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Computer Science

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Wednesday 26 August

Computation and Language

Overview of SHROOM-Visions 2026: A Shared Task on Hallucination Detection in Large Vision-Language Models

Raúl Vázquez, Aman Sinha, Chuyuan Li et al. (+12 more)

In 2026, we held the fourth iteration of the SHROOM Shared Task series: SHROOM-Visions (Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes in Vision language models), which is hosted at the UncertaiNLP Workshop co-located with EMNLP 2026. Following the success of the 2024 and 2025 tasks, this time we aim to tackle hallucinations through a model-agnostic detection task focused on large vision-language models. Building on the recently introduced SHEEP dataset, designed for long-term evaluation across model generations, the task invites participants to detect and classify fine-grained hallucination spans in image-conditioned text generation (VQA, image captioning, etc.). The evaluation uses a five-class taxonomy of hallucinations spanning four languages: Chinese, English, French, and Italian. The shared task generated strong interest in the NLP community worldwide, with 27 teams contributing 600+ system submissions. The best systems achieve average scores of 0.58 in character-level correlation, 0.46 in label-conditioned correlation, and 0.51 in intersection-over-union (IoU) across four languages, outperforming the baselines by 30-40 points.
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All authors Raúl Vázquez, Aman Sinha, Chuyuan Li, Artem Shelmanov, Artem Vazhentsev, Claudio Savelli, Eduardo Calò, Emilio Raimond, Stella Frank, Hengyu Luo, Flavio Giobergia, Vincent Segonne, Lorenzo Vaiani, Jörg Tiedemann, Timothee Mickus

Software Engineering

From General Agents to RCA Experts: A Self-Evolving Harness for Root Cause Analysis

Haiyu Huang, Jiewei Lyu, Zhihan Jiang et al. (+5 more)

Automated root cause analysis (RCA) with large language models (LLMs) has drawn growing attention. Today, SREs typically automate RCA with LLMs in one of two ways: directly using a general-purpose agent (e.g., Codex or Claude Code) for diagnosis, or building a specialized RCA agent from scratch. As mainstream general agents grow more capable and iterate quickly, our quantitative study finds that the former now often surpasses the latter. Its accuracy, however, still falls short of production needs, and this gap stems mainly from the external adaptation layer outside the agent's general capabilities, namely the harness. We therefore argue that LLM-based RCA should focus on this external harness, reusing the strong general capabilities of a modern agent rather than rebuilding an agent from scratch. A key capability of such a harness is to self-evolve, accumulating system-specific experience from past diagnoses so that it gets better the more it is used. We introduce OpsHarness, a self-evolving RCA harness that turns diagnosis experience into reusable expertise. Its data plane combines layered operational knowledge with an idea-card tool library, while its control plane coordinates setup, diagnosis, evolution, and verification. During evolution, OpsHarness contrasts successful and failed trajectories, converts their evidence into atomic proposals, and admits updates only through a dual-gate verification process designed to prevent overfitting and regression. Across two public benchmarks and an industrial deployment, OpsHarness achieves 59.0% top-1 accuracy, improving over a bare general agent by 63.4% and over baseline RCA agents by 4.02$\times$.
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All authors Haiyu Huang, Jiewei Lyu, Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Xiao He, Tieying Zhang, Wu Xiang, Michael R. Lyu

Computation and Language

Think-Probe-Respond: Improving Large Language Models as Judges of Research Idea Novelty

Tim Schopf, Tobias Schreieder and Akiko Aizawa

Automated novelty judgment can accelerate scientific discovery by enabling efficient evaluation, refinement, and comparison of research ideas. While large language models are increasingly adopted for this task, we investigate a previously overlooked limitation in their judgment capabilities: despite generating reasoning rationales that closely mirror those of human experts, their final novelty judgments often diverge substantially. We demonstrate that this miscalibration stems from a systematic bias towards judging ideas as "medium novel". To mitigate this, we propose Think-Probe-Respond (TPR), a lightweight approach that probes latent novelty judgments from hidden states during the reasoning phase and uses the probed judgments to condition the final response. Across strong baselines, TPR improves novelty judgment performance by 22.30% and successfully mitigates the prevalent "medium novelty" bias.
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Robotics

GaussianDream++: Efficient 3D Gaussian World Modeling for Robotic Manipulation

Yuqing Jiang, Zijian Zhang, Weitao Zhou et al. (+8 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have advanced language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet action-imitation objectives provide only weak supervision for metric 3D structure and short-horizon physical evolution. Geometry-enhanced policies mainly improve current-scene grounding, whereas predictive policies often model future dynamics in RGB or latent spaces and may incur substantial deployment cost. GaussianDream demonstrates that training-time current Gaussian reconstruction and future Gaussian prediction provide effective 3D supervision, but its dense VGGT/TGE-based prefix jointly carries state, dynamics, and action-conditioning information. We present \methodname, a compact, policy-native extension that inserts World State Tokens and World Prediction Tokens directly into the VLA backbone. A training-only World Representation Head decodes these tokens into a Current World and coupled Future Prediction over shared Gaussian primitives, while static–dynamic factorization preserves persistent structure and focuses residual motion on interaction-relevant regions. At inference, the head, renderer, auxiliary objectives, and VGGT/TGE pathway are removed, leaving only 20 world tokens without online Gaussian decoding or rollout. \method achieves 98.6% on LIBERO and 87.8% on LIBERO-Plus, with clear gains under Camera and Layout shifts. Real-robot experiments further improve average success from 29.2% to 52.5% over reproduced $\pi_{0.5}$ while maintaining efficient closed-loop control.
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All authors Yuqing Jiang, Zijian Zhang, Weitao Zhou, Jiawei Wang, Junjie He, Lei Yang, Haifang Qing, Si Liu, Ding Zhao, Ping Luo, Haibao Yu

