specialized training objective to ensure stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our theoretically grounded approach achieves superior generalization across heterogeneous physical regimes while maintaining strict inference efficiency comparable to conventional numerical baselines.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from stat.ME

Interventional Score Geometry for Causal Inference

Mojtaba Eslami

Let $p(x)$ be the joint density of variables $X$, and let $\psi(x)=\nabla_x\log p(x)$ be its score field. Geometry constructed from $p$ and $\psi$ alone cannot identify causal direction: structural models with the same observational distribution have the same score geometry. I develop an interventional analogue. A hard intervention $\operatorname{do}(X_k=\xi)$ does not merely reweight the joint law; it restricts the distribution to the submanifold ${x_k=\xi}$. Its score should therefore be defined on the remaining $d-1$ free coordinates. I define causal influence $X_k\rightsquigarrow X_j$ as variation of the interventional marginal distribution of $X_j$ with $\xi$, and show that the corresponding derivative of the marginal interventional score gives a local sufficient condition for influence. Projecting the observational score onto admissible intervention directions does not generally recover causal response: two models may share the same observational score and admissible set yet respond differently. I therefore introduce an interventional response field supplied by structural information. A causal metric is defined as the Fisher information metric on a family of interventions with a common target, avoiding ill-posed comparisons across targets. The framework yields a geometric dictionary for randomized trials, instrumental variables, and conditional-independence designs, clarifying what each does and does not identify. A bivariate Gaussian example gives two models with the same observational score but different interventional score derivatives. The framework organizes relations among designs, interventions, and score fields, but adds no identification beyond the underlying assumptions. In Pearl's Ladder of Causation, observational score geometry belongs to association, intervention-indexed score fields to intervention, and unit-level counterfactual geometry is left for future work.
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Artificial Intelligence

TRW: TRACE-RealWorld—An Auditable Consistency Contract for World Models as Materialized Views

Edward Y. Chang

World models let agents plan against predicted physical state, but that state drifts; re-observation is costly and delayed, and repair can fail. We present TRACE-RealWorld (TRW), to our knowledge the first commitment-level consistency contract for world models. TRW treats predicted state as a materialized view and a physical commitment as a read whose authorization can expire. Typed, calibrated claims specify consequence-conditioned freshness and priced verification. Adaptive refresh generalizes dual-Kalman synchronization to consult the world when evidence could change a decision; dependency-scoped SagaLLM compensation repairs reversible commitments invalidated after authorization. Under an event-aligned risk oracle and recovery-liveness assumptions, we prove that synchronization and compensation are insufficient alone, whereas their composition gives a conditional consistency guarantee. Otherwise, the argument yields an auditable decomposition of violations into named debts. We implement TRW in Flood-SAR, a search-and-rescue simulator over real geography, and test six preregistered questions at frozen operating points on held-out seeds. Adaptive refresh reduces stale execution but does not dominate fixed refresh on cost, coverage, or rescue outcomes. Localized repair reduces repair work by 9.56 units per mission and restoration latency by 80.7 seconds relative to global recovery; the observed residual-violation difference is zero without establishing equivalence. Detection coverage is 0.83-0.89, and 10 of 97 invoked restorations are incomplete by mission end. The campaign treats empirical slack as sensitivity inputs rather than discharging the theorem's assumptions or providing a simultaneous population certificate. Exact replay reconstructs a disputed dispatch. TRW thus makes a world model an auditable predictive interface rather than a self-validating source of truth.
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2607.21910 · 24 Jul · v2 propagates declared point and extended hazards through the composition theorem and separates point-event from interval-risk budgets. It aligns Flood-SAR adjudication with each hazard class, sharpens calibration-slack and drift claims, adds bootstrap Monte Carlo error and joint-coverage requirements, revises terminology, and expands related-work context

Abstract PDF $AGNT ×1$THRM ×1

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

ISPCloak: Weaponizing ISP for Optimization-Free Physical Camouflage against Deepfake Detectors

Jiale Zhao, Jiajun Wan, Lei Tang et al. (+3 more)

