Computer Vision
Papers
Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.
Tuesday 6 October
We adapt Stevens's power law to measure the implicit ability of AI models to read visualizations, which can reveal the built-in perceptual mechanisms of algorithmic models. In our pilot study, AIs see no legend. In the color conditions, no colormap name is provided either. GPT-5.5 first views a reference visual representation and estimates its magnitude, then estimates the magnitude of each subsequent image of the same representation relative to that reference. Our evaluation of twelve visual variables makes how algorithmic models read visual encodings measurable, comparable with human perception, and more transparent to humans.
Artificial Intelligence
Transect: Retaining Observability for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Evaluations
Frontier AI evaluations increasingly use open-ended, agentic, long-horizon tasks whose transcripts can span hundreds of pages of outputs and actions from complex multi-agent networks. The observability envelop-the range of what evaluators can reliably infer about an agent's behaviours-is therefore narrowing. Language model assistants can help classify and interpret agent behaviour but also afford human evaluators significant analytical degrees of freedom, threatening the reproducibility and auditability of language-model-based transcript analysis. Transect is an open source package built on Inspect Scout to help evaluators understand how a long agent run unfolded, identify behaviour worth investigating, and check interpretations against the transcript. Users specify task context and behavioural vocabulary in a reusable evaluation-family configuration, with judge models and analysis settings supplied separately. Transect's navigable reports align recorded events, token use, sub-agent activity, and model-generated behavioural labels on a common turn-based timeline. Reviewers can quickly grasp a run's narrative, trace any label or event to its source turns, and export the underlying data tables for cross-run analysis. We demonstrate the workflow on an AI R&D evaluation that generated almost 13 million tokens, dividing the agents' work into behavioural phases aligned with research-skill classifications, sub-agent delegations and interactions, and token use. The combined view shows a focus on operational work and manuscript production, with little evidence of a sustained hypothesis generation stage-arguably a necessary component for high-quality scientific outputs. Transect's flexible, customisable transcript-analysis pipeline will enable evaluators to keep pace with longer, more complex, more frequent AI evaluations while supporting scientific rigour, transparency, and reproducibility.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
Explainable Failure Prediction and Prevention in Maritime
Maritime systems operate in highly dynamic environments where unexpected equipment failures can compromise safety, reliability, and operational efficiency. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, and predictive maintenance enable proactive failure prediction and prevention. However, ensuring trustworthy and explainable decision-making remains a major challenge in safety-critical maritime applications. This chapter reviews key AI technologies required for explainable failure prediction and prevention in maritime systems and presents a conceptual architecture capable of supporting autonomous or human-in-the-loop corrective actions. This architecture integrates data acquisition, time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, risk assessment, decision-making, and explainable AI into a closed-loop framework. With reference to the architectural components, a review and discussion of relevant maritime studies is performed, outlining their methods, advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, it highlights current challenges, including uncertainty and robustness, model generalization, explainability, limited availability of maritime datasets, and operational deployment, and identifies future research directions toward trustworthy AI-assisted maritime decision-making.
Read the full abstract
Logic in Computer Science
A First Introduction to Isabelle/ML Metaprogramming: Automatic Estimation of Polynomial Degrees
This article offers an introduction to metaprogramming in Isabelle/HOL for beginners, based on a running example for working with multivariate polynomials. The example is motivated by our formalisation of universal Diophantine pairs. We describe the implementation of the poly_degree command, which computes upper bounds on the total degrees of multivariate polynomials and automatically proves their correctness. The complete metaprogram handles a variety of special cases but herein we present a simplified version for the sake of exposition. We describe our development process and design decisions; our goal is to offer a small and self-contained tutorial on Isabelle/ML, for mathematicians who want to get started with metaprogramming.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Test-Time Adaptation of Quantized ViTs via Single-Pass Quantizer-Aligned Recalibration
