Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on proprietary records enables domain adaptation but introduces two challenges: (i) privacy leakage of memorized private data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), and (ii) balancing private data removal with utility preservation. Existing defenses, including data sanitization and differential privacy, often degrade performance, while privacy-neuron editing lacks a PII-free reference to distinguish identity-specific neurons from those supporting useful text. We propose JEPA-Prune, a post-hoc neuron pruning framework guided by a model trained exclusively on PII-free views. Alongside the fine-tuned private model, JEPA-Prune, trains a public model on surrogate and masked views of the same records using a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA), capturing domain knowledge without identifiers. A cross-model representation probe quantifies deviations between private representations of leaked records and this PII-free reference. Integrated gradients and a scale-invariant specificity score then identify PII-responsive neurons, which are pruned without retraining. Experiments show that pruning just 1.6% of neurons reduces PII inference accuracy by up to 7.4x and PII extraction recall by up to 13.9x, while keeping unseen-text perplexity within 16% of that of the unpruned model for most LLMs. In contrast, privacy-neuron editing increases perplexity by at least 26x.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22792
High-fidelity 3D generative modeling underpins game asset creation, medical imaging, and VR/AR environmental design, where geometric structure directly influences perception and decision-making. Diffusion models represent a powerful paradigm for point cloud generation. However, existing approaches rely heavily on local voxel or patch features and often miss global structural organization, and much less work has studied how global conditioning can be used to improve generation quality. In this paper, we introduce HilbertGen-3D, a novel topology-aware conditional diffusion framework based on Hilbert-Multifractal Conditioning (HMC). HMC computes multi-scale voxel measures, serializes them via a 3D Hilbert curve to expose structured spatial dependencies, and estimates the generalized fractal dimensions from scale-dependent partition functions. We encode these signals as global embeddings and multi-scale tokens, and inject them into a diffusion denoiser through an efficient bottleneck fusion module. Across the Chair, Airplane, and Car categories of ShapeNet, our two conditioning variants reduce the absolute deviation of 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy (1-NNA) from 50% by up to 8.90 percentage points and increase coverage by up to 5.88 percentage points relative to TopoDiT-3D. This shows that combining local density cues with global Hilbert-multifractal structure provides a simple and effective recipe for high-fidelity and diverse 3D generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22720
The advent of distributional semantics as a framework for computational semantics marked a paradigm shift in the nature of representations, by which meanings are represented as dense vectors commonly known as word embeddings. Computational approaches to historical or typological language comparison, on the other hand, still mostly rely on discrete representations, while the potential of embedding-based methods remains largely untapped in this context. Recent studies have proposed concept embeddings as a language-independent, onomasiological counterpart to word embeddings, based on networks of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. While the resulting concept embeddings reflect meaningful semantic properties and relations, they suffer from a lack of scalability, since they rely on transductive embedding approaches which only learn embeddings for nodes present in the training data. In this study, we present an inductive framework for learning concept embeddings, combining the structural properties of full and partial colexification networks with semantic information from short concept descriptions. This framework allows the embedding of unseen concepts based on a short definition. We show that the resulting concept embeddings correlate with various cross-linguistic measures of similarity or relatedness, while generalizing well to new concepts that were absent from the training data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22638
