Face
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Touch-JEPA: Tactile Representation Learning from Hand-Object Video with Limited Tactile Supervision
2026-10-20 16:56:11Minseong Kweon, Qiao Feng, Yiming Huang, Lingjie LiuAbstract
Understanding contact and tactile magnitude in hand-object interaction is a key step toward physically intelligent systems, yet learning such representations is limited by the cost and restricted coverage of tactile measurements. We present Touch-JEPA, a framework for learning tactile representations from hand-object videos with limited tactile supervision. We first introduce a self-supervised pretraining objective that learns from video alone without tactile supervision. Using video-derived hand geometry, Touch-JEPA predicts masked visual features at corresponding hand-surface locations from spatial and temporal context, encouraging the representation to capture latent contact dynamics. We then extend this formulation to joint representation learning, where masked prediction is applied to all videos while tactile supervision is available only for a labeled subset, grounding the shared representation in measured contact and magnitude. With self-supervised pretraining alone, simple supervised readouts on frozen Touch-JEPA features outperform supervised baselines in contact discrimination and tactile magnitude estimation across three human-hand benchmarks, and transfer to robotic hands without robot tactile training data. Joint learning with limited tactile supervision further improves contact and magnitude estimation on the human-hand benchmarks. Together, these results show that hand-object video can provide scalable self-supervision for tactile representation learning, while limited tactile measurements provide complementary physical grounding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28519
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MARE: An Open-Source Lunar Rover Simulator with Shadow Ground Truth for Perception and Autonomy
2026-10-20 16:18:29Ra\'ul Castilla-Arquillo, Miguel Olivares-MendezAbstract
Lunar surface exploration increasingly relies on autonomous rovers that must perceive and traverse unstructured terrain under extreme illumination conditions. Near the lunar poles, low sun elevations produce long, high-contrast shadows that challenge stereo vision, terrain segmentation, and localization. Developing perception and navigation algorithms for these conditions requires large amounts of sensor data with accurate ground truth, which field campaigns and analog facilities can only provide at high cost and with limited variety. This paper presents MARE (Modular Autonomy and Rendering Environment), an open-source simulation suite for lunar rover perception and autonomy built on Unreal Engine 5 and ROS 2. MARE consists of three integrated components. Terrain Studio generates cratered and rocky lunar Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) to build simulation scenes. A dedicated Unreal Engine project hosts two physics-based rovers with plugins for stereo, lidar, event, and Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) cameras, streaming time-stamped sensor data and pixel-accurate ground truth. Lastly, a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) stack provides web-based mission control. Validation shows a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.79 between predicted and rendered shadows at low sun elevations, and stereo depth analysis verifies decreased pixel coverage in shadowed regions relative to sunlit terrain.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28465
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MythoSemantic: An Interactive System for Discovering Semantic Parallels Across Mythological and Religious Traditions
2026-10-20 16:11:21Nikita Ganziuk, Innokentiy S. Humonen, Ilya Makarov, Pavel LebedevAbstract
We present a tool for the comparative study of mythological and religious texts. Traditional manual analysis is highly labor-intensive and difficult to scale. To address this, we use neural language models to embed texts into a shared semantic space, so that users can find semantic parallels across cultural traditions in an interactive interface. Embedded fragments form distinct semantic structures whose coarse geometry aligns with well-documented historical relations between traditions. We quantify how much of that geometry is already explained by lexical overlap and by proper names. The current system is available at this https URL, and the installable package is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28452
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Revision-Based Learning from Interactive Experience and Feedback
2026-10-20 16:11:17Jiawen Li, Chenming Ge, Alice Gao, Rishab Vempati, Yi-Hao Peng, Jason WuAbstract
Code generation models are increasingly used to produce interactive artifacts, such as websites and user interfaces. Many properties that determine whether these interfaces are useful only become apparent through realistic interaction, making them difficult to incorporate into model training. In this paper, we introduce RELIEF (REvision-based Learning from Interactive Experience and Feedback), a method for improving code generation models using feedback on their generated interfaces. RELIEF uses a coding agent to revise these interfaces, then incorporates the improvements into their original generation traces to produce supervision for fine-tuning. To evaluate RELIEF, we collected a dataset of 200 synthetically generated websites paired with 355 interaction recordings and accompanying feedback from 24 users. We used critiques derived from code inspection, automated interaction, explicit human feedback, and human interaction recordings to fine-tune variants of two code generation models. Our results show that feedback effectiveness varies with base model capabilities, with critiques inferred from human interaction recordings leading to the largest usability improvements overall under our tested models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26636
