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Computer Science

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Tuesday 1 September

Machine Learning

HarmoCore: Functional Latent Diffusion for Sparse Reconstruction of Oscillatory Wave Fields

Reconstructing oscillatory wave fields from scattered sensors is a severely underdetermined inverse problem. Beyond the challenges of general physical-field reconstruction, wave responses are complex-valued, frequency-sensitive, and highly oscillatory, while costly simulation and sensing often leave only extreme-sparse observations. Existing low-rank, operator, and diffusion approaches are largely designed for real-valued, smoother fields; dense pixel-space diffusion is particularly inefficient for oscillatory complex fields and difficult to scale to 3D. We propose HarmoCore, which places a generative prior in a compact, continuous, and structured wave-field latent. HarmoCore represents joint real–imaginary channels with Functional Tucker cores over shared continuous spatial bases, learns a frequency-conditioned core diffusion prior, and performs Diffusion Posterior Sampling directly in core space. At fixed sensor coordinates, the multilinear decoder induces an explicit likelihood guidance operator, avoiding dense pixel-space correction. Optional target-equation residual guidance further promotes physical consistency. Experiments on 2D Helmholtz, 2D synthetic wave fields, and 3D Helmholtz show substantial gains under 1%–2% sensing while remaining practical in three dimensions.
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All authors Lihao Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Panqi Chen, Lei Cheng, Ting Zhang, Jianlong Li, Shikai Fang

Formal Languages and Automata

Two-State Max-Plus Comparison Is Decidable

Daviaud, Guillon, and Merlet proved that comparison of max-plus automata is undecidable under a fixed state bound of 553 and explicitly left the range from 2 to 552 states open. We resolve the two-state endpoint. More strongly, given an arbitrary finite max-plus automaton $A$ and a max-plus automaton $B$ with at most two states, it is decidable whether $[\![A]\!](w)\leq [\![B]\!](w)$ for every word $w$. The structural reason is a one-dimensional projective normal form for two-state dynamics. Outside an effective bounded region, a transition has one of three tail behaviors: it propagates the unbounded projective gap with gap-independent height increment, forgets the gap with gap-independent height increment, or reads the gap magnitude into the height increment and then forgets it. In particular, any transition whose output depends on the unbounded gap necessarily destroys that gap. This yields an exact one-counter realization of $B$. Effective semilinearity of context-free Parikh images then reduces comparison to Presburger arithmetic. As a consequence, two-state max-plus comparison, equivalence, and positivity are decidable.
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Robotics

ADAPT: Agile Diffusion Action Priors for Robust and Steerable Online Text-Driven Humanoid Control

We present ADAPT, an end-to-end framework for interactive, text-conditioned humanoid whole-body control. Unlike dominant text-to-motion pipelines that generate kinematic motions for a separate tracker, ADAPT solves language control with an end-to-end closed-loop control framework, where the robot must continuously respond to changing commands while maintaining balance, natural motion, and smooth transitions. ADAPT learns a diffusion-based action prior from text-labeled humanoid state-action trajectories, enabling diverse motion skills to be directly executed from language commands. To improve long-horizon robustness and smooth prompt switching, we train a lightweight residual reinforcement learning policy on top of the frozen diffusion controller. We further show that the same diffusion policy can be reused as a steerable text-conditioned motion prior for downstream task adaptation. Experiments demonstrate robust language-grounded skill execution, smooth interactive transitions, and style-preserving downstream control.
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All authors Yan Wu, Chenhao Li, Kaifeng Zhao, Gen Li, Marco Hutter, Siyu Tang

Cryptography and Security

Automating Static Code Analysis Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration

In the contemporary landscape of software devel-opment, securing sensitive data is paramount to safeguarding organizational reputation, preventing financial losses, and pro-tecting individuals from identity theft. This paper addresses the pervasive challenge of identifying and rectifying security vulnerabilities early in the development process, emphasizing the role of Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools. While SAST tools play a crucial role in detecting vulnerabilities, widespread adoption has been hindered by usability issues, including high false positive rates and a lack of native pipeline support. This paper proposes a novel, generalized, and automated process for aggregating SAST tool outputs and integrating them into developers' familiar issue-tracking software. The process streamlines the identification and communication of security vulnerabilities during the development lifecycle, facilitating more efficient remediation efforts. We demonstrate the successful implementation of the proposed process with the SonarQube SAST tool in a GitLab-based development environment. Developers were positive about the structured implementation, real-time feedback, and proactive vulnerability management. However, despite some challenges such as a potential learning curve and tradeoffs between secure coding and workflow disruption, the overall positive impact on security awareness and responsiveness suggests that the proposed process holds promise in enhancing the security posture of software development practices
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Symbolic Computation · Cross-listed from math.AG

