Week beginning 19th October 2026

Every computer science paper posted to arXiv this week, with plain-language summaries and practical uses for each one. Includes commercial applications where relevant.

FlexPart enables flexible image-based 3D part creation with varied input detail

A Unified Framework for Image-to-3D Part Generation via Variable Granularity

Abstract: Controllable 3D part generation is pivotal for digital asset creation, yet existing methods lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse user workflows requiring varying levels of control. In this paper, we introduce FlexPart, a unified image-to-3D part generation framework that supports variable-granularity geometric conditions within a single model. By seamlessly integrating heterogeneous inputs, ranging from sparse points to dense bounding boxes and masks, via gated adaptive modulation, FlexPart unlocks a powerful cross-modal synergy. We also propose an asymmetric geometric guidance mechanism that leverages strong spatial priors to align representations across granularities, improving geometric consistency and facilitating inter-task synergy. Under mask conditioning on PartVerseXL, FlexPart reduces Part CD by 16.6% relative to TripoSG + SAM3D and by 10.5% relative to OmniPart, while maintaining competitive whole-mesh quality. The code can be found at https://github.com/Gucci233/FlexPart

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Making 3D parts from images usually requires users to provide detailed instructions, which can be limiting. The authors propose FlexPart, a system that lets users control 3D part creation through different types of guidance, from simple points to detailed masks, all handled by one model. This approach helps produce more accurate and consistent 3D parts, improving on previous methods. The system combines these different inputs smartly and maintains high-quality full shapes.
Open → 2610.31671v1

Sensorimotor alignment predicts robot model success with no extra training

Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success

Abstract: Robotic foundation models are typically evaluated through costly closed-loop rollouts, which motivates cheap offline proxies for model capability. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that as representations improve, different modalities such as vision and language converge toward a shared statistical model of reality. We ask whether motion trajectories form another such modality: as embodied models become more capable, should their sensory representations converge toward the structure of physical motion? To examine this, we propose Sensorimotor Alignment ($S^2$), a training-free offline metric that measures how well a model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. We find that $S^2$ correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, making it a low-cost offline proxy for prioritizing models before closed-loop evaluation. $S^2$ can also identify promising vision-language model (VLM) backbones even before costly fine-tuning into vision-language-action models (VLAs). Beyond this correlation, $S^2$ offers representation-level explanations for phenomena observed in VLAs and world action models (WAMs). With $S^2$, we extend PRH to embodied models and make sensorimotor alignment empirically measurable, offering insight into why an embodied model succeeds beyond its closed-loop success rate.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine LearningRobotics
The gist
Robots that learn to move and sense the world are usually tested by letting them act and seeing if they complete tasks, which can be slow and expensive. The authors propose a new way to guess how well a robot model will do by checking if its internal sensory understanding matches the natural patterns of real motion, without doing any action testing. They call this check Sensorimotor Alignment (S²) and show it is linked to how well robots perform tasks later. This method also helps pick good vision-language models before fully training them for robot actions.
Open → 2610.31670v1

Video models help understand and change the world through video

Reading, Writing, Sharing, and Interacting with the World through Video

Abstract: Video foundation models have advanced rapidly in understanding and generating visual sequences, while video world models seek to capture the underlying dynamics of the world they depict. Despite their different objectives, both concern the relationship between video observations and an evolving world. This survey adopts world modeling as a unifying lens for examining these developments. Viewing an observed video as a partial, lossy, and temporally ordered projection of a latent temporal world, we organize the literature around four complementary operations: reading infers world properties from observed video; writing synthesizes video from specified or learned world conditions; sharing integrates understanding and generation through common modeling mechanisms; and interacting predicts and updates world states under actions and evolving observations. This perspective distinguishes temporal coherence in observed or generated sequences from consistency in the underlying world state. Across tasks, representations, models, datasets, and benchmarks, we trace a shift in emphasis from clip-level recognition and perceptual fidelity toward persistent state, controllable evolution, physical and causal validity, and evaluation grounded in interaction and downstream decisions, and we distill the open challenges that follow.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Videos show us parts of the world over time, but they don't capture everything perfectly. The authors look at research about how computers can read videos to learn about the world, write videos based on what they know, share knowledge between reading and writing, and interact by predicting changes when actions happen. They emphasize the difference between making videos look smooth and making sure the world they represent stays consistent and reasonable. Their review points to new challenges like producing videos that follow physical rules and are useful for decisions.
Open → 2610.31668v1

Reasoning model pruning method balances solution quality and diversity

Direct Pass@$k$ Optimization for Thought Pruning: Balancing Quality and Diversity in Test-Time Reasoning

Abstract: Test-time scaling has emerged as a key inference strategy for reasoning models, where a model generates a large number of candidate solutions in the hope of finding at least one correct solution. Running all candidate solutions to completion can be computationally demanding, so recent work prunes the candidate pool after generating only a short prefix, committing further computation only to the surviving candidates. Existing pruning strategies divide broadly into two categories: Quality-based methods assign a score to each partial solution and discard those predicted to ultimately lead to an incorrect final solution, while diversity-based methods select partial solutions that follow different reasoning trajectories and are therefore likely to cover different final solutions. The tension between these two objectives is an instance of exploration versus exploitation, yet little to no prior work on pruning exposes this trade-off directly, let alone optimizes it. In this paper, we introduce a pruning procedure that addresses this trade-off directly by optimizing pass@$k$ over the selected solution pool. In particular, it chooses the pool to maximize the probability that at least one of its partial solutions, when continued to completion, yields a correct answer. Because this objective simultaneously rewards high-quality partial solutions and penalizes redundancy among them, quality and diversity are naturally balanced by the criterion itself rather than through separate ad-hoc design choices. On eight open-weight reasoning models, our method outperforms existing quality-based and diversity-based pruning strategies. The gains are particularly pronounced when the pruning procedure keeps a moderate number of partial solutions for continued generation, highlighting the value of directly balancing quality and diversity during pruning.

Thu 22 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Generating many possible answers from a reasoning AI can use a lot of computing power, especially when checking all answers fully. The authors found a way to quickly pick a smaller set of partial answers to finish, aiming to have at least one correct final answer. Their method balances between choosing high-quality partial answers and ensuring the chosen answers are different from each other. Tests on several AI models showed this approach works better than previous pruning methods, especially when keeping a moderate number of partial answers.
Open → 2610.31667v1

Training a few neural network parts cuts most errors quickly

Phase Transition from Random Features to Fully Trainable Networks

Abstract: Constructing accurate and computationally tractable approximation spaces is a fundamental task in scientific computing. Partially trainable neural networks bridge fixed random features and fully adaptive representations. This paper quantifies a phase transition pattern in approximation bounds and observes analogous behavior in training errors: a rapid but smooth initial improvement followed by diminishing returns, with a sharper transition under greater initialization mismatch. Under polynomial spectral decay with exponent $α>1$ and leverage compatibility, we establish a squared $L_2$ approximation rate $\mathcal{O}((κ_P\log(m/δ)/m)^α)$ for two-layer networks of width $m$ and trainable proportion $P$, where $κ_P=(P/κ_1^*+(1-P)/κ_0^*)^{-1}$. The bound holds uniformly over the unit ball of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) with probability at least $1-δ$. The constants $κ_0^*$ and $κ_1^*$ quantify the fixed and trainable groups' sampling mismatches relative to the target RKHS. For spherical biased-ReLU features in dimension $d$, we verify these assumptions with $α=(d+2)/(d-1)$ and $κ_0^*=4\sqrt{2}τ(d+1)/d$ for initialization scale $τ\ge1$, and $κ_1^*=1$ under ridge leverage sampling. For $d=5$ and $τ=10$, a trainable proportion of approximately $4.1\%$ captures $90\%$ of the reduction in the approximation bound from $P=0$ to $P=1$. A structured three-layer example illustrates how a few trainable first-layer neurons exploit fixed downstream blocks through nonlinear composition. Numerical experiments across diverse settings, including networks with up to 15 layers, exhibit similar phase transitions in training errors.

