Unsupervised anomaly detection, which learns only from normal images, is a central task in medical image analysis and remains an open problem. Reconstruction-based methods pass an image through an encoder-decoder network trained on normal data and detect anomalies from the residual between the image and its reconstruction. This works only if the information passed from the encoder to the decoder is limited; otherwise the network learns an identity mapping and reconstructs anomalies too. This limit is usually imposed through architectural choices, tuned per dataset, that cannot be stated in bits. We introduce the quasi-binarizing (QB) layer, which squashes each latent element into [0, 1] and adds Laplace noise of scale 1/epsilon. Each element is then epsilon-locally differentially private, and the mutual information between an image and its reconstruction is bounded by a quantity that depends only on epsilon and the number of QB elements, whatever the encoder and decoder. Placing a QB layer on every encoder-decoder path, including all skip connections, we build QBAE, a seven-level attention U-Net with 32,768 QB elements. On the seven datasets of the MedIAnomaly benchmark, QBAE with one architecture and one configuration reaches a mean image-level AUROC of 0.828, the highest among methods that do not adapt to each dataset, and the best reported results on BraTS2021 (AUROC 0.911, pixel-level AP 0.838). The noise is kept at test time, so that every reconstruction satisfies the bound. Without input corruption, the bottleneck alone prevents identity collapse (mean AUROC 0.805 vs. 0.590). Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09670
Negation is an essential feature of human language, yet large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable in processing it. We evaluate recent open-source and closed-source LLMs on our negation benchmark and find that, in 37-71% of cases, they repeat the same answer under negation (e.g., "Madrid" for "What is not the capital of Spain?"). To understand and address this brittleness, we mechanistically examine how models operate under negation. Our main finding is that specialized attention heads and MLP neurons jointly implement negation by (1) suppressing retrieval of the original answer (e.g., "Madrid") while (2) promoting a favored candidate within the answer category (e.g., "Paris"). This contrasts with accounts of human negation processing, in which information about the original answer helps to determine what should be excluded. Furthermore, we find that this difference from human processing is a key source of negation failures: the model's mechanism relies on suppressing the original answer rather than using it to determine what to exclude, so the model can repeat the original answer when suppression is too weak or when a bias toward particular answers prevents it from selecting an alternative. To address this weakness in the model's negation mechanism, we propose a training objective that requires larger shifts in answer preference for more confident original predictions, and show that it reduces negation failures with less degradation of general capabilities than standard fine-tuning baselines. Together, our results demonstrate how mechanistic analysis can reveal why a linguistic capability fails and guide training that targets the underlying limitation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09571
Imitation learning policies that integrate multiple sensory modalities are prone to overreliance on a dominant modality, such as vision, during training, which can disrupt policy execution when that modality is lost at inference time. In this paper, we introduce Targeted Modality Dropout (TMD), in which the dependence on each modality is estimated using attention and the most dominant modality is selectively dropped. This is combined with entropy regularization over the dependence distribution. Through real-robot evaluation using a bimanual manipulator, we show that under vision loss the success rate of the baseline policy drops substantially, whereas TMD sustains task execution. In contrast, a conventional dropout that selects the dropped modality at random, without the entropy regularization, fails on many tasks even without vision loss.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09566
Understanding how the brain selectively follows relevant speech amid competing voices is a central challenge in auditory neuroscience and a key step toward neuro-steered hearing technologies. However, most open-source Electroencephalography (EEG) datasets for Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) use idealized single-competing-talker paradigms that oversimplify the acoustic, spatial, and semantic structure of everyday communication. To capture this ecological complexity, we introduce the SoundBubble-EEG dataset: a high-density 128-channel EEG resource comprising more than 25 hours of recordings from 30 participants. The paradigm requires listeners to selectively attend to a dynamic target speaker group, a designated "sound bubble", amid competing multi-speaker distractor bubbles across three realistic scenarios: a restaurant, a home TV viewing, and a meeting discussion. By bridging the gap between constrained laboratory protocols and real-world auditory scenes, this dataset enables investigations of multi-talker speech comprehension, neural speech tracking, and cross-scenario generalization. It also provides a benchmark for AAD algorithms under realistic acoustic and semantic variability and may support auditory neuroscience and the development of neuro-steered hearing technologies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09539
