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Monday 5 October

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Steering by Influence: Curvature Aware Data Weighting for Activation Steering

James A. E. Dixon, Stephen J. Roberts and Francesco Quinzan

Inference-time steering offers cheap, fine-grained control over a language model's outputs by estimating a concept's representation in activation space and shifting activations towards it. Existing methods build these representations from activation averages over contrastive datasets. These averages incorporate unrelated concepts and noise, and are dominated by a few tokens, meaning the activation transport encodes token-level rather than thematic concepts. In this work, we steer towards examples that most express a concept thematically, rather than towards an expectation over all. We identify these examples using influence functions, which estimate how much each data point contributes to a model's representation of a concept. Unlike simple model activation similarity, they incorporate the curvature of the model's loss landscape, allowing them to capture concept-relevant relationships beyond superficial token-level similarity. We then propose influence-weighted activation transport, which uses optimal transport to steer activations of non-concept text towards those of concept text, weighting concept examples by their influence scores. We evaluate on toxicity suppression (Jigsaw), object-based concept induction (OneSec) and truthfulness induction (TruthfulQA), outperforming existing activation-transport baselines. We track capability after steering using perplexity and MMLU accuracy, finding that our method improves steering while largely preserving model quality. We further show that influence functions capture concept-relevant information that activation-based methods miss with the two approaches ranking data points significantly differently. Together, these results demonstrate the value of curvature-aware influence information for activation steering.
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Artificial Intelligence

Capability-Driven Self-Evolution of Agent Memory

Yaoqi Chen, Yuru Feng, Qianxi Zhang et al. (+8 more)

Memory self-evolution uses task feedback to iteratively improve executable memory programs that store and retrieve information from past interactions. Existing approaches typically adopt holistic evolution, deriving revision directions from mixed feedback and judging progress by overall performance. This can obscure optimization directions and hide capability-specific gains offset by regressions elsewhere, leaving promising directions underexplored. We introduce capability-driven evolution, which extends search guidance from overall performance to individual capability dimensions, preserving promising revisions and expanding exploration beyond the boundaries of holistic evolution. We propose PrisMem, which uses dependency-aware capability selection to prioritize targets with potential cross-capability benefits and history-guided diagnosis to refine capability specialists. Trace-guided integration compares evaluated programs on paired differential cases, using their behavioral differences to consolidate complementary gains into a unified memory program. Experiments show that PrisMem outperforms the strongest baselines by 10.54 and 7.83 percentage points on BEAM-1M and LongMemEval-M, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness on million-token histories.
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All authors Yaoqi Chen, Yuru Feng, Qianxi Zhang, Baotong Lu, Jianan Lu, Zhirui Wang, Shusen Xu, Zewen Jin, Zengzhong Li, Cheng Li, Qi Chen

Artificial Intelligence

GraphDecisionBench: Benchmarking System One Models on Graph Tasks

Xianliang Yang, Yapu Zhang and Li Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for graph understanding and decision-making, while System One models such as Jev select directly from supplied options. However, the capabilities of System One models on graph-related tasks remain unclear. We introduce GraphDecisionBench, a model-independent benchmark that combines structural task profiles, matched graph-text input contrasts and heuristic-proposal controls to diagnose graph decision performance. We evaluate Jev and related choice-based models alongside language-model baselines, covering fourteen model-interface configurations. Jev's results illustrate the benchmark's central distinctions: accurate adjacency recognition does not guarantee broader structural correctness, joint graph-text input does not consistently improve prediction, and feasible construction does not establish high solution quality. Its task contracts, candidate interfaces and scoring rules support comparison across native selectors and language-model adapters. Code and aggregate results are available at https://github.com/VictorYXL/GraphDecisionBench.
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Artificial Intelligence

ImproveAnyTask: An Autonomous Post-Training Harness for Iterative Model Self-Improvement

Xingbo Yao, Xiaoman Wang, Zhengwu Lei et al. (+11 more)

Adapting general-purpose large language models to specific tasks requires substantial human effort in designing data and training strategies. Sustaining improvement is especially challenging because model updates change the error distribution, requiring strategies to be continually refined. We introduce ImproveAnyTask, an autonomous post-training harness that improves task performance under a limited compute budget. Drawing inspiration from gradient-based parameter optimization, the harness organizes adaptation into error attribution, update-direction selection, and executable model updates. It combines metric-level and case-level analysis to identify a focal problem, then investigates research-backed strategies and compares their reported gains and reproduction difficulty. The selected strategy is translated into training data and a training configuration, with small-scale execution checks preceding full post-training. Subsequent evaluation guides model selection and further adaptation, while validated strategies and scripts are retained for reuse. Across 11 tasks, ImproveAnyTask achieves mean gains of 18.29 and 11.97 percentage points on the Base and Instruct models, respectively, with a maximum gain of 41.96 points, under a 24-hour budget with resources equivalent to eight H20 GPUs.
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All authors Xingbo Yao, Xiaoman Wang, Zhengwu Lei, Tinghui Luo, YiLin Zhang, Yuefeng Wu, Yijie Xu, Tianfu Wang, Qingyuan Zhan, Ye Guo, Daoxin Zhang, Zhe Xu, Jian Liu, Hui Xiong