Traffic agencies need current and near-future speeds on every link of their network, but their fixed sensors cover only part of it. We study joint nowcasting and next-hour forecasting of hourly speeds on all 4{,}127 directional freeway links of the Dallas--Fort Worth region from sensors on 643 links (15.6%). Historical probe-vehicle data supervise every link in training; only sensor readings are used at inference. We call this setting probe-supervised sparse sensing. We propose GCRN+, a graph convolutional recurrent network that predicts deviations from a historical speed profile. It combines a parameter-free, direction-aware kernel interpolation of sensor anomalies, used as input features and as an output baseline, with a diffusion-convolutional GRU on the directed road graph, a low-rank adaptive graph and learnable link embeddings. It scales linearly with network size and trains on a CPU. Sensor readings are emulated from probe speeds, which isolates spatio-temporal inference from detector calibration. On four held-out test days, GCRN+ attains an RMSE of 2.21~mph for the current hour and 2.39~mph for the next hour on unsensored links, against 3.23~mph for the historical average. The best baselines that use the same interpolation features reach 2.53 and 2.75~mph. Adapted recent models without these features (STID, STAEformer, ImputeFormer, MoGERNN) reach at best 2.54 and 2.53~mph; this comparison is between complete pipelines rather than architectures. GCRN+ is best in every distance band except links not connected to any sensor through the road graph. Ablations within one recurrent backbone attribute most of the gain to the link embeddings and the adaptive graph, which can be trained because probe labels exist for every link. For congestion detection on unsensored links, recall rises from 77\% (historical average) and 86% (best competitor) to 89% at aprecision of 0.94.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22630
Retrieval is a fundamental task in multimodal systems: given an image or text query, the goal is to find the most relevant images or texts in a collection, often using a shared embedding space. Reliable retrieval requires these embeddings to capture not only which concepts are present, but also how they are composed. One key compositional challenge is attribute--object binding: encoding which attributes belong to which objects. Existing benchmarks provide a limited view of this capability, typically covering a subset of modality pairings, simple two-object swaps, or small attribute sets. Consequently, it remains unclear how robustly current models preserve attribute--object bindings across different modality pairings and more complex settings. We therefore introduce SABER, a controlled benchmark for evaluating attribute--object binding across all four image and text modality pairings, spanning diverse attribute types and scenes with up to ten objects. Evaluating models on SABER reveals substantial binding failures in both CLIP-style dual encoders and recent MLLM-based embedders. These findings motivate us to ask how binding can be improved efficiently. While multimodal supervision may be effective, collecting suitable images is difficult and costly. Text, on the other hand, is well suited to binding supervision: it is cheap to generate, supports a broader range of attributes and enables precisely controlled hard negatives. We thus finetune an MLLM-based embedder exclusively on synthetic attribute-binding text. Despite the absence of image supervision, the gains transfer to cross-modal and image--image retrieval while preserving general multimodal embedding performance. Our model achieves SOTA results on SABER while also improving on negation and instance-retrieval benchmarks, demonstrating broader benefits of our binding-focused supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22602
Strong multi-hop retrieval should be practical to deploy without expensive corpus preparation or complex database infrastructure. We present SAG2, an embedding-free retrieval architecture built around a single SQLite database, BM25, and contextual evidence decisions from JEV. SAG2 follows the query-time association principle of SAG (SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation), while replacing its event-entity and dense indexes with a lexical index over original passages. Selected passages supply terms for further retrieval, and newly retrieved evidence guides subsequent decisions. This moves semantic evidence selection to query time, eliminating offline embedding computation, LLM-based event-entity extraction, and dedicated database servers. The resulting system combines lightweight preparation with strong retrieval accuracy: on 1,000-question subsets of MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and HotpotQA, SAG2 achieves the highest Recall@5 and Recall@10 among the compared methods, with Recall@10 of 86.62%, 97.43%, and 99.00%. It also reaches 81.10% document Recall@10 over the 511,962-document EnterpriseRAG-Bench corpus. Indexing all 11,656 MuSiQue passages takes 2.36 seconds, produces a 25.87 MiB database, and requires no model calls. SAG2 demonstrates that accurate multi-hop evidence retrieval can be supported by compact, rapidly prepared infrastructure, making it a practical foundation for knowledge retrieval applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22588