Post-training quantization is a standard route to fitting vision transformers (ViTs) into edge compute and memory budgets, yet quantized models become especially brittle under distribution shift. Test-time adaptation (TTA) addresses such shifts without labels, but most existing approaches are poorly aligned with the constraints of quantized inference. Prevailing TTA methods recover accuracy through backpropagation, while backprop-free methods often still incur overhead from extra forward passes or parameter updates, and lightweight feature- or logit-level methods recover only part of the loss. Across these approaches, a quantization-specific failure mode that amplifies the drop is not directly targeted: under shift, activations occupy frozen quantizers' calibrated ranges differently, distorting their code distribution. We propose Quantizer-Aligned Recalibration (QuAR), a single-pass TTA method tailored to quantized ViTs that neither backpropagates nor updates any model parameters. QuAR recalibrates activations at the input to a frozen quantizer, mapping the test stream's running per-channel statistics back toward the source calibration. On ImageNet-C with ViT-B, QuAR achieves the highest mean accuracy among state-of-the-art backprop-free TTA methods at 3-, 4-, 6- and 8-bit weight/activation precision, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.28 points at 8 bits and 4.00 at 3 bits, with 46% lower latency and a memory overhead of only 0.17 MB (0.01% of peak inference memory). Analysis and diagnostics trace the gain to a reduced per-channel mismatch at these quantizers, which restores the code distribution the baselines leave unchanged or distort further. A single fixed configuration remains ahead across continual streams, non-i.i.d. label shift, seven out-of-distribution suites, and three other backbones.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Sensor Geometry as a Flow-Matching Prior for Multi-Channel Brain Signals
Flow-matching models start from an isotropic Gaussian source, the standard choice when the correlation structure of the data is unknown in advance. For multi-channel brain recordings, however, part of this structure is known in advance. Electrodes sit at fixed positions on the head, and volume conduction through the skull and scalp makes nearby electrodes co-vary in a way that is shared across subjects. Existing EEG generative models nonetheless leave the network to learn this from scratch. We put this structure into the source instead. From the sensor coordinates alone, we build a k-nearest-neighbor graph and take a graph-Matérn function of its Laplacian as the source covariance, so the flow starts from spatially coherent patterns rather than channel-independent noise. The change adds no learned parameters, works with any coupling and any drift network, and uses the same three hyperparameters on every dataset. Across eight EEG datasets and four flow-matching methods, the graph-Matérn source lowers the spectral discrepancy between generated and real signals in the five clinical bands (PSD-KL) on most datasets. PSD-KL falls by 12% to 17% in geometric mean over datasets depending on the method and by up to 40% on PhysioNet-MI, the densest montage. We show that the improvement stems from the spatial eigenvectors of the local graph of sensor positions, since randomizing the eigenvectors while preserving the eigenvalue spectrum eliminates the gain. Furthermore, a prior fitted directly to the empirical data covariance performs worse than isotropic noise. The same construction applies unchanged to MEG, intracranial EEG with patient-specific grids, and a traffic-sensor network, lowering PSD-KL for every method on each. https://jd730.github.io/projects/GraphPrior
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Uncertainty Quantification Is Indispensable for Reliable Connectome-Based Graph Learning: A Narrative Review and Case Study
While graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown substantial promise in connectome-based diagnostic classification, deterministic models inevitably suppress pipeline-induced noise and model ambiguities, yielding overconfident predictions. Although uncertainty quantification (UQ) is widely adopted in voxel-level segmentation, its role in connectomic graph learning remains largely unaddressed. This paper presents a comprehensive narrative review of UQ frameworks tailored to connectome graph learning alongside an empirical case study demonstrating the perils of uncalibrated predictions. We delineate sources of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty across neuroimaging pipelines and review prominent UQ paradigms, from Bayesian approximations and ensemble methods to evidential learning and conformal prediction. In our case study, a temporal Graph Attention Network (GAT) trained on dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) matrices from the SUDMEX CONN dataset achieves 80.0% diagnostic accuracy (F1 = 0.794) for Cocaine Use Disorder. However, a post-hoc uncertainty audit via Monte Carlo dropout reveals severe overconfidence (ECE = 0.127), with misclassified subjects assigned prediction confidences up to 95%. This empirical divergence between discrimination and calibration underscores the confidence paradox in deep connectomics. Our findings establish that rigorous UQ, calibration, and selective prediction mechanisms are indispensable for deploying trustworthy graph-based biomarkers in clinical neuroscience.