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

MeSD: Multi-Evidence Self-Distillation for VideoLLM

Weijie Zhu, Han Fang, Hanyu Fu et al. (+13 more)

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards provides reliable outcome supervision for VideoLLMs, sequence-level rewards offer limited token-level guidance. On-policy self-distillation addresses this limitation by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. However, aggregating heterogeneous evidence within a single teacher context obscures cross-evidence agreement and conflict. A further challenge lies in determining whether teacher guidance should refine reward-based updates or provide corrective supervision for failed trajectories. To address these issues, we propose MeSD, a multi-evidence self-distillation framework for VideoLLMs. MeSD constructs three evidence-conditioned teachers with shared parameters, using the ground-truth answer as a common semantic context while separately incorporating temporal and spatial evidence. Given the same student-generated prefixes, MeSD evaluates evidence-specific preferences relative to the Answer Teacher and fuses teacher-common preferences with gated teacher-specific residuals. Furthermore, MeSD introduces Verification-Guided Optimization to classify trajectories as Success, Failure, or Indeterminate. For Success and Indeterminate trajectories, MeSD refines token-level advantage magnitudes while preserving reward-derived signs. For verified failure trajectories that contain the required evidence, MeSD applies failure-conditioned distillation, using reverse-KL correction toward the fused distribution. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.
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All authors Weijie Zhu, Han Fang, Hanyu Fu, Yuzhe Zhang, Xin Wei, Zhaoyan Pan, Feiran Liu, Xunjie Jin, Hongbo Sun, Zhiyu Lin, Tianyi Gao, Tianyi Ding, Ye Yuan, Zhongjiang He, Hao Sun, Zhiheng Wu

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.DC

Fine-Tuning a 3B-Parameter LLM on a Smartphone: Characterizing Sustained Training

Andrew Geyko, Marius Mosbach and André Brinkmann

Multi-billion-parameter LLMs now run on phones for inference, and training them on the device would personalize them without user data leaving the phone. Prior work has measured individual training steps of such models on phones, but not complete training runs, and not whether adapters trained on the device improve personalization. We present the first systematic characterization of a multi-billion-parameter LLM fine-tuned on a mobile device, covering memory, per-step time, thermal behavior, and energy. An iPhone 17 Pro can fine-tune a 3B-parameter LLM to a typical user within one battery charge, and the resulting adapters improve personalization as much as adapters trained on a server. Sustained training throttles the phone to about half its initial throughput, and none of the pausing or burst schedules we tested recovers it. Nearly all of each training step is spent in the frozen base model, most of it in the backward pass, which nine of the ten other runtimes we audited do not accelerate. Apple's MLX had a kernel for it that was never dispatched and was incorrect, and our repair, now merged upstream, trains an adapter 1.47x faster on a third less energy. On-device fine-tuning is feasible on current phones, and making it efficient requires runtimes and operating systems to treat training as a first-class workload.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Agentic schema-guided extraction of materials process knowledge from scientific literature

Sameer Sadruddin and Jennifer D'Souza

Materials literature contains detailed experimental knowledge, but procedures, chemical entities and measurements remain difficult to aggregate because they are reported in heterogeneous forms and depend on process-specific context. We present SciKGExtract, a schema-guided framework that combines large-language-model extraction with chemical normalization and agent-based evaluation and refinement before knowledge-graph integration. We evaluate the framework on 176 atomic-layer-deposition papers describing zinc oxide (ZnO) and indium–gallium–zinc oxide (IGZO), together with an expert-annotated full-schema subset. PubChem normalization improves exact-match extraction F1 for every tested model. For ZnO, the best F1 increases from 0.591 for direct normalized extraction to 0.805 with agentic refinement, whereas the best IGZO result is 0.344, revealing the greater difficulty of multicomponent supercycle processes. Evaluation against a deeply nested schema containing 65 experimental properties and 155 quantitative measurement nodes further exposes errors in process segmentation and numerical assignment. These results show that chemical canonicalization and targeted agentic verification provide complementary controls for converting complex materials literature into reusable, machine-actionable experimental knowledge.
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Artificial Intelligence

CRAFTER: Causality-based Self-adaptation for Autonomous IoT Systems

Houssam Hajj Hassan, Ajay Kattepur, Denis Conan et al. (+1 more)