Time Series Language Models (TSLMs) enable language-based understanding and reasoning over temporal data, yet a fundamental question remains: what information should their time-series representations preserve, and what variation should they factor out? Existing TSLMs typically expose the language model to a single representation, imposing a fixed inductive bias across downstream tasks. We instead introduce complementary representations as a design principle for time-series reasoning. Our model combines two visual views: line plots preserve absolute measurements and the observed coordinate frame, while normalized delay embeddings factor out positive amplitude rescaling and offsets while exposing temporal structure. Dedicated visual encoders integrate both views into a shared language model through visual tokens and multi-level feature fusion. Evaluation-time interventions verify that the two views exhibit distinct invariance profiles, while single-view ablations show that their combination is particularly beneficial beyond basic perception, with the large gains in prediction and reasoning. Built on Qwen3-VL-8B, our dual-view model improves overall TSRBench accuracy from 44.5% with line plots alone to 53.2%, substantially exceeding the strongest evaluated dedicated TSLM baseline at 36.7%. It further achieves 89.9% accuracy on TSExam and 86.8% numerical accuracy on multivariate ChatTS alignment. Together, these results demonstrate that complementary representations provide an effective design principle for general-purpose TSLMs, enabling models to exploit temporal structure without sacrificing access to the original measurement frame.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22327
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation, enabling their application to visual storytelling, where coherent image sequences are generated from narrative prompts. However, existing methods primarily focus on identity preservation and often fail to adapt to diverse scene variations, resulting in semantic misalignment and structural inflexibility. We propose EOS-Story, a training-free framework that harmonizes identity consistency with scene-specific adaptation across text and vision spaces. In the text space, we decouple the narrative into identity and scene sub-prompts to prevent information dilution, but this leaves the scene without access to appearance cues. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-Contextual Bridging, which softly injects a phrase-level appearance residual into the scene's <EOS> embedding. In the vision space, we find that scale mismatch between identity and scene subjects causes a few identity tokens to be repeatedly transferred, producing structural artifacts. We address this with Adaptive Identity Preservation, which anchors identity features at the scene-specific scale (Identity Anchoring) and integrates them via Identity-Aware Self-Attention. To evaluate performance under varied spatial compositions, we extend the Consistory+ benchmark with diverse framing scenarios (Consistory+_+). Extensive experiments show that EOS-Story achieves competitive or superior performance on both benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22320
Multi-object tracking in sports broadcasts is hard for two reasons: athletes move fast and change direction abruptly, and the camera pans and zooms at the same time. We present ARC-SORT (Adaptive, Robust, Compensated SORT), a tracking-by-detection tracker that trains nothing and runs in real time. Its design rule: the tracker measures its own uncertainty, and that measurement decides how it acts. An Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) Kalman filter gives every track a predictive covariance, and we turn it into a per-track search region: the less reliable the motion prediction, the larger the region in which a detection may match (uncertainty-adaptive Expansion IoU, EIoU). On identical inputs, this continuous coupling is what matters: the same covariance used as a hard Mahalanobis gate hurts at every threshold we swept, and richer covariance summaries add nothing measurable. When two tracks cross, the assignment cost itself reports whether the decision was close. ARC-SORT keeps such pairs under review and applies at most one corrective identity swap once post-crossing appearance evidence shows the first decision was wrong; this adds +1.0 HOTA (higher order tracking accuracy) on both the SportsMOT and DanceTrack test sets at under a millisecond per frame. For players who leave the frame for seconds, motion extrapolation carries no information, so our offline re-identification drops the usual motion gate and links tracklets by appearance alone. ARC-SORT reaches 81.82 HOTA on the SportsMOT test set with the fewest identity switches of the 69 leaderboard entries as of August 2026 and tied-third multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA, 97.09), and 62.1 HOTA on DanceTrack test with the same association settings. On Deep-EIoU's public detections and embeddings it reaches 80.31 HOTA, +3.1 over Deep-EIoU. It runs at about 50 frames per second on a laptop RTX 3060 GPU. Code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22306