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by leveraging rich representations from pretrained vision-language models. However, their deployment in real-world environments remains limited by recurring unreliable behaviors. In this work, we study state hallucination, a recurring failure pattern in which a VLA continues acting as if an unrealized robot-object state had been achieved. Our analyses find that state hallucination coincides with weakened attention to task-relevant visual regions, and a mechanistic interpretation via sparse autoencoders reveals that hallucination-associated sparse features are activated when these failures occur. Based on this analysis, we propose SOUL (Sparse feature pOlicy UnLearning), which selectively unlearns policy knowledge associated with state hallucination behaviors, where sparse features identified from hallucination failures and successful behaviors serve as explicit forgetting and retention targets, respectively. Experiments across VLA architectures in simulated and real-world environments show that our method substantially reduces hallucinated failures and improves task success without substantially compromising the existing manipulation capabilities. These results suggest that interpretable feature analysis provides a practical basis for selectively modifying undesirable knowledge in robot policies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09496
Geometric and Spectral Alignment (GSA) characterizes trained networks through spectral concentration, physical-channel alignment, support structure, and changes in singular bases. In this paper, we propose CHASE (Channel-Aligned Structure Exploitation) to use these structures in practical model design. CHASE covers six applications across model modification, reconfiguration, and compression. CORA, COEC, and CORAM apply GSA to parameter-efficient finetuning, structured-pruning compensation, and model merging. We further develop three new methods. CAGA uses GSA to identify multi-head attention heads that can share a KV representation and constructs the shared key and value heads through geometric alignment and low-rank subspace extraction. SAKV uses GSA to determine which adjacent layers can share a low-rank KV-cache representation and the retained rank for each layer group. CAPS uses GSA spectral structure to group output neurons and selects retained input channels separately for each group. Results from CORA, COEC, and CORAM establish the effectiveness of GSA for adaptation, pruning compensation, and model merging. Experiments on CAGA show that geometric shared-head construction substantially improves MHA-to-GQA conversion, and SAKV and CAPS improve over representative baselines for KV-cache compression and structured pruning. These results show that the structures identified by GSA can be used directly to design methods for a range of model operations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09476
Accurate and rapid prediction of the aerodynamic drag coefficient ($C_D$) is essential for vehicle design, particularly during early-stage design, where many candidate geometries must be evaluated. Although computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides reliable aerodynamic estimates, its high computational cost limits large-scale design exploration. This paper proposes the hierarchical graph-pooling Transolver (HGPTrans), which combines hierarchical graph pooling with Transolver-based attention to directly predict $C_D$ from vehicle surface meshes. Motivated by the fact that vehicle aerodynamics depends on both local geometric features and long-range interactions among spatially distant surface regions, HGPTrans integrates three complementary components. Graph isomorphism convolutions encode discriminative local geometry, Transolver-style slice attention captures global interactions with linear computational complexity, and information-redundancy-aware hierarchical pooling progressively removes redundant nodes while preserving informative geometric structures. The model is trained and evaluated on the large-scale DrivAerNet and DrivAerNet++ datasets, where it achieves the lowest mean absolute error and mean squared error among the evaluated baselines. Its generalization capability is further assessed through transfer learning on a real-vehicle dataset containing both sedans and sport utility vehicles (SUVs), achieving relative $L_1$ errors of 1.56\% (sedans) and 2.12\% (SUVs) with an inference time of approximately $0.293$ s per vehicle. This corresponds to an acceleration of several orders of magnitude relative to high-fidelity CFD while keeping the predicted drag coefficients within a few percent of the CFD reference. Ablation studies confirm each component's contribution and reveal the effects of depth and pooling ratio.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31765
Recently, approaches that leverage human video datasets for robot policy training have become increasingly prevalent. However, most existing hand trackers regress pose from cropped frames with limited priors on hand motion and object interaction, resulting in inaccurate and physically inconsistent estimates. Moreover, the lack of physical cues, e.g., contact and force, limits the use of human videos for robot policy training. To this end, we propose RLHND, a video foundation model-based hand tracking model that jointly estimates hand pose and realistic tactile information from monocular egocentric videos. RLHND turns the pre-trained Cosmos 3 video diffusion backbone into a deterministic clip-level feature extractor via clean-latent conditioning, carrying its learned priors on hand motion and hand-object interaction into tracking. For pose estimation, RLHND (i) predicts hand poses with anatomically plausible joint angles and (ii) enables optional conditioning on the shape parameter to maintain consistent hand shape within the same video and even across videos recorded by the same actor. For tactile estimation, a separate tactile expert stream, trained with the pose stream frozen, predicts dense contact and force over the hand surface. We further adopt LBS-based feature spreading to enable vertex-wise feature extraction without costly per-vertex attention. RLHND achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmark datasets for pose estimation, while also achieving state-of-the-art performance in contact and force estimation. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of RLHND for robot learning through retargeting results and real-world robot experiments. The code will be publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09455
