Embedding
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FLINT: Fixed-budget Late Interaction
2026-10-19 20:46:01Himank Handa, Negar Arabzadeh, Matei ZahariaAbstract
Multi-vector retrieval models such as ColBERT often outperform single-vector models of comparable scale by matching queries and documents at the token level. However, retaining a vector for every token substantially increases storage requirements and slows retrieval compared to single-vector bi-encoders, limiting their scalability. We introduce FLINT (Fixed-budget Late INTeraction), an architecture that uses attention-based pooling to represent each query and document with a fixed number of embedding vectors. Unlike architectures that pool only document representations while retaining token-level queries, FLINT applies pooling symmetrically to both sides, limiting document storage and the number of vector comparisons needed during retrieval. FLINT achieves comparable ranking effectiveness to the closest baselines on BEIR and outperforms them on several benchmarks with longer and more complex queries, including BrowseComp+, CRUMB, and TREC Tip-of-the-Tongue 2025. We demonstrate that FLINT's effectiveness-efficiency benefits extend across encoder architectures, testing it on two separate backbones (BERT and ModernBERT). On long-query corpora, FLINT delivers 1.5-2.8 times faster end-to-end retrieval than ConstBERT, the closest baseline. FLINT also reduces index size by 5.3-9.3 times relative to token-level late-interaction models such as ColBERTv2.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27273
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Predicting Linear Relational Decodability Without the Relation
2026-10-19 20:07:21Jonas Rohweder, Adrian M\"ulthaler, Farid Mehri, Sebastian Gerstner, Hinrich Sch\"utzeAbstract
Linear relational embeddings (LREs) approximate a language model's subject-to-object mapping with an affine function. Their faithfulness varies enormously across relations, from near zero for person_father to the ceiling for country_capital_city. We investigate the factors that contribute to this variation and demonstrate that it can be significantly predicted from a readout that is not aware of the underlying relation. To do so, we propose a novel form of the Jacobian lens, the entity lens. Whereas the Jacobian lens is estimated across all tokens and concepts, the entity lens EL_t is trained to predict what the model will output for an entity of type t under the neutral prompt "{} is known for"; e.g., we train ELs for countries and persons. After estimating an entity lens, we measure how highly it ranks the model's answer for a relation without using any relation-specific information in estimation and prediction. Across 28 relations of the LRE dataset on Olmo-3-7B this relation-agnostic score correlates with LRE faithfulness at \rho = 0.7355 (p < .01). This suggests that linear decodability is largely a property of what a subject's representation already carries, rather than of the relation being decoded. Moving the unit of analysis from the relation to the individual fact, we conclude that new relation datasets and analysis methods are needed to address several problems in existing datasets, most prominently semantically weak first tokens (e.g., most predicted universities' first token is "University") and reference competition (e.g., the LLM confuses obscure actor names with competing non-actor entities that have the same last name). Our full pipeline is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27241
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Sparse RL Relaxation for LLM Reasoning
2026-10-19 19:50:46Jiabin Fan, Matthias Lindemann, Zita Marinho, Andr\'e FT Martins, Lili MouAbstract
Recent work has explored continuous representations in place of discrete tokens during Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, often referred to as soft CoT. This is motivated by the idea that a mixture of token embeddings can represent a superposition of multiple reasoning possibilities within a single step. However, it remains challenging to train large language models to realize this potential. Existing work has explored reinforcement learning (RL)-style training for soft CoT. However, these approaches treat soft tokens as actions in a Markov decision process rather than as differentiable intermediate computation steps. Thus, they do not propagate gradients across the soft tokens and miss out on the signal of how the choice of one soft token affects the next. In this paper, we propose a sparse relaxation method for RL (called SpaRLax), which leverages the differentiability of soft-CoT reasoning over time steps and makes training more stable and effective. We adopt an entmax sparsity method that adaptively determines the degree of softness, which truncates long-tail noise at confident steps while retaining multiple plausible candidates when uncertain. Across nine reasoning benchmarks, our method achieves the highest average performance compared with baseline methods. Further analyses validate the effective use of soft-token superposition in our approach, and also demonstrate the contribution of adaptive sparsity in our approach.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27220