This paper presents CRAFTER, an automated framework for designing and deploying self-adaptive IoT systems using Causal Reinforcement Learning (CRL). As IoT devices increasingly populate pervasive computing spaces, smart environments are enabled with advanced monitoring and interactive services. The dynamic nature of these environments, such as fluctuating workloads and evolving application demands, poses significant challenges in maintaining consistent Quality of Service (QoS) levels of IoT applications. While existing self-adaptation techniques offer adaptive capabilities, they are often designed to deal with specific application domains, hindering the design of self-adaptive solutions that can be re-used across multiple IoT verticals. In addition, there is a lack of automated pipelines that act on identifying key performance drivers to take effective adaptation decisions. CRAFTER addresses these issues by using Causality as a formal framework for performance analysis of IoT systems. CRAFTER generates causal graphs to uncover dependencies among system components and guide adaptation decisions based on cause-effect relationships. Then, adaptation agents can leverage this knowledge to take more effective adaptation decisions in dynamic situations. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates how CRAFTER enables deriving causal graphs spanning diverse IoT use cases. Furthermore, we showcase how CRAFTER improves self-adaptation performance by 25% compared to state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning-based approaches.
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All authors Houssam Hajj Hassan, Ajay Kattepur, Denis Conan, Georgios Bouloukakis

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Wiring Matters: Injection Topology and Initialization of Affordance Heads in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Zijian An, Linhan Wang, Jiayan Wang et al. (+4 more)

Dense affordance supervision is an appealing auxiliary signal for vision-language-action (VLA) policies, yet naively co-training an affordance head can severely damage instruction following. We present a controlled study of how to wire such a head into a modern VLA on the LIBERO benchmark. Our recipe reads the backbone through a stop-gradient and re-injects an intermediate head feature into the action expert via a learned bridge. The stop-gradient is a precondition: letting affordance gradients reach the backbone drops the policy below the headless base (85.5% vs. 93.1%). With the backbone protected, a same-budget 2*2 ablation over injection topology (concatenation vs. residual) and bridge initialization (zero vs. random) shows initialization is the dominant lever. The best wiring, an actively initialized residual bridge, reaches 96.2%, matching the far more elaborate three-expert AffordanceVLA (95.8%) with under 1% extra parameters. Two probes explain the mechanism: ground-truth affordances fed as an input hurt, and inference-time zeroing shows a lazy bridge acts only as a training-time regularizer while an active bridge becomes load-bearing.
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All authors Zijian An, Linhan Wang, Jiayan Wang, Shijie Geng, Ran Yang, Yiming Feng, Lifeng Zhou

Artificial Intelligence

RollPlace: Improving Macro Placement via Monte Carlo Rollout Search

Qi Zhou, Guojun Liu, Guangzhi Qi et al. (+5 more)

The application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), particularly for chip placement, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. While existing machine learning (ML)-based approaches have achieved notable progress, they predominantly focus on generating optimal layouts in a single attempt, often producing solutions that require subsequent refinement. To address this limitation, we propose RollPlace, a novel and generalized macro placement framework. RollPlace adopts a two-stage optimization strategy: generating initial placement solutions via machine learning methods or heuristic-based strategies, and refining these layouts efficiently by adjusting specific macros derived from the initial stage. This strategy circumvents the sequential generation constraints inherent in traditional RL-based placement methods. Furthermore, RollPlace seamlessly integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to balance exploration and exploitation, and employs a rollout mechanism for efficient local search. Extensive experiments on the ISPD 2005 benchmark demonstrate that RollPlace outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, end-to-end experimental results based on OpenROAD across 19 benchmarks show that RollPlace excels in multiple metrics. The proposed framework offers a robust and scalable solution for addressing the growing complexity of modern chip design challenges.
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All authors Qi Zhou, Guojun Liu, Guangzhi Qi, Ming Lu, Jiechu Liu, Zhongli Liu, Jianqun Yang, Xingji Li

Artificial Intelligence

Teaching a Minimalist Machine to Discover Recursive Programs for Arithmetic

Dominik Magiera, Christiane Wiebel-Herboth and Frank Jäkel

Humans can often acquire and synthesize complex, recursive concepts from minimal experience. Leveraging cognitive insights, we propose the Minimalist Machine, a framework for inductive program synthesis designed to model such conceptual learning. The system uses a compact relational subset of Prolog: Programs are searched within a fixed schema of body-free facts and two-body conjunctive Horn clauses. Recursion is not defined by a dedicated metarule. Instead, it emerges when a target predicate is reused inside the body of a learned clause. Inspired by a primary school curriculum, the model is taught through a human-curated, sequential introduction of new concepts in arithmetic. Starting from initially empty knowledge base, it first acquires simple structural predicates, then successor-based state transformations, and finally recursive programs for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Ultimately, this approach yields the fully transparent, inductive reasoning trace necessary for human-like conceptual learning.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task

Saad Ezzini, Shadi Abudalfa, Maram Alharbi et al. (+6 more)

Sentiment analysis is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Standard sentiment classification for the Arabic language remains challenging due to the high volume of dialectal Arabic. To advance research in this area, this paper proposes the Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic Dialects (DialectSentEval), hosted with the Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026). This shared task consists of two subtasks: Subtask 1 focuses on multi-class and multi-dialect sentiment analysis, requiring models to identify sentiment polarity across various Arabic dialects. Subtask 2 introduces a generative task for Arabic sentiment swap, challenging models to invert sentiment polarity while preserving core semantics. In this overview paper, we present the motivation, dataset creation, and summarize the main findings from participating models.
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All authors Saad Ezzini, Shadi Abudalfa, Maram Alharbi, Salmane Chafik, Hind Alatawi, Mo El-Haj, Ahmed Abdelali, Osamah Alnahari, Salima Lamsiyah