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by querying external structured knowledge. However, it can also introduce privacy risks by leaking sensitive information from the retrieval datastore. We propose a simple method to preserve datastore privacy in RAG systems via random projection. By applying the same projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings, our method provably preserves semantic similarity between queries and retrieved items while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets, we show that this lightweight approach achieves superior retrieval and generation performance compared to prior methods which leverage formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees, while exhibiting comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. Our results for the first time suggest that random projection can serve as a competitive and practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22297
Lossless image compression fundamentally relies on accurate entropy modeling, driving a recent shift toward large language model (LLM)-based methods. However, existing approaches mainly emphasize the modeling capacity of LLMs while directly serializing images into pixel or residual sequences, leaving heterogeneous signal patterns entangled within a single prediction stream. In this paper, we argue that effective entropy modeling depends not only on model capacity, but also on the predictability of the input representation. Motivated by this insight, we propose WaveLLM, a wavelet-domain LLM-based entropy model for lossless image compression. By decomposing an image into multi-level wavelet subbands, WaveLLM converts a heterogeneous prediction problem into a set of more structured and statistically homogeneous subproblems that are more amenable to autoregressive probability estimation. To bridge numerical coding symbols with the LLM's native text token space, we introduce a dedicated numerical interface featuring value embeddings and a coefficient prediction head. Furthermore, a task-adaptive prompting strategy is designed to enable a single shared model to adapt to diverse subbands within a unified framework. Built on Llama-3.2-3B with LoRA adaptation, WaveLLM achieves 2.51, 2.24, and 2.27 bpsp on Kodak, this http URL, and DIV2K, respectively, outperforming the PixelCNN-based codec using the same wavelet transform by 0.43, 0.36, and 0.46 bpsp, and surpassing recent LLM-based lossless compressors on all three benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22232
Physical understanding is crucial for decision making, yet vision models struggle to infer properties such as damping that govern how materials behave. Audio encodes such properties directly, because an object's acoustic response to impact reveals its damping through measurable decay. We probe frozen encoders for the quality factor $Q$, a dimensionless measure of how many oscillations an object completes before its ring dies away, and report how well each embedding orders impacts by $Q$ using the Spearman rank correlation $\rho$, for which $\rho=1$ is a perfect ordering and $\rho=0$ an unrelated one. Audio embeddings reach $\rho=0.73$ and retain most of that advantage on materials withheld from training, while a single video frame taken at the moment of impact, encoded by CLIP, supports only $\rho=0.28$. Having established where the signal lives, we ask how much of that gap vision can recover. We distill a frozen audio teacher into a frozen CLIP backbone through a trained projection head and find that this recovers a useful fraction of the audio advantage. Because pooled correlations on this task are dominated in practice by category identity, we also evaluate under a leave-one-material-out protocol in which the held-out material is withheld from the projection head as well as the probe. Distillation with a four-frame input improves the correlation there from 0.234 to 0.338 (+0.053 over the matched four-frame baseline, 14 of 17 materials), a gain that no category-level strategy can produce. Widening the visual input to four frames spanning the impact supplies half of that improvement at no acoustic cost, which indicates that part of what a single frame misses is visible dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22221
The vocabulary of a language model is its native semantics: the embedding and the unembedding fix the meaning of a state at the two ends of the residual stream. Between them, existing methods either reuse a fixed lens or treat the states as a point cloud, and neither reads a state the way the model does. We argue that every hidden state has a native reference frame, induced by the layers that read it next and adaptive to the context. Lexical reference frames approximate it by reading a state through the model's own remaining layers with a stated number of rounds of attention between positions and a typical attention output for the rest, without fitting to the model's output. No lens, with fixed directions per layer, can exceed the square root of the native frame's coherence, 0.30 and 0.35 at mid-depth of SmolLM3-3B and OLMo3-7B, whereas the first-order frame, LexFrame[1], reaches 0.97 and 0.97 and reads a state within 0.16 nats of the model's output. Its coefficients attribute predictions more faithfully than attribution patching, its lexical basis steers a prediction while sparing other tokens, and its confident readings would let an early exit skip 0.45 and 0.42 of the layers, where lenses skip almost none. In this way, lexical reference frames make every hidden state of the model readable, attributable and steerable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22169