Deciding superellipticity and computing the Weierstrass normal form

Let \( \mathcal{S}_{g,n} \subset \mathcal{M}_g \) be the locus of curves of genus \( g \geq 2 \) admitting a model \( y^n = h(x) \) with \( h \) separable; such curves $C$ have a cyclic group \( C_n \leq \operatorname{Aut}(C) \) of order \( n \) with \( C/C_n \cong \mathbb{P}^1 \). % We give an algorithm which, given an absolutely irreducible plane model \( F(x,y) = 0 \) of a curve \( C \) over a field \( k_0 \) of characteristic zero, decides for which \( n \) the curve lies in \( \mathcal{S}_{g,n} \) and returns a model \( y^n = h(x) \) together with the birational transformation to it.
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Robotics

Behavior–Realization Separation for Constrained Physical Human–Robot Interaction

Physical human–robot interaction software often couples desired-behavior specification with constrained realization; we treat these as separate layers. A behavior layer supplies a desired contact-port acceleration $a_k^{\mathrm{id}}=f_\theta(e_k,\dot e_k,F_{h,k})$. A realization layer converts it into constrained robot commands and reports total desired-versus-realized acceleration error instead of hiding it in saturation. A same-objective unconstrained counterfactual separates regularization from constraint intervention, while plant data expose model error. This paper implements a receding-horizon quadratic program realizing memoryless affine behaviors. Changing the behavior modifies objective coefficients through $(C_\theta,G_\theta)$ while the robot-command variable and feasible set remain unchanged. A planar study instantiates impedance and admittance; the same running layer accepts an impedance–admittance–impedance reassignment without reconstruction, under its existing rate limit. On a torque-controlled 7-DOF Franka FR3 in MuJoCo, the runtime freezes task-space dynamics per solve and enforces torque feasibility across its horizon. Under a sustained 20~N push, it holds a slack-relaxed workspace boundary to within approximately 0.1–0.2~mm, versus 4.4~cm (impedance) and 4.7~cm (admittance) overshoot from instantaneous clipping. A derated actuator budget then activates the torque constraint: horizon-wide enforcement keeps its frozen-model plan feasible to $2.1\times10^{-4}$~N$\cdot$m, whereas a first-step-only ablation plans up to 11.329~N$\cdot$m beyond budget; on the executed nonlinear plant, where both share the same local-model error, the gap is smaller but still favors horizon-wide enforcement (0.161 vs.\ 0.380~N$\cdot$m). These results are a focused proof of behavior–realization separation.
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Information Retrieval

From Saliency to Discriminability: Rank-Preserving Visual Token Pruning for VLM Rerankers

Large vision-language models used as listwise rerankers must jointly process visual tokens from tens of candidates per query, making token pruning essential for practical deployment. Existing pruning methods retain tokens by attention saliency, yet we show that saliency is systematically misaligned with ranking contribution: visually prominent tokens often capture order-neutral patterns shared across candidates. This mismatch is layer-dependent: saliency becomes informative only where attention is concentrated, and normalized attention entropy diagnoses the reliability shift (Pearson r=0.87). We propose RaDiCal (Rank-Discriminative Calibration), a training-free framework that uses normalized attention entropy to decide when saliency can be trusted, fusing it with an attention-free rank-discriminative prior and selecting pruning layers from the same trust landscape. Across three retrieval benchmarks and multiple VLM architectures, RaDiCal matches Dense MRR@10 on Flickr30K and surpasses it on MSCOCO at a 20% token budget, ranks first among all pruning methods on FashionIQ, and holds within 1.2 pp on Flickr30K and MSCOCO at 10% retention. It cuts FLOPs by 39–45% and delivers 1.28–1.45$\times$ measured speedups across two VLM architectures without dataset-specific retuning.
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All authors Siyi Liu, Hanjun Yang, Chenchen Zhang, Xiaorong Zhu, Xinyu Zuo, Lisheng Duan, Haijin Liang, Jin Ma, Junfu Pu, Yongqi Zhang

Computer Vision

DGNet: Dual-knowledge Guided Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

InfRared Small Target Detection (IRSTD) is a prominent and challenging task in computer vision. In recent years, text-guided methods have significantly improved detection performance. However, they still suffer from two key limitations. First, a single text description simultaneously modeling both background and target leads to semantic entanglement, which contradicts the objective of background suppression and target enhancement. Second, reliance on image-specific textual prompts (requiring additional external models such as CLIP during inference) results in deployment constraints. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dual-knowledge Guided Network (DGNet) based on multiple generalizable texts. Specifically, we design a Prior-knowledge Wavelet Modulation (PWM) module, which leverages dual textual priors that separately characterize large-scale backgrounds and sparse targets to effectively disentangle and modulate entangled semantics in the frequency domain. Furthermore, we introduce a Consensus-knowledge Directional Alignment (CDA) loss, which models the initial state and the ideal target across samples as `complex background' and `bright target', respectively, thereby constructing a clear and unified directional optimization trajectory for the model. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of DGNet and the effectiveness of each component. The source code is available at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/MM26-DGNet.
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All authors Chenglong Yu, Mingzhu Xu, Jing Wang, Tongtong Wang, Pingping Miao, Liqiang Nie

Artificial Intelligence

Triple-Bottom-Line Sustainability of Language Models for Edge AI: A Comparison Between SLMs and Quantized LLMs