Forecasting future 3D occupancy from surround-view cameras is essential for autonomous driving, yet existing approaches rely on dense voxel or bird's-eye-view representations whose cost grows rapidly with spatial resolution and prediction horizon. Because these representations do not explicitly maintain object identities, they also struggle to preserve instance consistency over time. We present LighTROcc, a lightweight instance-centric framework that represents movable objects with a compact set of learned queries and predicts present and future occupancy in a single forward pass. LighTROcc localizes each query through attention-guided forward lifting, combining image-space cross-attention, query-specific depth, and camera geometry to estimate its 3D center. Each instance is modeled as a mixture of anisotropic 3D Gaussians and propagated across future steps using predicted displacements, producing continuous, temporally consistent occupancy forecasts. Experiments on nuScenes and supplemented nuScenes-Occupancy show that LighTROcc outperforms the evaluated dense and instance-wise baselines in instance-level forecasting accuracy while maintaining strong voxel-level occupancy quality. Across different model configurations, LighTROcc achieves a favorable balance between forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency, demonstrating the potential of compact instance-centric modeling for camera-based 4D occupancy forecasting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09444
Microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) and high tumor mutational burden (TMB-H) are clinically relevant biomarkers, yet their histopathological prediction remains challenging when models are transferred across morphologically distinct cancer types. Immune-associated spatial patterns can persist across cancers despite these morphological differences, but foundation-model-based predictors trained on a single cancer do not explicitly use this information, limiting cross-cancer generalization. To address this limitation, we propose TIRA (Tumor Immune Representation Adaptation), a target-free framework that refines frozen foundation-model representations using spatial immune topology, without requiring target-domain data during model development or test-time adaptation. TIRA uses a topology-supervised biology representation to condition tile-level attention while pooling only morphological features for joint MSI and TMB prediction. We train TIRA on TCGA-COAD+READ and evaluate it zero-shot on CPTAC-COAD, TCGA-STAD, TCGA-UCEC, and CPTAC-UCEC, covering cross-site, cross-cancer, and combined cross-cancer-site distribution shifts under UNI2, CONCH, and Virchow2. With UNI2, TIRA improved zero-shot AUROC on TCGA-STAD from 0.633 to 0.766 for MSI and from 0.651 to 0.772 for TMB. Source-derived spatial immune topology improved the cross-cancer robustness of frozen pathology foundation-model representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09441
Reasoning models write most of their KV cache while decoding long chains of thought (CoT), so the cache has to be compressed online under a fixed memory budget. Decode-time methods mostly decide which tokens to evict. We ask how a fixed byte budget should be split between the number of cached tokens and their precision. BreadthKV spends the bytes on more tokens at low precision, combining quantization with eviction, and picks the bit-width for each model and budget with a 60-problem end-to-end calibration, since offline attention error does not predict it reliably. On three reasoning models and four math and science benchmarks, it scores above eviction alone in 17 of 18 settings and produces shorter outputs. Much of what eviction loses comes from derailed runs, which keep reasoning until the length cap without reaching an answer. On Qwen3-8B at our tightest budget, eviction sends 91% of AIME samples to the cap and BreadthKV 40%. Under the same protocol, BreadthKV is statistically indistinguishable from a joint rate-distortion allocator (RDKV) that uses 27% more KV memory-time, and it outperforms our re-implementation of ThinKV.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05685
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers replace the feed-forward block of a Transformer with E expert networks, and each token is routed to k of these experts. Under expert parallelism (EP) the experts are distributed across GPUs, and every MoE layer runs all-to-all collectives in the forward and backward passes to dispatch tokens to their experts and then combine the results. On a cluster with 8 AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs per node, these collectives can take 45% of the training step at EP32 with top-2 routing and 60% with top-6 routing. We find that early in pretraining routers have already learned to assign tokens to experts in correlated patterns, both within a layer and across layers. At top-2, 0.8% of the expert pairs in a layer are selected together by 42% of tokens, and the experts a token selects at one layer predict the experts it selects at the next layer. We use these correlations to keep more token--expert assignments on the token's own GPU, which reduces communication across GPUs and across nodes. Correlated expert placement puts experts that are often selected together on the same GPU. Combined with a dispatcher that sends each token to each GPU once, it removes up to 58% of dispatched rows. Token shuffling applies when sequence parallelism shards tokens across the EP group. It moves each token to the GPU predicted to hold its next-layer experts during the reduce-scatter that follows attention. On one node this raises the share of token--expert assignments served on the token's GPU from 12.5% to 59%. In Megatron-LM, across EP degrees from 8 to 64 with top-2 and top-6 routing, the two methods reduce all-to-all time by 1.16-2.63X and end-to-end step time by up to 1.41X. Neither method changes the models' underlying routing decisions or expert parameters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09372
