With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across languages and domains, AI safety has emerged as a critical global concern. However, due to resource constraints, research and development efforts tend to prioritize a limited number of high-resource languages, leaving many others, especially those spoken in Africa, underrepresented. While existing research on language "resource-ness" has largely examined whether sufficient resources are available to develop language technologies, the question of whether languages are adequately represented in AI safety research has received attention only more recently. This report examines the readiness of African languages for inclusion in AI safety discussions, drawing on existing literature and data. It considers four factors: the availability of AI-relevant resources, including text data; national AI policy support; performance on established text benchmarks; and speaker population. Based on these factors, languages are grouped into four readiness categories: fully ready, mostly ready, emerging, and foundational support needed. This classification is intended to inform the inclusion of African languages in AI safety benchmarks, highlight varying levels of preparedness, and guide strategic investment in data development, policy, and community engagement for underrepresented languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27269
As AI systems begin to resolve open research problems, reliable verification becomes increasingly important. Formal mathematics provides a trusted framework for mathematical reasoning, enabling agents to produce machine-checkable proofs while conducting mathematical exploration. Existing formal mathematics benchmarks often focus on known results or a small set of prominent open problems, which can become difficult to evaluate reliably once solutions are discovered and widely disseminated. Existing evaluation protocols are also not always aligned with how modern coding agents operate. We therefore introduce ReuF2F, a Lean 4 benchmark of 244 formalized open problems drawn from Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), spanning entry-level open research problems across a broad range of mathematical subfields. We expect these less prominent open problems, which tend to attract less attention and may remain unsolved for longer, to be better suited for held-out evaluation of end-to-end open problem resolution in Lean. We adopt a standard coding-agent evaluation setting, placing each problem and its logical negation into a Lean project in a Docker container. We also build Leanimum-agent on mini-SWE-agent to provide a unified harness for fair comparisons across models. Our evaluation finds that even the best-performing model resolves only ~40% of the problems, leaving substantial room for improvement on formalized open research problems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27046
In recent years, physical artificial intelligence (physical AI) has experienced rapid development, capturing significant attention in academia and industry. However, the field has yet to reach consensus on its definition, technical landscape, and core challenges. To address this gap, this monograph seeks to define physical AI, present its technical landscape, and examine each key technical subfield in depth. In doing so, it establishes a unified framework for Physical AI: artificial systems that perceive, model, and act upon the physical world through continuous feedback under real-world constraints. Further, this monograph distinguishes physical AI from conventional digital AI, embodied AI, cyber-physical systems, and digital twins. It develops the foundations of physical AI across physics, control, cognition, learning, and reasoning. It reviews key methodologies, including multimodal perception, physical data and simulation, world models, embodied foundation models, motor-control systems, multi-agent coordination, and hardware-software co-design. Furthermore, it examines applications spanning robotics, manufacturing, infrastructure, scientific experimentation, and autonomous services. Particular attention is given to sim-to-real transfer, reliability, real-time execution, evaluation, safety, governance, and long-term deployment. By connecting perception, prediction, decision-making, action, and adaptation in a closed loop, this monograph identifies the technical challenges and research directions required to advance from narrow automation toward more generalizable physical AI and, ultimately, physical artificial general intelligence (Physical AGI).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27045
Drug--target affinity (DTA) prediction plays an important role in computer-aided drug discovery, where reliable computational models can help prioritize compound--protein pairs before experimental validation. A key challenge in DTA prediction is to effectively mine multi-level molecular information from drug structures while accurately modeling the binding-site environment of target proteins. To address these issues, we introduce HierDTA, a hierarchical structure-aware framework for DTA prediction. \textcolor{black}{HierDTA represents each drug as an atom--motif heterogeneous graph and introduces an augmentation module that propagates functional-motif semantics to the corresponding atoms. For proteins, kinase-domain structures are converted into residue interaction graphs. The resulting atom and residue representations are integrated using cross-attention to capture pair-specific relationships, while molecule fingerprints and pretrained ESM-2 embeddings provide complementary global information. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, HierDTA achieves superior performance on the Davis dataset across all metrics and attains the highest \(r_m^2\) of 0.791 on KIBA. It also exhibits strong generalization under cold-start settings, particularly on KIBA, where MSE is reduced by 21.7\% in the unseen-protein scenario. Ablation study and interpretability analysis supported the contributions of the hierarchical augmentation and interaction components.} Case studies further showed that HierDTA provided early enrichment of candidate bioactive compounds. These results indicate that HierDTA is an effective framework for affinity prediction and target-specific virtual screening.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27001