Edge-AI model selection is commonly driven by one isolated metric - accuracy, latency, memory, energy, or safety, even though a deployable language model must balance all five. Our work focuses on answering the question whether na- tively trained small language models (SLMs) or large language models (LLMs) compressed through post-training quantization offer the more sustainable edge- deployment trade-off. We introduce a reproducible Holistic Sustainability Score (HSS) organized around the triple bottom line: an economic pillar for capability and systems efficiency, an environmental pillar for operational GPU energy and a social pillar for harmful-prompt robustness. Five BF16 SLMs and five LLMs under different quantization approaches - BF16, INT8, NF4 4-bit, GPTQ 4-bit, and GGUF Q4 produce 30 measured configurations. Capability is assessed on five zero-shot benchmarks; efficiency uses latency, throughput, peak VRAM and energy; and safety is approximated by attack success rate on five harmful prompts. Qwen3-30B-A3B/GGUF Q4 ranks first in the combined pool (93.38), followed by Mistral-Small-24B/GGUF Q4 (92.40), while Phi-4-mini/BF16 is the highest- ranked SLM in that pool (89.49). Thus, the hypothesis that native SLMs must be the most sustainable edge choice is not supported universally; optimized quantized LLMs can win overall, while SLMs remain competitive through lower resource demand. Quantization is a systems-level choice rather than a monotonic precision- efficiency trade-off and HSS remains relative to its comparison pool and proxy definitions.
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Computer Vision

Separating perception from reasoning in vision-language models: a model-free render ceiling for crystal structures

Multimodal evaluations cannot say whether a vision-language model misread an image or misreasoned about it, because every existing method for separating the two places a second model in the loop. We introduce the render ceiling, a model-free reference for benchmarks built by rendering known objects: inverting the frozen cameras and re-solving cross-view correspondence recovers exactly the answer the images support. We prove the ceiling fails only through an enumerable set of projection coincidences and certify that set empty on 2,160 rendered crystal structures, so every point of a model's deficit belongs to the model. Across fourteen vision-language models, supplying exact geometry as text lifts every model yet closes under half the gap for thirteen, while a supervised vision model with no language component reads the same images at 0.8952, above every vision-language model. The instrument exposes extraction-stage fabrication that downstream accuracy would misattribute to reasoning, yields camera-placement rules for benchmark builders, and transfers to any benchmark with an invertible forward rendering.
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All authors Can Polat, Mustafa Kurban, Erchin Serpedin, Hasan Kurban

Artificial Intelligence

Drift-Aware LLM Routing with Sparse Contexts and Shared Budgets

A multi-model language service must route each request while preserving workload-level budgets for compute, latency, memory, or monetary cost. Two features make this problem materially harder than static model selection. Prompt representations are high dimensional, so only a small subset of embedding directions may predict the incremental value of a model, and both the request mix and the model frontier drift after launches, fine-tunes, quantization changes, and system updates. We formulate nonstationary sparse contextual routing with multiple knapsack constraints and an optional shadow-audit stream that evaluates a small fraction of prompts on several models. We propose Drift-Aware Sparse Routing (DRS). The policy estimates reward and resource use from a rolling audit window, routes using pessimistic reward and optimistic cost estimates, updates resource shadow prices online, and applies a hard meter before commitment. The analysis separates control from statistics. On any event with uniform prediction radii $\{\beta_t\}$, regret against a paced dynamic fluid benchmark is bounded by the sum of the radii, a capacity-buffer term, and an $O(\sqrt{T})$ pacing term. Under a sparse linear model and bounded drift $V_T$, rolling estimation gives \[ \widetilde O\left( T\sqrt{\frac{s}{\rho W}}+WV_T+\sqrt{T} \right), \] where $s$ is sparsity, $\rho$ is the audit rate, and $W$ is the window length. Optimizing $W$ yields the usual stationary $O(\sqrt{sT/\rho})$ rate when $V_T=0$ and a $O(T^{2/3}(s/\rho)^{1/3}V_T^{1/3})$ adaptation term under drift.
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Computer Vision

Do Satellites See Commuters? A Critical Benchmark of Vision Foundation Models

Satellite foundation models offer a globally available alternative to census data for commuting origin-destination (OD) generation, yet no study has systematically compared encoder paradigms within a single downstream pipeline. We ablate four satellite vision encoders: language-supervised (RemoteCLIP), self-supervised (DINOv3), and geographically grounded (SatCLIP, AlphaEarth) within an identical WeDAN graph diffusion framework across 1,925 US counties, 325 UK districts, and 14 global cities under five random seeds. Three main findings emerge. First, language-supervised features achieve the strongest in-distribution performance (RemoteCLIP CPC 0.602), while geographically grounded encoders transfer more reliably zero-shot: AlphaEarth improves CPC by 33% over RemoteCLIP on UK districts. Second, pretraining corpus scale alone is insufficient: DINOv3, trained on a substantially larger satellite corpus, underperforms RemoteCLIP by 0.091 CPC in-distribution and collapses to CPC 0.022 globally. Third, no encoder transfers usefully to global cities (best CPC 0.122 for RemoteCLIP, 0.022 for DINOv3), confirming cross-continental OD generation remains an open problem. We additionally clarify the semantics of the census noise parameter $\eta$, whose ordering reverses under cross-continental evaluation, a distinction critical to correctly interpreting prior results. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/satellites-see-commuters.
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Robotics