The rapid advancement of generative models has spurred the critical need to evaluate the worst-case robustness of deepfake detectors. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental blind spot in current forensic paradigms: while existing detectors excel at capturing digital synthesis artifacts, their effectiveness drops drastically when AI-generated content is cloaked in authentic physical imaging characteristics. We posit that genuine photographs inherently possess hardware-intrinsic statistical signatures, which are imperceptible footprints imprinted by optical sensors and Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipelines, and are fundamentally absent in purely data-driven generative models. Driven by this insight, we propose ISPCloak, a novel optimization-free adversarial attack framework that explicitly weaponizes the ISP pipeline to mislead the judgment of deepfake detectors. Rather than relying on computationally expensive gradient perturbations, our method first employs an Invertible ISP network to project images into the RAW domain. Then, we seamlessly imprint the complex statistical priors of real cameras onto AI-generated images by injecting realistic Poisson-Gaussian sensor noise and conducting forward ISP reconstruction. Synergized with generative artifact suppression and adaptive masking, this streamlined physical simulation enables ultra-fast generation of adversarial examples. Extensive experiments show that embedding authentic physical perturbations fundamentally disrupts a broad range of current detection mechanisms, yielding universally evasive adversarial examples with imperceptible visual alterations.
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All authors Jiale Zhao, Jiajun Wan, Lei Tang, Ye Qin, Kebing Jin, Jinghui Qin

Artificial Intelligence

Multi-Agent System-driven Digital Twins for predictive maintenance: architectures, technologies and open research challenges

Korota Arsène Coulibaly and Mohamed Hamlich

Digital twins have emerged as a foundational technology within the context of Industry 4.0, offering a paradigm for the real-time virtual representation of physical systems. However, managing their growing complexity, particularly in distributed industrial environments, requires intelligent architectures capable of autonomous decision-making, dynamic adaptability, and inter-agent coordination. This systematic review explores the intersection between Multi-Agent Systems and Digital Twins, with a particular focus on predictive maintenance applications in resource-constrained contexts. Through a critical analysis of over 547 papers published in high-impact journals (IEEE Transactions, Nature, Elsevier, MDPI), we establish a taxonomy of existing hybrid architectures, identify persistent technological bottlenecks, and formulate three open research questions concerning: (i) the deployment of artificial intelligence on resource-constrained microcontrollers, (ii) distributed multi-node coordination via lightweight communication protocols, and (iii) the hierarchical orchestration of Digital Twins toward smart factory control integrating residual life estimation and explainable Artificial Intelligence. The results of this analysis reveal that, despite significant progress, no existing system offers an integrated embedded-distributed hierarchical solution that simultaneously meets the requirements of Industry 5.0.
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Thursday 23 July

Artificial Intelligence

CriticGen: Generation-Aware Evaluation as Actionable Feedback

Huifang Du, Zecheng Zuo, Sen Wang et al. (+3 more)

Current evaluation methods for large language models are coarse-grained and decoupled from generation, producing generic explanations that fail to provide actionable feedback for model improvement. We propose CriticGen, a fine-grained, generation-aware evaluation framework that turns evaluation into actionable control for answer improvement. CriticGen first generates sample-specific evaluation dimensions and scoring criteria under high-level categories such as subjective, objective, and self-derived constraints. These criteria then serve as a dynamic rubric for jointly producing a score, a reason, an executable refinement suggestion, and a refined answer. This rubric-conditioned refinement process enables models to diagnose flaws and perform targeted answer improvement. Experimental results show that fine-grained evaluation should be both instance-specific and actionable. CriticGen induces higher-quality rubrics, improving relevance/coverage from 3.33/4.03 to 3.97/4.24. CriticGen also achieves the best score correlations, with 0.9556 Pearson and 0.9560 Spearman, and raises the F1 of criterion-grounded reasons and executable suggestions from 0.6369/0.5994 to 0.7554/0.7900. Crucially, its feedback translates into reliable answer improvement, improving 73.17% of answers with a 93.28% non-degradation rate.
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All authors Huifang Du, Zecheng Zuo, Sen Wang, Chenghao Fan, Haofen Wang, Yehui Yang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

STAGEET: Stage-wise Typed Edit Tagging for Grammatical Error Correction with Arabic as a Case Study