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

GAMBIT: Learning to Plan Continuous Multi-Robot Trajectories

Rishabh Jain, Akmaral Moldagalieva, Lorenzo Magnino et al. (+5 more)

GAMBIT is an opening chess move in which a player sacrifices a piece, typically a pawn, to gain a positional advantage later in the game. Analogously, in multi-robot coordination, individual robots may need to forgo locally reward-maximising behaviours to improve overall team performance. Such self-sacrificial behaviours are difficult to capture with manually designed heuristics, particularly in dense, interaction-rich environments. Focusing on double-integrator continuous dynamics, this work studies how to learn such coordinated heuristics over motion primitives for multi-robot trajectory execution. Our framework, GAMBIT, first learns coordinated motion-primitive selection through imitation learning and subsequently fine-tunes the policy through reinforcement learning. We further introduce a safeguarded rollout mechanism with backup trajectories that guarantees collision-free execution at all times. Experiments demonstrate that GAMBIT substantially outperforms a range of baselines, including centralised motion planners and decentralised reactive planners, while exhibiting strong scalability. In particular, it coordinates over a thousand robots with planning latency below a few hundred milliseconds in continuous domains.
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All authors Rishabh Jain, Akmaral Moldagalieva, Lorenzo Magnino, Michael Amir, Keisuke Okumura, Ajay Shankar, Wolfgang Hönig, Amanda Prorok

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

When Are Concept Bottleneck Model Explanations Faithful and Compact?

Stefano Teso, Emanuele Marconato, Steve Azzolin et al. (+1 more)

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) are neural classifiers that allow to explain their decisions via high-level concepts, potentially enabling understanding, steering and debugging. However, their explanations are often derived heuristically. Building on formal explainability, we argue they should also be faithful, i.e., not misreport which concepts actually matter. We show that, for widespread CBM architectures, including recent VLM-based variants, faithful explanations must include all concepts in the bottleneck, compromising interpretability when this is large. This result applies to both heuristic and faithful-by-construction formal explanations. To encourage the existence of compact faithful explanations, we suggest i) modeling concepts probabilistically as binary or categorical random variables (rather than logits), and ii) employing per-concept training-time sparsification via group lasso (rather than regular elastic net). We also extend algorithms from formal explainability to CBMs, and show they outperform natural heuristics in terms of guarantees and explanation size. Overall, our work warns against naive interpretability claims and provides formal conditions and practical strategies for ensuring CBMs are as interpretable as advertised.
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All authors Stefano Teso, Emanuele Marconato, Steve Azzolin, Antonio Vergari

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Future Anchored Verification and Online Recovery for World Action Models

Zhibin Qin, Zhenxiong Tan and Xinchao Wang

World action models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation. They act by first predicting how a task should be performed and then decoding the actions from that future. However, the remaining actions are invalid once execution drifts from the prediction. Simply replanning from the already out of distribution state rarely restores what the task still requires; existing execution monitors decide when to stop, but not what to restore. We observe that the answer is already in hand: the future the WAM predicted before acting depicts exactly the states it intended to pass through. We introduce FAVOR (Future Anchored Verification and Online Recovery), a lightweight framework that keeps these predicted frames as anchors and uses them for verification and recovery. An Anchor Verifier compares each observation with its anchor, together with the executed actions, to flag deviations that break the task. Anchor-Guided Recovery uses a vision-language model to turn the flagged anchor into a short corrective instruction. Under strengthened instruction guidance, the WAM executes this instruction to return to the intended future. It then resumes the task. FAVOR raises the task success of the base WAM from 97.85% to 98.10% on LIBERO and from 72.60% to 72.98% on LIBERO-Plus without modifying the policy.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO

VLA-ZO: Fast Zeroth-Order Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Jaemin Kim, Jiahn Kim and Taesik Gong

Adapting vision-language-action (VLA) models to deployment-time distribution shifts is important for reliable robotic operation, but conventional first-order adaptation can exceed the memory budget of inference-oriented deployment platforms. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a forward-only alternative with inference-level memory, but accurate gradient estimation requires many perturbation queries, making naive ZO prohibitively slow for large VLA models. We present VLA-ZO, a framework for fast ZO adaptation that exploits the structure of VLA computation. By confining adaptation to the action side, VLA-ZO keeps the expensive vision-language prefix frozen and reuses its conditioning states across perturbation queries and optimizer steps, while schedule-aware prefetching hides state-transfer overhead. On LIBERO camera-viewpoint shifts, VLA-ZO reduces end-to-end adaptation time by 25.59$\times$ at $q=16$ and 32.54$\times$ at $q=64$ relative to baseline ZO, while improving average task success from 48.27% without adaptation to 58.17% and 63.58%, respectively. These results show that making ZO faster can make larger query budgets practical, providing a promising path toward resource-efficient VLA adaptation on deployment platforms.
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Artificial Intelligence