Networking

Stochastic End-to-End Latency Modeling of the IoT-Edge-Cloud Continuum: Impact of Jitter and Traffic Variability on Deterministic Service Provisioning

Keyvan Aghababaiyan, Javier Gozalvez and Baldomero Coll-Perales

6G will integrate communication and computing capabilities in a IoT-edge-cloud continuum, enabling nodes to distribute workloads across the continuum. To support time-sensitive services, both communications and computing latencies must be controlled. Two key sources of temporal variability are arrival-time jitter and traffic variability. They can both impact the timing at which data is generated, transmitted and processed, and the resulting fluctuations can propagate throughout the continuum, increasing latency uncertainty. This paper studies the impact of stochastic temporal variability on the ability to support end-to-end deterministic service levels across the continuum. To this end, we present a novel queueing-based end-to-end latency model for the continuum, which we openly release. The model jointly captures computing and communication latency, and characterizes the complete end-to-end latency distribution, including tail latency. Our analysis shows that services with stringent latency deadlines and larger computing demands are more sensitive to temporal variabilities, making local execution the preferred option. In contrast, services with more relaxed deadlines are more resilient to temporal variabilities when executed locally or at the edge despite higher average and tail latencies. Edge offloading is beneficial under good cellular connectivity and increasing local processing workloads, whereas cloud execution is more sensitive to traffic variabilities because of the additional communication latency. Our analysis also shows that services offloaded are more sensitive to traffic variability than jitter due to higher communication latencies. These findings highlight that effective service offloading must jointly consider service requirements and sources of temporal variability to guarantee deterministic service levels.
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Artificial Intelligence

Narcissus: Program Synthesis Using Context-Aware LLM Approximations

Tilman Hinnerichs, Sebastijan Dumancic and Neil Yorke-Smith

Large language models (LLMs) excel at programming, but not when the task fixes the target language: prompted with a grammar rare in their training data, their programs usually break the grammar or fail the given specification. Enumerative synthesizers search the space of syntactically correct programs systematically guided by LLMs; the state of the art guides them by approximating LLM proposals into rule frequencies, which loses where each construct belongs and prunes every rule the proposals miss, exactly when the proposals are wrong. We present Narcissus, a synthesizer that keeps the proposals as syntax trees and scores each expansion of a candidate program in its context: does a proposal with the same surrounding structure continue the same way, and does the expansion rebuild a fragment the proposals repeat? A regularization term keeps every rule reachable, so wrong proposals delay the solution but cannot hide it. Across five domains and two search backends, Narcissus beats static guidance at every budget and consistently outperforms re-prompting the LLM to fix its own proposals; it reaches proposal-like programs an order of magnitude sooner and solves $40\%$ of ARC tasks where the raw proposals solve $13\%$, all without a single LLM call during search.
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Computation and Language

Reconstructing the Right Episode: Evaluating Interleaved Conversational Memory Beyond Long Context

Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang et al. (+1 more)

Conversations with chat assistants increasingly span many topics in a single long-running thread, challenging memory systems. Existing long-context and memory benchmarks often expose session or topic boundaries, or probe direct personal-memory questions. These settings understate a harder assistant-memory regime: a flat mixed-topic thread where the system must infer which earlier episode makes a later task decision valid. We introduce SCALE-QA, a constraint-grounded task QA benchmark for flat unsegmented threads targeting episode integrity failure. The dataset contains 3,000 audited questions across 10 domains, uses deterministic four-way multiple-choice grading, and includes a deterministic runtime builder; experiments use all 3,000 questions through 128k and a stratified 400-question diagnostic at 1M. SCALE-QA questions are ordinary task-oriented requests whose correct answer depends on causally related evidence introduced earlier in the conversation. We also propose Temporal-Semantic Interleaved Memory Reconstruction (TSIM), which segments the turn stream into coherent episodes and indexes them through a hierarchical multi-view memory stack with deterministic episode-level summary and cluster-routing views. Experiments show that SCALE-QA challenges strong RAG baselines and long-context LLMs alike; across three open-source and proprietary LLM backends, TSIM achieves the highest accuracy in every backend setting, gaining 5.6-17.6 accuracy points over the strongest corresponding baseline.
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All authors Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang, Pengtao Xie

Computation and Language

When Answer Evaluation Misleads Confidence Selection: Fact-Grounded Form Grading for Open-Ended QA