In minoritized (low-resource) language technologies, a common response to data sparsity is to aggregate text across multiple varieties and treat the combined data as a single corpus. However, mixed corpora of closely related indigenous variants can produce an artificial register that is accountable to no single speaker community, a structural failure we call variant fragmentation. This issue is acute for minoritized languages native to Mexico, such as Nawatl. Building on a 70,000-pair multi-variant foundation, we specialize an mT5-large checkpoint to Masewalkopa (nhn), the Nawatl variety spoken in Santa Ana Tlacotenco. We curate 2,665 parallel pairs, reserve all sentence-level data for evaluation, and incorporate 192 elder-transcribed target sentences via asymmetric backtranslation. A custom finite-state analyzer reduces unanalyzed surface forms from 82.0% to 19.9% and supplies functional syntax tags as plain-text prefixes, allowing the model to reuse existing subword embeddings rather than relying on frozen special tokens. The resulting LoRA-v9c-b model achieves 58.46 dev chrF++ and 58.20/57.90 directional test chrF++. Finally, CTranslate2 int8 quantization reduces CPU latency from 137.5 to 1.8-2.6 seconds per request, enabling cost-bounded Cloud Run deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22110
Reconstructing what a person perceives from their brain activity is a stringent test of whether neural recordings carry meaningful information. Naturalistic speech offers a rich testbed for this challenge: it unfolds over multiple timescales, but fMRI's noisy, temporally smeared measurements make this structure hard to recover. We introduce NOEMA, a temporal convolutional decoder that aligns windows of consecutive fMRI measurements with multimodal stimulus embeddings. These embeddings combine complementary text, audio, and speech representations of the same stimulus segment, enabling its retrieval directly from brain activity. On two naturalistic speech datasets, Cephalonauts One and LeBel, NOEMA retrieves the correct segment among 2,000 candidates within the top 10 for more than 42% of held-out queries. This substantially outperforms baseline decoders, an advantage that persists when the candidate pool is extended with thousands of distractors absent from training. Controlled ablations establish the contributions of temporal modeling and complementary stimulus representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22049
Conditional memory expands language-model capacity through selective lookup, but the full embedding table must remain available for every possible input. We introduce Conditional Program (CP), a compressed representation that reconstructs only the rows an input requests. CP represents each row by a short code and a local scale, with a reconstruction program shared across the table. We instantiate this representation with a Gaussian trellis, norm restoration and independently decodable row records. CP's two-bit code lowers output KL by 41--63\% relative to 2-bit round-to-nearest. Analysis across three trained n-gram memory families shows that Gaussian-like coordinate statistics coexist with learned relationships among rows; at matched storage budgets, the shared trellis outperforms the fitted codebooks and low-rank residual variants we test. For DeepSeek, it reduces table storage from 203GB to 51GB, leaving room for larger workloads when the table is kept on GPU.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21810
Multimodal objects can require different partitions under different instructions, as when products in an e-commerce catalog are grouped by color, material, or both. Retrieval-oriented embeddings may not recover these partitions, while generative clustering often relies on intermediate descriptions or iterative decisions. This paper presents CIM-Embed, a framework for learning instruction-conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. Supervised contrastive learning uses same-group positives and negatives from other groups, optionally including other tasks; heterogeneous structured batches accommodate tasks with different group counts. At inference, the model maps each object's image, text, and instruction directly to an embedding; HDBSCAN then forms a partition without the ground-truth cluster count. We construct ProductMIC from product metadata in Amazon Reviews 2023, comprising training data and an evaluation benchmark for instruction-conditioned clustering. The benchmark contains 5,373 products and 449 single-attribute and compositional grouping tasks spanning 50 leaf categories excluded from our training. With full-dimensional embeddings and HDBSCAN, direct within-task SupCon training achieves a mean per-task V-measure of 95.01, compared with 53.06 for WeMM 9B, the strongest general-purpose embedding baseline evaluated. Frozen product-trained encoders also improve out-of-domain conditional grouping, while controlled transfer experiments distinguish partition transfer from instruction response. We will release the code and dataset upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21805