DPNL: A DPLL-based Algorithm for Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning

Thomas Jean-Michel Valentin, Pierre Genevès, Luisa Sophie Werner et al. (+3 more)

Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (PNL) combines neural predictions with symbolic reasoning, enabling end-to-end learning from final-output supervision without labels for intermediate concepts. A central challenge is probabilistic inference: state-of-the-art approaches often rely on materializing the logical provenance of a query, which can itself become a major computational bottleneck. We introduce Dynamic Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (DPNL), an oracle-guided framework that avoids requiring complete provenance materialization before inference. DPNL lazily explores the space of intermediate assignments, while oracles resolve entire regions that can already be certified to produce or exclude the target output. We establish conditions ensuring soundness and termination. ApproxDPNL extends the same search with early termination while maintaining certified bounds on the exact output probability, providing controlled approximation guarantees. The oracle interface decouples inference from the representation of the symbolic component, enabling problem-specific reasoning within the same framework. Experiments on several neurosymbolic tasks show that DPNL and ApproxDPNL substantially extend the range of problem instances tractable by probabilistic neurosymbolic inference.
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All authors Thomas Jean-Michel Valentin, Pierre Genevès, Luisa Sophie Werner, Sarah Chlyah, Nabil Layaïda, Nils Gesbert

Artificial Intelligence

Evolving in Thought Space: Training a Small Model at Test Time Unlocks Better Discoveries

Chonghe Jiang, Ao Qu, Siyuan Liu et al. (+9 more)

Open-ended scientific discovery often requires repeatedly proposing and evaluating candidate solutions. LLM-based systems can support this process by generating and refining executable solutions from verifier feedback. Methods such as TTT-Discover use test-time training (TTT) to update the solution-generating LLM from verifier feedback, adapting its generation policy to improve subsequent proposals on the target problem. However, this becomes expensive when reliable execution requires a large model, since training must maintain gradients, optimizer states, and policy statistics while repeatedly generating long, structured outputs. It also complicates credit assignment: outcome-level verifier feedback must jointly evaluate the high-level strategy and its low-level implementation. In this work, we introduce Guidance-TTT, which separates these roles. A compact guidance model is trained at test time to propose high-level strategic changes, while a frozen execution model implements them as complete executable solutions. At each step, the system selects a promising previously discovered solution, proposes a change, executes and verifies it, and updates only the guidance model using an adaptive group-relative RL objective. This concentrates test-time learning on short strategic decisions while retaining the implementation capability of a substantially stronger model without adapting it. Without web access, Guidance-TTT produces strong solutions across four distinct domains: combinatorial optimization (Polyomino Packing), heuristic programming (AHC058), machine learning (Lasso), and GPU kernel optimization (TriMul). Across these tasks, it outperforms the best solutions reported in prior work while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art results on public online leaderboards. Code is available at https://github.com/Human-Agent-Society/reef/tree/guidance-ttt-support.
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All authors Chonghe Jiang, Ao Qu, Siyuan Liu, Ruoyun Ma, Zijian Zhou, Dingyi Zhuang, Bo Liu, Han Zheng, Hanfei Yu, Baichuan Mo, Jinhua Zhao, Paul Pu Liang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Ramp Metering Control via Hybrid State Deep Reinforcement Learning in Partially Observable Connected Vehicle Environments

Youcef Mehamlia, Nadir Farhi and Meriem Bouali

Freeway on-ramp merges are major sources of congestion, causing significant economic and environmental costs. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a promising solution for ramp metering, existing approaches rely primarily on aggregated macroscopic data. Connected vehicles (CVs) provide vehicle-level observations that can complement aggregate traffic measurements, but their limited penetration produces incomplete microscopic information. This paper proposes a hybrid observation representation combining macroscopic traffic measurements with a two-channel grid encoding observed CV presence and speed. A Dueling Double Deep Q-Network processes these inputs to select ramp-metering green durations. The controller is trained under varying traffic demands and CV penetration rates and evaluated against ALINEA and macroscopic-only DRL variants in SUMO. Across 50 matched evaluation scenarios, the hybrid controller under partial CV visibility reduces the reported total travel time by 11.4 % and mean spillback duration by 84.9 % relative to ALINEA. Evaluating the same trained policy with full CV visibility yields a further travel-time reduction of approximately 1.6 %. Analysis across penetration rates suggests that the performance gap decreases as microscopic observations become more complete. These results support the use of complementary macroscopic and sparse microscopic observations for learning-based ramp metering. The source code implementation of the model is available at: https://github.com/youcefMehamlia/Multimodal-DRL-RMC
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

CentriQ: Calibration-Free Quantization of Diffusion Transformers via Exact Mean Centering