Fleets Need a Context Plane: Rethinking Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Drones

Cooperative perception allows a drone fleet to combine observations from multiple viewpoints. However, existing systems typically fix their feature-sharing policies at design time or adapt to only one context signal. This is a poor fit for aerial fleets, whose missions, bandwidth, formation geometry, and scene coverage can change during flight. We quantify the cost of context-blind sharing on UAV3D by controlling feature exchange at evaluation time using a released DiscoNet checkpoint, without retraining. Mission-aware sharing matches full-sharing accuracy while using only 5-10% of the bytes. The best tested peer selection policy changes with the byte budget, and choosing the wrong policy loses up to 7.7 AP. Moreover, under a constrained budget, two policies with the same full-scene accuracy differ by 5.9 AP within the mission region, showing that multiple context axes must be considered jointly. We therefore propose the context plane, a bounded, structured interface for runtime context. Each drone publishes a descriptor of at most 1 KB at 10 Hz, and lightweight, replaceable policies use the fleet context to decide what each drone computes, shares, and fuses. Existing sharing schemes become fixed policies within this interface. In our ROS 2 prototype on a Jetson AGX Orin, the context plane uses approximately 0.01% of the data-plane bandwidth, and each policy decision takes 0.10 ms. These results show that an explicit context interface can support low-overhead runtime adaptation without modifying or retraining the perception model.
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Computer Vision

Teaching Vision-Language Models to Use the Scale They Are Given: Label-Free Equivariance Training for Metric Physical Reasoning

Metric questions about video, such as the speed of a moving object, require a vision-language model to convert visual measurements into physical units using a real-world reference supplied in the prompt. We find that current models use this reference only partially. When every world-space quantity in the prompt is multiplied by a common factor, the prompt still describes the same video and the correct answer changes by exactly that factor, but the predictions of eight models change by less, and their accuracy stays concentrated near the scale that the depicted objects usually have. Asked the same physics in a scale-free form, the two models we test recover the closed-form scaling laws on most items, which indicates that the deficit lies in metric grounding and not in knowledge of the physical mechanism. Because the scaling relation is exact, it can serve as supervision without metric annotations. Equivariance Self-Distillation (EquiSD) projects a model's own prediction onto the functions that satisfy this relation and fine-tunes the model on the resulting targets, with one query per training question and no ground truth. Trained on synthetic video only, EquiSD brings a 3B model close to the exact relation on held-out simulated videos, also at scales not seen in training, and improves its accuracy across scales. Without adaptation, it also improves accuracy across scales on the QuantiPhy benchmark, where its gain reaches 93% of that obtained by supervision with exact simulator answers.
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All authors Kaizhen Tan, Yang Feng, Heqing Du, Siru Tao, Xin Xu, Hanzhe Hong

Computer Vision

Physically Plausible Video Generation via Visual-Semantic Chain-of-Events Conditioning

Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) seeks to synthesize videos consistent with physical principles, yet remains challenging due to underspecified natural language conditioning. Advanced chain-of-thought (CoT) frameworks augment prompts with physical knowledge. However, such prompts describe physical phenomena holistically, overlooking intermediate states and transition dynamics. In this paper, we reformulate PPVG as event-centric generation by representing physical evolution as a chain of causally connected and physically constrained events. Our framework comprises three key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes physical phenomena into causally connected events represented by evolving scene graphs. Formula-derived physical quantities are bound to relevant objects and interactions, characterizing the direction and magnitude of each event transition. (2) Transition-aware Routed Keyframe Conditioning. This module routes each event to a specialized keyframe synthesis operator for appearance variation or object transformation. Consecutive keyframes are injected as residual guidance during denoising, enabling smooth visual transitions between event-boundary states. (3) Physics-injected Contrastive Semantic Guidance. This module constructs physics-informed positive and counterfactual negative prompts for classifier-free guidance, steering generation toward plausible dynamics and away from physics-violating counterparts. Experiments on PhyGenBench, VideoPhy, PhyWorldBench, and Physics-IQ demonstrate that our framework generates videos with superior physical plausibility across diverse domains.
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All authors Zixuan Wang, Yixin Hu, Wen Li, Feng Chen, Yan Liu, Duo Peng, Yinjie Lei

Artificial Intelligence

SciTrue: Reliable Scientific Claim Validation with Frontier and Open Language Models at the NTCIR SciClaimEval Task