Wenjie Lou and Alaa Mamdouh Akef

Sequence-to-edit approaches make grammatical error correction (GEC) efficient and locally interpretable by predicting edit labels over the input rather than generating a full corrected sentence. Their interpretability, however, is primarily operational: a label specifies how the string should change, but a single edit vocabulary does not always reveal the type of correction being made. We propose STAGEET, a stage-wise typed edit-tagging framework that reorganizes Seq2Edit supervision into typed executable stages and extends edit operations to correction categories. STAGEET decomposes correction into an ordered sequence of medium-grained typed stages; each stage predicts from its own label space, rewrites the current hypothesis once, and passes the resulting intermediate sentence to the next stage. We instantiate the framework as both an end-to-end shared-encoder multi-head model with stage-specific adapters and a fully specialized variant with one independent tagger per stage. Experiments on QALB-2014 and ZAEBUC show that category-aware staged correction retains competitive edit-based GEC performance while exposing a more inspectable correction trajectory, and attains state-of-the-art results on QALB-2014.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.DB

DRL: A Deterministic Relational Middleware Layer for Transaction-Safe Enterprise NL2SQL Under Schema-Graph Scaling

Sanjay Mishra, Divya Chukkapalli and Ganesh R. Naik

Deploying natural-language interfaces over enterprise OLTP catalogs fails at scale because semantic parsers collapse under schema-graph scaling, inflating context beyond stable LLM attention budgets. We present DRL (Deterministic Relational Middleware Layer), a safe pipeline interposing between front-ends and SQL backends. DRL comprises dynamic context pruning, relational AST typing, and transactional safeguard verification (EXPLAIN gating and NULL guards) to bound context and flag operational silent divergence (SDop). We evaluate DRL on PostgreSQL and MySQL, contributing (i) an OLTP schema-graph scaling model, (ii) a 1,000-pair Workload Verification Suite, (iii) baselines B0-B3, and (iv) an enterprise NL2SQL failure taxonomy. On PostgreSQL, schema-linked hints (B1) yield a 76% context reduction over naive full-catalog prompting (B0); DRL's dynamic router (B2) reaches a 92% reduction at pruning p95 = 0.58 ms and middleware p95 = 4.6 ms. GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash achieve 52.9%, 52.8%, and 52.1% execution match under a corrected evaluation harness; SDop flags 89-100% of false-positive EX-passing queries. GPT-4o failures are dominated by semantic/filter errors (254/471), while column hallucination is a minor factor (47/471). Crucially, a single regex defect in our evaluation post-processor silently suppressed accuracy and manufactured a false 4-10% cross-vendor gap that vanished when corrected, showing that benchmark code deserves the same scrutiny as the models it scores. DRL reframes enterprise NL2SQL as systems engineering - context bounding, verification, and plan-aware admission - not a leaderboard exercise.
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Artificial Intelligence

World models of environment, agent and joint agent-environment systems

Manuel Baltieri, Filippo Torresan, Yivan Zhang et al. (+2 more)

World models are a central component of model-based reinforcement learning. They are usually discussed in terms of what variables they predict, such as observations, rewards, states, latent or information states. We argue that there is a prior distinction: which channel they model. We consider three cases: the environment channel $O_{:} \mid A_{:}$, the agent channel $A_{:} \mid O_{:}$, and the realised joint process $(A, O)_{:}$, equivalently viewed as a channel with no inputs. Using computational mechanics, we define canonical predictive models for these three cases as $\epsilon$-transducers or $\epsilon$-machines. Canonical environment models recover standard predictive state representations, while the other two give analogous notions of canonical models for the agent and the joint system. We then build canonical support-restricted environment and agent models induced by closed-loop coupling, whose predictive equivalences range over continuations supported by the realised interaction. The key structural result is that canonical support-restricted environment states factor through the canonical joint causal states, and their transition structure is induced directly from the joint model; the agent-side construction is dual. Finally, we give a POMDP/controller example in which the unrestricted environment model has infinitely many states while the canonical support-restricted model induced by the coupling is finite. The framework clarifies what different world models are models of, and how coupling and support restriction can change their canonical predictive structure and complexity.
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All authors Manuel Baltieri, Filippo Torresan, Yivan Zhang, Alexander Boyd, Fernando E. Rosas

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Trustworthiness Costs of Domain Adaptation in Small Language Models:A Cross-Architecture Empirical Study