Thu 22 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Building computer models that learn patterns can be slow or expensive if everything is adjustable. The authors show that making only a small portion of a neural network trainable leads to most of the improvement you get from training it fully. They find a clear jump when increasing trainable parts, with the biggest gains early on. Their math explains why this happens and matches real experiments, even for deep networks.
Open → 2610.31663v1

AI decision monitoring cuts need for expert review without losing reliability

Reliable AI-Assisted Decisions via Selective Auditing

Abstract: We consider online monitoring of an AI system that produces a sequence of decisions. At each round, the system outputs a proposed decision together with a confidence score estimating the trustworthiness of the decision. The decision and confidence score need not be produced by the same model: for example, one agent may propose a decision, while a separate verifier agent evaluates it and outputs a correctness or safety score. Based on this information, we must decide whether to accept the AI decision automatically or consult an expert, such as a human auditor, who reviews the proposal and either accepts or corrects it. We formulate this task as an online constrained optimization problem in which the goal is to minimize the frequency of expert auditing while guaranteeing that the fraction of AI errors that go unaudited stays below a user-defined threshold. We derive a family of algorithms with provable error-control guarantees with no assumptions, including a method that is optimally efficient: it asymptotically attains the best achievable auditing rate for both adversarial and i.i.d. data streams. Experiments on screening harmful requests to large language models, qualitative text annotation, and data labeling show that our methods achieve valid error control in practice while substantially reducing the need for human auditing compared to baselines.

Thu 22 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Sometimes AI systems make decisions that need to be checked by humans to avoid errors, but checking every decision can be slow and costly. The authors study a way to decide when a human should audit the AI's decision and when it’s safe to trust the AI automatically. They propose algorithms that balance reducing human audits with keeping AI errors under control, no matter if the data is random or adversarial. Tests on tasks like filtering harmful requests and labeling data show their methods work well and reduce expert workload.
Open → 2610.31662v1

OpenTac creates customizable 3D tactile skins for enhanced robot touch sensing

OpenTac: An Open Ecosystem for Customizable, Scalable, and Transferable 3D Tactile Sensing

Abstract: We present OpenTac, a novel sensor and a full-stack ecosystem for tactile skins that are highly customizable, scalable, and readily deployed in downstream robot control and learning applications. Our core contribution is twofold. First, we develop a scalable resistive tactile skin with a structured deformable overlay that converts tangential loading into spatially varying pressure. Differential responses across neighboring "taxels" support decoding of local shear vectors, and the common-mode response encodes normal force. Second, we provide a highly customizable sensor design tool that is able to automatically generate fabrication files for these tactile skins from 2D outlines and developable 3D surfaces, including from abstract descriptions such as text (e.g., "design a sensor for a size 9 shoe insole"). We develop an ecosystem around the OpenTac sensor, including the CAD design tool, a sensor simulator, cross-sensor transfer, and fast/adaptive data acquisition. We demonstrate the broad applicability of the OpenTac-CAD sensor design tool by designing and fabricating more than 30 sensors across a variety of robot embodiments. We characterize the three-dimensional tactile fields produced by OpenTac with a commercial, high-precision force/torque sensor. We demonstrate the broad applicability of 3D tactile sensing across contact-rich feedback control and manipulation policy learning on four real-world robot embodiments. Additionally, adaptive acquisition enables kilohertz-rate partial readouts, exceeding full-array raster scanning on the same sensor by 19.2X at 16 sampled taxels per update for a 1024-taxel skin. We provide all hardware, software, and result videos are at opentac.github.io

Thu 22 OctRobotics
The gist
Robots often need to feel objects to pick them up or use them safely, but making tactile sensors that fit different shapes and tasks is hard. The authors created OpenTac, a flexible system that lets people design and build 3D touch sensors that detect forces and shearing like human skin. Their tools can make sensors for varied robot parts, such as hands or feet, and collect touch data quickly. This helps robots learn and adjust to touching objects in the real world.
Open → 2610.31661v1

Spectralcanary plants hidden low-frequency signals for image model auditing

SpectralCanary: Embarrassingly Simple Low-Frequency Traces for T2I Dataset-Use Auditing

Abstract: Auditing whether a text-to-image (T2I) model was fine-tuned on a particular image collection is difficult: a model can absorb collection-level visual characteristics without reproducing training images. Proactive dataset-use auditing plants a shared signal in a dataset before release, then later checks whether that signal appears in a suspect model's generated outputs. Existing approaches often trade off verifiability, fidelity, robustness, and deployability. We introduce $\textbf{SpectralCanary}$, which uses a smooth low-pass mask to blend a fixed canary image into every collection image while leaving captions unchanged and requiring neither auxiliary generation nor per-image optimization. A lightweight verifier detects the transferred signal in suspect-model outputs. Across eight tests on the Pokemon dataset and three realistic data transformations, spanning two architectures families, SpectralCanary achieves the highest average per-generation TPR@$1\%$ FPR ($91.1\%$) and fixed threshold model-level accuracy using 30 generations ($94.8\%$) among the evaluated methods. Across five datasets spanning artistic, medical, satellite, and fashion domains with SD3.5, SpectralCanary averages $92.4\%$ per-generation TPR@$1\%$ FPR while preserving the released images (SSIM $0.989$, LPIPS $0.022$) with a near-zero mean change FID (mean $Δ$FID $0.05$) across datasets. Matched-energy ablations on Pokemon and ROCOv2 support our design choice, low-frequency placement transfers more reliably compared to mid/high-frequency placement. Under the evaluated adaptive attacks, the most effective removal requires aggressive modification and incurs more than $25$ $Δ$FID points. These results identify low-frequency visual signals as effective carriers for collection-level T2I audit traces.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
It can be hard to tell if an image-generation AI was trained on a specific set of pictures, since the AI might learn general features without copying exact images. The authors propose SpectralCanary, which subtly mixes a special low-frequency pattern called a canary into every image of a dataset before it’s shared. Later, if a model is suspected of using that dataset, a simple check can find this hidden pattern in images it creates. Tests show this method works well across different data types and models, and the hidden signals are hard to remove without ruining image quality.
Open → 2610.31659v1

Cost-aware ticket routing reduces wrong IT support assignments by nearly 40 percent

Cost-Aware Abstention for LLM-Based IT Ticket Classification

Abstract: Wrong automatic routing of an IT support ticket can cost more than human triage. We evaluate cost-aware abstention as an offline, cost-conditional readiness assessment: select a routing policy on calibration data under explicit costs, then evaluate that frozen policy once on held-out test data. On a public 47,837-ticket, eight-class corpus, we compare four trained non-LLM classifiers with four large language models under zero- and few-shot prompting. Under the illustrative cost model (c_ok, c_triage, c_wrong) = (0, 1, 5), TF-IDF with logistic regression and a threshold of 0.60 selected on calibration reduces test cost from 0.763 to 0.472, a 38.1% relative reduction (paired ratio-bootstrap 95% CI [35.7%, 40.4%]), while lowering wrong routes from 15.3% to 3.5%. Frozen calibration-selected policies also beat both always-route and always-defer on held-out test data in 14 of 16 settings in a post-hoc cost-parameter analysis. The strongest prompted configuration reaches 0.477 accuracy on a stratified 1,000-ticket test subset, versus 0.879 for fine-tuned DistilBERT on the same tickets. Isotonic lowers expected calibration error without reliably improving discrimination: GPT-4o-mini few-shot has one confidence value before and after recalibration and correctness AUROC 0.500. We therefore report correctness AUROC and tie-aware risk-coverage area alongside ECE. At the analytically derived break-even probability 0.80, seven prompted configurations defer all tickets; Haiku few-shot routes only 19/1,000. An LLM-only agreement control and margin/entropy rejection baselines further separate calibration from discrimination. The findings are scoped to this dataset, prompt design, model endpoints, and illustrative costs; the work is an evaluation framework, not a new abstention algorithm or universal deployment certification.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Automatic sorting of IT support tickets can sometimes cost more if tickets are routed incorrectly. The authors tested a method that lets the sorting system choose when to automatically decide and when to ask for human help by understanding the costs of mistakes. They found that adjusting when the system abstains from making a decision greatly lowers wrong assignments and reduces overall cost. Their tests compared traditional classifiers and large language models and showed that cost-aware abstention with simple models can perform better in this task.
Open → 2610.31657v1