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MoSAIK: Motion Search with Artificial Intelligence in K-space
2026-10-19 18:49:59Oscar Dabrowski, Abijith Jagannath, Fr\'ed\'eric Grouiller, S\'ebastien CourvoisierAbstract
Object: Motion artefacts remain a major limitation of routine two-dimensional T2-weighted turbo spin-echo (TSE) brain MRI, reducing diagnostic confidence and often necessitating repeated acquisitions. MoSAIK (Motion Search with AI in K-space) retrospectively estimates in-plane rigid-body motion directly from standard multi-coil TSE k-space. Without a motion-free reference, external navigators, or additional acquisitions, MoSAIK infers motion from k-space self-consistency violations and incorporates predicted parameters into model-based, motion-aware reconstruction rather than synthesizing corrected images. Materials and Methods: Selected complex coil data were represented as log-magnitude and phase channels. A decoupled convolutional embedding and Transformer encoder estimated phase-encoding-line-indexed rotation and two-dimensional translations. Training used motion-free clinical acquisitions with simulated motion; four held-out subjects were evaluated. Component-wise errors assessed estimation; SSIM and PSNR in silico and entropy focus criterion (EFC) in vivo assessed reconstruction. Results: Motion estimation errors were low for both rotation (MSE $<$ 0.2 deg$^2$) and translation (MSE $<$ 0.2 pixels$^2$), with Pearson correlations of approximately 0.96 and 0.94, respectively. In every in-vivo acquisition, more than 75% of slices showed information gain relative to uncorrected reconstructions. MoSAIK reduced visible artefacts while preserving anatomical detail. Discussion: Transformer-based k-space motion-trajectory estimation enables fast retrospective correction of standard clinical TSE brain MRI.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27156
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Beyond Two Tracks: Speaker-Anchored Full-Duplex Dialogue Recovery
2026-10-19 18:09:47Yuxuan Chen, Yang Xiao, Jack Sun, Chak Sun, Brick Li, SamAbstract
Spoken interaction is moving from alternating turns to full-duplex conversation, where an agent listens while speaking. Learning this coordination requires natural dialogue with persistent speaker-resolved tracks, a data requirement that remains difficult to satisfy at scale. Generative recovery offers a route from ordinary recordings, but recovering two voices is not enough: their track assignments can drift as the conversation unfolds. We address this missing link with speaker-anchored routing before diffusion: a 1.84M-parameter module matches the separator's coarse streams to fixed enrollment identities and orders them before a frozen generator reconstructs the speech, without retraining the generator or altering the reconstructed audio. On 25-minute remote conversations, routing cuts wrong-track time from 43.9% to 4.1%, below the 6.2% of matched-enrollment waveform re-identification, with its largest advantage when one participant holds the floor (17.8% versus 28.6%), and raises fixed-track activity F1 from 0.46 to 0.84 while per-chunk reconstruction quality is unchanged. The same router transfers to unseen face-to-face and telephone recordings, and a margin-gated verification step brings their wrong-track time to 0.9-1.7% while embedding 20-36% of the output, where full re-identification embeds all of it. Recovered voices thus become the participant-consistent tracks that full-duplex dialogue modeling needs. Audio examples: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27109
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LVMem: Image-Augmented Memory for Long-Horizon Question Answering
2026-10-19 18:01:56Victoria Khoruzhaya, Maksim Kalmykov, Tuong Do Minh, Tatiana Zemskova, Yixin Zhu, Dmitry YudinAbstract
Reliable language-guided perception is essential for embodied agents, where questions about objects, events, and their locations must be answered from long observation histories. Unlike conventional visual question answering, realistic robotic settings require reasoning over extended temporal horizons and persistent scene memory. We build upon the view-based memory paradigm and propose an efficient framework for long-horizon spatio-temporal question answering. While existing view-based systems typically store either text captions or visual embeddings, we extend the ReMEmbR-style memory with image paths that link each stored description to its original visual content. To make the stored annotations more informative, we replace uniform sampling during memory construction with an optical-flow-based frame selection strategy (PSFR) and store an object-centric descriptive scene representation instead of plain captions. We further equip a VLM-based agent with an adaptive retrieval tool that returns the image associated with the most relevant caption, allowing the agent to decide when visual inspection is needed. On the OC-NaVQA benchmark, LVMem outperforms ReMEmbR on binary and positional metrics with both backbones and matches or exceeds a 4D scene graph DAAAM baseline on binary accuracy, while operating on a lightweight view-based memory that requires no explicit graph construction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27104