We study the 305M-parameter audio encoder shared by Gemma 4 and EmbeddingGemma 2 (identical except for its final projection) for Saudi and Gulf Arabic speech recognition, without changing any of its weights. A frozen system trains only a 22.6M-parameter CTC reader over a mix of encoder layers; an adapted system adds 3.1M low-rank adapter parameters, a 41.5M-parameter hybrid CTC/attention reader and joint decoding with a sub-word language model. Against Cohere Transcribe Arabic (2.07B parameters), re-run on identical audio, the frozen system trails in word error rate (WER) but is statistically indistinguishable in character error rate (CER) on five of six human-labelled conditions, while running 3.4 times faster on CPU with greedy decoding. The adapted system is statistically indistinguishable in WER on a public Saudi customer-service call (19.20% against 19.27%) and on clean Emirati speech, is significantly better on telephone-coded Emirati speech, has a significantly lower CER on all six conditions of these sets, and beats a 0.6B recogniser fine-tuned on SADA in WER on all six; it still trails Cohere in WER on long-form Saudi speech. On a blind, human-corrected public call-centre sample it ranks 4 of 15 systems, behind three commercial APIs (significantly only one) and ahead of the other self-hostable systems by point estimate. An optimised joint decoder runs it at 139 times real time on one GPU. We also show that references made by correcting machine drafts favour the drafting system. Code and public-set results are released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28673
We show that two-layer transformers trained to near-zero loss on a sorting task converge to one of two mechanistically distinct solution classes depending on their initialization. One solution class consists of solutions that do not use the second attention layer to sort, but also fail to length-generalize. The other, which uses both attention layers, length-generalizes perfectly, despite only being trained to sort sequences of a fixed length. By carefully choosing the weight initialization, we demonstrate that we can steer the model toward learning one solution or the other. We identify input types that are rare at the training length but increasingly common at longer sequence lengths as a source of this disparity in length-generalization, and find that layer-wise specialization of the second class of solutions allows them to handle these rare sequences more accurately. In the second class, we discover a mechanism by which the second layer attention can use the contextual information gathered by the first layer attention to reduce its search space. On the related task of finding the minimum of a sequence, we find a similar two solution-type phenomenon, but with the opposite generalization pattern, where a different form of layer-wise specialization causes the two-layer solution to length-generalize worse than the single-attention solution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26974
We present SZED's submission to ArGuard 2026 Track A: Arabic hateful meme detection. The task has two parts: binary classification (A1) and fine-grained multi-label tagging (A2). For A1, we fuse MARBERTv2 and CLIP ViT-L/14 embeddings, comparing concatenation, self-attention, and ensemble heads. For A2, we use a multi-task label-attention architecture with per-class query vectors and an auxiliary head for cascade calibration. We reach macro-F1 = 0.7597 on A1 and 0.3142 on A2 (averaged over 10 active classes). We report reproducibility across runs, per-class error patterns, and the effect of cascade calibration on the long-tailed A2 label space.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26972
Differences in hand geometry, joint parameterization, and kinematic topology pose challenges for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp generation. However, spatial relations among links alone are insufficient to fully capture the hand's kinematic topology. We propose DexGraspFlow, a conditional link-level $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ flow-matching framework integrating geometric relations and kinematic topology. The framework encodes local object geometry, link geometry, and current poses. A dual-stream DiT models link--link coordination and link--object interaction, while attention biases derived from kinematic-tree distances provide explicit structural information for modeling evolving geometric interactions. The model jointly learns translational and rotational velocity fields, integrates them to generate link poses, and recovers joint configurations through inverse kinematics. Additionally, inference-time palm-orientation guidance enables controllable grasp generation without retraining. Across three robotic hands and 30 object--hand pairs, DexGraspFlow achieves a 95.33\% average simulation success rate, with an average generation latency, including inverse kinematics, approximately 49\% lower than that of a state-of-the-art baseline. Further experiments demonstrate zero-shot adaptability to seven finger-removal variants and palm-orientation control. A model trained on demonstrations for the deployed hand achieves a 91\% success rate over 100 real-robot grasping trials, supporting the framework's applicability to physical grasp execution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26962