Memory-enhanced adaptation improves agents in unseen reinforcement tasks

METTA: Memory-Enhanced Test-Time Adaptation for Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning aims to train agents that adapt quickly to unseen tasks from limited interaction, but this requires representing task evidence over long interaction histories. Classical recurrent agents compress experience into hidden states, while transformer-based agents retrieve from past trajectories at quadratic memory and computation cost. In this work, we propose Memory-Enhanced Test-Time Adaptation (METTA) for meta-reinforcement learning. It decomposes the fast adaptation phase into two temporal scales: a causal neural memory performs fine-grained within-episode adaptation with linear sequence complexity, while compact episode-level summaries support long-range cross-episode task inference without attending over the full interaction history. Moreover, equipping agents with neural memory provides sufficient expressive capacity and test-time training capability, enabling effective adaptation to unseen held-out tasks and task families at meta-test time. On unseen held-out Meta-World ML10/45 test environments, METTA achieves a success rate over $50\%$ while maintaining a low training budget and short wall-clock time. On long-context sparse-reward PointMaze tasks, it outperforms transformer-based baselines by exhibiting more structured exploration behavior. These results show that METTA provides an efficient path toward more adaptive and scalable long-context meta-RL.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Learning to adapt quickly to new tasks is hard because agents need to remember many past experiences. The authors propose METTA, a method that helps agents adapt by using a special memory system that focuses on recent events while summarizing longer past episodes efficiently. This approach uses less computing power compared to previous methods and performs better in tests where tasks are unfamiliar or rewards are rare. METTA helps agents explore smarter and succeed more often in these challenging situations.
Open → 2610.31656v1

Brickwright enables agents to build valid physical lego models

BrickWright: Agentic Creation of Physically Feasible Brick Builds

Abstract: Frontier coding agents are becoming increasingly adept at 3D modeling. Yet, they still face challenges when building objects meant to be assembled in the physical world, often creating invalid assemblies with floating, colliding, or disconnected parts. We argue that providing agents with tools for assembling builds and verifying their physical feasibility is sufficient for them to produce physically valid assemblies that still adhere to input prompts. Focusing on the domain of LEGO brick builds, we present BrickWright, a framework for generating physically feasible brick builds from text or image prompts using pre-trained agents, where a build is physically feasible if it uses only real parts, has no colliding or floating parts, and forms a connected structure if possible. BrickWright guides agents to create builds by writing code with BrickLayer, a Python toolkit with two main components: an ergonomic brick assembly API that halves inference cost compared to working in raw LDraw, and a validator that provides feedback on physical feasibility. Whereas baseline agents achieve physical validity rates ranging from only 9% (GPT-6 Luna) to 69% (GPT-6 Astra), BrickWright-guided agents achieve 100% validity on a sample of 512 prompts, while improving prompt adherence for lightweight agents and maintaining it for stronger agents. Additionally, they outperform specialized models on the text-to-brick task. Code is available on our project page: https://avalovelace1.github.io/brickwright/

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Building 3D models with computer agents is getting better, but they often create LEGO designs that can't exist in real life because parts float or collide. The authors developed BrickWright, a system that helps agents create LEGO builds that could actually be assembled. BrickWright provides code tools and checks to make sure every LEGO model uses real pieces and fits together properly. With BrickWright, agents always made physically valid LEGO models and followed the building instructions better than before.
Open → 2610.31651v1

Benchmark tests language model safety under missing facts

EpiSEM-Bench: Evaluating Safety and Evidence Recovery in LLM Agents under Missing Evidence

Abstract: Tool-using language model agents rely on environmental facts to decide whether an action is permitted. When a tool response omits a safety-relevant fact, an agent may carry out a prohibited action even though the user request is benign and every returned statement is true. We introduce \bench{}, an executable benchmark for evaluating unsafe execution, safety boundaries, and evidence recovery in LLM agents under missing evidence. It contains 300 matched unsafe/safe task pairs across six domains. By systematically suppressing critical facts, the benchmark measures unsafe execution under critical evidence omission and determines the minimum observed failure cardinality, including failures with full evidence and cases with no observed failure after exhaustive testing. An independent audit tool tests whether agents seek missing facts and then withhold prohibited actions while completing permissible tasks. The benchmark reveals substantial variation across the ten models in omission robustness, evidence acquisition, and appropriate action. Resistance to missing evidence does not necessarily translate into useful recovery. Recovery access reduces unsafe execution for all ten models, but agents differ in whether they actively obtain the missing facts and use them to act appropriately in both worlds.

Thu 22 OctArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Sometimes AI models use tools to get facts before acting. If some important facts are missing, the AI might do something unsafe even if the user’s request is harmless. The authors created a test called EpiSEM-Bench that checks how well different AI models handle missing facts and avoid unsafe actions. Their tests show that some models are better at finding missing information and acting safely, but there is still lots of variation.
Open → 2610.31650v1

Gate3DGen improves 3D image quality by selectively cleaning photos

Gate3DGen: A Pre-processing Model that Selectively Purifies Real-World Images for 3D Generation

Abstract: Single-image 3D generation has achieved high fidelity on curated benchmarks, yet degrades sharply on real-world images with uneven illumination, blur, and occlusions. Purifying such inputs requires deciding when to intervene and preserving the visual cues needed for 3D generation, while leaving clean inputs unchanged. We introduce Gate3DGen, a selective pre-processing model that gates image inputs to existing 3D generators without retraining them. A degradation-aware router bypasses inputs classified as clean and extracts features to guide purification of the remaining inputs. Conditioned on these features, a 3D-oriented one-step purifier purifies degraded inputs with spatial losses that encourage preservation of object identity, contours, and textural cues. To provide paired supervision, we construct a synthetic data engine that renders clean views of 3D assets and synthesises composite degradations. On the synthetic benchmark, the purifier improves image fidelity and downstream 3D geometry in only 2.3s on average, reducing TRELLIS.2 mesh distance by 61.5% relative to degraded inputs. VLM evaluation and human preferences on real photographs further support identity preservation and degradation correction. More demos and code are available at https://supra-3d.github.io/gate3dgen.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D models from a single photo works well with high-quality images but struggles with real-world photos that might be blurry, dark, or partially blocked. The authors designed Gate3DGen, a tool that first checks if a photo needs cleaning and only fixes it when necessary, keeping important details for 3D modeling. They trained this system using synthetic images with known problems, so it learns what needs fixing. Tests show this method quickly improves the quality of 3D models from challenging photos while preserving what makes objects recognizable.
Open → 2610.31649v1

Low bit n-gram embeddings cut memory use in language models

Low-Bit N-Gram Embeddings for Language Models

Abstract: Many recent open-weight language models use n-gram embedding tables to improve performance. These tables store learned representations of short token sequences, such as pairs or triples of consecutive tokens, which the model retrieves during processing. However, they can require substantial memory: DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, for example, allocates 196 billion parameters to its Engram n-gram memory. We therefore investigate whether this memory cost can be reduced while preserving the performance improvement that the tables provide. We propose storing n-gram embeddings at low precision and systematically investigate different quantization methods and bit allocations across tables. Across nanochat-, Llama-, and GPT-2-family models trained from scratch, four-bit tables save approximately 75% of table memory while preserving more than 99% of the validation-loss improvement from adding the tables. Using fewer bits leads to a larger drop in performance, although we find that a short fine-tuning phase recovers a significant part of this loss. In addition, reinvesting the saved memory in larger tables can improve performance beyond that of the original full-precision tables while still using less memory. These table memory savings also extend to large existing models: on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, low-bit tables save 47-55% of table memory, with perplexity increases of less than 1.2% and largely preserved downstream task performance. These findings establish low-bit precision as a practical way to reduce the memory requirements of n-gram embeddings and use the saved capacity to improve model performance.