Zhexi Feng, Bingrui Zhang and Wuxi Chen

Many benchmarks now prefer open-ended questions for testing LLM and NLP methods. We find that the choice of a calibration rule can flip when only the correctness labels change: on 141 pilot answers, rules chosen with exact-match labels look 0.239 Brier points better than raw confidence but are 0.103 worse under human labels. How such flips arise remains unclear. We look deeply into their mechanism: reference matching rejects many correct answers (exact match misses 42%), and an exact Brier identity shows these errors favour rules giving such answers lower confidence, which abstain on them at common thresholds. Guided by this, we propose FactForm, a grader that trusts reference matches and otherwise consults evidence retrieved from the question alone. One LLM call per answer fills a fixed-order closed form that a program scores. On 998 fresh EVOUNA answers with 400 fact-based human labels, FactForm reaches a balanced error of 0.077 and an AUROC of 0.985, against 0.112 and 0.930 for the best of eight traditional graders. Its same-model stability is no worse than that of LLM judges (mean absolute run-to-run difference 0.0136 against 0.0159 to 0.0206). We hope this helps benchmarks grade open-ended answers more accurately, with repeatable and discriminative scores.
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Computer Vision

Towards Purified Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Yiwen Liang, Hui Chen, Yizhe Xiong et al. (+7 more)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has been widely explored in single-label recognition, effectively mitigating distribution shifts, especially when combined with vision-language models. However, real-world images often contain multiple objects, while the more practical multi-label test-time adaptation (MLTTA) has received little attention so far. Recent cache-based TTA methods have shown promising efficiency and effectiveness, yet directly extending them to multi-label scenarios suffers from a one-to-many mapping problem: a shared global representation entangling co-occurring objects is stored as class-wise cache prototypes, inducing dominant-label bias and compromised cache calibration. While introducing region-level cues helps isolate class-specific evidence, such regional evidence can also be unreliable under distribution shifts, making its identification and utilization non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce PuRF, a novel PuRiFication-driven cache-based method for multi-label test-time adaptation of vision-language models. Specifically, PuRF first performs region purification to identify reliable regions, providing comprehensive regional cues for multi-label recognition and enabling fine-grained alignment. Based on these purified regions, PuRF conducts cache purification to enhance cache representation and adaptability, where episodic purification builds a discriminative region-based cache, and temporal refreshing further promotes long-term cache adaptability. Experiments demonstrate that PuRF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a notable 4.05% mAP improvement on ViT-B/32 across five datasets.
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All authors Yiwen Liang, Hui Chen, Yizhe Xiong, Mengyao Lyu, Yuhan Cao, Zijia Lin, Shuaicheng Niu, Sicheng Zhao, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

Computer Vision

Diffusion Transformers for Roof Graph Synthesis and Reconstruction

Daniel Panangian and Ksenia Bittner

We present RoofDiT, a generative framework for 2D roof graph synthesis and reconstruction. Roofs are compactly described as planar graphs of junctions and structural edges, but existing methods often rely on fixed geometric rules or direct reconstruction objectives. RoofDiT instead models roof structures directly as vertex-edge graphs and learns a conditional generative prior over their geometry and connectivity. Our framework follows a two-stage design: a diffusion transformer generates roof vertices, and an edge prediction module infers the corresponding graph topology. To improve geometric fidelity, RoofDiT combines relative geometry-aware attention with footprint and aerial-image conditioning, while using an alignment regularizer to encourage common horizontal, vertical, and diagonal roof patterns. The same model supports unconditional generation, footprint-conditioned synthesis, and image-guided reconstruction by changing the conditioning signal. Experiments show improved graph generation quality over a diffusion baseline, favorable performance against a straight-skeleton prior in the footprint-conditioned setting, and the highest edge F1 among compared methods for image-guided reconstruction.
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Computer Vision

MAMA-FLUX.2: Image-to-Image Synthesis of Post-Contrast Breast DCE-MRI for the MAMA-SYNTH Challenge

Kamil Kwarciak and Marek Wodzinski

Dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI is central to cancer diagnosis and monitoring, but requires gadolinium-based contrast agents. In this work, we address pre-to-post contrast breast MRI synthesis for the MAMA-SYNTH challenge. We propose MAMA-FLUX.2, a conditional latent flow-matching approach based on FLUX.2-Klein-4B. The pre-contrast image is encoded as spatial conditioning, while the model predicts the flow field associated with the post-contrast target latent. To adapt the pretrained model efficiently, we use LoRA fine-tuning and introduce a regional training objective combining global flow matching, tumor-region supervision, and stable foreground regularization. We further investigate LoRA rank, intensity windowing, and regional loss weights on axial slices, prioritizing clinically relevant tumor-focused metrics. Our ablation study shows that moderate tumor and stable-foreground weighting improves the trade-off between image fidelity and tumor-region accuracy. The final model achieves the best overall balance with LoRA rank/$\alpha=64/64$, $\mathrm{MHA}_{\max}=25$, $\lambda_{\mathrm{tumor}}=0.25$, and $\lambda_{\mathrm{stable}}=0.1$. These results demonstrate that compact pretrained rectified-flow transformers can be adapted for contrast-enhanced MRI synthesis using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and task-aware regional losses.
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Machine Learning

LDAC-Net: A Learnable Multi-Lag Differencing Attention-Convolution Network for Drift-Robust Recognition with Low-Cost MOX Gas Sensors