Conversational recommender systems have recently adopted vision-language models to match user dialogue intents with multimodal product information. However, extending these methods to many product domains faces a dilemma: deploying a separately adapted VLM per domain scales cost linearly with the number of domains and requires routing each dialogue to the right model, while naively merging all domains into a single VLM degrades accuracy because product characteristics vary widely across categories. We propose LightCRS, a lightweight, query-conditioned framework for unified multi-domain multimodal conversational recommendation. LightCRS precomputes multimodal product representations once offline with frozen encoders. Online, a compact 5.3M-parameter module fuses this evidence for each dialogue via query-conditioned cross-attention, whose parameters are shared across all domains, and compares candidates jointly with an inter-candidate Transformer. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct MM-R2A-25, a 25-domain benchmark pairing natural Reddit recommendation-seeking conversations with Amazon product listings. LightCRS achieves state-of-the-art average HR@1, NDCG@5, and MRR, improving HR@1 by 35.4\% over the strongest baseline while reducing per-query latency by 266 times. Joint multi-domain training itself improves HR@1 by 15.2\% over separately trained single-domain models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26948
Controllable object insertion provides a targeted approach to augmenting object detection datasets that require category--count fidelity, annotation alignment, and source-content preservation beyond visual realism. Several approaches have been proposed to address this grand challenge, but most suffer from different constraints in precise category--count requests and visual consistency, limited coordination across categories and instances, and poor localization of multiple objects of specific category and count. We design SceneP2F, a two-stage trainable framework that connects scene-aware joint planning with layout-aligned generation leveraging explicit instance-level layouts. SceneP2F consists of two novel designs. The first is ScenePlan which allocates one class-labeled query per requested instance, jointly predicts scene-compatible object centers, and separately estimates box sizes conditioned on the planned centers and scene context. The second is SceneAlign-Fill which combines geometry- and appearance-aware conditioning, box--class-guided regional attention, and an annotation-region-weighted flow-matching objective to render the planned objects while limiting unintended changes to source content. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks UAVDT, VisDrone, and BDD100K show that SceneP2F outperforms representative general-purpose editors and object-insertion methods consistently, demonstrating the value of coordinating instance-level planning and generation for category-targeted detection augmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26922
Reproducible and analytically robust research findings are essential to scientific progress, but evaluating these properties typically requires costly manual effort. We investigate whether LLM agents can help automate reproduction and robustness analysis, using a medical case study grounded in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, a widely used U.S. cancer registry underlying tens of thousands of published studies. First, we introduce SEER-Repro, a benchmark of 20 published SEER-based papers together with the data and resources required to reproduce their findings. Second, we create an AI agent that successfully reproduces 77.4% of 2,190 atomic claims, while providing executable baselines for further analysis. Third, we develop an agentic analysis pipeline to test the robustness of the medical findings by identifying analytical choices underlying each finding, proposing defensible alternatives, and rerunning the analysis to determine whether those choices affect the conclusion. Across published papers in SEER-Repro, our pipeline identifies potentially consequential analytical choices in 9.5% of fully reproduced findings and flags them for expert review. These results show how LLM agents can support scientific review by reproducing findings, systematically testing their robustness, and directing expert attention toward potentially consequential analytical choices.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23845
Jev has attracted considerable attention for its rapid, generalizable decision-making, yet its medical reliability remains underexplored. To address this gap, our study compares various types of system-one decision models across 15 medical datasets comprising 8,742 instances under a unified protocol. Beyond accuracy, we assess decision stability and the ability to recognize unreliable decisions. Our results show that Jev rivals leading models on primarily text-driven tasks but is less effective on numerically driven tasks, revealing a distinct capability boundary. Under question-format variations, Jev maintains strong decision consistency and small accuracy fluctuations. StartLux-27B exhibits comparable consistency, while D3-27B achieves higher overall accuracy and a lower mean decision reversal rate. But these strengths do not extend to reliable abstention awareness: most evaluated models show limitations in both recognizing missing correct answers and using optional abstention. Moreover, we find that Jev's probability-based answer selection can be improved by changing how decisions are scored: normalizing option-wise binary scores yields higher retained accuracy than choice scoring. Taken together, our findings provide early guidance for improving and applying decision models in medicine.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18529