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ClockMark: Adaptive and Host-Dependent Watermarking for Large Language Models
2026-10-19 18:00:03Yupeng Qiu, Han Fang, Ee-Chien ChangAbstract
Large language model (LLM) watermarking operates on the next-token distribution that evolves during generation. In streaming generation, each sampled token becomes part of the text and affects subsequent distributions. Embedding therefore proceeds with a changing host, unlike classical watermarking, which adapts embedding to an existing host signal. To accommodate this difference, we formulate a novel embedding framework for LLM watermarking based on two principles. We first argue that embedding should be adaptive, retaining the state of previous sampling decisions to better guide subsequent choices. We further argue that embedding should be host-dependent, using the current LLM distribution to constrain both token selection and state updates. Guided by these principles and the two requirements of distribution preservation and robustness to text editing, we propose ClockMark. It combines adaptive and host-dependent embedding with message spreading, embedding the full payload in each watermarked token. Theoretically, we prove that ClockMark preserves the original LLM sequence distribution, thereby maintaining generation quality. Empirically, extensive experiments against 12 baselines demonstrate improved robustness to text editing, with gains of up to 16.08 percentage points in bit accuracy over the strongest tested baseline.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27079
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HierDTA: Hierarchical Structure-Aware Representation Learning for Drug--Target Affinity Prediction
2026-10-19 09:17:26Huangchao Xu, Baohua Zhang, Qian Liu, Zhong Jin, Yi DuAbstract
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.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27001
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TRACE: Training-aware Robustness and Challenge Evaluation for Text-Vision Embedding Models
2026-10-19 07:38:29Pume Tuchinda, Tinnakit Udsa, Peerat LimkonchotiwatAbstract
Existing benchmarks for text-vision embedding models report aggregate scores that obscure whether performance comes from general capabilities, task-specific adaptation, or robustness to challenging tasks. We introduce TRACE, a Training-aware Robustness and Challenge Evaluation framework that reorganizes 168 tasks from various sources of datasets into three categories: General, Adaptability, and Challenge. Through controlled experiments on two text-vision embedding models, we show that combining general and adaptation data improves Adaptability performance by 7.67 and 7.09 points, respectively, while largely preserving General performance. However, Challenge performance remains below 5.0, with limited improvements from additional training data. Further analysis identifies multilingual and visual-document tasks as major weaknesses. Our findings demonstrate that data adaptation alone is insufficient to address these challenges, highlighting the need for methodological advances beyond data-centric improvements.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26993
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How Far Can the Gemma 4 Speech Encoder Go Without Changing Its Weights? Saudi and Gulf Arabic Speech Recognition with a Frozen and an Adapter-Augmented Encoder
2026-10-18 21:06:44Amr AbdelkhalikAbstract
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.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28673
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SZED at ArGuard Shared Tasks: Multi-Task Label-Attention and Cross-Modal Fusion for Arabic Hateful Meme Detection
2026-10-18 18:56:03Selma Khelili, Zohra AbdeliAbstract
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.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26972
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Steerable Pluralistic Policy Alignment from Anonymized Crowd Feedback
2026-10-17 06:14:59Akansha Kalra, Ellen R. Novoseller, Vernon J. Lawhern, Daniel S. BrownAbstract