Nataša Jovanović, Mathieu Salzmann and Saqib Javed

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) achieve state-of-the-art image generation, but their sampling cost limits deployment. Quantizing both weights and activations to 4 bits reduces this cost, yet existing methods fall short in one of two ways. Calibration-based methods are tied to a specific checkpoint and prompt distribution, whereas data-free Hadamard rotation, effective for LLMs, loses quality on DiTs. We show that this loss has a structural cause. Adaptive layer-norm conditioning adds a per-token mean to the activations, and at the widths of the evaluated DiTs, the Hadamard rotations used by data-free methods cannot spread this mean uniformly across coordinates. A single dominant direction therefore survives the rotation and sets the quantization range. We introduce CentriQ, a calibration-free quantizer that centers each token before rotation and restores the mean exactly through a rank-1 full-precision branch, so that per-token scales follow in closed form without data. Weights are fitted under a robust $\ell_p$ objective that tracks the dense mode of each group and discounts heavy tails. Across three DiTs, CentriQ matches the quality of calibrated SVDQuant at 4 bits, whereas calibration-free weight quantizers with plain per-token activation quantization collapse or degrade substantially. CentriQ outperforms the strongest calibration-free method reported to date at 2-bit weights. It is also the first calibration-free method to retain usable image quality at 2-bit activations.
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Artificial Intelligence

From Papers to Mechanisms: An Evidence-Grounded Knowledge Substrate for Scientific Language Models

Qiuhui Chen, Yibo Liu, Tao Dai et al. (+3 more)

Scientific language models often access literature through untyped text chunks, which fragment the functional and evidential structure required for mechanism-rich questions. We introduce an evidence-grounded mechanism knowledge substrate that organizes scientific literature into provenance-linked evidence units, role-typed entities, and directed mechanism paths. We instantiate it as MS$^3$, a Material-Sensor-Signal-System schema for conductive-fiber flexible sensors, over 13,689 papers, 131,083 evidence items, and 26,648 mechanism objects. On in-domain and coverage-shift question-answering benchmarks, we compare closed-book generation, Web search, Raw-PDF RAG, and MS$^3$ retrieval across ten language models. MS$^3$ improves macro-averaged scientific correctness. It also improves citation entailment and answer completeness. These results support mechanism substrates as a reliable representation layer for scientific language models and motivate a source-repair workflow in which insufficient MS$^3$ evidence triggers targeted retrieval from its linked papers rather than assuming that a user has already supplied the correct PDFs.
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All authors Qiuhui Chen, Yibo Liu, Tao Dai, Jiafan Lu, Zhenglei Zhou, Weimin Zhong

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Few-Shot Prototype Head Adaptation for On-Device ECG Personalization on PSoC~6

Guilherme Silva, Pedro Silva, Gladston Moreira et al. (+1 more)

Wearable and bedside electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors must adapt to patient-specific morphology to maintain arrhythmia detection accuracy across users, yet personalization is typically performed offline and cannot account for individual physiology, electrode placement, or recording drift. On-device adaptation by backpropagation is expensive for microcontroller-class medical devices because it requires an optimizer state, repeated backward passes through convolutional layers, and labeled arrhythmic beats that may not be available at deployment time. This letter proposes prototype-only head adaptation as a compact personalization primitive for TinyML ECG systems. A one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1-D CNN; 1,314 parameters and 72.6k multiply-accumulate operations per beat) is trained offline on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database under an inter-patient protocol, frozen as a feature extractor, and exported to a PSoC 6 microcontroller. Patient-specific adaptation then reduces to computing closed-form class means in a 32-dimensional embedding space, requiring no convolutional backward pass, no iterative optimization, and only one forward pass per support beat. Prototype adaptation improves inter-patient macro-F1 from 0.635/0.639/0.646 to 0.731/0.771/0.797 at 1/5/10-shot, outperforming linear stochastic-gradient-descent (SGD) head fine-tuning at every shot count for the target tiny backbone. On-device replay over 18 one-shot episodes on a PSoC 6 Cortex-M4F matches the host macro-F1 for the prototype head (0.798), with 11.39 ms per beat, 5.2 KB flash, and 22.2 KB SRAM. A restricted variant that updates only the normal-class prototype from passively buffered sinus beats yields a consistent +0.05 macro-F1 gain, reducing the annotation burden during initial
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All authors Guilherme Silva, Pedro Silva, Gladston Moreira, Eduardo Luz

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Artificial Intelligence and the New Science of Culture

Douglas R. Guilbeault, Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan and James A. Evans