Multi-modal semantic segmentation benefits from complementary sensors, but this benefit is fragile when some modalities are degraded or missing at test time. Many existing methods rely on dedicated fusion modules or multi-branch cross-modal encoders, and the fusion often becomes unreliable when modalities are absent, leading to substantial performance drops. We propose \textbf{FuseAdapt}, a parameter-efficient framework that performs fusion within the adaptation space of a frozen vision foundation model (VFM), exploring whether VFM priors can serve as an effective shared backbone for multi-modal segmentation. Instead of attaching a standalone fusion network, FuseAdapt assigns each modality a lightweight adaptation branch and performs \emph{adaptation-space fusion} by keeping Q/V low-rank adaptation private to each modality and routing only FFN low-rank residual activations across modalities inside the frozen backbone. The pretrained VFM remains fixed while modality-specific corrections and explicit cross-modal interaction are learned through the adaptation paths. To handle missing modalities, we further introduce \textbf{Predictive Modality Modeling (PMM)}, a direct representation-level objective for cross-modal redundancy. During training, PMM masks a target modality and predicts its embedding from the visible ones, supervised by a teacher target computed under full-modality input. PMM is used only during training and adds no inference-time overhead. Across three multi-modal segmentation benchmarks (MCubeS, DELIVER, MUSES), FuseAdapt consistently improves both modality-complete and modality-incomplete segmentation with a small trainable budget, yielding up to +3.01 mIoU under full modalities and +12.56 mIoU under missing modalities over prior state-of-the-art. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21779
As image generation models become increasingly capable of producing highly realistic content, traditional forensic techniques are struggling to keep up. This paper investigates whether MLLMs can instead be used as a form of forensic analysis by identifying synthetic media. Specifically, the study aims to determine whether these models detect fake images by recognising physical inconsistencies, or whether they rely on digital artefacts such as embedded this http URL MLLMs: GPT-4o, GPT-5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5, Gemini 3, and Seed 1.6, are benchmarked using a dataset of 400 images. Fifty images are authentic photographs, while the remaining 350 are generated using seven leading image models: Gemini 3, Gemini 2.5, Flux.2 Pro, GPT-Image-1, GPT-Image-1.5, Seedream 4.0, and Seedream 4.5. The evaluation is structured in three stages: single-image classification, pairwise comparison, and a focused "self-detection" experiment on Gemini. Several MLLMs achieved a high detection accuracy, with GPT-5.2 reaching a peak of 97.9% in the pairwise experiment, against specific generators and an overall mean pairwise accuracy of 82.5% by identifying structural or physical inconsistencies within images. However, results from the self-detection experiment indicate that the presence of invisible SynthID watermarks leads to a 10% reduction in Gemini's detection accuracy compared to the clean control group. One possible explanation is that SynthID embedding reduces some of the visible artefacts the models rely on for this http URL results imply that MLLMs can detect structural artefacts without relying on watermarks, but performance varies substantially across model generations. The findings from comparison C5 also suggest that SynthID embedding may suppress some of the structural artefacts used during detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21760
Language embeddings are increasingly used in recommenders to represent item content, but their privacy risks remain poorly understood. We study whether item embeddings can reveal item identities when an adversary has access to auxiliary item text from external sources. We show that a simple cosine-similarity attack can recover item identities with high mean reciprocal rank across language models and candidate-set settings on two real-world datasets. Leakage is strongest when the adversary's partial information overlaps with the victim representation, but it also persists through semantic alignment between independently sourced descriptions. We further show that item leakage can propagate to user re-identification from sparse ratings. Finally, we evaluate obfuscated descriptions as a mitigation and find a clear leakage-utility tradeoff.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21713