Pluralistic alignment requires AI systems to learn from diverse populations whose preferences may reflect heterogeneous or even conflicting objectives, and to personalize their behavior to individual users. Existing approaches in pluralistic alignment often assume access to annotator identities and rely on powerful pretrained representations to model individual preference variations. We propose Preference-PCA Pluralistic Learning (P3L), a novel framework for pluralistic alignment that jointly learns trajectory embeddings and the shared basis of preference directions via PCA decomposition from heterogeneous crowd feedback without requiring annotator identities. At test time, our approach enables rapid and accurate personalized reward learning and downstream policy optimization. Experiments across multiple embodied control tasks demonstrate that P3L enables steerable personal alignment that generalizes beyond the offline dataset to out-of-distribution new users and attains competitive RL and test performance, while substantially reducing computational cost and supporting variable adaptation query budgets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26914
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MOSS: A Production Framework for Monitoring and Diagnosing Semantic Failures in Search and Recommendation Systems
2026-10-16 21:26:06Alina Nesen, Prathyusha Kanmanth Reddy, David Relyea, Rohit Avinash Mujumdar, Samaneh Karimi, Bo Shen, Jordan HashemiAbstract
Detecting semantic failures in production recommendation and search systems is hard: behavioral metrics lag by days, manual review does not scale, and most LLM evaluation frameworks are designed for offline, fixed datasets rather than continuous operational monitoring. We present Model Sanity Service (MOSS), a production framework that addresses this operational gap by embedding LLM-based relevance scoring into a recurring monitoring loop with targeted sampling, strategy-aware prompting, structured alerting, and diagnostic follow-up prompting that categorizes failures into actionable root causes. MOSS has been running in production at a large U.S. retailer for over six months across recommendation, search, and offer surfaces, and has surfaced two confirmed serving defects. For one of these, a backfill blending defect, MOSS quantified the impact of the proposed fix offline as a 76.4\% relative reduction in alert rate. On a 498-pair human-annotated recommendation benchmark, frontier LLM judges achieve higher F1 and AUC point estimates than non-LLM baselines (internal production embeddings and SBERT), with the largest gains on strategy-dependent tasks requiring intent-level relational reasoning. The same judge, score scale, and threshold transfer to a 466-pair search benchmark spanning 21 queries with only a surface-specific prompt adaptation, achieving strong F1 and AUC without retuning. These results show that a single LLM monitoring framework can provide useful, actionable quality signals across multiple product discovery surfaces in a large-scale e-commerce setting.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26902
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Large language model and reinforcement learning based autonomous construction and progress updates
2026-10-16 19:57:20Yifei Xiao, Huasheng Lin, T. Y. YangAbstract
Due to the rapid growth of the global population, traditional construction methods are gradually unable to meet the current housing demand. The advancement of machine learning algorithms has encouraged researchers to explore their applications in the construction industry, leading to more intelligent and efficient building processes. In particular, the rise of large language models in recent years has provided more possibilities for the transformation from traditional construction to smart construction. In this study, a large language model and reinforcement learning based autonomous construction method is proposed. An enhanced soft actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to plan actions for a mobile crane according to construction tasks. Robot kinematics and control algorithms are used to ensure that the actions generated by the reinforcement learning algorithm can be executed by the crane. In addition, a customized embedding model is developed to extract information from the construction environment according to user interests. Then, a large language model, ChatGPT 5, is used to update construction progress, provide safety information to control system, and generate construction progress reports. The feasibility of proposed method is verified through several full-scall retaining wall construction experiments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26899
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Steering beyond Language: Improving Multilingual Training-Free Text Embeddings via Paired-Residual Subspace Removal
2026-10-16 17:30:43Ailiang Lin, Zhuoyun Li, Yusong Wang, Keyu Mao, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu OkumuraAbstract