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Stratified Sparse Attention: Reducing the Sparse-to-Dense Gap at Extreme Sparsity
2026-10-20 16:02:12Sahil Joshi, Prithvi Dixit, Aryan Katiyar, Agniva Chowdhury, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Anshumali Shrivastava, Aditya Desai, Kumar Krishna AgrawalAbstract
Large Language Model inference over long contexts is increasingly bottlenecked by the cost of attending to a growing Key-Value (KV) cache. Sparse attention reduces this cost by accessing only a fraction of the cache, but existing methods face a trade-off between deterministic retrieval, which captures high-scoring tokens but discards residual attention mass, and sampling, which improves coverage at the cost of higher variance. Hybrid methods combine top-$k$ retrieval with uniform sampling, yet still exhibit a substantial gap from dense attention at aggressive sparsity. We introduce \emph{Stratified Sparse Attention (SSA)}, a unified framework combining deterministic retrieval with score-guided sampling. SSA deterministically attends to high-scoring tokens while sampling the residual using proxy attention scores and correcting for their inclusion probabilities, thereby recovering attention mass beyond the retrieval set. SSA encompasses top-$k$, top-$p$, and hybrid top-$k$+sampling as special cases. Across RULER, LongBench, LOFT, and AIME, and five models ranging from 3B to 27B parameters, SSA consistently improves over the baselines at matched sparsity. On RULER-HARD with Ministral-3-8B, SSA improves accuracy over the strongest practical baseline from 81.8\% to 84.2\% at 32K and from 63.8\% to 69.3\% at 128K under $50\times$ attention sparsity, recovering 94\% and 85\% of dense-attention performance, respectively. With optimized CUDA kernels, SSA achieves up to $2.96\times$ decode speedup over FlashInfer at 1M context, demonstrating that its accuracy gains translate into practical long-context inference acceleration. We open-source our code at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28441
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Every Model Leaves a Trace: Multi-Resolution LLM Fingerprinting
2026-10-20 16:00:34Mohammad Reza Modarres, Armin Tourajmehr, Artin Tavasoli, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh, Mohammad Taher PilehvarAbstract
Large language models leave model-specific traces in their generated text, but it remains unclear how finely these fingerprints can distinguish related models and which signals remain informative as obvious cues are reduced. We study this through fingerprint resolution, considering both model resolution, from different families to distilled and adapted variants, and signal resolution across behavioral, stylometric, lexical, and semantic evidence. We progressively suppress surface cues, paraphrase outputs, vary the amount of available text, and test generalization across prompt distributions and languages. Our results show that fingerprints persist beyond broad family differences, remaining detectable in distilled models and even LoRA adaptations of the same base model. Although attribution weakens as surface and lexical cues are altered, substantial model-specific signal remains. These signals transfer across prompt sources and languages, with semantic representations proving most robust across languages. These findings show that model identity is recoverable at multiple resolutions, but that recoverability depends on model similarity and the evidence available in the text.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28434
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After the Attacker Leaves: Benchmarking Carryover Attacks on LLM Agents
2026-10-20 15:55:05Zhiyue Xu, Xukai Wang, Zhiyuan Huang, Mingjie Zhan, Jian Zhao, Xu-Yao ZhangAbstract
Modern LLM agents persist state across sessions via two channels: long-lived memory files silently prepended to the system prompt, and scheduled tasks waking the agent without user input. A one-time indirect prompt injection committed to either channel can re-fire across sessions long after the attacker leaves, threats we term carryover attacks. Existing prompt-injection benchmarks evaluate attacks only in the session where malicious content is first observed, leaving the gate governing when and how often a planted payload later re-fires unmeasured. We present CarryoverBench: 12 personal-assistant scenarios and 101 attack tasks across three trigger channels: Instant, same-turn IPI; Autonomous, heartbeat-scheduled; and Latent, memory-resurfaced. A rule-based verifier scores planting and triggering as independent stages. Across five frontier models, planted payloads re-fire without measurable decay over five rounds; conditional on successful planting, the trigger stage often provides little additional protection. Porting the Latent channel to a second runtime, Hermes, attenuates but does not eliminate the effect, suggesting that carryover defense requires runtime-layer controls in addition to prompt-level interventions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28425
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Code2Video-Compass: A Comprehensive Benchmark for General-Purpose Code-Based Video Generation across T2V, I2V, and V2V
2026-10-20 15:51:41Zhenghan Chen, Zekai Shao, Xin Lin, Leting Cheng, Siming ChenAbstract