Automated quality inspection is essential for ensuring product reliability in this http URL image-based methods effectively capture appearance-related defects, these methods are limited in detecting structural and geometric anomalies, motivating multimodal approaches incorporating 3D information. However, existing methods mainly rely on local patch-level representations, which often lead to unstable reconstruction errors even in normal regions. To address this limitation, we propose GRC-Net, which integrates a global-attention MLP to enforce global representation consistency across patch embeddings with a stable reconstruction module to improve reconstruction stability. The proposed method captures holistic contextual information through a global token and suppresses reconstruction noise by minimizing discrepancies between original and predicted embeddings. Experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that GRC-Net consistently outperforms existing methods at both image and pixel levels. Qualitative results further demonstrate reduced reconstruction errors in normal regions and more distinct reconstruction differences between normal and anomalous regions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09329
The Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) marks a significant leap forward in 3D scene reconstruction, as it is the first model that directly infers all key 3D attributes (camera poses, depths, and dense geometry) jointly in one pass. However, this joint inference mechanism requires global attention layers with extremely long sequences that causes a significant latency bottleneck. In this paper, we propose blockwise clustered attention (BC attention) to accelerate the global attention layers in VGGT. By limiting the clustering within HW-friendly neighborhood blocks, BC attention reduces the computation overhead of query clustering as well as the costly data movement between on- and off-chip memory. This enables BC attention to scale to long sequences and deliver practical latency improvements on GPUs. Moreover, we introduce a hashing hyperplane calibration method and a threshold-based error compensation method to reduce clustering errors efficiently, which is a bottleneck in the current clustered attention mechanism. Overall, our experiments on GPU demonstrate that calibrated BC attention accelerates the global attention layers by 2.10-2.63$\times$ and the whole backbone by 1.77-2.35$\times$ with negligible loss (1%) for large scenes. With a small performance loss (< 5%), calibrated BC attention further achieves a 2.26-2.87$\times$ latency improvement on the global attention layers and a 1.90-2.55$\times$ improvement on the backbone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09274
Electromyography-to-Speech (ETS) synthesis is typically a non-linear, chaotic dynamical system. However, no prior work has studied the chaotic behavior of ETS synthesis to date. Yet, prior works strictly rely on standard reconstruction metrics with parameter-heavy transformers that systematically over-smooth natural acoustic dynamics. To close this gap, for the first time, we propose a chaos-inspired Lyapunov-derived activation function (LyRIC) with two novel chaotic loss functions, Lyapunov Exponent Regularization and Multi-Scale Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, to explicitly capture the deterministic chaos of human phonation. In addition, we introduce a compressed novel encoder, GLAME, which synergizes global Mamba state-space modeling with localized GLARE attention. We comprehensively perform frame-level acoustic evaluation in a multilingual and multi-speaker setup using English and Mandarin datasets. The proposed system outperforms the established baseline with a 4.69x increase in objective intelligibility (STOI: 0.61 vs. 0.13) and a 2.08x improvement in spectral reconstruction (LSD: 1.08 vs. 2.25). Importantly, this improvement is achieved with 73.49% fewer parameters (14.34M vs. 54.10M), establishing a new baseline for ETS synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating that integrating non-linear chaotic physics into neural networks yields superior yet compact inductive biases for real-time ETS synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09225
Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and readiness for change. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often fail to produce cognitively coherent and clinically realistic patient behavior, especially under ethical and data-scarce clinical settings. Moreover, deploying frontier-scale LLMs in healthcare applications presents practical challenges including high computational cost, latency, privacy concerns, and limited deployability in resource-constrained environments, motivating the need for cognitively aligned small language models (SLMs). We propose a cognitively grounded framework for SUD patient dialogue generation that explicitly models and aligns latent cognitive components with patient histories and counselor questions. Our pipeline consists of two stages: cognitive component detection and cognitive component-aligned dialogue generation. To enable effective learning with smaller models, we combine knowledge distillation from high-capacity teacher models, preference optimization from human-annotations, and attention-guided reward shaping. Extensive evaluations using automatic scores like BERTScore, ROUGE, METEOR and BLEU, and LLM-as-judge hit-metrics against both human and teacher-model references show that cognitively informed fine-tuning substantially improves cognitive realization and alignment over a generic instruction-tuned baselines and mental health domain specific SLMs, with particularly strong gains for open-ended cognitive components.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09209