While deriving text embeddings directly from frozen LLMs has emerged as a promising direction, existing methods focus almost exclusively on English, leaving multilingual settings largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multilingual training-free text embeddings in LLMs. Our analysis reveals a language-conditioned embedding geometry in which semantically equivalent sentences remain misaligned across languages. We hypothesize that language-specific variation can be disentangled from semantic content to improve embedding quality. To this end, we propose Paired-Residual Subspace Removal (PRSR), a training-free inference-time intervention that steers LLM representations toward a more language-invariant semantic space. PRSR first constructs paired residuals from multilingual parallel sentences to capture language-specific deviations. It then estimates layer-wise low-rank subspaces from these residuals and suppresses the corresponding components in the last-token hidden states. We conduct more than 200 monolingual evaluations across 18 languages using MTEB and MMTEB, along with cross-lingual bitext mining between English and over 200 other languages. Empirical results demonstrate that PRSR consistently improves the performance of existing training-free baselines in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings across different LLMs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23807
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Synthetic Image Oversampling for Rare-Class Representation Learning in Deep Facial Phenotyping
2026-10-16 16:43:59Miles Liao, Zhanliang Wang, Hongzhuo Chen, Kai WangAbstract
Recent deep facial phenotyping methods can support the recognition of genetic syndromes, but patient images are often scarce and unevenly distributed across disorders. Synthetic facial images offer a way to supplement the training data without collecting additional patient photographs. Their usefulness, however, depends on whether they improve recognition of real patients: generated images may introduce artifacts or repeat features already represented in the training set. It is therefore necessary to examine both how much synthetic augmentation to use and which disorders benefit. We investigate disease-specific synthetic oversampling using images from the Phenotypic Disease Image Database to augment a subset of the GestaltMatcher Database. We compare increasing augmentation levels in an image-based model, GestaltMatcher-Arc, and a multimodal model, GestaltMML, while keeping the real training and patient-disjoint evaluation partitions fixed. Repeated training runs assess overall and disease-specific accuracy, and an exploratory embedding analysis examines changes in class compactness and separation. Augmentation improves mean recognition accuracy in both training setups, although gains remain modest in GestaltMatcher-Arc and continue across the tested levels in GestaltMML. These aggregate improvements are accompanied by uneven disease-level responses, including reduced accuracy for some disorders. In the embedding analysis, disorders with fewer real training images tend to gain more class separation, but geometric changes do not consistently track classification performance. Together, the findings support synthetic oversampling for limited-data facial phenotyping and emphasize the need to assess its amount and benefit for individual disorders within each training setup.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23730
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Metro-WM: Long-Horizon Latent Planning with Realisable Sub-Goals
2026-10-16 15:23:50Royson Lee, Fady Rezk, Titouan Parcollet, Timothy Hospedales, Cristina CornelioAbstract
Model-predictive control with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provides a strong zero-shot goal-reaching planner, but it is only effective over short planning horizons. Hierarchical extensions attempt to bridge this gap by learning a macro planner to predict intermediate latent sub-goals to guide the micro planner. In this work, we demonstrate that unconstrained latent sub-goal prediction is fundamentally flawed. A rigorous evaluation reveals that a leading state-of-the-art macro planner routinely emits physically unrealisable sub-goals. To resolve this, we introduce Metro-WM, a hierarchical framework that issues sub-goals by retrieving genuine states from prior experience rather than generating ungrounded latent vectors. Specifically, Metro-WM constructs a graph whose vertices are observed frames from offline expert demonstrations or random-action trajectories, allowing frames from different episodes to be connected and stitched into routes to the goal. Planning over the full graph also makes the system highly robust to execution errors: if the micro planner drifts off course, Metro-WM instantly finds a new optimal path from the current state. Our experiments show that Metro-WM achieves superior long-horizon success rates of up to 37.33 percentage points over the next best hierarchical approach while being up to 10.9 times faster, requiring both 13-56 times less offline compute and fewer tuned hyperparameters. Additional analysis reveals that Metro-WM finds shorter paths than the offline demonstrations, outperforms an oracle relying on the query's own demonstration, and maintains robust performance under extremely sparse dataset conditions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31868