Thu 22 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Language models often store information about common short word sequences to work better, but this requires a lot of memory. The authors studied ways to save memory by storing these short sequences at lower precision using fewer bits. They found that using four bits keeps almost all the benefits while saving about 75% of the memory. Even when using fewer bits, a bit of retraining helps recover lost accuracy. This means language models can be smaller and faster without much loss in quality.
Open → 2610.31646v1

OmniRay predicts 3D scenes from any camera image directly

OmniRay: Camera-Agnostic Monocular 3D Reconstruction with Composite Ray Fields

Abstract: Monocular models recover 3D geometry from a single image in one pass, but most assume a pinhole camera and produce distorted geometry on the wide-angle imagery produced by fisheye and panoramic lenses. Camera-aware models remove this assumption by predicting a per-pixel ray field. However, they represent different camera geometries using a single fixed basis to capture both the overall camera projection and its finer variations. We argue that camera geometry can be viewed as having a hierarchy of complexity for representing rays. We present OmniRay, a feed-forward model whose Ray Module is composed of three components: a monotone radial base that captures radially symmetric structure, a spherical-harmonic residual for smooth deviations from it, and a free-form residual for remaining local variation. These components are composed as successive rotations on the sphere, allowing the representation to accommodate diverse camera geometries. Given a single image, OmniRay predicts a ray direction and an up-to-scale radial distance for every pixel, from which a 3D point cloud is recovered without needing camera information at inference time. Extensive experiments across different camera configurations demonstrate that OmniRay establishes a new state-of-the-art in camera-agnostic monocular 3D reconstruction.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Most methods that turn a single photo into a 3D shape assume the camera acts like a simple pinhole, which distorts wide-angle pictures. The authors developed OmniRay, a model that learns to understand how rays travel from many types of cameras, including fish-eye and panoramic lenses. It breaks down the camera's ray directions into simple parts, allowing it to handle complex and unusual camera shapes without needing camera info during use. This leads to better 3D reconstructions from just one image, no matter the camera type.
Open → 2610.31645v1

Learnable representations benchmarked for gigapixel image compression and scaling

GigaBench: Benchmarking Learnable Representations for Gigapixel Image Compression and Super-Resolution

Abstract: Learnable Representations (LRs) can fit parametric families of functions to diverse kinds of signals. These emergent neural-native data formats are gathering interest in the scientific community due to their compactness, resolution-agnosticism and amenability to direct neural processing. On the other hand, gigapixel images are becoming increasingly widespread across a variety of scientific, cultural, and industrial domains. In this paper, we present GigaBench, the first benchmark and experimental evaluation focused on deploying LRs with gigapixel imagery. GigaBench includes images collected, acquired, and synthetically rendered across diverse domains, and addresses image compression and super-resolution. We adapt a representative set of LRs, spanning Implicit, Hybrid, and Explicit methods, so as to operate reliably at the gigapixel scale on consumer hardware. Through systematic evaluation across reconstruction quality, model size, compression and inference times, we identify consistent trends across methods and suggest actionable guidance for future investigation.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
High-resolution gigapixel images are very large and difficult to store or process efficiently. The authors created GigaBench, a benchmark that tests how well different neural network-based representations compress and improve these huge images. They compared several methods on various types of big images, measuring quality, speed, and storage size on regular consumer hardware. Their findings help identify which approaches work best for gigapixel images and offer guidance for future research and development.
Open → 2610.31644v1

Softmax and cross-entropy bugs fixed improve model training stability

A Fix for Softmax and Cross-Entropy

Abstract: Standard implementations of softmax, log-softmax, and cross-entropy have two numerical bugs. The first bug, Softmax Collapse, rounds the target logit's gradient to zero if that one logit is much larger than the others, resulting in gradients that no longer sum to zero. The second bug, Softmax Cancellation, occurs when student logits are close to teacher logits, and produces non-zero gradients even when the student and teacher logits are equal. We present simple implementations of log-softmax, softmax, and cross-entropy that fix both bugs. Our fix eliminates the previously-observed "Slingshot" phenomenon, speeds up grokking with weight decay, prevents accuracy collapse without weight decay, stops student networks from drifting away from the teacher during distillation, and shows that after memorization, logit growth is bounded by an equilibrium between weight decay and Adam's $ε$ hyperparameter.

Thu 22 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Softmax and cross-entropy are basic tools in AI that help computers learn from examples. The authors discovered two small but important bugs in how these tools are normally implemented, which cause errors in training. They provide simple fixes that prevent these errors, making AI training more reliable and efficient. Their improvements stop models from behaving strangely during training and keep models closer to their intended outputs.
Open → 2610.31642v1

Uni voe enables better video object removal and insertion with interaction effects

UniVOE: A Removal-Driven Framework for Interaction-Aware Universal Video Object Editing

Abstract: Video object removal and injection are reciprocal editing operations between object-present and object-absent video states, yet they differ substantially in training difficulty. Removal can be effectively bootstrapped from video inpainting and further adapted to erase object-related interaction effects. Injection, however, requires large-scale paired supervision to model object appearance, dynamics, and scene-dependent effects, while perfectly aligned real-world pairs are difficult to collect and synthetic data lacks sufficient realism and diversity. To address this challenge, we present UniVOE, a removal-driven framework for training both video object removal and injection models. We first train an effect-aware remover by transferring video inpainting priors and finetuning on object-present/object-absent pairs. The trained remover converts real object-present videos into object-absent counterparts, creating large-scale paired supervision for injection. An injection model is trained on these pairs in the reverse direction to recover objects together with their dynamics and interaction effects. Moreover, since pixel-level reconstruction alone cannot adequately capture perceptual realism, we introduce a reward-based post-training method that aligns injection results with human preferences using a proprietary reward model. Experiments against strong open-source and commercial systems demonstrate that UniVOE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object removal and injection, particularly in challenging interaction-effect cases.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Removing or adding objects in videos is tricky because objects often interact with their surroundings in complex ways. The authors developed UniVOE, which first learns to remove objects and their effects from videos, then uses this to teach a model how to add objects back realistically. This method creates training data automatically, improving video editing quality without needing hard-to-get real paired videos. They also use a feedback system that aligns the results with what people prefer to see. Tests show UniVOE works better than existing tools, especially when objects interact with their environment.
Open → 2610.31641v1