We propose SwinDS-BWE, a decision-science-inspired bandwidth extension (BWE) model with two coupled contributions: (1) Swin Transformers with lattice-style cross-stream interaction yield locality-aware modeling with linear-in-sequence per-window attention cost and reduce the prior AP-BWE generator size 0.5x from 33M to 17M. (2) Three novel lightweight decision-science-inspired discriminators augment AP-BWE's performance: a CVaR discriminator tail-pools activations to emphasize worst high-frequency (HF) segments, a Chance-Constraint HF discriminator penalizes excessive HF energy via a differentiable barrier, and a Multi-Criteria Utility discriminator learns convex style weights over spectral criteria. SwinDS-BWE surpasses prior AP-BWE with a 30x smaller discriminator (42.3M vs. 1.36M) and higher fidelity on English and French datasets. This work shows that decision-science-inspired critics can supervise BWE to reduce discriminator size.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09189
Topology reasoning jointly detects 3D lanes and traffic elements from multi-view images and infers their structural connectivity. Current methods model lanes as discrete polylines, lacking smoothness, analytical tangent directions, and global spatial support for attention, while providing sparse topology supervision. We propose TopoCurve, a geometry-driven architecture for 3D topology reasoning grounded in a structured parametric lane representation. Lanes are modeled as endpoint-fixed cubic Bézier curves, enabling continuous geometry with exact endpoints and analytically defined directionality. We exploit this shared curve geometry across the entire pipeline. Endpoint distance and tangent alignment are encoded with multi-scale Fourier features and injected into the topology head. Sampled curve points serve as geometry-aligned references for deformable cross-attention spanning the full lane. Parallel curve-anchored attention branches provide diverse predictions for one-to-many topology supervision. These components form a tightly coupled cascade where representation enables geometric reasoning, guides feature aggregation, and supports denser supervision. TopoCurve achieves 50.6 OLS on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark without any post-processing, establishing a new state-of-the-art among end-to-end camera-only methods, and outperforms all existing approaches on endpoint detection (56.8 vs. 52.6 on DET_p).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09118
Modern language model systems operate autonomously over increasingly long contexts containing untrusted text and images. Can an adversarial input continue to steer a model even after that input is removed from its context? We show that attacks can be trained to persist through the key/value (KV) cache of subsequent tokens, allowing adversarial influence to outlive direct access to its this http URL consider the Visual Memory Injection (VMI; Schlarmann and Hein, 2026) attack setting, in which an adversarial image that stays in the context plants a hidden backdoor: the model behaves normally until a chosen trigger elicits an attacker-chosen response. We first demonstrate persistence in this setting with optimized soft prompts, which remain effective after we mask the prompt from attention. We then introduce Persistent Visual Memory Injection (P-VMI), which optimizes images to preserve this adversarial behaviour after they are masked from attention. These attacks persist over conversations substantially longer than those used during optimization. On Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, P-VMI achieves up to approximately $90\%$ target success in its strongest configuration and remains effective under a stricter removal setting that exposes the image only on the first turn. A cache-swap ablation localizes the persistent influence to the KV cache. Finally, we show that these attacks can be trained to survive compaction that retains the KV cache of a summary generated by the same model, demonstrating that adversarial behaviour can persist in cached state without continued access to its source.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09027
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved strong performance in image and video generation, but the quadratic complexity of full attention makes high-resolution generation computationally expensive. Window attention offers an efficient alternative, yet existing methods face a practical trade-off: partitioned window attention typically achieves computational efficiency consistent with its theoretical complexity. However, isolated windows block cross-window interaction, often introducing visible grid-like artifacts in the generated results. Fine-grained sliding-window attention effectively restores interactions across neighboring windows and improves visual quality. However, its irregular computation patterns create a substantial gap between theoretical and practical speedups and require specialized kernels tailored to each hardware backend. To tackle these challenges, we propose BASA, a backend-agnostic sparse attention, which brings the best of both worlds: visual quality and practical acceleration. Specifically, BASA replaces visual self-attention with shifted local-window attention. By introducing a structured window-shifting scheme across DiT blocks, we allow tokens divided by window boundaries in one layer to communicate in the following layers, thereby achieving global information exchange and eliminating window-induced visual artifacts. Notably, our design introduces no additional irregular operators or customized kernels, making it readily deployable on existing attention backends and closing the gap between theoretical sparsity and practical acceleration. Experiments demonstrate that BASA achieves measured speedups exceeding 90\% of the theoretical estimates on FLUX and delivers a 4.52$\times$ attention speedup on Wan while maintaining competitive generation quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08772