Xin Zhang, Liangxiu Han, Yue Shi et al. (+1 more)

Portable electronic-nose systems based on low-cost metal-oxide (MOX) gas sensors offer a practical solution for gas and odour recognition, but their signals are affected by slow chemical transients, drifting sensor offsets, scale variation, and cross-channel correlations. Existing pipelines commonly use fixed first-order temporal differencing (FOTD), which requires a manually selected lag and may discard useful response information. We propose LDAC-Net, an end-to-end learnable multi-lag differencing attention-convolution network that operates directly on multi-channel MOX signals. Its learnable differential feature enhancement front-end combines window-conditioned statistical affine normalisation, which compensates for window-specific offset and scale variation, with learnable multi-lag differencing, which weights and combines temporal differences across multiple lags. A compact attention-convolution backbone subsequently models local transients and longer-range temporal dependencies. On the 50-class SmellNet-Base task, LDAC-Net achieves 68.2% top-1 accuracy, exceeding the best FOTD-preprocessed comparison model by approximately 14 percentage points and the raw-input Transformer by more than 30 points. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of both proposed components. The representation also transfers to SmellNet-Mixtures, improving accuracy from 45.4% to 50.5%, and generalises to the 62-channel eNose-Drift benchmark under strong long-term drift, achieving 70.6% top-1 accuracy and 69.6% macro-F1. These results outperform the best comparison model with dataset-retuned FOTD preprocessing by 8.0 and 3.0 points, respectively, demonstrating that learnable, sensor-aware preprocessing is more effective than fixed handcrafted differencing for low-cost MOX gas-sensor recognition.
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All authors Xin Zhang, Liangxiu Han, Yue Shi, Tam Sobeih

Machine Learning

A Token-Level Analysis of Sampled-Token Reverse-KL On-Policy Distillation

Bing Shao, Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma et al. (+13 more)

On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises a student on its own trajectories with token-level signals from a frozen teacher, yet how a sampled loss allocates updates across tokens remains poorly understood. We analyze the gradient of the per-token K2 estimator of reverse KL with respect to the student logits. The $\ell_1$ norm of this gradient factorizes into the absolute teacher–student log-probability gap and a student-side softmax factor that grows as the sampled token becomes less likely under the student. In our math-distillation runs, these per-token norms are highly non-uniform: low-student-probability tokens account for a disproportionate share of their sum and are also enriched in large teacher–student gaps. As a lightweight intervention suggested by this analysis, we study Surprise-aware Reweighting (SuRe), a detached, bounded weighting rule that further amplifies this existing allocation. Across two Qwen3 student scales, SuRe improves several math metrics over vanilla OPD and shows no clear degradation on the selected out-of-domain benchmarks. Our primary contribution is therefore a gradient-level characterization of reverse-KL OPD trained with the K2 estimator, with SuRe as one empirical instantiation.
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All authors Bing Shao, Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yujiong Shen, Senjie Jin, Xin Guo, Yuming Yang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Boyang Liu, Junlin Shang, Peixin Wang, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Robotics

EgoNav: Bridging Learned Waypoints and Geometry-Aware Local Control for Robust Indoor Navigation

Jing Wang, Shiqi Zhao, Hairong Qu et al. (+1 more)

Image-goal navigation using lightweight topological maps is a practical paradigm for indoor robot deployment: the map requires only geotagged images, and localization relies on visual matching rather than precise pose estimation. However, learned waypoint predictors can produce targets that violate geometric constraints or deviate from the global path. Executing these waypoints safely further requires a local planner capable of collision avoidance, yet existing systems either lack one or rely on fixed parameters that cannot adapt to confined spaces. To address these limitations while retaining the navigational intuition of the learned predictor, we present EgoNav, a hierarchical system that implements this idea by generating candidates from semantically segmented traversable regions and scoring them alongside the learned waypoint for geometric safety, directional coherence, and fidelity to the learned prior. An adaptive local path planner then executes the refined waypoint with parameters modulated based on the refinement outcome. Experiments in Habitat-sim and on a physical humanoid robot show that EgoNav consistently outperforms contemporary baselines in both success rate and path efficiency.
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All authors Jing Wang, Shiqi Zhao, Hairong Qu, Peng Yin

Robotics

Leveraging Inter-object Affordances for Efficient Planning in Contact-rich Tasks

Pouya P. Niaz, Justus Piater and Alejandro Agostini

Traditional task-and-motion planning (TAMP) approaches primarily focus on defining sequences of actions along with the necessary geometric and kinematic constraints to execute long-horizon tasks. However, their applicability in real-world settings is limited, as they typically assume simplified object models that overlook key physical properties critical for the successful execution of contact-rich tasks. Moreover, they often use sub-symbolic reasoning during motion planning, which drastically increases planning time and decreases overall success rates. We propose a method that leverages a TAMP approach, defining object-centric abstractions of execution constraints, called Unified TAMP (U-TAMP), to execute robotic tasks involving interactions among objects with heterogeneous shapes, sizes, and materials. Using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), we generate abstractions of inter-object affordances for characterizing physical interaction constraints between objects in contact-rich tasks, such as grasp and support constraints. These constraints are used to enrich the U-TAMP planning domain to deal with objects with variable physical properties. We perform experiments in simulated kitchen table organization scenarios and compare our results with those of the original U-TAMP, as well as a state-of-the-art VLM-based planner that leverages common sense knowledge of objects' affordances for plan generation. Our approach achieves significantly higher planning success rates and improves planning times by one to two orders of magnitude compared to other methods.
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Computation and Language