Video diffusion models achieve accurate camera control and smooth motion

WorldForge V2: Eliciting Camera-Trajectory Alignment in Video Diffusion Models

Abstract: Video diffusion models have learned rich 3D/4D priors, making them promising for scene generation and video re-rendering. However, their use in spatial tasks is limited by imprecise camera control, spatial and temporal inconsistencies, and entangled camera motion with scene dynamics. Existing approaches, such as task-specific fine-tuning and post-process warping, often introduce visual artifacts, generalize poorly, or incur high computational costs. We propose WorldForge V2 to achieve accurate camera control while preserving the generative capabilities of pretrained video models. We first develop a training-free guidance framework using warped references to iteratively refine generation along a target camera path. Optical-flow analysis identifies motion-related latent channels for selective guidance, helping separate motion control from appearance. A dual-path strategy further compares guided and unguided predictions to correct artifacts from imperfect references. Together, these components guide viewpoint changes while preserving scene appearance and object motion. To reduce refinement costs, v-cache approximates the correction using the preceding denoising prediction, avoiding an additional model evaluation. We further extend motion localization from latent channels to network blocks and introduce Trajectory LoRA, which concentrates adaptation on blocks most responsive to trajectory guidance. A two-stage training strategy teaches these adapters to denoise the states encountered during guided generation, using limited supervision effectively. This enables reliable camera control with very little training data, with a single training scene already supporting generalization to unseen scenes. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and trajectory accuracy in camera-controlled video generation.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Controlling camera movements realistically in generated videos is tricky because models often mix up camera motion with the objects moving in the scene. The authors created a method called WorldForge V2 that can guide video generation along a desired camera path without messing up how things look or move. Their approach uses smart techniques to separate camera movement from object motion and makes corrections to keep the video smooth and natural. It requires very little new training and works well even on new scenes.
Open → 2610.31640v1

Causal chain of thought improves reasoning by isolating context

Causal Chain of Thought: Mitigating Attention Leakage via Context Isolation

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting elicits step-by-step rationales that appear to explain model predictions, but there is no guarantee these steps causally drive the final answer. In standard autoregressive generation, dense attention allows each reasoning step to attend to the full context, enabling the model to derive answers through direct lookup while generating plausible-sounding but post-hoc justifications. We introduce CausalCoT, an inference framework that enforces causal transparency by decomposing problems into a directed acyclic graph of atomic sub-questions, evaluating each node in an isolated context containing only its direct causal parents. This Markovian structure removes attention pathways to non-parent content, making downstream predictions sensitive to local reasoning rather than global context leakage. Across a diverse suite of reasoning benchmarks, CausalCoT preserves competitive predictive performance while improving explanation faithfulness, increasing causal sensitivity of intermediate reasoning steps by an average of 12 and up to 21 percentage points over the strongest baseline. The structured dependency graph additionally enables test-time interventions in which local corrections propagate predictably through downstream reasoning.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Chain-of-thought prompting helps language models explain how they reach answers step-by-step, but those steps don’t always actually cause the answer. The authors introduce CausalCoT, which breaks problems into small questions linked like a flowchart and solves each with only the information that directly influences it. This stops the model from shortcutting and making explanations that just sound plausible. Their approach keeps accuracy high while making the reasoning steps much more honest and lets users fix parts and see how corrections flow through the rest.
Open → 2610.31639v1

Computing composed boolean functions requires less queries than expected

No Perfect Randomized Composition

Abstract: Does computing a composition of total Boolean functions require the product of the randomized query complexities of its factors? We give a negative answer. There are families of total functions $f,g$ such that $R(f\circ g) =Θ\!\left(\frac1{\log R(g)}\right)R(f)R(g)$ This result requires first separating linearized query complexity $\LR$, as well as noisy randomized query complexity $noisyR$, from standard randomized query complexity $R$. Both constructions essentially come from totalizing existing partial function separations, albeit via different techniques. By adapting these techniques, we also construct total functions separating every adjacent pair in the chain from sabotage $RS$, max-conflict $\barχ$, and linearised query complexity $LR$. We show that AND-of-ORs separates conflict $χ$ from max-conflict $\barχ$ complexity and makes conflict and sabotage incomparable. Finally, randomized complexity can be smaller than its composition limit $R^*$ by the maximal factor $Θ(\log R)$. The total--total composition separation is also formalized in Lean.

Thu 22 OctComputational Complexity
The gist
The paper finds that combining certain Boolean functions doesn't always need as many computer queries as previously thought. The authors show that the complexity of solving a function made by composing two others can be smaller than the product of their individual complexities, defying old assumptions. They also explore different ways to measure this complexity and provide examples separating these measures. Their work helps clarify relationships between various query complexities and establishes limits on how efficient randomized algorithms can be for these problems.
Open → 2610.31638v1

Agent uncovers hidden defects in large Slovak web document collection

Can an Agent Debug a Web Corpus? Agentic Auditing of Slovak FineWeb2

Abstract: Multilingual pipelines such as FineWeb2 apply one recipe across a thousand languages, leaving the failure modes of individual languages unanticipated. We use an LLM once, as a corpus debugger rather than a classifier: a tool-using agent explores the corpus through a read-only, budgeted API and compiles each finding into an executable test, which a native speaker then validates. On the 26.5M-document Slovak portion of FineWeb2, three runs costing \$2.21-\$2.84 each found seven findings over four phenomena. The largest is a machine-generated content farm of 1,408,437 documents (5.32%) that passed the pipeline's filters, 86.6% of it passing even stricter thresholds. Blinded labels support 6 of the 7 findings (defect rates .53-1.00 against .08 in a random control) and do not support one. The compiled suite scans the full corpus in 0.7 s of wall-clock time without a GPU, against \$12k-\$90k per LLM classification pass. The best static sampling baseline validates more selectors than any agent run, at under half the cost. The agent contributes exact prevalence, a precision estimate checked against sampled documents, an account of why the pipeline missed each slice, and a reusable test. We release the framework, Slovak test suite, validation data and agent trajectories.

Thu 22 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models often handle many languages without focusing on unique problems for each one. This paper describes how the authors used an AI agent to carefully examine a huge collection of Slovak web documents to find errors, like machine-made content slipping through filters. The agent created automated tests that a Slovak speaker then checked, confirming most issues. This process is faster and cheaper than running many classification passes with AI and produces reusable tests for future use.
Open → 2610.31636v1

Hierarchical pose graphs improve 3D reconstruction from long videos

HiP3R: Hierarchical Pose Graphs for Long-Horizon 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Feed-forward models accurately estimate camera motion and 3D geometry from short video windows. However, computational and memory costs prevent direct inference on sequences containing thousands of frames. Long videos must therefore be processed as overlapping chunks. This division produces independent local reconstructions with inconsistent coordinate frames and duplicate estimates of shared cameras. Achieving global consistency requires propagating constraints from adjacent overlaps and distant revisits across the sequence. This requirement naturally motivates pose graph optimization. However, the choice of graph level creates a trade-off. Chunk-level graphs efficiently resolve scale drift and close large loops. Yet, their rigid transformations cannot correct internal errors or conflicting frame predictions. Conversely, frame-level optimization offers local flexibility, but scaling it globally is computationally expensive and can break metric scale. HiP3R resolves this trade-off using a hierarchical pose graph. HiP3R first optimizes a robust chunk-level $\mathrm{Sim}(3)$ graph to establish the global layout and scale. It then holds this layout fixed and estimates one shared $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ camera per frame, turning overlapping window predictions into a single trajectory. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HiP3R in improving camera trajectories and 3D reconstruction. Our method applies to both chunk-based and streaming backends without additional training or fine-tuning. The codes are available at https://kkakkkka.github.io/HiP3R.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
It is hard to accurately stitch together thousands of frames from a long video into a single 3D scene because of inconsistent local maps and duplicated camera positions. The authors created HiP3R, which solves this by first arranging video chunks to fix overall scale and layout, then refining each camera frame within this global map. This approach balances efficiency and detail, improving camera paths and 3D models without needing extra training. It works for different video processing methods and has been tested on multiple benchmarks.
Open → 2610.31635v1