Code-based video generation offers fine-grained control, targeted editing, and component reuse compared with direct video generation. This approach requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to translate visual and temporal requirements into executable programs that produce complete videos. However, existing code-based benchmarks primarily target specialized tasks, leaving complete video creation across diverse creative categories and input modalities insufficiently evaluated. We introduce Code2Video-Compass, a general-purpose benchmark for code-based video generation across text-to-video (T2V), image-to-video (I2V), and video-to-video (V2V) settings. Code2Video-Compass comprises 2,104 tasks spanning 10 categories, 24 subtypes, and three complexity dimensions covering construction, dynamic animation, and state dependency. It combines tasks curated from textual instructions and visual references with corresponding T2V, I2V, and V2V tasks derived from complete professional and user-created videos. We propose a dual-level evaluation framework combining 12 objective metrics and five subjective metrics. Objective evaluation covers operational performance, video quality, text-video alignment, and reference fidelity, while subjective evaluation uses an MLLM judge to evaluate instruction following and holistic video quality. Extensive evaluation of 15 recent proprietary and open-weight MLLMs from nine families reveals that even leading models face challenges in reliably generating high-quality complete videos aligned with textual and visual requirements, with performance generally declining as construction, dynamic animation, and state-dependency complexity increases. We anticipate that Code2Video-Compass will advance reliable, coherent, and controllable code-based video generation and inspire broader progress in programmatic visual creation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28416
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A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Machine Learning with Evidence-based Planning for Medical Image Analysis
2026-10-20 15:49:38Yiqing Shen, Mathias UnberathAbstract
Deep learning has become the default tool for medical image analysis, driven by the open-source movement. However, achieving the best performance on a given task remains difficult, with architecture selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) still considered "more of an art than a science". Automated machine learning (AutoML) automates parts of model training, yet helps little in medical imaging: general-purpose approaches lack medical architectures and preprocessing, and medical-focused ones demand engineering expertise and remain confined to narrow tasks such as 3D segmentation. We introduce MedicalMLOmni, a multi-agent AutoML framework that automates model training for diverse single- and multi-modal medical tasks through a natural language interface. Specifically, MedicalMLOmni performs evidence-based planning by retrieving published results to guide model selection and configuration, and employs parallel HPO where multiple agents explore adjustment strategies concurrently. MedicalMLOmni achieves the best score on 19 of 20 benchmarks; PMC-VQA is the exception, where a vision-language model with broader pre-training leads. Backbone-matched controls attribute the gains to the framework, not the backbone. By removing coding requirements, MedicalMLOmni lowers the barrier for domain experts with rich datasets but limited engineering expertise.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28410
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The Instruction Tax on Factual Recall: Base Models Can Beat Their Instruction-Tuned Counterparts
2026-10-20 15:48:56Christophe Khalil, Aya MouradAbstract
We present our solution to the AKBC LM-KBC 2026 Shared Task, where we achieved a score of 0.6836 on the official leaderboard, more than double the baseline of 0.2964. This task requires generating all possible objects for subject-relation pairs using a language model with up to 32 billion parameters, with no retrieval or fine-tuning involved. We show that the prompting methodology is as important as the model architecture: while the instruction-tuned model version achieves 0.5681 with its chat interface, the base model achieves 0.6836 when prompted using text completion. Thus, instruction tuning decreases factual recall; we refer to this effect as the instruction tax, which is caused by the model's weights rather than the prompting method. Our final solution is fairly straightforward: we prompt the base model with some examples from the training data, generate 64--256 outputs, and retain only the repeated ones. Two specialized methods are then applied for each relation: one improves the recall of large answer sets, and the other verifies a person's vitality before predicting their place of death.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28407
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S-Agent 2.0: Spatial Reasoning with a General Coding Agent
2026-10-20 15:20:00Rui Gong, Ruoyu Wang, Yalun Dai, Hao Li, Sidi Yang, Qihao Zhao, Hongyu Li, Zeyang Guan, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Kim-Hui Yap, Ziwei LiuAbstract