AutoVerifier: Residual-Guided Non-Parametric Optimization for Reference-Based Answer Verification

Zebei Zhao, Zhihao Shi and Minqi Shi

Reference-based verifiers are important for evaluating reasoning models and providing accurate outcome rewards in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. To improve verification accuracy, prior work has explored rule-based, model-based, and tool-augmented verifiers for checking answer equivalence across diverse answer forms. However, the equivalence of answer forms such as $1+3.14$ and $1+\pi$ may depend on the question and scoring criterion. We frame such implicit assumptions as verifier inductive biases. To address this challenge, we propose AutoVerifier, a residual-guided non-parametric optimization method that learns these biases from recurring verifier errors. Specifically, AutoVerifier records these biases in rule cards and promotes them to code modules or prompt guidance only after replay validation detects no direct regressions, keeping accepted updates auditable, editable, and reusable. Experiments on four verifier benchmarks demonstrate that AutoVerifier outperforms state-of-the-art verifiers by a large margin.
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Machine Learning

DCEO: Direct Causal Effect Optimization for Long-Term User Value Modeling in E-commerce Search

Junzhao Zhang, Tao Zhang, Liren Yu et al. (+4 more)

Industrial e-commerce search systems ultimately aim to optimize the user-level long-term objective, such as n-day cumulative purchases or gross merchandise value (GMV) per user. However, such objectives are defined at the user level, whereas search ranking is based on item-level scores within each request. Existing methods typically bridge this granularity gap through manually designed multi-objective fusion, where predictions of multiple item-level objectives, such as clicks, carts, purchases, and transaction value, are combined into a ranking score that serves as a proxy for the ultimate objective. Such hand-crafted fusion schemes rely on a small set of manually tuned weights, limiting fine-grained personalization and leading to suboptimal alignment with the ultimate objective. In this paper, we propose DCEO (Direct Causal Effect Optimization), a data-driven framework for learning item-level proxy scores that are better aligned with the ultimate objective. We first aggregate the item-level proxy scores into a user-level proxy metric and quantify its alignment with the ultimate objective using a relative causal effect. We then develop an actor-critic framework, where the critic estimates the ultimate objective for a given user-level proxy metric, and the actor dynamically generates context-dependent fusion weights over multiple objectives to construct the item-level proxy scores and is trained to directly optimize the relative causal effect. Extensive offline experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of DCEO. In addition, DCEO has been deployed in a large-scale industrial e-commerce search system, outperforming the conventional GMV proxy by 0.36% in GMV in a 41-day online A/B test.
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All authors Junzhao Zhang, Tao Zhang, Liren Yu, Feiyi Dong, Zhixuan Zhang, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from q-bio.QM

Propensity Straight-Through Gradients for Discrete Stochastic Systems

Jose M. G. Vilar and Leonor Saiz

We introduce the propensity straight-through (PST) estimator for gradient-based learning through exact simulations of continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These models describe discrete stochastic dynamics across physics, chemistry, and biology, but their categorical event choices prevent ordinary differentiation. PST preserves exact forward trajectories and differentiates, in the backward pass, the normalized reaction propensities the simulator already computes. The affine state update makes this rule exact for the one-step conditional-mean sensitivity. We derive the per-step discrepancy for one-step sensitivities composed along nonlinear trajectories in closed form, show that it vanishes for affine downstream dependence, and bound it quadratically in the stoichiometric jump size. Across reversible dimerization, a genetic oscillator, a 50-task repressilator suite, and experimental patch-clamp recordings, PST recovers parameters to within 0.06-1.7% and converges 2.4-3.0-fold faster than the Gumbel-Softmax straight-through estimator at matched computational cost. At deep-learning scale, PST trains all 203,796 parameters of a stochastic reaction network using exact discrete events from initialization. By differentiating an exact conditional mean, PST eliminates reaction-selection temperature tuning and provides a scalable route to learning through exact stochastic dynamics.
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Computer Vision

SeVeR: Selective Visual Exposure and Retrieval for 3D Medical Image Question Answering

Yaojun Hu, Danyang Tu, Yang Liu et al. (+8 more)

Volumetric medical VQA requires reasoning over long and redundant 3D visual token sequences, especially in multi-sequence MRI where complementary modalities provide diverse diagnostic cues but expose the decoder to many repeated anatomical regions. To investigate reasoning under multi-sequence visual redundancy, we first introduce BreMRIs-VQA, a clinically curated breast MRI benchmark with 1.19M QA pairs from 71.0K sequences and 12.9K patients, covering both free-text and multiple-choice questions. We further propose SeVeR, a selective visual exposure framework that compresses dense volumes into modality-wise prototypes and retrieves complementary multi-level evidence with change-aware gated attention during decoding, trained with a marginal-utility self-consistency objective that suppresses unhelpful retrieval. Experiments on BreMRIs-VQA and public benchmarks show that SeVeR improves both discriminative and generative performance while exposing substantially fewer visual tokens.
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All authors Yaojun Hu, Danyang Tu, Yang Liu, Jiajin Zhang, Wei Fang, Zhiqiang Liu, Chunlai Dong, Yingda Xia, Haochao Ying, Jian Wu, Ling Zhang