Looped models share memory caches to reduce inference costs

BeNice! Closing Looping's Inference-Memory Gap via KV-Sharing

Abstract: Looped architectures scale quality while keeping parameter count fixed by repeatedly passing activations through the same block of layers. During inference, each recurrence generates independent KV-caches, causing memory to grow linearly. To address this challenge, prior work has proposed KV-sharing (i.e., sharing KV-caches across depth), finding that, in some cases, the KV-cache of the final recurrence can be shared with the earlier recurrences without quality loss, a property we denote as KV-shareability. However, the mechanisms underlying KV-shareability remain poorly understood, with even identically trained looped architectures not consistently exhibiting it. In this paper, we study how KV-shareability can be enabled in looped models. We propose a two-stage method: in the first stage, we use stochastic depth during pretraining, which induces contractive residual dynamics that drive representations toward a common limit across recurrences. In the second stage, we propose BeNice!, a post-training method that broadcasts the final recurrence's KV-cache into the first recurrence, training it to produce compatible residuals while preserving the original model's quality. As a result, BeNice! enables KV-shareability while matching standard finetuning's unshared validation perplexity. Using BeNice!, we show that KV-sharing is complementary to alternative KV-compression methods, composing with memory-efficient sequence mixers (e.g., multi-latent attention, Kimi delta attention) and low-precision KV-cache quantization (e.g., fp8, mxfp8, nvfp4). Finally, in simulated low-memory, long-context inference, KV-sharing improves cache hit rates by up to 31.4%, increases throughput by up to 23.6%, and reduces p90 time-to-first-token by up to 83.6%.

Thu 22 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Looped models run the same layers repeatedly to improve quality without adding parameters, but this increases memory use because each repetition stores its own cache. The authors study how to let looped models share these caches safely to save memory. They first train models with a technique called stochastic depth to make outputs similar across repeats, then fine-tune them with a method named BeNice! which helps the model use a shared cache without losing quality. This reduces memory growth during use, makes the models faster, and cuts down waiting times when generating text.
Open → 2610.31633v1

Ray-by-Ray improves GPU ray tracing performance with fine-grained control

Ray-by-Ray: Fine-Grained Resource Management for GPU Ray Tracing Units

Abstract: Ray tracing (RT) generates photorealistic images by simulating the physical behavior of light as it interacts with surfaces in a virtual scene. In film production and high-end rendering pipelines, this technique computes global illumination, reflections, refractions, and soft shadows by tracing millions of light rays per frame and accurately modeling their bounces and attenuation. Contemporary GPUs incorporate specialized ray tracing hardware to accelerate key operations in the traversal pipeline. By accelerating these stages in hardware, the unit enables real-time ray tracing for complex scenes that previously required offline computation. However, ray tracing introduces substantial control and data divergence. Each ray may traverse a different set of nodes in the acceleration structure, encounter distinct materials, or terminate at varying depths. This irregularity reduces thread coherence and exposes a fundamental disparity between the GPU SIMT and per-thread execution model of dedicated RT units, where each ray progresses independently. In this work, we seek to validate assumptions made in open-source infrastructure and identify potential inefficiencies in resource management within the ray tracing pipeline. To address inefficiency caused by mismatches between SIMT and RT granularities, we propose Ray-by-Ray, which decomposes on-chip buffers into the granularity of individual rays and introduces lightweight management structures that enable more warps to run in parallel without increasing buffer capacity. This approach improves ray tracing unit utilization and increases memory-level parallelism. Experimental results show that Ray-by-Ray achieves an average performance improvement of 1.91x over the baseline, with an area overhead of 0.19\%.

Thu 22 OctHardware Architecture
The gist
Rendering realistic images with ray tracing on GPUs can be slow because each light ray behaves differently, making it hard for hardware to handle many rays efficiently at once. The researchers found that current GPU designs waste resources due to this mismatch between how rays are processed and how hardware threads work together. They created Ray-by-Ray, a way to manage each ray individually to better share the hardware, improving speed without needing bigger memory buffers. Their tests showed this approach nearly doubles performance with very little extra hardware cost.
Open → 2610.31630v1

Hybrid CPU GPU dispatch reduces AI radio processing delays

Workload-Aware Monitoring for AI-RAN

Abstract: AI-RAN platforms are expected to share CPU and GPU resources between radio workloads and AI services. Aggregate telemetry reports operating conditions, but timing changes may reflect different workloads, processors, or measurement boundaries. We propose workload-aware monitoring that associates radio-work descriptors with processing paths, timing boundaries, and operating context before comparing like with like. In 16 over-the-air downlink experiments, hybrid dispatch (CPU for transport blocks (TBs) below 4,096 bytes and GPU otherwise) has 29.66% and 22.93% lower mean host-callback durations than direct GPU dispatch, without and with a synthetic GPU co-runner, respectively. Grouping locates the separation in small TBs, while large-TB callback-duration ranges overlap. These observations identify a candidate for complementary CPU/GPU use.

Thu 22 OctNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Processing radio signals and AI tasks on shared computers can cause delays because CPUs and GPUs work differently. The authors found a way to watch how these tasks use the processors and match similar types together before measuring. Their tests showed that using the CPU for small radio data pieces and the GPU for larger ones made the system faster than using the GPU alone. This approach helps make better use of computer parts for combined radio and AI workloads.
Open → 2610.31627v1

New method plans safe paths for multiple robots around obstacles

Extending Harmonic Function Methods via Root Locus for Coordinated Path Generation

Abstract: We consider the offline generation of coordinated paths for N interchangeable robots and N goals in planar environments with polygonal obstacles. After a conformal map to a circular domain, starts and goals become the poles and zeros of a rational function R, and the paths are the branches of its Generalized Root Locus (GRL), i.e. the streamlines of the logarithmic potential -log R. We show that, for every phase outside a finite set of critical phases and a set of boundary phases, the induced gradient motion drives each robot to a distinct goal along pairwise disjoint paths that never reach the obstacles; the robot-goal assignment is produced by the construction, and with the gain used as a clock all robots move as the closed-loop roots of the GRL and arrive together at a prescribed time. Obstacles become streamlines through successive Milne-Thomson reflections, and for a finite number of reflections a finite test certifies safety for the potential that is actually computed. Reciprocal root-locus planning is recovered as a special case. The method is illustrated on two polygonal workspaces, 100 random instances compared with independent harmonic planning and artificial potentials, and a scene with ten robots and ten obstacles.

Thu 22 OctRobotics
The gist
When many robots need to reach targets without crashing into obstacles or each other, planning their paths can be complicated. The authors propose a mathematical way to design smooth, non-colliding routes for multiple robots using special functions and a unique mapping of the environment. Their method ensures each robot reaches a unique goal safely and at the same time without hitting obstacles. They tested this approach on different robot and obstacle setups and compared it with other planning methods.
Open → 2610.31625v1

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards does not steadily increase power-seeking behavior