Spatial reasoning asks a model to work out where objects are in 3D space, how they relate to one another, and how they move. Agentic VLMs have recently brought large improvements on such tasks by letting the model actively gather evidence with 3D perception tools instead of answering in a single pass. Even so, on many questions the tools return the right evidence and the model still does not arrive at the correct answer: the gap between model and tools, where raw readings become usable conclusions, is left unfilled. We present S-Agent 2.0, a spatial reasoning agent that equips an off-the-shelf general coding agent with a command-line perception toolkit, and we design the interface around one principle: help the VLM close the evidence loop: acquire scene evidence, remember it in a persistent scene memory, and interpret each reading in plain spatial language. This design keeps the full flexibility of a coding agent, and every reading it acts on stays grounded in the tools' geometry. On MMSI-Bench and ReVSI, the toolkit improves a strong open-source model, Qwen3.8-27B, by +13.9 and +20.5 points over the same agent without tools, and a strong closed-source model, Gemini-3.8-Flash, by +11.2 and +9.6 points. With the open backbone S-Agent 2.0 reaches 66.5 on MMSI-Bench and 82.3 on ReVSI, ahead of the specialized system SpatialClaw on the same backbone (62.6 and 74.5), and with Gemini-3.8-Flash it reaches 74.1 and 90.5 against its 67.0 and 79.7. Both tool gains shrink as the backbone grows more capable, but SpatialClaw's shrinks far more on ReVSI, from +13.2 to +2.7, while ours stays at +9.6. S-Agent 2.0 also works across different general coding agent harnesses, such as Codex and Claude Code.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28354
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HRoPE: Homography Relative Positional Encoding
2026-10-20 14:36:51Huachen Gao, Yang Yang, Xiaoqian Liang, Xingyu Chen, Youjia Zhang, Qi Zhang, Baorui Ma, Anpei Chen, Wei YangAbstract
Geometric Relative Positional Encoding has become the primary mechanism for injecting spatial inductive biases into multi-view transformers. Existing designs condition attention on camera-level frustums or ray-marched depth, associating cross-view tokens through the sensor geometry. Such sensor-centric formulations, however, describe only where a token is observed from, leaving the rich surface geometry of the scene region depicted by the token. In this paper, we advocate a shift toward surface-aware positional encoding that explicitly grounds patch tokens in the geometry of physical surfaces. We introduce HRoPE, which represents the local geometry of each patch as a slanted 3D plane, following the slanted support-window assumption of classical multi-view stereo. We inject token-level, plane-induced homographies into attention as relative transformations. This equips the transformer with a geometric prior for rectifying perspective distortions and aligning patch features across viewpoints. Our encoding requires no ground-truth geometry: the plane parameters can be predicted end-to-end under a view-synthesis objective alone, or derived from foundation models. Extensive experiments on RealEstate10K, CO3Dv2, and DL3DV show that our best variant of HRoPE consistently outperforms the evaluated geometric positional encodings for novel view synthesis. Extensive ablations and analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed encoding. Please refer to our project page at: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28284
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Reliability-Aware Reconstruction of V-Shaped Surfaces with a Low-Cost Multi-Zone SPAD Sensor
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Low-cost multi-zone single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensors provide compact time-of-flight measurements but are limited by sparse sampling and unreliable depth estimates near geometric discontinuities. This letter presents a reliability-aware reconstruction framework for V-shaped surfaces using two complementary TMF8821 acquisition configurations. Point-wise reliability is learned from sensor confidence, transient peak amplitude, and peak sharpness, and is incorporated into a graph-based depth optimization. The reconstructed geometry is evaluated by robust two-plane fitting and a perpendicular cross-section. Experiments on 60-degree, 90-degree, and 120-degree targets reduce the mean V-angle error from 11.21 degrees to 9.66 degrees (13.8%). For the representative 90-degree target, the combined point-to-plane RMSE decreases from 14.56 mm to 13.65 mm.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28258
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Attractive Faces Skew Text-to-Image Reward Models and Leaderboards
Abstract
Human preference is now central to the evaluation, guidance, finetuning, and ranking of text-to-image models. However, the susceptibility of human preferences to bias in image generation remains underexplored. We identify a key observation: for human faces, perceived attractiveness overrides image quality in preference judgments, even when comparing real photographs of identical fidelity. In a controlled user study, annotators rank more attractive faces as higher quality, even when unattractive real faces are compared with attractive AI-generated ones. We examine the downstream consequences of this bias. Firstly, simulating Elo rankings from user study data shows attractiveness can invert a leaderboard's ranking, elevating synthetic attractive faces over real, unattractive ones. Secondly, the same bias reappears in the human preference models. Editing 40 annotated facial attributes in isolation, we find that attractiveness is the strongest correlate of score for four of five human preference models (PickScore, MPS, HPSv2.1, HPSv3), and the strongest predictor of score in regression analysis. We further show that preference aligned generation shifts faces toward younger, more feminine faces, and can override explicit prompts for unattractive faces, thereby limiting user control. Finally, we explore mitigation strategies, both for data collection and post training on human preference models. These findings highlight the need for preference models that disentangle image quality from human cognitive bias, enabling more reliable evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28195