We describe the SciTrue team's participation in both subtasks of the NTCIR-19 SciClaimEval task~\cite{sciclaimeval}, which asks systems to verify scientific claims against the tables and figures of a paper. Rather than tuning a single model, we benchmark eleven frontier and open multimodal models under one honest, per-sample protocol and combine them with light, transparent post-processing. On the official, blind test leaderboard (Section~\ref{sec:results}), SciTrue placed first by a clear margin in three of the four evidence-category/subtask combinations, and tied for first on the primary metric in the fourth. Three findings explain the result. First, strong instruction-tuned models are already competitive: Claude Opus~4.8 and Gemma-4-31B each exceed the strongest public baseline (o4-mini), and GPT-5.5 and Claude Fable~5 lead both subtasks (97.7 on Subtask~2). Second, the task's pairing structure is the largest lever: a leak-free pair prior that recovers the Supported/Refuted pairing from the claim text alone (a visible field) and assigns Supported to the higher-confidence evidence raises Subtask-1 pair-accuracy from 72.2 to 93.5, far more than any model swap or ensemble weighting. Third, a case-by-case audit finds that most residual errors are visually-undetectable label-mapping swaps or dataset label noise, so measured accuracy understates the true ability and the fixable-by-modeling headroom is small. Controlled fine-tuning, distillation, and agentic consistency-checking support the same conclusions, and we document throughout a measurement leak—label information reaching a system through the packaging of the data rather than its content—in which the released file ordering encodes the label, including one instance that briefly misled our own pipeline.
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All authors Qiming Bao, Neşet Özkan Tan, Siyuan Wang, Mark Gahegan

Machine Learning

EEG-AS: Instance-Level Foundation Model Selection for EEG Foundation Models via Behavior Reconstruction

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique for measuring neural activity and has been widely used in neuroscience applications. Recent advances in EEG foundation models have enabled strong performance across diverse neural decoding tasks. However, no single foundation model consistently performs best across datasets or individual EEG instances, while instance-level model selection remains largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we formulate EEG foundation model selection as an instance-level Algorithm Selection (AS) problem. We propose EEG-AS, an instance-level algorithm selection framework that characterizes each EEG instance using inference-available latent EEG embeddings, handcrafted neurophysiological features, and an anchor foundation model. During training, EEG-AS learns to reconstruct unavailable foundation-model behaviors from privileged prediction tokens conditioned on an anchor foundation model, while during inference it estimates these behaviors without executing the entire model portfolio, enabling efficient selection from seven EEG foundation models. Experiments on seven public EEG benchmarks demonstrate that EEG-AS substantially narrows the gap between the Single Best Solver (SBS) and the oracle upper bound for each instance. These results highlight the effectiveness of instance-level AS for adaptive deployment of EEG foundation models.
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All authors Yunzhen Zhang, Ruoxi Piao, Muhammad Ibrahim Ali Shah, Hasan Onur Keles, Mustafa Misir

Artificial Intelligence

Self-Reports Are Not Verification: Environment-Grounded Auditing of LLM Operators in Evolutionary Search

Language model agents increasingly propose actions, observe external feedback, and explain their own behavior. Their confidence and rationales are convenient monitoring signals, but convenience is not verification. We introduce an environment-grounded audit in which every intermediate proposal receives an exact outcome. A language model operates an evolutionary Contexto search whose feedback function assigns every valid guess an exact rank without human annotation. Across 200 runs spanning five configurations and three model families, four reporting configurations produce 12,249 self-reports. We test three assumptions: stated confidence is calibrated, inherited rationales affect later proposals, and fitness-based selection improves report quality. All three fail. Operators overstate top-100 success by factors of 4.8 to 9.3, while calibration and discrimination dissociate across model families. Controlled interventions on 754 inherited rationales bound any measured benefit of the genuine rationale to roughly 250 ranks. Neither fitness-based nor random selection produces a detectable selection differential or parent-to-offspring transmission in report accuracy, despite sharply different search behavior. Agent self-reports should therefore be treated as claims to verify against the environment, not as evidence of their own reliability.
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Systems and Control

Strategic and Grid-Aware Maintenance Planning of Offshore Wind Farms

Wind turbines require regular maintenance and the resulting costs are a substantial component of a wind farm's cost of electricity production. As a result, there has been ongoing interest in improving wind turbine maintenance scheduling to find an optimal balance between maintenance costs and the risk of failure or unplanned repairs. What remains understudied is the opportunity for wind farms to schedule maintenance in the context of grid conditions and electricity market clearing. This paper contributes to closing this gap by modeling and studying wind farm maintenance planning in a grid and electricity market context. We also review current U.S. practice of wind farm maintenance scheduling, which motivates this paper and its models. Our focus is the derivation of a strategic maintenance planning problem, alongside an efficient solution approach, in which the wind farm operator aims to submit a derated wind farm capacity such that the resulting market clearing and electricity prices maximize its profit while ensuring that all required maintenance can be performed. We derive and study both deterministic and stochastic versions of the model, with the latter considering environmental and operational uncertainties. We conduct numerical experiments using the IEEE RTS 96-bus testbed with real-world offshore wind farm data and investigate the roles of farm and turbine size, as well as forecast quality. We observe an alignment between strategic and grid-serving maintenance planning and find that wind farms can improve their bottom line with low impact on system costs.
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Systems and Control