Information Retrieval

RetrievalRouter: Joint Modality and Architecture Selection for Document Retrieval

Emre Kuru, Mehmet Onur Keskin, Reza Farahbakhsh et al. (+1 more)

Document retrieval increasingly supports high-stakes information access in finance, healthcare, and law. Modern retrieval pipelines vary both in modality (text or multimodal) and in retrieval architecture (dense or late-interaction). These choices impose a hard compromise: the most effective pipelines are too slow and expensive to run at scale, while the fastest fail to retrieve evidence from complex documents. Practitioners must therefore choose between missed evidence and unusable latency, with no principled basis for adapting that choice at the query level. We show that this compromise is unnecessary. Not every query requires the same pipeline. Across benchmarks spanning financial and scientific corpora, no static pipeline dominates. We introduce RetrievalRouter, a lightweight query-aware router that learns, from the query text alone, which retrieval pipeline best fits each query. A single tunable parameter exposes the full accuracy-latency frontier, and for every static baseline, RetrievalRouter offers an operating point that is simultaneously more accurate and faster. Against the best static baseline, RetrievalRouter is 2.5% more accurate and 12.4 times faster. Furthermore, compared with prior adaptive strategy selection methods, RetrievalRouter achieves significantly higher nDCG@5 across accuracy-oriented settings, while matching or numerically outperforming them on both nDCG@5 and latency in latency-oriented settings. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/emrekuruu/retrieval-router.
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All authors Emre Kuru, Mehmet Onur Keskin, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi

Artificial Intelligence

Using profiles of cognitive capability to assess AI suitability for workplace tasks

Jonathan Prunty, Marko Tešić, Patrick Quinn et al. (+2 more)

Organisations deploying AI face a scoping problem: which tasks can be automated, which should remain with humans, and which are best shared between the two. Aggregate benchmark scores provide little insight into where systems will succeed or fail in practice, while human judgements of model capabilities quickly become outdated. We introduce a pipeline that profiles agents and tasks using a shared set of core cognitive capabilities. Cognitive capability profiling infers an agent's capabilities from performance on a benchmark battery annotated for the cognitive demands of each item. Task requirements weighting elicits from domain experts the relative importance of these same capabilities for their work. As both use a common set of cognitive dimensions, they can be updated independently as models and roles change, and combined to estimate AI suitability at the level of a domain, organisation, role, or individual duty. We validate capability recovery on synthetic agents, profile six AI systems, and elicit task requirements from 410 employees across six occupational domains. AI systems differed more across cognitive dimensions than across model families, while workplace activities converged on a shared cognitive core. The resulting scores provide a comparative scoping tool for identifying promising candidates for piloting and areas where current systems are unlikely to be well suited. We discuss extending the framework to profile human workers alongside AI systems, moving from AI suitability towards human-machine task allocation.
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All authors Jonathan Prunty, Marko Tešić, Patrick Quinn, José Hernández-Orallo, Lucy Cheke

Computer Vision

Plans You Can Check: Verifier-Grounded Learning of an Open-Weight Planner for Executable Video-Editing

Haoyu Wang, Cheng Feng, Liuyang Bian et al. (+5 more)

Practical video editing is not only pixel generation: an editor must turn a brief, a clip pool, music metadata, and hard constraints into an executable timeline. We study this decision layer as executable video-editing planning and introduce RefineCut, which, unlike workflow systems that wrap a prompted frontier model, trains a compact open-weight planner for it. The planner edits a typed timeline through structured patches covering clip selection, trimming, ordering, transitions, and duration and music alignment; a deterministic verifier applies each patch and checks it against an explicit constraint ledger. Because editing has no single ground-truth repair, we do not imitate teachers directly: RefineCut replays every multi-teacher branch through the verifier and keeps verifier-best repairs as supervision. A second stage, RefineCut-Evo, lets the student score its own repairs with the verifier and a task rubric and trains on high-margin preference pairs, so the final $8$B planner runs in a closed verifier loop with no teacher calls at inference. On RefineCut-Bench ($3{,}578$ tasks, $7{,}971$ captioned clips, $499$ music tracks, explicit ledgers), verifier-replayed distillation lifts the planner from $0.620$ to $0.858$ on the protocol-specific Video-Editing Score and RefineCut-Evo reaches $0.924$; the gain transfers to Llama-3.1-8B and GLM-4-9B, and in the same closed loop the $8$B planner matches or exceeds its frontier teachers. Code and RefineCut-Bench are publicly released; see the Data Availability statement.
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All authors Haoyu Wang, Cheng Feng, Liuyang Bian, Ruiyang Huang, Lei Wei, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Xiaoying Tang

Sound

Dissonance Spectrum explicitly models perceptual frequency interactions for better music understanding

Tianle Wang, Xinyi Tong, Liangke Zhao et al. (+7 more)