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Africa-Papers: A 10-Billion-Token Multi-Domain Academic Corpus for African Foundation Language Models
2026-10-20 13:14:58Mich-Seth OwusuAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) depend fundamentally on the diversity, depth, and factual rigor of their pre-training corpora. However, contemporary foundational pre-training datasets (such as The Pile, S2ORC, and Dolma) exhibit a severe structural omission: African scientific, medical, legal, and agricultural scholarship constitutes less than 0.5% of global pre-training tokens. Consequently, state-of-the-art models suffer from systematic failure modes when reasoning about tropical epidemiology, localized smallholder agro-ecologies, regional economic governance, and indigenous linguistic structures. To resolve this representation deficit and advance African intellectual sovereignty in artificial intelligence, we introduce Africa-Papers, the largest curated multi-domain Pan-African academic pre-training corpus to date. Comprising over 844,807 full-text papers spanning 10.15 billion tokens across 879 Parquet shards, Africa-Papers unifies four primary scientific streams: (1) continental peer-reviewed journals indexed in DOAJ across 31 African nations, (2) the CGIAR CGSpace agricultural repository, (3) African-authored and African-focused STEM/AI preprints on arXiv, and (4) open-access international publications by scholars affiliated with African institutions indexed via OpenAlex. The entire corpus is processed into layout-aware, clean Markdown preserving section hierarchies, mathematical equations, and tabular data, accompanied by exact BPE token counts and a standardized 8-domain taxonomy. We release Africa-Papers openly on the Hugging Face Hub under the AfriSpeech organization to accelerate continual pre-training and domain evaluation for foundation models globally.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28173
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Design and implementation of thermal control strategy for micro-size lunar exploration rover hakuto
2026-10-20 12:35:18Toshiki Tanaka, Takuto Oikawa, Keeni Shruti, Teruhito Iida, Kazuya Yoshida, John WalkerAbstract
The research focuses on the thermal interface design of the HAKUTO Rover Flight Model (FM) and its evaluation using the final thermal vacuum experiment. Initially, an analytical thermal model was developed, dividing the rover into six distinct radiating surfaces. The surface temperature of the rover was then determined based on its orientation relative to the solar radiative flux, as well as other thermal factors such as lunar radiation, solar albedo, and conduction from the lunar regolith. By considering the impact of these heat sources, suitable mounting locations for the avionics and the angle of the solar panels were determined to optimize the rover's thermal performance and power generation while ensuring the rover's mass remained under 4 kg. After the preliminary thermal analysis, numerical computational simulations were conducted to further elaborate on the thermal response of the final HAKUTO Rover FM design, which was then verified through a thermal balance test in a vacuum environment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28127
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Interruption-Aware Recurrent Reinforcement Learning for UAS Navigation Under Temporary Overrides
2026-10-20 12:30:41Christopher Conrad, Deepak Panda, Weisi Guo, Antonios TsourdosAbstract
Safe autonomous navigation of UASs requires tactical deconfliction to address conflicts that strategic coordination cannot prevent. This task is challenging under partial observability, when sensor or traffic data are missing, delayed, or degraded. Geometry-based methods can offer separation assurances but face limitations in dense encounters. Recurrent reinforcement learning has therefore been proposed to learn navigation policies that integrate observation-action histories to optimise long-term safety-efficiency trade-offs. However, operational safeguards may require a remote pilot, onboard detect-and-avoid system, or runtime assurance mechanism to temporarily override the learned policy. A research gap remains in understanding how these interruptions affect recurrent policies when the agent regains authority. Benchmark evidence shows that interruptions make task variables less decodable from the recurrent hidden state and increase post-interruption collision risk. The findings suggest that altered recurrent context prolongs post-handback degradation through an action-observation feedback loop, in which changed actions alter the flight path and subsequent recurrent updates. To address this vulnerability, we propose three interruption-aware architectures that condition recurrent processing on interruption context through separate feature streams, dedicated interruption memory, or gated environmental features. Across simulations, all three architectures preserve more decodable task information than a standard recurrent policy. Moreover, the strongest architecture reduces post-interruption collisions by 74% and interruption-induced mission failures by 69% relative to the recurrent baseline, without degrading interruption-free performance. These results show that safe interruption does not guarantee safe handback, and support interruption-aware recurrent design for resilient UAS autonomy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28121