Read the full abstract
Networking
6G NeXt - Towards 6G Split Computing Network Applications: Use Cases and Architecture
The definition of the sixth generation mobile communication is in the full swing. Mobile communication aims for the convergence of physical, human and digital world. Research project 6G NeXt is considering two demanding use cases, holographic communications and drones anti-collision system, which set heterogeneous requirements on the communication as well as the computing infrastructure. In both use cases, the clients are widely spread in the network and are cooperatively interacting with each other. Especially for holographic communication, also high processing power is required. This makes a high-speed distributed backbone computing infrastructure, which realises the concept of split-computing, inevitable. Furthermore, tight integration between processing facilities and wireless network is required in order to provide adequate quality of service to the users. This paper illustrates the use case scenarios and their requirements. Afterwards, an appropriate solution approach to realise those is elaborated. Here, the novel technological approaches are discussed based on the developed overall communication and computing architecture.
Read the full abstract
Robotics
How Much Planning Is Enough? Reducing Search and Computation in World-Model Planning
Visual world models enable goal-directed control through decision-time action search, but their deployment efficiency is often limited by conservatively large planning budgets. We show that competitive task performance can be achieved without agreement with the Full-budget action, that sufficient budgets vary across model–task pairs, and that iterative planners repeatedly encode solve-invariant context. To address these inefficiencies, we propose {SufficientPlan}, a simple deployment framework that requires no modification to pretrained world models or planner updates. Its {Paired Sequential Budget Certification (PSBC)} component uses paired closed-loop evidence to search for and certify a reduced model–task-specific budget within a predefined Full-performance tolerance. Its {Static-Context Reuse (SCR)} component caches observation and goal representations across search iterations while preserving candidate-dependent planning and selected actions. Experiments across multiple world-model backbones and visual-control tasks show that SufficientPlan substantially reduces search budgets and planning latency while maintaining competitive control performance.
Read the full abstract
Information Theory
Optimal Conversion Bandwidth for MDS Convertible Codes in the Split Regime with $r^F<k^F<r^I$
Erasure codes are widely used in distributed storage systems to provide fault tolerance. An $[n,k]$ erasure code encodes $k$ data symbols into $n$ coded symbols and distributes them across $n$ storage nodes. Once the code parameters are fixed, the achievable fault tolerance is also fixed. However, the failure rates of storage nodes may vary over time, and dynamically adapting the code parameters to these variations can substantially reduce storage overhead. Motivated by this observation, Maturana and Rashmi introduced convertible codes, which allow an $[n^I,k^I]$ initial code with redundancy $r^I=n^I-k^I$ to be transformed into an $[n^F,k^F]$ final code with redundancy $r^F=n^F-k^F$, while preserving the required code properties. Convertible codes whose initial and final codes are both MDS codes are called MDS convertible codes. They are of particular interest because MDS codes provide the maximum erasure tolerance for a given amount of storage overhead. Several works have established lower bounds and constructions for the bandwidth cost of MDS convertible codes in the split regime. However, the tight bound in the parameter range $r^F<k^F<r^I$ remains unknown. In this work, we establish a family of new rank inequalities for stable MDS convertible codes with linear conversion procedures and derive an improved lower bound on the bandwidth cost consisting of three cases for this remaining range. We prove that the bound is tight by presenting three explicit constructions, one for each case.
Read the full abstract
Game Theory
Network Intervention by Polling Strategic Agents
A planner in a network of strategic agents faces three entangled challenges: the optimum depends on agents' private information, queried agents may misreport to steer the outcome, and exact computation does not scale. We study these challenges in multi-activity network games with heterogeneous private technologies, in which the planner sets non-discriminatory prices. We show that the optimal prices admit a centrality-based decomposition of the welfare kernel: each agent's contribution scales with its squared centrality in a network reweighted by agents' preferences across activities. This decomposition motivates Poll, a polling algorithm in which the planner samples one agent per round, walks briefly through the agent's neighborhood, and updates the price from a local report. From the same decomposition flow three forms of efficiency: computationally, Poll uses significantly fewer operations than exact computation and other distributed methods, requiring up to three orders of magnitude less communication on a real-world network with over 300,000 agents; statistically, its query complexity scales with topology and preference heterogeneity rather than explicitly with population size; and economically, it converges to welfare-maximizing prices while admitting behavior-specific implementations that induce truthful reports and detect adversarial deviations.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
PolarScale: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Radiometrically Consistent RGB-to-Stokes Estimation
Polarization imaging provides physical cues beyond intensity imaging but typically requires specialized hardware. Recent methods infer polarization from RGB-like inputs, yet predict only normalized Stokes components or relative descriptors, from which the radiometric scale needed for full Stokes reconstruction has been divided out. We introduce PolarScale, a benchmark that makes this scale an explicit prediction and evaluation target. Built on existing trichromatic full-Stokes measurements, PolarScale takes the per-scene normalized total-intensity image $s_0$ (a scene-referred linear image, not a consumer sRGB photograph) and asks models to predict normalized Stokes components, AoLP/DoLP/DoCP, and a per-scene scale. Because the scale is divided out of the input, it is not physically identifiable; PolarScale therefore evaluates dataset-conditioned semantic scale estimation against a constant-scale control, together with angular, self-consistency, and physical-bound metrics. Across seven restoration-based and generative backbones and three prediction strategies, the strongest restoration models estimate the scale with 3.6-4.3% mean relative error versus 5.7% for the constant control and violate physical bounds on fewer than 0.25% of pixels, whereas two generative baselines collapse to a near-zero scale; explicit descriptor supervision improves descriptor accuracy (23.66 vs. 18.88 dB PSNR for MAE). Predicted full-Stokes representations improve diffuse/specular separation, material segmentation, and glare classification, although in diffuse/specular separation the learned scale performs only on par with the constant control.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML
High-Dimensional Statistical Inference for Sparse Support Vector Machines
Using a replica-symmetric high-dimensional characterization, we develop an inferential framework for sparse support vector machines when the sample size and number of features grow proportionally. The main challenge is the nonsmooth hinge loss, which prevents direct application of debiasing arguments developed for smooth classification losses. We overcome this difficulty by representing the $L_1$-penalized support vector machine (SVM) as a linear program and identifying the hinge-loss subgradient through its dual variables. This yields a computationally accessible debiased estimator whose coordinates are asymptotically Gaussian under the proportional asymptotic regime. The resulting distributional characterization provides confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for individual features and enables false-discovery-rate-controlled variable selection. Extensive simulations examine calibration, power, and variable-selection performance under a range of covariance structures, including strongly correlated designs. An analysis of high-dimensional breast cancer gene-expression data illustrates how the proposed inference can distinguish statistically significant features from variables selected by the original sparse SVM.
Read the full abstract
Robotics
Proactive Robot Assistance via Event-Driven Reasoning over State Changes
Assistance in collaborative manipulation is often initiated by user instructions, making high-level reasoning request-driven. In fluent human teamwork, however, partners often infer the next helpful step from the observed outcome of an action rather than waiting for instructions. Motivated by this, we investigate an event-driven formulation of proactive assistance, where human–object interaction outcomes initiate assistive reasoning without user-provided task specifications at inference time. To this end, we propose an event-driven framework that monitors workspace state changes with an event monitor and, upon event completion, extracts stabilized pre/post snapshots that characterize the resulting state transition. A frozen pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) then uses its semantic priors to infer the task context, decide whether assistance is appropriate, and, when needed, generate a sequence of assistive actions from the observed transition. To make outputs executable and verifiable, we restrict actions to a set of action primitives and reference objects via integer IDs. We evaluate the same framework across three distinct real world tabletop collaboration tasks without task-specific training or fine-tuning. The event-driven framework achieves performance comparable to variants given user instructions.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
DIPrune: Task-Aware Token Pruning with Dual Importance for Efficient Multimodal Language Models
Recent training-free pruning approaches for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) effectively cut computational overhead by exploiting visual redundancy or text-vision attention. However, they frequently suffer from semantic degradation due to their task-agnostic design or unreliable attention estimates. Based on our empirical analysis, we have found that this issue arises because salient tokens in shallow layers persistently suppress emerging semantic ones through numerical inertia, leading to premature discarding of signals crucial for deep reasoning. To address the aforementioned issue, from the task-oriented aspects, we first reformulate training-free pruning as a minimization of the distortion in the final task loss and derive a tractable, token-wise upper bound to serve as a surrogate objective. Specifically, this formulation inherently reveals a previously neglected inter-layer term that accounts for gradients across layers. Accordingly, for the implementation, we propose DIPrune, a rank-based framework that employs a dual importance scoring mechanism to jointly optimize intra-layer static feature saliency and inter-layer dynamic semantic evolution. Extensive experiments on LLaVA and Qwen-VL demonstrate that DIPrune consistently achieves state-of-the-art results.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Digital Twin-Driven Real2Sim2Real: Simulator-Conditioned Generation via Paired Driving-Scene Reconstruction
Camera-based 3D perception for autonomous driving relies heavily on large annotated datasets, and deploying such a system to a new target region typically requires data collection and annotation. Generative augmentation has been proposed to reduce this cost, but existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: label-conditioned methods consume the very annotations they aim to replace, while simulator-conditioned methods offer free annotations but lack visual grounding to specific real environments. This work investigates the extent to which a digital-twin-driven Real2Sim2Real pipeline (DT-R2S2R) can substitute for target-region real data. By reconstructing recorded driving clips inside a georeferenced digital twin (DT-R2S), we condition a diffusion model on geometrically aligned simulator renderings, establishing a digital twin-grounded Sim2Real model (DT-S2R). As a result, DT-S2R synthesizes photorealistic driving images given low-cost yet georeferenced simulator data across both reconstructed and novel simulator scenes within digital-twin coverage. The efficacy of generated data is verified on diverse 3D detectors. DETR3D, especially, reports 93.18% of mAP obtained by a target-region real-data oracle, without employing target images for detector training. Furthermore, simple co-training with existing out-of-target real data outperforms the oracle. Thus, DT-R2S2R can substantially reduce the cost of manual on-site data collection and annotation in digital twin-available districts, providing a practical foundation for scaling 3D perception.