Questioning Instrumental Convergence in RLVR: Checkpoint Evidence from OLMo-3

Abstract: Instrumental convergence is often invoked as a general reason to expect capable agents to acquire or express power-seeking subgoals: self-preservation, resource acquisition, deception, or resistance to oversight which poses an important threat to the society. For LLMs, reinforcement learning is the first stage of post-training that directly optimizes behavior against an objective; therefore, it is the stage where convergent instrumental behavior, on IC grounds, likely to appear. Does reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) make a model more likely to express instrumental-convergence behavior, or does this depend on the training regime, evaluation frame, and stage of post-training? We study this question as a checkpoint-conditioned behavioral trajectory rather than as a single before/after safety score. Using InstrumentalEval, we evaluate OLMo-3-7B-Think across SFT, DPO, 13 intermediate RLVR checkpoints, and the final RLVR model. The trajectory is nonmonotonic: instrumental rate rises from 25.0% at SFT to 46.1% near RLVR step 200, then falls to 11.8% at the final checkpoint. Paired item-level tests and step-wise regression support the final SFT-to-RLVR reduction. Prompt framing does not explain this pattern: a harmful-prompt indicator combined with other framing effects explains only 15% of within-checkpoint score variance on average, and Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP) removes a detectable framing direction without changing the SFT-to-final-RLVR gap. Together with preliminary 32B endpoint results (35.53% SFT to 22.37% RLVR final), these findings indicate that RLVR does not monotonically increase instrumental behavior in this setting: the rate rises early, then falls below the SFT baseline. The result is specific to this model family and benchmark, and judge agreement is moderate, so absolute rates should be read cautiously.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Some people worry that smart AI systems might try to gain power or hide bad actions when trained to get rewards. This paper looks at whether training language models with a special kind of reward actually makes them more likely to want power. The authors find that such behavior goes up at first during training but then drops even below the starting level. This means that the idea that training with rewards always makes AI more power-hungry might not be true for all models.
Open → 2610.31624v1

F2G-Pose estimates 3D object pose and shape from one RGB-D view

F2G-Pose: Geometry-Aware Foundation Feature Lifting for Direct RGB-D Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Abstract: This paper studies category-level RGB-D object pose estimation, which recovers an object's 3D rotation and translation without instance-specific CAD models or reference views. This task is highly ambiguous due to intra-class variations, symmetries, and partial observations. Current solutions struggle to balance reliability and efficiency: methods based on intermediate structures are prone to error propagation, while diffusion models suffer from high inference latency and complex post-hoc candidate extraction. To address this, we present F2G-Pose, a real-time direct, single-pass framework that predicts category-level pose, metric size, and camera-frame completed shape from a single RGB-D observation in one feed-forward pass. F2G-Pose lifts dense visual foundation features to partial point clouds, encodes local geometry with DGCNN tokenization, and integrates object-level structure with a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer. Joint size prediction and camera-frame shape completion encourage metric consistency through dense geometric supervision. With its task-specific network trained only on pose-annotated synthetic SOPE data and its frozen RADIO backbone externally pretrained, F2G-Pose achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SOPE and ROPE while running at 28 FPS for pose-only inference, and further demonstrates strong camera-frame geometry on HouseCat6D and real-object transfer on HANDAL. Analyses of latency, robustness, shape completion, and GenPose++ candidate behavior further demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of F2G-Pose, with real-world manipulation experiments demonstrating deployment potential under segmented RGB-D inputs. The project page, code, and pretrained models are made available at https://jrryzh.github.io/F2G-Pose/.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Estimating the 3D position and orientation of objects from images can be hard, especially when you don’t have exact models of each item. The authors present F2G-Pose, a fast method that takes a single RGB-D snapshot (color plus depth) and predicts the object’s pose, size, and shape all at once. It uses advanced neural network techniques to understand both local details and overall shape from partial views. This method works well on synthetic and real data, runs in real-time, and can help robots handle unknown objects more reliably.
Open → 2610.31623v1

Bilingual language models predict second language reading influenced by first language

Bilingual Language Models Capture Cross-Linguistic Influence in Second-Language Reading

Abstract: While monolingual language model (LM) surprisal is widely established as a predictor of reading times, it cannot capture the non-native (L2) reading dynamics that are shaped by the reader's first language (L1). In this work, we investigate whether the cross-lingual transfer within bilingual models aligns with human L1-driven biases during L2 reading. We evaluate bilingual models on eye-tracking data of readers from 12 diverse L1 backgrounds reading English texts. To isolate L1-specific transfer, we compare bilingual models trained on an L1 that matches the readers' L1 background to both a monolingual English baseline and bilingual models trained on other L1s. We demonstrate that matching the readers' L1 improves the prediction of L2 reading times. This predictive advantage is concentrated in late-stage eye-tracking measures, modulated by L1-L2 script overlap, and peaks among intermediate-proficiency readers. These findings provide evidence that bilingual LMs capture aspects of cross-linguistic influence, and that such influence is present in L2 reading behavior.

Thu 22 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Reading in a second language is often influenced by a person’s first language, but usual language models can’t capture this effect. The authors show that bilingual language models, trained on both a reader’s first and second language, better predict how people read in their second language. This improvement is strongest for readers who have an intermediate level of skill and when their first and second languages share writing styles. The work suggests that these models reflect how the first language affects reading in the second language.
Open → 2610.31620v1

Diffdreamer couples learned models with simulators for quadrotor control

DiffDreamer: Coupling World Models with Differentiable Simulation for Agile Quadrotor Control

Abstract: Tasks such as quadrotor dynamic-gate racing require agents to anticipate external motion while maintaining precise high-frequency control. World-model-based reinforcement learning provides a natural solution by learning latent dynamics for future imagination, yet it often entangles environmental evolution and the robot's own dynamics in a single learned rollout, where model bias can affect policy optimization efficiency. We propose DiffDreamer, a differentiable reinforcement learning framework that tightly couples a learned world model with differentiable simulation for actor optimization. In one optimization step, the learned world model propagates latent states that capture external dynamics and history-dependent features, while the differentiable simulator propagates the robot's explicit physical state. We further decompose the actor objective into a critic-driven pathway for non-differentiable task rewards and a simulator-driven pathway for differentiable motion rewards. Experiments on aggressive tracking and dynamic-gate racing show that DiffDreamer improves training convergence over the model-free, model-based, and differentiable-RL baselines, and final performance over these baselines and classical planning and control methods. Additional experiments assess reward decomposition and the odometry-conditioned relative-state representation through ablations. We also provide proof-of-concept real-world flight experiments for validation.

Thu 22 OctRobotics
The gist
Flying fast drones through moving gates is very hard because the drone must predict how the environment changes while controlling itself very precisely. The authors created DiffDreamer, a method that learns about the environment and drone behavior separately and uses both a learned model and a physics simulator during training. This method helps the drone learn faster and perform better than other approaches. They tested DiffDreamer on tasks like aggressive flight maneuvers and showed it works on real drones too.
Open → 2610.31617v1

Membership inference risks in on-policy self-distillation revealed

OP-Print: Tracing Membership Imprints in On-Policy Self-Distillation

Abstract: On-policy distillation has been widely adopted for alleviating the distribution mismatch of off-policy distillation. Self-distillation further removes the need for an external teacher by using the student's own outputs, enhanced with extra context or demonstrations, as supervision. This teacher-free design makes on-policy self-distillation practical, yet its privacy risks remain largely unexplored. In particular, using two coupled views of the same training example may strengthen its memorization. Motivated by this, we present the first study of membership inference attacks against on-policy self-distillation. We investigate both gray-box and black-box threat models and propose a unified attack framework, named OP-Print. OP-Print builds on our finding that the supervision imprint in on-policy self-distillation is sparse and structured, concentrating on uncertainty-sensitive correction sites rather than across the entire rollout. Exploiting this property, we construct attack signals tailored to the two access levels: in the gray-box setting, OP-Print directly aggregates the privileged teacher-student residual correction along the same rollout; in the black-box setting, it measures restart-based output-basin stability as an observable surrogate for the hidden correction process. Across diverse models and distillation schemes, all baseline attacks remain essentially at random guessing even under gray-box access, whereas OP-Print is broadly validated to be effective in both gray-box and black-box settings.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningCryptography and Security
The gist
When computer models teach themselves by using their own past predictions (on-policy self-distillation), they may unintentionally memorize who was in their training data. This paper shows that such self-teaching methods leave behind distinct patterns that can be detected by clever attacks, even when outsiders have limited information. The authors developed a new attack approach called OP-Print that finds these hidden memory clues more effectively than previous methods. Their results highlight potential privacy concerns in this teaching style.
Open → 2610.31616v1