Ramesh B. Paramkusham

Domain adaptation of small language models (SLMs) has emerged as a practical strategy for deploying capable NLP systems in resource-constrained, high-stakes environments including healthcare, legal services, and financial analysis. While performance gains from parameter-efficient fine-tuning are well characterised, the corresponding impact on trustworthiness (factual calibration and adversarial robustness) remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first systematic cross-domain, cross-architecture empirical study quantifying the trustworthiness cost of domain adaptation across three SLM architectures (TinyLlama 1B, Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), three domains (healthcare, legal, finance), two training-data conditions (benign and adversarially perturbed), and four fine-tuning strategies (baseline LoRA, Safety-DPO, Dark Experience Replay, and Task Arithmetic LoRA, TA-LoRA). Trustworthiness is evaluated through TruthfulQA MC2 (factual calibration) and HarmBench ASR (adversarial robustness) across all 216 experimental configurations with three random seeds. Three principal findings emerge. First, baseline QLoRA domain adaptation produces minimal TruthfulQA MC2 change across all model-domain combinations (mean |Delta TQA| < 0.02). Second, adversarially perturbed training data consistently improves domain adaptation quality (Delta loss approximately -0.040) without worsening trustworthiness benchmarks. Third, none of the three safety-preserving strategies reduced adversarial harm susceptibility: Safety-DPO was effectively neutral (mean Delta ASR < 0.001), while Dark ER and TA-LoRA increased mean HarmBench ASR by +0.171 and +0.155 respectively in safety-aligned models (Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), with individual configurations exceeding +0.45. These results challenge the assumption that replay-based and arithmetic-merge strategies transfer alignment to domain-adapted SLMs.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

Cross-Cohort Spectral-Temporal Dissociation in Frozen EEG Foundation-Model Representations

Marzieh Zare

Objective. We tested whether frozen representations from five EEG foundation models support decoding of long-range temporal correlations, measured as the detrended-fluctuation-analysis (DFA) exponent of the alpha-band amplitude envelope. Approach. REVE, LaBraM, BENDR, CBraMod, and BIOT were evaluated in CAUEEG and BrainLat. A common 240 s estimator used 8-13 Hz filtering, DFA over 2-23.8 s, artifact masking, and quality control. One fixed nested-cross-validation readout predicted DFA and a fixed-mode aperiodic exponent. Controls tested pre-pool order sensitivity and aperiodic residualization. Results. CAUEEG included 764 recordings and BrainLat 79. BIOT decoded DFA in CAUEEG (R-squared = 0.232; conditional subject-bootstrap 95 percent interval, 0.121-0.310), and CBraMod was positive but imprecise (R-squared = 0.121; 0.003-0.214). Neither replicated in BrainLat, where all five point estimates were negative. In contrast, CBraMod and BIOT decoded the aperiodic exponent in both cohorts (R-squared = 0.459-0.757). BIOT remained positive after removal of the measured linear aperiodic association in matched CAUEEG data (R-squared = 0.240). The post-hoc order control was batch- and configuration-sensitive. Because chronological EEG epochs are not exchangeable, it was descriptive, not an LRTC-specific test. No revised DFA transfer direction passed source-label permutation testing. Cohort membership was near-ceiling decodable from all five embeddings, but this is not a pure site effect. Significance. CBraMod and BIOT show a replicated, model-specific spectral-temporal dissociation: aperiodic decoding is present in both cohorts, whereas alpha-envelope DFA decoding is cohort-dependent. These findings bound the evaluated readouts; they do not establish representational absence or an architectural cause. Transfer and clinical associations remain exploratory.
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Artificial Intelligence

AdaKP: Online Adaptive Knowledge-Point Selection for Reasoning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

Zibin Meng, Zhenyu Zhao and Chunqiang Run

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is a powerful paradigm for eliciting reasoning in large language models, yet it suffers from severe reward sparsity on competition-level mathematics. A common remedy injects atomic knowledge points (KPs) - short natural-language hints distilled from gold solutions - into the prompt. Existing methods, however, either fix this selection once offline or merely scale the monolithic quantity of injected text, leaving untouched the most informative axis of choice: which subset of atomic KPs to inject, and when. We introduce AdaKP, an online selector that re-chooses each problem's KP subset over the course of RL training. At its core is an entropy proxy that scores a KP by the reduction in next-token entropy it induces - a single inexpensive forward pass, with a provable bound on its truncation bias - in place of expensive rollout-based estimation. Three lightweight mechanisms make this signal usable online: a momentum smoother that absorbs per-step noise, a retirement-and-revival manager that prunes weak KPs while preserving exploration, and an adaptive scheduler that front-loads re-evaluations into early training. AdaKP further contributes a pre-flight validation gate that certifies the proxy against a leave-one-out ground truth before any expensive run is launched, turning method-level risk into a falsifiable check. Realized as a fully additive fork of a standard DAPO+GRPO trainer with no optimizer changes, AdaKP improves over a strong static-selection baseline on all eight competition-mathematics benchmarks at negligible added cost, positioning online, validated KP-subset selection as a practical and as-yet under-explored axis for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.MA