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SemPurify: Semantics-Aware Data Purification for Black-box Backdoor Defense
2026-10-16 15:09:14Jiawei Yu, Syed Irfan Ali Meerza, Yi Wu, Amir Sadovnik, Jian LiuAbstract
Backdoor attacks have emerged as a critical security threat in machine learning, where adversaries embed triggers within poisoned training samples to manipulate a model's predictions on targeted inputs while leaving its general behavior unaffected. This stealthy nature makes backdoor attacks difficult to detect, as the model functions normally until activated by a specific malicious trigger. Current purification-based defenses use image transformations (e.g., blurring) to disrupt trigger patterns but often degrade image quality. Even with advanced restoration techniques like diffusion models, these approaches can still alter visual or semantic information, reducing utility for downstream tasks. To address this, we propose the first semantics-aware data purification framework for black-box backdoor defense, SemPurify, which explicitly incorporates multi-level semantics (i.e., low-level semantic embeddings and high-level image tags) within a text-to-image (T2I) framework to guide image restoration during purification. Using this semantic information, the T2I model subsequently refines the transformed samples, helping preserve visual details and semantic information during restoration. Extensive experiments spanning multiple backdoor scenarios, i.e., classification models, CLIP-style encoders, and generative models, demonstrate that SemPurify reliably removes backdoors while effectively preserving semantic information for downstream tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23589
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ConvexLLM: Scaling Convex-Hull Speech Interfaces to General-Purpose Audio Intelligence
2026-10-16 14:35:04Ming-Hao Hsu, Shujie Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Yuxiang Wang, Yingda Shen, Jinyu Li, Zhizheng WuAbstract
Speech and audio language models connect continuous acoustic representations to decoders pretrained primarily on text data. Most such models use MLP or Q-Former interfaces to map acoustic features into the decoder's input space, requiring the decoder to learn how to interpret the resulting representations. We investigate whether grounding these representations in the decoder's existing text embeddings can help it use acoustic information while better preserving its pretrained text capabilities. We present ConvexLLM, a general-purpose speech and audio language model whose C-Gate interface represents audio as continuous convex combinations of frozen text embeddings. ConvexLLM achieves an eleven-task VoiceBench aggregate of 75.36, the highest among the open-weight models we compare, and an MMAU Test-mini accuracy of 62.50%. Its largest margins over the baselines are on spoken knowledge and reasoning tasks, while the strongest baselines are more accurate on audio understanding and transcription. In a comparison with a 2B-parameter decoder, C-Gate achieves higher aggregate spoken-language performance than MLP and Q-Former interfaces, with text-task performance close to MLP and task-dependent tradeoffs in transcription and audio understanding. These results support convex combinations of text embeddings as a viable interface for general-purpose speech and audio language models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23539
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Interpreting SSL Representations for Spoof Detection: a WavLM Study
2026-10-16 14:26:55Mohamed Mallat, Michele Panariello, Massimiliano Todisco, Nicholas Evans, Anthony LarcherAbstract
Self-supervised speech models such as WavLM achieve strong spoofing detection performance, yet which layers encode the most spoof-relevant information and what acoustic properties they capture remain opaque. We present a layer-wise interpretability study of WavLM using the ASVspoof 5 database, combining three complementary analyses: (i) per-layer linear probing with attack-level evaluation across speech synthesis, voice conversion, and adversarial attacks; (ii) a canonical correlation analysis (CCA) linking layer representations to spoofing-relevant acoustic features; (iii) an exhaustive grid search over layer subsets showing that use of five layers outperforms full thirteen-layer pooling. CCA analysis reveals that, while most acoustic features peak in alignment with mid-layers and then decay, voice quality measures jitter, shimmer, and the harmonics-to-noise ratio show the opposite trend, with correlation increasing toward later layers. Embedding visualisations reveal that deeper layers capture a continuous acoustic similarity among attacks rather than discrete categories, suggesting these layers encode fundamental synthesis artifacts rather than attack-specific signatures.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23526
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