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BAIT: Can LLMs Find What Biases a Reader? A Benchmark for Cognitive Bias Triggers in News
Abstract
Persuasive writing exploits cognitive biases, recruiting a reader's mental shortcuts to shape belief, often without the reader noticing. We call the linguistic features exploiting such mental shortcuts cognitive bias triggers. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate how people encounter news, summarizing it, ranking it, and answering questions over it, a natural question is whether they can recognize the features of a text that bias a human reader. We introduce BAIT (Bias Annotation In Text), a resource for detecting cognitive bias triggers in news. BAIT pairs a schema of nine triggers, each specified in an annotator codebook, with 50 English news articles annotated by trained annotators at the article and span levels and adjudicated into a gold standard. On this data we define two tasks, detecting which triggers a text contains and locating the spans that carry them. We then benchmark six frontier LLMs zero-shot and with three or ten in-context examples. The models approach human agreement on which triggers an article contains, but rarely recover its full set of triggers, and they reach less than half of human agreement in locating the passages that carry them. Moreover, they over-predict triggers that come with easy surface cues, and most of the passages they mark for these triggers are not triggers, yet carry the trigger's surface cue far more often than random text. These findings suggest that the evaluated LLMs respond to surface cues rather than to the mechanisms that make a passage manipulative. We release the schema, the codebook, standoff annotations, and the evaluation pipeline.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28092
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Slot-JEPA: Object-Structured Prediction Interfaces for Latent World Models
2026-10-20 11:53:42Peisong Wen, Qianqian Xu, Minye Lei, Siran Dai, Yang Liu, Qingming HuangAbstract
As a prototypical latent world model, Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide strong semantic representations. However, dense patch representations expose a redundant interface to downstream predictors, which must implicitly infer spatial organization and temporal correspondence, presenting three challenges. First, object information is distributed across patches, forcing each downstream predictor to redundantly recover object structure that could otherwise be reused across tasks before modeling interactions. Second, the lack of explicit entity correspondence across time makes historical transitions expensive, restricting the predictor's flexibility in utilizing context. Third, without explicit transport structure, existing JEPA models typically use pointwise l1/l2 distances, which are insensitive to spatial displacement when predicted and goal supports are largely disjoint. We propose the Slot-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (Slot-JEPA), which decomposes dense representations into stable semantic slots and time-varying spatial masks. Pretrained once and frozen downstream, this decomposition exposes a reusable object-structured interface. Building on it, our Transition Memory Predictor (TMP) stores visual transitions as compact masks and retrieves useful context using statistics of corresponding slots. Its two branches separate slot-specific dynamics from shared cross-slot dynamics. We further use Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) to supervise mask prediction and evaluate candidate plans by transporting mass between aligned predicted and goal masks, providing a signal better aligned with spatial progress. Across seven visual-understanding benchmarks, the slot-reconstructed features remain transferable. Slot-JEPA also improves goal-conditioned planning across six planar environments and four robotic arm planning tasks on the REALM-JEPA benchmark.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28074
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Quantifying the Threat: A Bayesian Probabilistic Framework for Heavy Metal Health Risks among Children in the Densu Basin, Ghana
2026-10-20 11:48:56T. Ansah-Narh, G. Y. Afrifa, J. B. Tandoh, E. N. N. Nortey, D. Adjei, R. Opoku-Sarkordie, R. DavisAbstract
Groundwater in Ghana's Densu River Basin remains a key domestic water source, but multi-metal contamination threatens children's health. Previous deterministic hazard index assessments provide limited treatment of uncertainty, co-exposure, and spatial variability. This study applies a Bayesian probabilistic framework for non-carcinogenic risk assessment using 94 groundwater samples and measurements of Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Cd, and As. A Bayesian regression model propagates parameter uncertainty and accounts for contaminant co-occurrence. Adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is used for posterior inference, while inverse distance weighting generates spatially continuous risk surfaces. Pb, As, and Cd dominate cumulative risk. Posterior predictive results indicate that approximately 31% of sampling sites have a probability greater than 0.5 of exceeding a hazard index (HI) of 1. The risk surface is highly heterogeneous, with a posterior mean of 0.372 and a standard deviation of 0.416. High-risk zones often reflect moderate co-exposure rather than extreme contamination by a single metal. The framework provides uncertainty-aware, spatially explicit information to support groundwater monitoring, risk mitigation, and public health planning in data-limited regions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28064
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