Text-to-image diffusion models have advanced video editing. However, existing video editing methods are limited by their high computational overhead and memory consumption. Furthermore, these approaches often sacrifice visual fidelity, leading to temporal inconsistencies and artifacts such as blurring and mosaic-like patterns. To address these dual challenges and strike a balance between computational efficiency and visual fidelity, we propose Edit-Your-Interest, a lightweight, text-driven, zero-shot video editing method. Edit-Your-Interest introduces a Spatio-Temporal Feature Memory bank (SFM) to cache spatial-attention features from previous frames under a fixed memory budget. The SFM maintains a representative candidate pool, reducing the computational overhead of full-sequence spatio-temporal modeling. To query this memory, we propose Feature Most-Similar Propagation (FMP), a similarity-based retrieval rule that propagates relevant cached tokens to the current frame. Together, SFM and FMP form a bounded-memory retrieval-based propagation design that improves temporal consistency while reducing blurring and mosaic-like artifacts. Finally, we introduce a feature-diversity-based SFM update algorithm to keep the memory representative and non-redundant throughout the video sequence. Furthermore, to enable precise object editing, we leverage cross-attention maps to automatically extract masks for the instances of interest. These masks are seamlessly integrated into the diffusion denoising process, enabling fine-grained control over target objects and allowing Edit-Your-Interest to perform highly accurate edits while robustly preserving the background integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Edit-Your-Interest outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and visual fidelity. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13084
LLMs and LVLMs are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware, ranging from data-center GPUs to resource-constrained edge devices. Their fixed-size architectures limit the ability to reuse a single model across deployment settings with different compute, latency, and model-size targets. We introduce HydraLLM, an elastic MQA-based architecture. Its number of active attention heads determines the effective widths of the embeddings, attention projections, feed-forward layers, and the output head, forming a nested family of subnetworks within a single parameter set. We introduce a static-to-elastic conversion pipeline that, starting from a pre-trained model checkpoint, includes importance-driven weight reordering and stochastic subnetwork training with knowledge distillation. We extend this principle to multimodal inference through an elastic projection module whose output width follows the active text width. HydraLLM covers a wider range of active parameter configurations than FFN-only elastic architectures. With 75% of heads active, HydraLLM achieves 2.2 percentage points higher TriviaQA accuracy than a state-of-the-art nested baseline configuration which has 17.25% more parameters. With 50% of heads active, our multimodal model achieves a CLIPScore comparable to that of the 7$\times$ larger Gemma 3 4B model. With only 25% of heads active, HydraLLM increases token-generation throughput by 75.3% over the full-width configuration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23455
Rapid progress in embodied intelligence has enabled increasingly capable robots to follow language instructions and manipulate diverse objects. However, strong results in structured environments do not automatically transfer to open-world conditions, where clutter, occlusion, and changing viewpoints can obscure the spatial relationships required for action. To address this perceptual gap, a virtual active-perception paradigm is introduced. AWAM, an Active World-Action Model actively plans where to observe and imagines what will be seen along the planned trajectory before acting. Task-related virtual camera motion is predicted and used as a structured query into a geometry-conditioned world model, producing a reusable spatial prior for manipulation, which is later compressed into a fixed memory and fused with live observations through cross-attention for diffusion-based action prediction. AWAM achieves competitive success rates with 75.9% on LIBERO-Occ, 62.4% on LIBERO-Plus, 76.5% on RLBench-OG Occlusion1, and 94.4% in real-robot trials. These results support improved robustness to the evaluated occlusions and distribution shifts, addressing part of the gap between structured manipulation and less controlled environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23396
As climate change intensifies, floods are becoming more frequent and destructive, making accurate flood understanding an urgent priority. However, existing vision-language models perform poorly on flood-related tasks, suffering from attentional bias and inaccurate descriptions of flood magnitude. To bridge this gap, we construct the first large-scale remote sensing flood multi-modal benchmark that supports language-level flood understanding and pixel-level flood segmentation. The benchmark contains 131,200 flood image patches and corresponding 443,100 textual descriptions for flood severity and evolution. Based on this benchmark, we propose FloodVLM-Pix, a language-guided pixel-level flood understanding model that includes a flood prior module and a multi-temporal flood pixel decoder to achieve accurate flood understanding. The flood prior module automatically distills sub-region flood spatial priors and inputs priors into FloodVLM-Pix, solving the attentional bias problem in flood language understanding. The flood pixel decoder introduces a novel general-specific feature fusion mechanism to address performance degradation caused by interference (e.g., clouds or mountain shadows) during flood segmentation. Experiments on FloodVL-Pix demonstrate that FloodVLM-Pix improves both flood description quality and pixel-level flood segmentation performance compared with state-of-the-art VLMs and flood segmentation models. Our code and data will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23377