Read the full abstract
Computational Geometry
Simulated Annealing for Antenna Placements
The 2026 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Cup posed the following geometric challenge: Given a set of simple, pair-wise disjoint polygons, compute $k$ antennas (points) on polygon boundaries, maximizing the number of polygons with at least a fraction $\tau$ of their perimeter visible from the antennas. Contestants had 24 hours to produce the best possible solutions. We describe an approach that separates geometric visibility preprocessing from a portfolio of incremental combinatorial searches. A construction pool provides initial solutions with antennas restricted to polygon vertices; simulated annealing explores one-for-one antenna swaps, complemented by exact discrete one-swap descent, ruin-and-recreate, and elite crossover. A secondary objective rewards progress toward the service threshold without overriding the primary score. Candidate antennas are later expanded to include points in polygon-edge interiors. Our submitted solutions cover between 261 and 16,273 buildings across the nine parameter combinations, and the team was invited to present as one of the top entries. The code is available at https://github.com/JacobusTheSecond/giscup.
Read the full abstract
Systems and Control
Machine Learning for German Redispatch Forecasting under Data Delays and Temporal Distribution Shift
Public redispatch records provide empirical data for grid congestion forecasting, but delayed reporting, zero-inflated distributions, and temporal shift present major modeling challenges. We assess the accuracy and reliability of probabilistic machine-learning forecasts using published German transmission records under experimentally imposed information-age constraints. The benchmark evaluates eight daily series of upward and downward intervention energy across four German transmission system operators from 2021 to 2024 (48,242 eligible records; 354 evaluation dates in 2024). We compare seasonal empirical, regularized autoregressive (ARX), quantile LightGBM, GRU, and Transformer models under a minimum seven-day target-latency constraint. Neural architectures use a zero-censored output head to accommodate exact-zero outcomes. Static, rolling, and adaptive delayed-feedback calibration are evaluated using normalized weighted interval score (nWIS), empirical coverage, and block-bootstrap inference. Raw LightGBM achieved nWIS 0.7952, outperforming ARX (1.0604) and the seasonal baseline (0.8739) by 25.0% and 9.0%, respectively (Holm-adjusted p<0.005). Rolling calibration improved LightGBM to nWIS 0.7767 versus 0.8251 for static calibration (p=0.0092), with 91.81% coverage for nominal 90% intervals. The zero-censored Transformer achieved nWIS 0.8161, with no significant difference from LightGBM (p=0.260). However, aggregate coverage concealed substantial undercoverage during high-volume interventions (61.91% coverage among above-threshold events). These results show that boosted-tree models with rolling calibration provide accurate probabilistic forecasts of aggregate redispatch volumes under target delays, while nominal aggregate validity does not ensure reliability during extreme congestion events.