Conventional music representations describe acoustic energy over time and frequency but do not explicitly expose relations among simultaneous frequency components. We introduce the Dissonance Spectrum (DS), a nonnegative time–frequency representation that applies a tolerance-based rational pitch-relation kernel with logarithmic harmonic distance to a constant-Q spectrum and attributes aggregate pairwise interactions back to individual frequency bins. Controlled music-theory tests show strong ordinal agreement for intervals, harmonic-function connections, and church modes, and weaker but significant agreement across diverse chord voicings. DS is then encoded by a lightweight parallel branch whose zero-initialized residual projection preserves the baseline function at initialization. Across six paired training seeds in open-ended music question answering and categorical and dimensional music emotion recognition, DS obtains the highest mean on every reported endpoint relative to the unchanged baseline, a parameter-matched Gaussian-input branch, and an architecture-matched magnitude-CQT branch. These results support DS as an interpretable, complementary representation, while listener-specific perception and broader task coverage remain open problems.
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All authors Tianle Wang, Xinyi Tong, Liangke Zhao, Jishang Chen, Sirui Zhang, Haoxin Zhang, Xin Jin, Duo Xu, Xiaobing Li, Song-Chun Zhu

Computation and Language

AWM: Answerable Working Memory for Long-Document VQA Agents

Dongzhuoran Zhou, Yuqicheng Zhu, Yule Liu et al. (+5 more)

Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers. Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access. This creates a memory-quality blind spot: an agent may reach the right page and answer correctly while leaving behind memory too generic or incomplete to support answering once page context is removed. We introduce memory-only answerability, a diagnostic that asks whether a reader can answer from the question and terminal working memory alone. Building on this diagnostic, Answerable Working Memory (AWM) treats terminal working memory as an answerable evidence artifact, and AWM-GRPO incorporates this signal into the GRPO reward while preserving final-answer priority. Under GRPO, this reward assigns higher advantages to answer-correct trajectories whose terminal working memory remains answerable. On MMLongBench-Doc, even when gold evidence pages are provided, 42.5% of correct answers still cannot be answered from terminal working memory alone. AWM-GRPO improves final-answer accuracy over the RAG baseline by 8.1 and 11.9 points on MMLongBench-Doc and LongDocURL and reduces the memory-missing-correct rate by 2.7 points over answer-only GRPO.
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All authors Dongzhuoran Zhou, Yuqicheng Zhu, Yule Liu, Zhen Yang, Rui Lu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Evgeny Kharlamov

Robotics

Advantage-Driven Explicit Memory for Social Navigation

Yeonsoo Park, Mattia Racca, Guillaume Bono et al. (+4 more)

Robot policies are predominantly learned with classical parametric variants of imitation learning or RL, where training stores the agent's behavior exclusively in the policy's network parameters, putting a heavy burden on the representation learning algorithm. We propose a new navigation agent equipped with non-parametric memory which explicitly indexes prior steps leading to critical events. The advantages are twofold: first, it allows the policy to outsource some of its behavior into an explicit memory; second, it encourages a form of continual learning by allowing an agent to collect data from its testing episodes during deployment and therefore to better generalize to OOD situations. In the context of social navigation, we show that this improves the agent's capability to retain sparse, high-cost failures, such as human collisions. If the policy is trained in simulation, this also naturally addresses the sim-to-real gap, partially, by basing some of the decision making on real data. We integrate the explicit memory into a recurrent PPO architecture and use hidden states for memory retrieval to capture continuous spatiotemporal dynamics. The goal of exploiting rare, high-impact events is achieved by leveraging the RL agent's advantage signals. We train our agent in simulation with a combination of photorealistic rendering and non-visual crowd simulation and show that the agent is robust with respect to OOD social behavior.
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All authors Yeonsoo Park, Mattia Racca, Guillaume Bono, Steeven Janny, Gianluca Monaci, Tomi Silander, Christian Wolf

Computer Vision

On the Separation of Human and AI-Generated Images in CLIP Embedding Space

Andrea Asperti

We identify a previously unreported phenomenon in CLIP representations: human and AI-generated paintings spontaneously separate along the dominant principal directions of their joint embedding distribution, without any supervised objective designed to distinguish the two classes. Rather than exploiting this phenomenon for detection, our objective is to interpret it: we seek to identify the visual information underlying the separation and to trace it back from the embedding space to the image domain. We pursue this objective through a progressive investigation combining interpretable image representations with gradient-based inversion, used systematically as an experimental probe of the relationships identified in feature space. Robustness experiments and increasingly expressive statistical descriptors progressively rule out several intuitive explanations based on global image properties and simple local statistics, and point instead to distributed multiscale image structure. Multiscale scattering provides the most informative interpretable representation considered, but offers only a partial account of the phenomenon. Direct inversion provides a complementary and striking observation: substantial displacements along the dominant CLIP directions can be induced by image perturbations that remain nearly imperceptible to human observers, showing that the directions involved in the separation are highly sensitive to image variations with very low perceptual salience for humans. Taken together, these results reveal a significant difference between the visual evidence reflected in CLIP representations and that readily accessible to human perception, raising broader questions about the relationship between artificial and human vision and, ultimately, between artificial and human aesthetic judgment.
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Computer Vision