Cognition and culture have long been treated as parallel objects of study, joined more by metaphor than by mechanism. We argue they are co-constituted in a manner now empirically tractable: subjectivities can be measured as local trajectories through a high-dimensional cultural field, and the field is itself the aggregate of those trajectories. Recent advances in machine learning, including embedding methods and large generative models, provide the first general framework for measuring this co-constitution from micro-cognition to macro-social structure. Vector geometry recovers individual conceptual structure, organizational communication, and large-scale ideologies; captures multimodal cultural content beyond text; and generates testable predictions about cultural emergence, including the simultaneous arrival of independent discoveries across distant minds. We treat this predictability of simultaneous innovation as evidence for the co- constitutive view: when the geometry of the cultural field is measurable, trajectories of cognitive search through it become predictable. We then examine generative AI agents as simulators of human subjectivity and as a qualitatively new coordinating substrate whose insertion into social life introduces evolutionary dynamics unprecedented in human cultural history. We formalize this reflexive condition as a Heisenberg-like Uncertainty Principle for generative AI: as instruments for fixing a culture's position grow more precise, our capacity to predict its trajectory degrades, because the machinery of cultural description and cultural action have merged. We close with ethical questions raised by AI-mediated cultural drift, recursive synthetic culture, and the limits of human cultural agency, offering guidelines for safe, equitable, and privacy-preserving research on AI and culture.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Joint Class-Time Learning for Video Classification with Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning

Lingyu Shen, Wei Tang, Fakhri Karray et al. (+1 more)

Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) addresses inexact supervision in both the instance and label spaces, which can be applied to video classification. However, bag-level labels do not explicitly supervise the correspondence between candidate classes and temporal evidence. We propose {\ours}, which couples label disambiguation with temporal evidence allocation through a joint class–time assignment. Occupancy-regularized spherical matching associates contextualized video features while learning nonuniform temporal mass and discouraging excessive concentration. During training, candidate-restricted inference recomputes the assignment within the candidate label set. A dual-marginal KL projection then constructs a structured teacher that incorporates momentum-refined class beliefs while preserving the proposal's temporal occupancy. A single plan-level KL objective aligns the full-space predictor with this teacher. Our analysis characterizes when candidate re-solving differs from masking and shows that, under the stated construction, the joint objective decomposes into class-marginal and class-conditional temporal supervision. We construct VCMIPL benchmarks from Breakfast, DoTA, and FineAction using model-generated candidate labels and evaluate the method across four feature representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PIVOTMIPL outperforms existing MIPL algorithms in both effectiveness and efficiency.
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All authors Lingyu Shen, Wei Tang, Fakhri Karray, Min-Ling Zhang

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG

SO(3)-RoPE for Spherical Transformers

Christian Libner, Chase van de Geijn, Alexander S. Ecker et al. (+1 more)

Spherical data arise in many scientific applications. Often spherical transformers disregard the geometry of the underlying spherical domain, causing distortions and coordinate singularities near the poles. We introduce SO(3)-RoPE, a relative positional embedding that incorporates spherical geometry into transformer attention through unitary SO(3) representations. Our formulation is SO(3)-equivariant and compatible with FlashAttention, retaining efficiency of vanilla transformers. On shallow water dynamics prediction over a rotating sphere, our SO3ViT outperforms an S2Transformer baseline with lower errors and reduced runtime.
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All authors Christian Libner, Chase van de Geijn, Alexander S. Ecker, Maurice Weiler

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from q-bio.QM

APOD: reasoning-guided agentic population ordinary differential equation discovery for pharmacological digital twins

Romain Ferrara, Martin Soucail, Victor Gertner et al. (+7 more)

Establishing ordinary differential equations (ODEs) describing population data is a fundamental part of mathematical modeling in pharmacology, crucial to developing digital twins. However, doing so from sparse, noisy data is a slow, expert-driven task. Existing automated methods either search a restricted model space or ignore population inter-individual variability. Here we introduce APOD (Agentic Population ODE Discovery), a language-model agent that iteratively reasons over biological knowledge and fit diagnostics in an open-ended search space to discover a population digital twin (PDT), i.e., a shared ODE system with between-subject variability. On synthetic pharmacokinetic and tumor-dynamics benchmarks, APOD recovered ground-truth structures in 94-100% of runs, 12-fold faster in median than an established library-based search. On real cohorts it converged to valid structures, and proposed a PDT of radioligand-therapy-induced platelet dynamics that predicts thrombocytopenia from first-cycle data and simulates alternative dosing schedules that lower the predicted risk of toxicity.
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All authors Romain Ferrara, Martin Soucail, Victor Gertner, Adil Moussali, Joris Cocquebert, Sandrine Oziel-Taieb, Julien Nicolas, Florence Gattacceca, Mihaela van der Schaar, Sébastien Benzekry

Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Cross-lingual Calibration of Pre-Generation Success Probes for Multilingual LLM Routing

Andrea Paganelli, Stefano Civelli, Pietro Bernardelle et al. (+1 more)