Read the full abstract
Robotics
SC3BF: Shifted Collision Cone Control Barrier Function for Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
The collision cone used by velocity-space control barrier functions is conservative: it rejects every relative velocity aimed into an obstacle, however slow. We propose the shifted collision-cone CBF (SC3BF), which adds a state-dependent allowance to the cone condition, so the robot may approach the obstacle at a rate that grows with distance and with its own speed. SC3BF is enforced by an ordinary quadratic program, and its safe set is forward invariant under bounded inputs without a minimum forward speed or a clearance margin. We prove that a nonzero allowance preserving safety always exists, and derive one in closed form. Against three velocity-space baselines on a kinematic bicycle among up to $100$ moving obstacles, SC3BF reaches the goal more often and modifies the nominal input less than half as much.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Transferable Spatial Temporal Coherence Adversarial Attack on Black-Box Vision Language Models for Autonomous Driving
The rapid integration of Vision Language Models (VLMs) into sensitive systems introduces critical safety vulnerabilities that remain unexplored in exist studies. While adversarial attack robustness has been extensively studied for image-based models, the susceptibility of VLMs to temporally-aware adversarial attacks against video in driving context poses a distinct and under examined threat. In this paper, we introduce novel adversarial attack against video targeting VLM models used for autonomous driving scenes named Spatial Temporal Coherence Adversarial Attack (STCA). Our attack comprise from three stages: modalities expansion, Spatial attack, and STCA attack. In modalities expansion, we propose caption-guided frame selection method in order to ensure that adversarial perturbation target the most semantically significant frames. Secondly.In spatial attack, we craft effective perturbation and preserve high similarity. Then the perturbed video generated fed into STCA stage that disrupt cross-frame temporal coherence using motion guided mask. Our method operate under black box threat model against victim target VLMs, relying solely on transferability from white-box surrogate model.We conduct our experiments on the BDD100K and nuScenes autonomous driving datasets across three VLM models: Video LLaVA-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and Dolphin. Experimental results demonstrate spatial attack achieves an ASR with high SSIM. Our finding reveal that existing video language model, remain highly susceptible to adversarial attack in autonomous driving scenarios, underscoring the urgent need for robust defense for VLM models.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
MoF: Preference-Aware Mixture Modeling for Black-Box LLM Personalization
Proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet aligning their outputs with diverse user preferences remains challenging. Existing personalization approaches for black-box LLMs often rely on user-specific scoring heads, causing the number of personalized parameters to grow linearly with the number of users and requiring additional adaptation for unseen users. To address these limitations, we propose Mixture-of-Facets (MoF), a scalable personalization framework for black-box LLMs that models user preferences as compositions of shared latent preference facets rather than dedicated user-specific parameters. MoF performs personalization through history-conditioned routing over shared facet heads, enabling personalization for users unseen during training without additional parameter updates. Across diverse personalization tasks, MoF delivers stronger personalization performance while maintaining a more scalable and parameter-efficient design than prior approaches. Additional analysis indicates strong generalization to unseen users.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
An AI-Assisted Formalization of the Poincaré Conjecture
We present an AI-assisted Lean 4 formalization of the Poincaré conjecture. The project began with limited reusable formal infrastructure for the geometric analysis behind the proof. To organize this work, we combined a proof blueprint prepared by mathematicians with explicit milestone statements. These milestones enabled parallel agent work and gave mathematicians clear points to locate blockers and provide effective mathematical guidance. Our analysis identifies the human interventions and organizational choices behind this workflow. The project provides a starting point toward reusable infrastructure for future formalization projects; such infrastructure, once developed, could eventually reduce the cost of verifying mathematical results in geometric analysis.