IMU-Aided Correction of Orientation-Induced Ranging Error in Bluetooth Channel Sounding on Commercial Hardware

Bluetooth Low Energy Channel Sounding (BLE CS), standardized in Bluetooth Core Specification 6.0 (September 2024), enables distance estimation via phase-based ranging (PBR) and round-trip time (RTT). Although prior work has studied CS accuracy in configurations with a fixed orientation, no published work has studied how device orientation affects ranging error on commercial hardware. We present the first study of orientation-induced CS ranging error and a Machine Learning correction using IMU features. This study used the EFR32xG24 Channel Sounding Development Kit, the only commercial CS platform with an integrated six-axis Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Our results show that device orientation has a substantial effect on CS ranging accuracy; we found that a Random Forest model trained on the IMU derived orientation achieved a 74.6% Mean Absolute Error (MAE) reduction under a Leave One Orientation Out Evaluation, demonstrating that IMU readings have potential to improve ranging accuracy.
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Computer Vision

You Cannot Photograph the Same Street Twice: Reliability Limits in Vision-Language Measurement of Urban Change

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to measure urban change from repeated street-level imagery, and the results are often mapped for individual sample points. Such maps assume that a perception score changes only if the street does. We test this assumption with repeated Google Street View captures of unchanged streets in five US cities and with controlled experiments that hold the photograph, scene or camera fixed. Re-photographing an unchanged street shifts its perception score by two-thirds of the average difference between two streets in the same city. Much of this shift arises in the scoring and averages out over question orders; the rest comes from the photographs and is not predicted by image statistics of weather and light. A single image measures a place moderately well, but the change at one location barely separates redeveloped from unchanged streets. All models tested score degraded images as worse-looking streets, and in crowdsourced imagery camera differences cause false reports of physical change unless both images are rendered through a common virtual camera. After aggregation, redeveloped streets are scored as wealthier and better maintained, with more enclosure and less greenery. Streets photographed in the same capture campaign share part of their error, which averaging within a district does not remove. For urban research and planning, VLM perception scores can support comparisons between groups of streets, such as redeveloped and unchanged streets photographed in the same campaigns, but not the identification of individual streets that improved or declined.
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Robotics

Human-robot conversation with multiple participants in noisy public spaces

For noisy real-world environments such as those in open public spaces, spoken dialogue systems for both autonomous robots and avatars should be carefully designed to provide enhanced speech signals. These signals can be used either for speech recognition or, in the case of an avatar system, transmitted as clean speech to a remote operator. This work proposes an audio system that can be used for both these scenarios and was demonstrated as a proof-of-concept at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka. The first scenario is an attentive listening system with the android ERICA, and the second is a conversation support system with mobile Teleco robots, with one of them acting as an avatar for a remote operator. Both systems feature multi-party conversation and use a single multi-channel microphone array. We describe how our audio system not only enhances the speech of multiple speakers in a noisy environment, but provides a form of spatial audio which allows for more immersiveness in avatar-based conversational interactions.
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All authors Divesh Lala, Yogeeswaran Muthukumaran, Vincent Fernandes, Kazushi Kato, Shota Fujiki, Zihao Chi, Masaya Iwasaki, Taiken Shintani, Megumi Kawata, Kazuki Sakai, Koji Inoue, Yuicihiro Yoshikawa, Tatsuya Kawahara

Machine Learning

DK-GBMKKM: Dynamic Kernel-Space Granular-Ball Multiple Kernel $k$-Means Clustering

Multiple kernel $k$-means integrates complementary nonlinear similarities by learning a combination of base kernels. Its pointwise optimization, however, is sensitive to noisy and boundary samples and repeatedly operates on sample-scale kernel matrices. Granular-ball representations organize local sample groups into mesoscopic units, but granular balls generated once in the input space may be inconsistent with the fused-kernel geometry that evolves during multiple kernel learning. We propose dynamic kernel-space granular-ball multiple kernel $k$-means (DK-GBMKKM). The method generates granular balls in the current fused kernel space and alternates kernel-weight learning with granular-ball membership updates, allowing the representation to adapt to changes in the fused-kernel geometry. A sample-size-weighted granular-ball kernel is further constructed to preserve the contributions of balls of different sizes, and its positive semidefiniteness and related equivalence properties are established. Experiments on 12 public datasets demonstrate the strong overall clustering performance of DK-GBMKKM. The code has been open-sourced for reproducibility: https://github.com/lianxiaoyu724/DK-GBMKKM.
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All authors Xiaoyu Lian, Yuchao Zhang, Shuyin Xia, Siqi Zhong, Xuzhao Xiang

Artificial Intelligence

DramaChain Bench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Short-Drama Generation