Pre-generation success probes estimate response correctness from a language model's hidden activations before decoding, enabling cost-aware routing. While prior work has demonstrated their utility primarily on English inputs, we study their reliability across languages along three dimensions: (1) whether they preserve the ranking of likely successes and failures (DISCRIMINATION); (2) whether they retain probabilities that match observed success frequencies (CALIBRATION); and (3) whether they produce scores comparable enough across candidate models for cost-aware multilingual routing (UTILITY). Using 3,000 MATH problems in 10 languages and 8 open-weight model configurations, we compare cross-lingual transfer from English-trained probes and equal-budget pooled multilingual probes. English-trained probes retain useful cross-lingual discrimination but become less well calibrated after transfer. Pooled multilingual supervision improves both properties and yields more reliable estimates of success. In routing experiments, the pooled router achieves a 0.7% higher test success rate while reducing modeled cost by 13.0% relative to always selecting the model with the highest average success. These results show that multilingual routing requires success estimates that remain well calibrated and comparable across languages and models.
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All authors Andrea Paganelli, Stefano Civelli, Pietro Bernardelle, Gianluca Demartini

Artificial Intelligence

AI-Decision Checkpoints for AI-Augmented Business Process Management: Framework and Educational Instantiation

Amin Jalali

Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and AI agents are increasingly embedded in operational business processes. Yet Business Process Management (BPM) curricula and frameworks still largely treat artificial intelligence (AI) as an add-on technology, leaving graduates (as potential future process developers) unprepared to reason about AI as a first-class design element of end-to-end processes. This paper addresses that gap by proposing AI-decision checkpoints: explicit moments in a process development trajectory where process developers identify AI-candidate sub-processes, assess expected effects on time, cost, quality, and flexibility, consider legal and organisational constraints, and document a reasoned decision to adopt, constrain, or reject specific AI components. The checkpoints are instantiated through a fictitious customer onboarding process as a BPM Teaching Case, embedded in a lifecycle-driven framework spanning six modules that combine process modeling, simulation, workflow execution with AI agents, and process mining, with each module's output serving as the next module's input. A preliminary formative reflection draws on instructor observations, submitted artifacts, and discovered process maps from learning-management-system logs. These exploratory observations suggest that the approach supported clearer distinctions between task-level automation and process-level value.
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Artificial Intelligence

Do Small Language Models Learn to Negotiate? A Controlled Scaling Study of RL-Trained Sellers

Pedro Tabacof and Sagar Joglekar

LLM agents are starting to own the full customer experience. Soon, LLMs may be selling and buying on behalf of companies and customers respectively. Small models are more cost-efficient at scale, but can reinforcement learning train them into competent sellers? We train four Gemma 4 checkpoints (2.3B to 31B effective parameters) with GRPO on a programmatic utility reward for bilateral multi-issue bargaining, and evaluate every arm on the same 1,152 negotiations against two frontier buyers it never saw in training. With the same learning rate ($10^{-6}$) for every size, the gain of the RL model over its base rises from $+0.001$ at 2.3B to $+0.078$ at 31B. Each size was trained once and the two smallest checkpoints use a different architecture, so we fit no scaling law. Tripling the learning rate, with the same or fewer training steps, improves on the shared rate at every size by $+0.032$ (2.3B) to $+0.081$ (4.5B). In exploratory comparisons with two frontier models run as sellers, the 12B seller trained at the tripled rate scores above both, though its untrained base already scores as high as they do. The 4.5B seller at that rate shows no detectable difference from either and fits on one 48 GB GPU. A further 2.3B arm at ten times the shared rate raises pooled score, but its gain concentrates on the evaluation buyer that shares a model family with the training pool. These results suggest tuning the learning rate before concluding that a small model cannot learn to negotiate, and testing against buyers from more than one model family.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE

Correct Code, Broken Contributions? SWE-CC: Benchmarking Repository Policy Compliance for Coding Agents

Hai Dang Truong, Rayner Goh, Thanh Le-Cong et al. (+1 more)

Autonomous coding agents now resolve a substantial share of real-world GitHub issues. However, passing functional tests differs fundamentally from producing a high-quality contribution acceptable for merging. Mature open-source projects publish repository-specific contribution policies, spanning style, git, testing workflows, to ensure code quality and long-term maintainability. Because existing benchmarks evaluate patches solely on unit tests, agent compliance with repository governance remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce SWE-CC, a benchmark evaluating code and process compliance in autonomous software engineering. We develop a semi-automated pipeline that converts developer documentation across 12 open-source repositories into 823 machine-checkable atomic policies. SWE-CC introduces two features: 1) lightweight, deterministic checker functions that represent each policy, 2) a comprehensive auditing mechanism that inspects both agent runtime behaviors and final deliverables. We evaluate the compliance of agent workflows in 500 end-to-end software contribution tasks extended from SWE-bench Verified. Our evaluation of four LLMs under two agent scaffolds shows that modern agents suffer from coding compliance issues: although agents produce functionally correct patches, they still violate 43.1 percent of applicable project policies, with nearly half of all violations occurring during intermediate execution steps. These results show that functional correctness does not guarantee real-world readiness, highlighting that future software engineering agents must reliably conform to repository governance to enable safe and trustworthy deployment.
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All authors Hai Dang Truong, Rayner Goh, Thanh Le-Cong, Yintong Huo