Read the full abstract
Social and Information Networks
Enhancing LLMs with Cognitive-Affective Personality Inference for Simulating Human Social-Psychological Behavior
Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human participants in social and behavioral studies, yet static persona prompting typically maps a participant profile and an experimental scenario directly to a response, entangling stable dispositions with situation-specific interpretations. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIN, a cognitive-affective personality system-inspired inference pipeline for simulating human social-psychological behavior. Specifically, SPIN implements this structured inference process through three zero-shot LLM calls that compile a task-blind participant core, elicit condition-specific cognitive-affective states, and read out decisions from those states, thereby reusing stable personality structure while routing each trial-specific response through an explicit state representation. We evaluate SPIN on two reconstructed social-psychological study families spanning uncertainty reasoning and pluralistic ignorance, across four base LLMs. Compared with blank, demographic, narrative, and chain-of-thought prompt variants, SPIN consistently delivers the strongest overall alignment performance across base LLMs and study families. Ablations and state analyses further show that both personality compilation and structured state elicitation contribute to the gains, and that the elicited states shift interpretably across informational and normative conditions. These results suggest that structured personality-state inference can improve benchmark-level behavioral alignment beyond richer persona descriptions or generic multi-step reasoning.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
MedZERO: Self-Evolving Agents for Open-Ended Medical Reasoning Through Controlled Knowledge Accumulation
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering and clinical reasoning, yet their improvement remains constrained by static parametric knowledge and costly expert supervision. Self-evolving agents offer a promising alternative by enabling models to improve through iterative task generation and problem-solving. However, most existing self-evolving methods are designed for easily verifiable domains such as mathematics and coding, where solutions can be checked by exact answers or executable programs. Medical reasoning is fundamentally different: it is open-ended, knowledge-intensive, and often only partially verifiable. We present MedZERO, a self-evolving framework for open-ended medical reasoning. MedZERO couples an Examiner that generates frontier medical question-option pairs with a Reasoner that solves them through evidence-grounded multi-turn reasoning with external knowledge tools. To support reliable, continual improvement, MedZERO adopts controlled knowledge accumulation, which maintains temporary exploratory knowledge and curated persistent knowledge in reasoning. We evaluate MedZERO on five public medical reasoning benchmarks using 4B- and 8B-scale base models under open-ended evaluation. At both model scales, MedZERO achieves the highest average accuracy among the evaluated methods, with gains of up to 13.7 percentage points over the next-best self-evolving baseline. Code available at \url{https://github.com/IcecreamArtist/MedZERO}.
Read the full abstract
Robotics
Communication-Free Obstacle Localization from Aggregate Wrench Measurements in Leader–Follower Cooperative Transport
We consider obstacle localization for a team of robots cooperatively transporting a rigid payload without explicit inter-robot communication. A leader robot directs the payload's motion, while follower robots assist and react to locally detected obstacles. The leader measures the followers' aggregate wrench, i.e., the combined force and torque they exert on the payload, but cannot directly distinguish their individual reactions. We design a follower control law that allows the leader to recover obstacle locations from these measurements. Each follower resists motion toward nearby obstacles, resulting in a piecewise-linear relationship between the payload's translational and angular velocity and the aggregate wrench. Changes between adjacent linear regions reveal an obstacle's bearing and distance and identify the responding follower. We give sufficient conditions for exact recovery at a fixed payload configuration and develop an adaptive probing procedure in which the leader applies translational and rotational inputs to the payload to obtain the required measurements. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in simulations.
Read the full abstract
Logic in Computer Science
Essence and accident modalities meet Belnapian truth values
This paper investigates many-valued generalisations of the classical essence and accident modalities. In two-valued logic, a proposition is essentially true (resp. false) if, whenever it is true (resp. false), it is necessarily true (resp. false); it is accidentally true (resp. false) if it is true (resp. false) but not necessarily so. Many-valued logics provide a natural setting for introducing further modalities of this kind. We focus on Belnap-Dunn's First-Degree Entailment (FDE), a four-valued system that generalises the classical truth values. More precisely, we consider an extension of FDE with Boolean negation and implication. In addition to modalities of essential and accidental truth and falsity, we define modalities of essential and accidental inconsistency and indeterminacy. We present a four-valued S5-based Kripke semantics and cut-free hypersequent calculi for the resulting logics. We then prove semantic and syntactic embedding theorems for these logics into a four-valued version of S5 with necessity and possibility modalities. These embeddings clarify the intended interpretation of the Belnapian essence and accident modalities and yield soundness, completeness, and cut-admissibility results.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Structure-Aware Graph Abstention for Reliable Selective Forecasting
Selective forecasting abstains on high-risk test windows under a retained-coverage budget. Existing gates such as TEM (Brusokas et al., 2025) score each forecast as a whole; for multivariate outputs, trajectories can look plausible while violating dependencies among variables. We treat instance-level plausibility and relational consistency as distinct reliability axes and operationalize the latter via a learned sparse graph and a Dirichlet-style structural energy E_struct, trained with error-weighted graph regularization and score-error alignment. On seven long-horizon benchmarks and four backbones, structural gating often reduces selective MSE versus TEM at matched coverage, with the largest gains where cross-variable structure appears more informative in our benchmarks; gains are not universal, indicating a complementary abstention signal. Table 1 is a Protocol A ranking diagnostic (seed 2024); three-seed deployable Protocol B on an aligned subset is in Table 3 (full validation-to-test grids: Appendix A).