Accurate prediction of pedestrian crossing intentions plays a critical role in enhancing the safety of pedestrian-vehicle interactions in autonomous driving. However, effectively capturing subtle spatiotemporal patterns in pedestrian pose sequences and integrating complementary visual and ego-vehicle motion information remain challenging. This paper proposes a spatial-temporal-channel attention-enhanced multimodal graph network (STC-MGNet) for pedestrian crossing intention prediction. STC-MGNet introduces a spatial-temporal-channel (STC) attention-enhanced pose graph encoder to learn discriminative representations from pedestrian pose sequences. Three parallel attention branches selectively emphasize informative skeletal joints, observation frames, and feature channels, with their outputs integrated through learnable fusion weights. To leverage complementary visual and ego-vehicle motion information, a multi-stage cross-modal channel modulation mechanism is introduced to adaptively refine pose representations through modality-specific channel gating at successive graph encoding stages. Experimental results demonstrate that STC-MGNet achieves accuracy rates of 70%, 87%, and 88% on the JAADbeh, JAADall, and PIE datasets, respectively, outperforming several representative baseline methods. Ablation experiments further highlight the complementary contributions of visual and ego-vehicle motion information to prediction performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23356
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) repeatedly process hundreds of visual tokens across decoder layers, incurring substantial computation and memory costs. Existing inference-time visual token pruning methods often irreversibly remove low-ranked tokens, although the set of visual tokens receiving high query-conditioned attention can change across decoder depth. Recoverable routing preserves skipped tokens for later reconsideration, but re-admits them with stale representations after bypassing intermediate transformations. We further find that replacing stale re-admitted states with their current-depth oracle states from a full-token reference trajectory substantially improves grounding performance. We therefore propose CatchUp, a training-free framework for depth-aware visual-token re-admission. CatchUp repeatedly re-evaluates query-conditioned visual relevance, processes only selected visual tokens through each decoder interval, and preserves deferred tokens for later re-admission. Upon re-admission, CatchUp approximates missed representation evolution using reference-to-current transition signals from semantically and spatially related visual tokens. Across three referring-expression grounding datasets and six multimodal benchmarks, CatchUp achieves the highest average relative retention in both benchmark groups at 64-, 128-, and 192-token budgets. At a 64-token budget with 88.9% fewer active visual tokens, CatchUp retains 92.17% of the full model's performance on average across six multimodal benchmarks while reducing end-to-end latency by 8.0%. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23324
Single-image refocusing changes the focal plane and depth of field of a photograph after capture. It is inherently interactive: users try many focal points and blur strengths on one image, so each edit should be fast and change only the blur. Recent generative methods, however, rerun large diffusion models for every edit. We observe that the two sub-problems differ in kind: recovering the all-in-focus image is ill-posed and needs a generative prior, whereas rendering blur is largely determined by depth and the focal plane. We therefore propose FlashReFocus, which runs diffusion once per photograph and renders every edit with a lightweight network. To address the ill-posed restoration, a one-step diffusion deblurrer with a decoder refiner recovers fine detail efficiently while balancing fidelity and perceptual quality. For precise control, the renderer is conditioned on an explicit defocus map and uses defocus-bias attention, which lets pixels at similar defocus share information without interference from pixels at other depths; in-focus content stays unchanged, and editing the map yields tilt-shift and two focal planes. To further test generalization to unseen cameras, we collect 3CReal, a three-camera benchmark of 89 pairs. FlashReFocus achieves the best perceptual fidelity for zero-shot bokeh rendering on EBB! and 3CReal, refocuses 148.3x faster than GenRefocus, and takes about half a second per further edit, 462x faster.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23297
Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iterative denoising with bidirectional attention, which precludes the standard autoregressive key--value cache. Practical deployments therefore rely on approximate caching that reuses intermediate states across denoising steps. Such caching, however, often makes a response repeat one token at adjacent positions in a run that breaks the sentence, a failure we term the \emph{Repeat Curse}. Tracing the context-token information flow reveals three disruptions. Within a step, caching disperses the attention that anchors a position on nearby context tokens. Across steps, similarity-based refresh is not staleness-aware, so some positions are decoded against stale key--value states. Across layers, the deep-layer entropy of the context fails to converge where repetition arises. We accordingly propose CoTA++, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that counteracts each disruption where it originates: Context-Token Attention Re-anchoring re-forms the attention routing against the current context, Decode-Aware Refresh reserves part of the cache's refresh budget for the positions about to be committed, and Context-Token Entropy-Guided Voting discounts the confidence of a position by the deep-layer entropy of its context, which reorders the unmasking. The three components act at non-overlapping stages of a decoding step and compose freely with existing dMLLMs and caches. Across three dMLLMs and two caching backends, CoTA++ reduces the sample repetition rate of long responses from up to 99.6\% to at most 17.0\%, recovers most of the accuracy lost to caching on nine benchmarks, and keeps the speedup of caching at under 15\% overhead, making approximate caching reliable for dMLLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23290