Spectral Dynamics of Semantic Drift in Clinical Multi-Agent Language Model Networks

Amritesh Banerjee

The integration of iterative LLMs within multi-agent diagnostic frameworks requires a rigorous quantitative reevaluation of underlying communication topologies. Frequently used architectural paradigms depend on scale-free or small-world networks, assuming optimal communication efficiency. Our study mathematically dismantles that assumption for semantic data. By mapping multi-agent communication uncertainty trajectories onto a 768-dimensional Bio_ClinicalBERT embedding space via an analytical isotropic variance proxy using Barab'asi–Albert (BA) and Watts–Strogatz (WS) networks, we prove that structural bottlenecks compromise diagnostic safety. Our phase transition matrices illustrate that localized dense cliques confine hallucinated data, preventing global consensus and forcing the system toward a permanent entropy saturation threshold of $H_{\infty} \approx 5.947$. As a result, we measure a severe terminal cosine similarity degradation of 53.29%, completely overwriting the original ground-truth. Moreover, the terminal semantic drift reveals a catastrophic variance amplification of 51.81% ($\rho = 1.5181$) in highly clustered architectures, proving total system unpredictability when compared to Erdős–R'enyi configurations ($\rho = 1.0766$). Instead of reducing errors, hub-centric systems autonomously compound localized hallucinations. By introducing dynamic spectral monitoring operating at an $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ time complexity and imposing a strict lower bound on algebraic connectivity ($\lambda_{2_{min}}$) via the continuous eigen-decomposition of the graph Laplacian, we present a mathematically rigorous technique to ensure global state diffusion. Securing the reliability of autonomous medical diagnostics necessitates treating topological stability as a non-negotiable quantitative imperative.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Hierarchical Grading in Large Language Models

T. Shaska

We introduce Graded Large Language Models (GLLMs), an algebraic framework that equips the representation space of a transformer with a grading and propagates the induced weighted scalar action through embeddings, self-attention, and the training objective. The construction extends the theory of graded neural networks and graded transformers to autoregressive language models while preserving expressive power, asymptotic computational complexity, and inference cost. The governing geometric picture is that of geometric invariant theory. The benefit of a grading is expressed by a Kempf–Ness functional on the grading torus; the grades that improve upon the uniform architecture form an open convex cone whose membership is decided by a Hilbert–Mumford-type criterion pairing a grade direction against two measurable profiles of the target and the data; the optimal grades are the coincidence point of two moment maps, given in closed form; and the ordinary transformer appears as a semistable isotropic point on the boundary of the cone: one member of a larger graded family rather than a distinguished optimum. Separately, for level-stratified targets we prove a minimax separation between the graded prior and its absence: over all estimators the risks of the graded and uniform target classes separate throughout an explicit window of sample sizes, by a factor that decays exponentially in the number of levels under geometric stratification. Both profiles are estimable offline, so the optimal grades solve a convex program certified before training begins. Because the grading is absorbed into the learned parameters after training, every GLLM compiles to a standard transformer of identical architecture and inference complexity.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Real-time Reconstruction of Human Visual Perception from fMRI

Rishab S. Iyer, Jiaxin Cindy Tu, Cesar Kadir Torrico Villanueva et al. (+10 more)

Real-time closed-loop neurofeedback based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led to important scientific and clinical advances. However, the sophistication of the analysis methods used in real-time fMRI lags behind the state-of-the-art in fMRI decoding, largely due to computational factors: Most advanced decoding pipelines do not fit within the envelope of real-time processing, where the analysis needs to be conducted in a matter of seconds and without leveraging data acquired later in the session. Here, we present a real-time compatible adaptation of a computationally intensive state-of-the-art pipeline for reconstructing perceived natural images (MindEye2), and we demonstrate that reliable fine-grained decoding is still achievable in this setting. Using RT-Cloud, an open-source, scalable cloud-based platform, we performed a real-time scan where we decoded single-trial visual perception within seconds after an image was shown to the participant. Finally, we use simulated analyses to document the factors driving changes in performance from offline to real-time analysis. This work serves as a proof-of-concept that it is feasible to deploy these powerful fMRI decoding pipelines in real-time analysis, paving the way for their use in brain-computer interfaces for scientific discovery and clinical treatment.
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All authors Rishab S. Iyer, Jiaxin Cindy Tu, Cesar Kadir Torrico Villanueva, Anish Mahishi, Ross P. Kempner, Jacob S. Prince, Ernest W. Lo, Akash Bhowmick, Hritik Arasu, Amaar Chughtai, Elizabeth A. McDevitt, Paul S. Scotti, Kenneth A. Norman