Commercial short-drama production follows a multi-stage chain: script, storyboard, keyframe imagery, shot-level video, and the finished short drama. Most existing benchmarks evaluate solely the video-generation stage using pre-authored inputs instead of real upstream pipeline outputs. This leaves two critical questions unanswerable: whether each stage adheres to the original script intent (rather than only its immediate input prompt), and whether disparate shots remain coherent after assembly into multi-episode releases. We present DramaChain Bench, the first short-drama benchmark that evaluates every stage of the complete production chain. It is built upon three in-house systems sharing one dimension system, DramaChain Dimensions: five evaluation axes instantiated at every stage, resolving into 63 leaf dimensions. DramaChain Agent is calibrated against commercial short-drama platforms in both workflow and finished short-drama quality, enabling stage-wise fair comparison across models. DramaChain Labeling System has each of the 5,785 items scored independently by three professional annotators, with all defects spatio-temporally localised and selected from a predefined defect list. This process produces 17,488 valid scores and 255,925 traceable attribution records. The human annotations confirm that upstream defects cascade across the pipeline, demonstrating that final episode quality is not governed by video generation alone. DramaChain Agentic Judge then scores every leaf dimension automatically, gathering evidence over multiple agentic rounds before judging against a per-item checklist; it reproduces the model ranking at a mean PLCC of 0.918, enough to admit new models at no annotation cost.
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All authors Haoyuan Shi, Mingtao Chen, Shuo Jiang, Ziyan Chen, Xuyi Sheng, Yiming Liu, Ying Zhang, Miao Wang, Jianxiang Lu, Fanyang Lu, Songyuanyi Lu, Xiele Wu, Zhichao Hu, Yuhong Liu, Richeng Xuan

Computational Engineering · Cross-listed from math.OC

Disciplined Bilevel Programming

Bilevel optimization provides a natural modeling language for hierarchical decision problems. However, applying existing numerical solvers usually requires substantial manual analysis and reformulation. In this paper, we introduce disciplined bilevel programming (DBLP), a symbolic framework that allows users to specify and solve optimistic bilevel problems in a high-level, human-readable way that is close to the mathematical formulation. For problems with a disciplined nonlinear upper problem and a convex lower problem satisfying the disciplined parameterized programming rules, DBLP automatically canonicalizes the lower problem into conic form and constructs an equivalent single-level reformulation using the conic Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. We relax the resulting complementarity constraint and use a gap continuation procedure to approximately solve a sequence of smooth nonlinear problems. We implement DBLP in the open-source Python package BLVPY, an extension of CVXPY for bilevel programming. We demonstrate the modeling and solution capabilities of BLVPY on a range of bilevel optimization problems from several application domains. The proposed framework and implementation allow users to specify and solve bilevel optimization problems within a few lines of code, without prior expertise in bilevel modeling and numerical optimization.
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Artificial Intelligence

REVISE: Validity-Guided Recovery for Online Revisions in Agent Workflows

Agent revisions expose a fundamental correctness–efficiency trade-off during concurrent execution. Discarding ongoing work preserves latest-version correctness but wastes progress that may remain valid, whereas reusing prior work preserves efficiency but risks propagating stale state into outputs and tool effects. Existing recovery strategies resolve this trade-off in an imbalanced way with coarse-grained policies: they either favor efficiency by allowing potentially stale work to continue, or favor correctness by restarting the workflow or recomputing a linear suffix from the earliest conflict, thereby discarding unaffected progress. We present Revise, a validity-guided runtime for fine-grained recovery in structured agent workflows. When a revision arrives, Revise first intersects its delta with recorded data and control dependencies and propagates the resulting impact through the partially executed DAG to identify affected work. It then stops invalid work, preserves validity-established progress beyond the earliest conflict, and recomputes only the affected region. Incomplete provenance conservatively expands recovery, while reused results are revalidated before commit. Analysis of real coding-agent traces show online recovery opportunities: 118 sessions retain observable work before a queued later message is delivered; across 167 overlapping assistant responses, enqueue-to-completion overlap reaches 56.55~s at p95. Across 300 challenging revision/commit executions, Revise matches a latest-version oracle with no stale outputs or effects. On unmodified LangGraph and LLMCompiler applications using Qwen3-14B, it reduces model calls by 40.6–56.0% relative to full restart and by 31.3–43.6% relative to suffix recomputation. Under serving pressure, it further reduces revision-to-correct-completion tokens by 13.26% and improves SLO goodput by 3.07–5.43%.
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All authors Ruoling Qi, Xuaner Wu, Penghang Liu, Jian Chen, Yirui Liu

Robotics

AM-Bench: A Modular Simulation Suite and Benchmark for Aerial Manipulation Policy Learning

Standardized benchmarks have played a central role in advancing robot manipulation learning, yet most focus on ground-supported manipulation systems, which limits their applicability to dynamics-critical domains such as aerial manipulation (AM). AM presents distinct system-level challenges, including environmental disturbances, coupled dynamics between the manipulator and floating base, and constrained degrees of freedom. Consequently, task performance depends jointly on robot embodiment, low-level control, and high-level policy design. We introduce AM-Bench, a modular simulation suite and benchmark for multirotor-based AM policy learning. AM-Bench includes representative embodiments spanning underactuated, fully actuated, and overactuated systems, 12 tasks across contact, transport, and constrained interaction, configurable aerodynamic disturbances and actuator saturation, standard low-level controllers, and baseline policy-learning algorithms. Unlike prior manipulation benchmarks that primarily emphasize end-to-end policy performance, AM-Bench enables system-level evaluation of how embodiment, control, disturbances, and policy choices interact. We demonstrate its diagnostic value through three simulation studies spanning high-level policies, policy–control interfaces, and embodiments, together with real-world validation of modeled effects and a hardware test of the learning pipeline.
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All authors Yutong Wang, Dongjae Lee, Xiaofeng Guo, Yuanzhu Zhan, Yufei Jiang, Bavin Saravanan, Muqing Cao, Jia Xie, Chenyang Mao, Sebastian Scherer, Junyi Geng, Guanya Shi