Vision language action models monitor themselves to avoid failures

Progress Probes $P^2$: Lightweight Runtime Monitoring for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can perform diverse manipulation tasks directly from visual observations and natural language instructions, but they remain prone to mistakes and unpredictable failures. Deploying these policies without continuous human supervision will require robust runtime monitors that detect when the policy has gone off-course. Existing monitors use external foundation models, such as vision-language models (VLMs) to supervise the policy, introducing significant complexity and computational cost for monitoring at runtime. In this work, we investigate an alternate approach: \textit{can a VLA's own internal activations provide the information needed to monitor its execution?} Our method trains linear probes on policy activations from demonstrations to estimate progress, then flags executions that deviate from expected progress. In experiments with the open-source VLA $π_{0.5}$ and across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, this approach is competitive with or outperforms VLM-based monitors in task failure detection, as well as methods which require failure data for training. These findings suggest that simple probes of VLA internals can be used to develop reliable runtime monitors, opening a path toward building policies that can act reliably and monitor their execution without external foundation models.

Thu 22 OctRobotics
The gist
Vision-language-action models help robots perform tasks by understanding pictures and instructions, but they can make mistakes. The paper shows that instead of using extra big models to check if the robot is doing well, you can watch what's happening inside the robot’s own brain. By training simple monitors on the robot's internal signals during normal tasks, the system can tell if something is going wrong. This new way works as well or better than older methods and is less complicated and costly.
Open → 2610.31613v1

Learning discrete data distributions efficiently with user privacy guarantees

Efficient and Optimal Learning of Discrete Distributions with Person-Level Privacy

Abstract: We study learning a discrete distribution under person-level differential privacy in the batched setting. Given $n$ users, each contributing $m$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution $μ$ over $[k]$, we seek an estimate of $μ$ with total-variation error $α$. We give polynomial-time algorithms under both pure and approximate differential privacy. Under pure $(\varepsilon,0)$-DP, we achieve $n = \widetilde O(k/(α^2 m)+k/(α\sqrt{m}\varepsilon)+k/\varepsilon)$, the first polynomial-time pure-DP guarantee matching the information-theoretic optimum up to logarithmic factors. Under approximate $(\varepsilon,δ)$-DP, we achieve $n = \widetilde O(k/(α^2 m)+k/(α\sqrt{m}\varepsilon)+k+\log(1/δ)/\varepsilon)$. At $δ=2^{-Θ(k)}$, this is $\widetilde O(k)$ for fixed $α,\varepsilon,m$ and failure probability. Our algorithms use a new degree-6 sum-of-squares estimator for learning from untrusted batches. Its key ingredient is a trace-bounded diagonal majorizer for the difference between the empirical covariance of the repaired batch averages and the multinomial covariance predicted by their mean. We prove that clean data admit this certificate through semidefinite-programming duality and a new application of the stronger symmetric form of Grothendieck's inequality due to Friedland and Lim. The certificate preserves the mean-dependent variance of multinomial batch averages, yielding the near-optimal robust rate $O(η\sqrt{\log(1/η)/m})$ and providing the score required by the privacy reduction. We also prove a statistical query lower bound ruling out a uniformly smaller order of error under fixed polynomial SQ resource bounds.

Thu 22 OctMachine LearningCryptography and SecurityData Structures and Algorithms
The gist
This paper deals with a problem where we want to learn the pattern of a dataset made up of small categories, while protecting the privacy of individual people who contributed data. The authors develop fast algorithms that give nearly the best possible accuracy while ensuring strong privacy rules. They do this by using a new mathematical technique involving advanced polynomial estimators and inequalities to handle noisy or untrusted data batches. Their work also shows some fundamental limits on how accurately such private learning can be done.
Open → 2610.31612v1

Humanoids move naturally and flexibly using attention to plan contacts

Humanoid Mobility via Attention-based Contacts

Abstract: Humanoid mobility over complex terrain requires accurate foot placement and coordinated whole-body motion capable of robust adaptation. Reinforcement learning (RL) policies trained without motion references generalize well across terrains, yet eliciting effective whole-body coordination through reward design and exploration alone remains challenging. In contrast, reference-based methods yield natural motions but struggle to adapt beyond the predefined trajectories in their training data. We introduce a learning framework that bridges these two approaches by using motion data strictly as a training prior. An explicit, self-supervised, attention-based contact planner predicts future body-environment contacts, while a contact-conditioned tracker translates these plans into coordinated whole-body motion. Together, they establish contact as an interface between sensory observations and control actions. This abstraction allows the policy to internalize the contact-aware structure of locomotion rather than directly replicating kinematics. Consequently, a single policy can exploit data-driven motion priors for natural whole-body coordination while retaining the flexibility to discover environment-dependent behaviors through reinforcement learning. Building on the learned contact planner and tracker, a subsequent fine-tuning stage bootstraps their acquired capabilities to explore environment variations beyond those covered by the original motion data. Operating entirely from onboard observations without any reference inputs at deployment, this framework enables versatile humanoid mobility in challenging environments.

Thu 22 OctRobotics
The gist
Walking or moving like humans across tricky ground is hard because robots need to place their feet just right and move their whole body smoothly. The authors created a system that learns how to predict where a robot should touch the ground next, then moves the robot's body to follow that plan. This method uses examples of real motions to guide learning but doesn’t copy them exactly, giving the robot flexibility to handle new situations. The system works using only what the robot senses itself and can adapt to different terrains without needing exact motion instructions.
Open → 2610.31608v1

Evidence-aware approach improves retrieval of breast lesion information

How Ground Truth Shapes Retrieval Scores: Evidence-Aware Evaluation of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Breast Lesions

Abstract: Purpose: To describe an evidence-aware retrieval evaluation protocol for a clinical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system over breast lesion management literature, addressing the dependence of retrieval scores on annotation coverage. Methods: An 18-document corpus and an 18-query development benchmark, with one Yes/No or WH-question per document, were used. Retrieval combined dense embeddings, BM25, and cross-encoder reranking. Chunk sizes of 128 to 1024 tokens, overlaps of 0 to 20%, and four retriever configurations were evaluated. Relevance was defined by evidence spans mapped to all containing chunks, treating overlapping chunks with equivalent evidence as relevant. Retrieval was evaluated using R-Precision, Recall@K, MRR, and nDCG@K. Separately, generation was assessed on a 512-token index at K=1 to 5 using DeepEval claim-level metrics, with deepseek-v4-pro as the LLM judge, and BLEU/ROUGE metrics. Results: The selected hybrid retriever, using 384-token chunks and 20% overlap, retrieved accepted evidence in the top three results for 17 of 18 queries. Recall@3, R-Precision, MRR@3, and nDCG@3 each reached 0.94. Ground-truth curation increased evidence spans from 25 to 37 and accepted chunk targets from 36 to 51 without changing retrieval rankings. Conclusion: Cross-encoder reranking achieved the highest retrieval scores. Expanded relevance annotations increased recognized evidence without changing rankings, highlighting annotation sensitivity. The small development set and retrieval-informed curation require independent validation, including radiologist assessment of evidence sufficiency.

Thu 22 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Finding the right information in medical articles about breast lesions can be tricky because it depends on how the facts are marked up. The authors looked at how adding more detailed annotations of evidence affected searching accuracy in a small collection of documents. They combined different search methods and showed their best setup almost always found useful evidence near the top of the search results. Adding more evidence markers allowed the system to recognize more helpful text without changing the order of retrieved results. This means how you label information changes how well search scores reflect actual helpfulness.
Open → 2610.31606v1