When Should a Network Emit Geometry, and When Should It Detect It? Readout, Reconciliation, and Representation in Floorplan Vectorization

He Zhang

A network trained to recover the walls, openings, and rooms of a rasterized floorplan can produce its output in two ways: by emitting the geometry as an autoregressive coordinate sequence, or by detecting it on dense junction and centerline heatmaps and assembling a graph. We compare the two readouts on the same trained network. On real scans (CubiCasa5K) detection is better on every wall measure (+2.7 wall F1 at tolerance 0.05, +5.1 at 0.015; paired bootstrap intervals exclude zero), and reading an opening heatmap the decoder never used raises opening F1 by 2.6x without retraining. Within real scans the readout's advantage grows with plan size and reverses on small plans; on clean vector renders sequence decoding is better by 5 to 8 points where its training covered the render style, while under full domain shift the readout, given calibrated thresholds, stays ahead; neither ink density nor plan size explains the reversal. With matched data and recipe, a room-centric system with a reconciliation step and a wall-first sequence model reach comparable wall quality, so the output representation matters less than is usually assumed. A prior from the other family helps at the output but not at the input: deterministic fusion of the two outputs raises wall F1 by 7 points, whereas conditioning one model on the other's output gives no gain in three forms, including two ground-truth-content controls. We also provide an edit-cost metric that scores a draft by the human work needed to correct it, corrected CubiCasa5K annotations, and ResPlan-FP, a CC BY 4.0 benchmark of 16,998 plans with frozen splits and three baseline tracks. Code, the benchmark, and the corrected annotations are available at https://github.com/Cyprinus12138/fpvec-lab
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Computation and Language

From Specialization to Generalization: Instruction-tuned LLMs for Robust Harmful Content Mitigation

Lukas Edman, Daryna Dementieva and Alexander Fraser

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of general NLP tasks; however, their effectiveness in sensitive domains, such as hate speech detection, remains less clear. Prior studies comparing prompted LLMs with state-of-the-art encoder-based models (e.g., BERT variants (Roy et al., 2023; Dönmez et al., 2024)) have shown only marginal gains, suggesting that LLMs may not excel in hate speech detection or mitigation. In this work, we revisit this question through the lens of instruction tuning. By thoroughly unifying 36 English hate speech datasets spanning multiple labeling schemes, we fine-tune a generalist LLM, based on Qwen3 (Qwen Team, 2025), specifically for hate speech mitigation. Our results demonstrate not only state-of-the-art performance on in-domain benchmarks but also substantial improvements in cross-domain and cross-lingual generalization–areas where encoder-based specialist classifiers often struggle.
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Machine Learning

Frequency-aware forecasting for short-term typhoon gust prediction

Xuefei Wang, Tingyi Liu, Heng Zhang et al. (+2 more)

Accurate gust forecasting under typhoon conditions remains challenging due to the highly non-stationary and multi-scale characteristics of extreme wind fluctuations. Existing deep learning models often struggle to simultaneously capture long-term trends and rapid local variations, resulting in degraded performance during extreme events. We propose WDANet, a frequency-aware forecasting framework that integrates stationary wavelet decomposition, a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) strategy, and a dual-branch encoder-decoder architecture, enabling separate modeling of trend and fluctuation components. Taking the offshore regions of the Western Pacific in China as an example, we conduct fine-grid wind gust prediction research. The results demonstrate that WDANet shows advantages for short lead times under the experimental setting across a 24-h forecasting horizon and achieves higher prediction accuracy than ECMWF-HRES within the first 6 h. During extreme wind events, WDANet more accurately captures gust peaks and attains the best RMSE and MAE performance. These results highlight its potential for offshore wind power operation, disaster warning, and risk mitigation.
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All authors Xuefei Wang, Tingyi Liu, Heng Zhang, Lei Xu, Shengjun Zhang

Computer Vision

A Dual-Transformer for Multi-Camera View Recommendation

Josep Cabacas-Maso, Carles Ventura and Ismael Benito-Altamirano

Multi-camera systems are foundational to modern media production, and multi-camera editing is a critical task. This involves the proper selection of the appropriate camera view at each moment. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Transformer architecture with Cross-Attention that heavily outperformed the current SOTA models over the TVMCE dataset (TV Shows Multicamera Editing dataset). Our model decouples these tasks: (1) a dedicated temporal encoder first processes the sequence of past frames to build a rich memory of the recent history, and (2) the candidate camera views then act as queries to this memory via a cross-attention module, allowing each candidate to independently interrogate the historical context and find the most relevant information for its own evaluation. Our approach achieved 56.60% Precision@0.5, representing a substantial improvement over the prior best result of 37.16%. We further conducted an ablation study exploring the use of lightweight backbone architectures, where the SwinV2 backbone yielded the best performance, achieving 69.65% Precision@0.5. Using this best-performing configuration, we then investigated the feasibility of adapting the model to replicate the editing style of a specific human editor. To this end, we fine-tuned the model using varying proportions of the initial segment of a target video. Our results demonstrate that even with only 20% of the video used for fine-tuning, the model exhibited measurable improvements in Precision@0.5, indicating strong potential for data-efficient personalization of editing style adapted to each individual TV show or producer.
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