Artificial Intelligence

Commitment To Cooperation With Self-Negotiated Contracts

Tim Wyse, Kaitlin Bustos, Yulia Volkova et al. (+1 more)

As AI agents operate with increasing autonomy in a multi-agent world, they will need to learn to cooperate with other agents and with humans to generate mutual benefits. However, cooperation is a challenge because the costs of cooperation are often incurred early on, but the benefits are only realized later, creating an incentive to defect. How can AI agents cooperate with commitment? Here, we draw on inspiration from legal institutions and contracting that human societies have used to solve principal-agent problems of this kind. Contracts provide observable representations of agreements that enable credible commitments through the enforcement of terms. We study the role of contract-based cooperation using LLM-based agents in \CT, a spatial-temporal game that combines bargaining with navigation towards a goal. We study a suite of contract representations that range from formal contracts that compile to code to natural contracts that require reinterpretation. We evaluate agents with a range of LLM backbones using different sizes and providers. We find that self-negotiated contracts can improve cooperative outcomes beyond what is possible with regular trading.
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All authors Tim Wyse, Kaitlin Bustos, Yulia Volkova, Max Kleiman-Weiner

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Post-Operative Glioma Segmentation via Loss Stabilization, Normalization and Subspace Attention

Alexandru Crişan and Diana Borza

Tracking residual tumor after surgery is essential for catching recurrence early, but automating post-operative glioma segmentation remains a difficult task. Although transformer-based architectures, such as SwinUNETR, achieved impressive results, few studies test how well they generalize across clinical protocols. In this paper, we conduct an ablation study on the MU-GLIOMA-POST and UCSF-ALPTDG datasets and show that the standard Generalized Dice Loss (GDL) is unstable under domain shift: the Whole Lesion (WL) Dice drops from 0.88 on the internal validation set to 0.73 on the external UCSF test set. To address this, we pair brain-masked percentile normalization with voxel-level contrastive learning. We also propose a Subspace-Aware Class Attention (SACA) module that re-calibrates the bottleneck features and raises Enhancing Tumor (ET) sensitivity by 8% (9.1% relative improvement) on internal validation. Ensembling these refinements with nnU-Net brings every stable configuration to a WL Dice of 0.94, and the SACA variant ensemble achieves the best boundary error (HD95) of 2.92 mm on MU-GLIOMA-POST.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Learning to Access Computation: Accessibility Plasticity as a Principle of Adaptive Intelligence

Zhaowen Fan

Modern neural networks primarily adapt through parameter modification within predefined computational structures. While recent methods introduce modularity, conditional computation, and parameter-efficient adaptation, they generally do not distinguish computational capability from computational accessibility as separate adaptive variables. This work introduces Accessibility Plasticity, a principle of adaptive computation in which systems adapt not only by changing what computation exists, but also by reorganizing which existing computations can interact and participate. We formalize Accessibility Plasticity through a relationship-based operational realization and establish a reuse-first hierarchy of adaptation, where accessibility modification precedes more costly capability and structural changes. A proof-of-concept evaluation on sequential learning tasks shows that accessibility adaptation can reduce capability modification while maintaining comparable task performance. These results suggest accessibility as a distinct adaptive dimension and provide a foundation for future dynamic neural systems whose computational relationships evolve with changing environments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Advancing All-Weather Building Damage Mapping to the Instance Level: Outcomes and Insights from the 2026 Bright Challenge

Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang et al. (+19 more)

Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed. Post-event optical imagery, however, may be unavailable because of cloud, smoke, or darkness. The Bright Challenge evaluated all-weather building damage mapping from a submeter-resolution pre-event optical image and a post-event SAR image. Participants were required to detect and delineate each building and assign exactly one of three mutually exclusive damage labels. The challenge extended the globally distributed Bright dataset with instance-level annotations for about 291,000 buildings across 16 disaster events spanning seven disaster types. The final phase was evaluated exclusively on two 2025 events absent from training: a wildfire event in California and a hurricane in Jamaica. A total of 157 participants made 1,289 submissions, and 46 teams entered the final phase. The two winning solutions achieved test mAPs of 0.182 and 0.181, approximately 8.7 times the public baseline of 0.021, but remained far below the best in-domain holdout score of 0.513. Across teams ranked in both phases, performance declined sharply and the rank order changed substantially. The two leading solutions independently favored modality-specific encoding, staged or late optical–SAR fusion, and an optical-dominant separation of building localization from damage recognition. The winning method additionally used scene-aware threshold adjustment and pseudo-label adaptation. These results identify cross-event generalization and stable severity discrimination as the principal remaining challenges. All data, annotations, baseline code, and winning solutions are publicly available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT.
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All authors Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang, Jian Song, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Hamish Mitchell, Jiepan Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, Zijie Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiazhen Zhao, Lei Hu, Ting Hu, Hongyan Zhang, Gregory Angelides, Miriam Cha, Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Taylor Perron, Naoto Yokoya

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

AI-generated Images Challenge Visual Trust in High-risk Scenarios

Yi-Zhi Wang, Yichen Xiao, Linan Yue et al. (+5 more)

Rapid advances in image generation are eroding the evidentiary value of visual content in settings where authenticity can affect public safety and personal reputation. Yet existing detection benchmarks rarely examine synthetic images in public- and individual-safety contexts, where misleading visual content may carry substantial risks. Here we introduce SafeIMG, a safety-oriented benchmark spanning 12 public- and individual-safety scenarios generated using GPT Image 2. Unlike benchmarks centred on generic imagery and image-level labels, SafeIMG evaluates not only whether detectors recognise synthetic images, but also whether their decisions reflect human-identified anomalies. To this end, SafeIMG provides human annotations that localise suspicious regions and explain local artefacts and higher-level commonsense or physical inconsistencies. We evaluate specialized synthetic-image detectors and vision-language models (VLMs), and find that neither provides reliable detection. The strongest VLM identifies only 49.5% of generated images, whereas the best specialised detector identifies 33.1%, compared with 81.7% accuracy for human evaluators. Model explanations cover only 29.8% of human-annotated anomalies and predominantly capture local defects in text, faces and hands. Their coverage falls to 15.0% for commonsense conflicts and 12.0% for physical inconsistencies, while detection performance deteriorates further after dissemination-induced image degradation. These findings show that current detectors lack the accuracy, explanatory alignment and robustness needed to evaluate AI-generated images reliably across public- and individual-safety settings.
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All authors Yi-Zhi Wang, Yichen Xiao, Linan Yue, Weibo Gao, Yichao Du, Pengfei Fang, Shimin Di, Min-Ling Zhang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

QFedPolyp: A Communication- and Inference-Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Polyp Segmentation

Madan Baduwal and Priyanka Paudel

Background and Objective: Automatic polyp segmentation supports computer-aided diagnosis and early colorectal cancer detec- tion. Centralized deep learning requires hospitals to share sensitive medical data, while federated learning preserves privacy but introduces high communication costs through repeated transmission of full-precision model parameters. We propose QFedPolyp, a communication- and inference-efficient federated learning framework for collaborative polyp segmentation. Methods: QFedPolyp combines quantization-aware training with low-precision model communication. Each hospital locally trains a lightweight U-Net on private data while simulating quantization during training. Clients transmit quantized model parameters to a central server, where they are reconstructed and aggregated using Federated Averaging. Evaluation is performed on Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ClinicVideoDB, PolypGen, and BKAI-IGH NeoPolyp. Results: Full-precision federated training achieves Dice scores of 0.910 on Kvasir-SEG and 0.930 on CVC-ClinicVideoDB. Uni- form 8-bit communication reduces transmission cost by approximately 4 times while preserving competitive segmentation accuracy. Quantized models also achieve up to 1.5 times faster inference than full-precision models. Conclusions: QFedPolyp enables privacy-preserving collaborative polyp segmentation with reduced communication overhead and faster inference. The resulting lightweight models are suitable for real-time clinical deployment.
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