Sound

TUTTI: Toward generalizable audio-to-score transcription via fully synthesized data

Generalizable Audio-to-Score (A2S) transcription is fundamentally constrained by the severe scarcity of high-quality, real-world paired data. Relying solely on existing human-annotated datasets often restricts the generalization of A2S models, limiting their efficacy primarily to single-instrumentation domains. To break this dependency on scarce real-world data, we introduce TUTTI (Transformer for Unified audio-To-score Transcription trained on Synthetic multi-Instrumentation Data), a pre-training paradigm driven by a purely synthetic, large-scale dataset. Rather than using human-composed scores, we leverage a symbolic music generation model to generate a massive, highly scalable multi-instrumentation corpus and create audio-score pairs with expressive acoustic characteristics. Capitalizing on the generated data, we employ a standard Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. We empirically demonstrate that pre-training a unified attention-based model on generated, multi-instrumentation data yields a consistently stronger foundational representation than single-instrumentation training. When fine-tuned with downstream real-world datasets, TUTTI outperforms previous approaches, establishing new overall state-of-the-art results across various A2S baselines. Notably, TUTTI shows remarkable cross-instrument transferability, effectively adapting to unseen instruments with highly competitive performance. The source code and the TuttiCorpus dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/a-musiclover/TUTTI.
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All authors Jianhuai Hu, Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu, Zhancheng Guo, Shijie Liang, Wuna Meng, Chuanqi Yang, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun

Information Retrieval

It Takes Two to Match: Co-Evolving Generative Retriever with Reinforcement Learning

Retrieval is the first stage of modern search and advertising systems, selecting a candidate set from a large item universe for downstream ranking and auction. Recent work increasingly leverages LLMs to improve retrieval through query expansion, data synthesis, and retrieval-feedback training. However, the generative component is typically used for query-side augmentation, while final matching is still delegated to a downstream retriever. We introduce CoGR, a retrieval framework that instead trains LLMs to directly construct retrieval representations on both query and item sides. Each generator produces a compact set of keywords, which are matched directly through an inverted index, preserving compatibility with existing keyword-based retrieval infrastructure. CoGR uses a two-stage training pipeline. Supervised fine-tuning first establishes an aligned keyword space, after which co-evolving reinforcement learning alternately optimizes the query- and item-side generators with GRPO against the opposite side's frozen index. Both sides optimize the same query-to-item retrieval $F_1$ objective: the query side receives retrieval $F_1$ directly, while the item side receives a counterfactual marginal reward measuring the change in query-side $F_1$ caused by its generated keywords. Across 10 representative sparse, dense, and generative baselines, CoGR achieves the best performance on both an internal APP Marketplace dataset and the public WANDS benchmark, improving $F_1$ over the strongest baseline by $10.9\%$ and $36.1\%$, respectively. Further analysis shows stable co-evolution and increasingly aligned query–item keyword spaces over training.
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All authors Runpeng Dai, Kaili Huang, Changsung Kang, Ciya Liao

Computer Vision

Beyond Landmark Extraction: A Framework for Robust Geometric Feature Evaluation in Structured Image Classification

Much of the literature on structured image recognition has disproportionately focused on the comparison of classification algorithms. Rather than investigating which classifier performs best, this paper instead asks: what should a classifier know before it ever makes a prediction? In structured vision problems such as gesture recognition, facial expression categorization, and medical image analysis, discriminative information lies less in individual pixels and more in spatial relationships between semantic parts. Raw pixel spaces are high-dimensional, sensitive to nuisance variation, and often obfuscate the geometric structures that make visual tasks interpretable. Landmark extraction provides one form of dimension reduction, but it does not by itself determine the information preserved. This paper studies the post-landmark feature map as the central object of analysis and proposes a systematic framework for constructing and interpreting landmark-derived representations as an, informed, feature-based "dimension reduction" step. Using static hand gesture recognition as a case study, we evaluate coordinate, distance, angle, and hybrid representations through perturbation and ablation experiments. The results show that visually variable data exposes substantial gaps between raw coordinate features and their geometrically invariant counterparts, while hybrid representations achieve the strongest overall performance by combining complementary geometric components. These findings frame feature construction as a fundamental modeling decision and ultimately suggests that the question of what representation should a classifier learn from is one worth asking. The code used for feature construction and evaluation is available at https://github.com/ShivMaureeCWRU/Feature_based_dimension_reduction
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