Read the full abstract
Robotics
Humanoid Horizon: Extending Task Horizon in Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Parallel Training, Dynamic Starting, and Reward Gating
Cluttered indoor environments, where large and heavy objects are scattered across diverse surfaces, require humanoid robots to sequentially navigate, grasp, transport, and accurately place each item at its target location within a single uninterrupted episode. This long-horizon, whole-body loco-manipulation task remains a significant challenge for current methods. Previous approaches often suffer from two main issues: easy-reward bias, where training overemphasizes early transport stages at the expense of later ones, and catastrophic forgetting, where focusing on later stages leads to a decline in earlier-stage performance. In this work, we introduce Humanoid Horizon, a unified policy framework designed to overcome these limitations through three interrelated mechanisms. The Parallel Training Strategy organizes $N$ scenes into $S$ concurrent stage streams governed by a shared policy, ensuring all transport stages receive continuous gradient updates and removing the bottleneck of sequential optimization. The Dynamic Starting Mechanism updates each environment's initial state with terminal states from upstream rollouts, gradually broadening transition coverage and enhancing robustness at stage boundaries. Reward Gating sets the reward to zero for the rest of the episode in later-stage streams when the immediately preceding object is displaced beyond a set threshold, so the shared policy learns not to disturb a just-placed object and earlier placements are preserved throughout the episode. Collectively, these strategies achieve per-stage success rates exceeding 80% on the two-object LHM-Humanoid benchmark (350 training scenes, 66 held-out scenes). As the number of sequentially transported objects grows beyond two, success declines with the horizon, but the degradation is graceful relative to the sharp drop seen in all baselines.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
SCOPE: Certified Theorem Proving with a Language Model as the Policy Planner
In proof assistants such as Lean, a generated proof must pass machine compilation checks, so evaluation needs no human scoring. Direct generation fails on multi-step numeric propositions: a proof is valid only if every content integer is correct, so the pass rate is bounded by the k-th power of the per-integer accuracy. Controlled corruption across 2,617 reference proofs confirms this power law. SCOPE (State-Conditioned Operator Planning and Execution) enforces the natural division of labor: the model plans over an operator vocabulary, a symbolic engine executes the numerics, and a compiler renders the proof. On a 218-problem suite it certifies 191/218 (87.6%) with a 135M backbone; the 7B DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5-RL certifies 18/218 at 27.5 times the tokens and 37.5 times the wall-clock, and DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B certifies zero on a bidirectional dual suite. Multi-step thinking costs 6.12 discrete decision actions per problem and produces no natural-language thinking text. Replacing the lagged engine state in the decision frame with the current one lifts the pass rate from 117/218 to 191/218, while up-weighting the chain-end loss hurts. On the public Lean-Workbook library, 2,132 of 3,536 gradeable admissible problems certify (60.29%) with zero regression on the main suite. All readings come from a version-frozen review with independent rechecks and reverse verification. Restricting free generation and keeping decision-time information visible is a more direct route than enlarging the model.
Read the full abstract
Cryptography and Security
MARCO: The Radioactive Watermark for Protein Generative Models
Protein Generative Models (PGMs) have revolutionized structural biology by enabling the design of complex 3D protein structures from sequence data. However, this breakthrough introduces a dual-use challenge, exposing high-value PGMs to economic risks like unauthorized model extraction and biosecurity threats such as biohazard synthesis. To mitigate these threats, we propose MARCO (COnformation waterMARk), the first radioactive watermarking framework specifically tailored for PGMs. MARCO establishes a Dual-Layer defense that simultaneously protects intellectual property and ensures the forensic traceability of potential biosecurity misuses. (i) To preserve efficiency, MARCO iteratively embeds watermarks during diffusion reverse denoising via an auxiliary encoder-decoder, allowing the original PGM parameters to remain frozen for broad compatibility. (ii) To preserve biophysical fidelity and maximize robustness, we employ specialized loss functions targeting $C_\alpha$-atom pairwise distances and torsion angles ($\psi, \phi$) within an adversarial training framework integrated with stochastic attack simulations. (iii) Crucially, MARCO exhibits “radioactivity” where the watermark automatically transfers to the outputs of any pirate models trained on the watermarked data, effectively countering model extraction attacks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MARCO achieves superior fidelity and robustness while successfully validating watermark transferability.