Multimodal survival prediction jointly analyzes histopathological whole-slide images (WSIs), genomic profiles, and clinical variables to stratify patients by risk. However, existing approaches often inadequately account for granularity differences across modalities, particularly in spatial organization and feature dimensionality. Within pathology, aggregating WSI patch features without preserving their spatial arrangement can obscure tissue architecture; across modalities, directly concatenating low-dimensional clinical variables with high-dimensional visual and genomic features may limit the contribution of clinical information to prediction. To address these challenges, we propose HGASurv, which introduces a hierarchical WSI encoding module and a clinical-guided graph propagation module for granularity-aware multimodal integration. The hierarchical WSI encoding module maps WSI patch features onto a spatial grid using their original coordinates and applies parallel convolutions to construct representations at patch, local-neighborhood, and regional scales. Genomic signature embeddings then query these scale-specific WSI representations through cross-modal co-attention, producing signature-conditioned morphological features. The clinical-guided graph propagation module uses clinical variables to define patient-similarity edges and propagates fused image-genomic node embeddings with graph attention, integrating clinical information through topology rather than feature concatenation. Across three TCGA cohorts, HGASurv achieved the strongest overall C-index performance, with ablation studies supporting the complementary contributions of the hierarchical WSI encoding and clinical-guided graph propagation modules. This design shows that matching representation and integration mechanisms to modality-specific granularity improves multimodal survival prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26357
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have substantially improved spoken interaction and video understanding. Existing online and streaming benchmarks primarily assess causal multimodal perception through timestamped question answering, whereas real-world interaction requires models to continuously identify task-relevant multimodal cues and decide whether, when, and how to respond. This leaves open how well current models can sustain real-time interaction throughout an evolving multimodal stream. To address this gap, we introduce DIVE, a benchmark for evaluating full-duplex interaction with visual engagement under continuous and realistic multimodal streams. It organizes six tasks into three complementary interaction scenarios. (1) Proactive Intervention evaluates whether models can identify emerging visual or semantic cues and intervene at the appropriate moment. (2) Continuous Engagement evaluates sustained participation through continuous visual tracking and visually grounded query interaction. (3) Interaction Coordination evaluates how models coordinate listening and speaking under overlapping and multi-party interactions. DIVE contains 525 audio/video samples with fine-grained human annotations and precise temporal metadata. Its evaluation protocol separates response quality, participation decisions, and response timing. We evaluate representative real-time models using response quality, window response rates, and reaction latency. Experiments show that leading real-time models achieve sub-second average response latency, yet their average window response rates remain at or below 53.77%. Response quality varies substantially across models and tasks, with adapting ongoing responses to newly arriving information remaining particularly challenging. We hope DIVE facilitates progress toward more natural and capable real-time multimodal interactive systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28405
Predicting spatial gene expression from H&E images offers a scalable complement to experimental spatial transcriptomics. However, despite progress in spatial context modeling, how to construct subsequent context from spot states updated by earlier contextual interactions remains underexplored. We introduce HistoLoop, a looped Transformer that formulates prediction as iterative contextual inference. At each refinement step, HistoLoop aggregates the current spot states into context tokens at the corresponding resolution, processes them with a shared spatial Transformer, and retrieves spot-specific contextual information through cross-attention. A memory-mediated update integrates this information into persistent spot states, which are then used to construct context at the next, finer resolution. Under the HEST-Bench HVG50 evaluation protocol, HistoLoop achieves the highest macro-averaged gene-wise Pearson correlation among the compared methods across six cancer-specific tasks spanning five organs in HEST-1K. Ablation studies support the importance of recurrent state refinement and reconstructing context from updated spot states at progressively finer resolutions. Expression-derived clustering further suggests that HistoLoop better captures spatially organized multigene patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28339
Streaming video understanding requires a model to decide not only what to answer but also when to answer. Evidence arrives progressively, and recent benchmarks identify premature responses, issued before the queried event has concluded, as a recurring failure mode. Existing approaches often learn response timing through additional training, while training-free alternatives typically rely on scalar gating signals that do not explicitly represent when an answer becomes final. We organize chunk-wise streaming errors into three patterns: sampling variation can make an answer unstable, a stable answer may lack support in the observed video, or an answer may be supported by the current evidence while the event remains unfinished. We propose PACE (Plan, Attend, Check, and Emit), a training-free framework designed around these three failure modes. Given a question, PACE drafts a plan specifying what to observe and what will signal completion. As the stream unfolds, it invokes an off-the-shelf video LLM at informative moments, evaluates each draft for stability, grounding in its cited frames, and completion, and records verified observations in an event ledger. Experiments on ProactiveVideoQA and OVO-Bench Forward show that PACE improves over the official protocols by up to 5.9 average PAUC points and 6.2 average accuracy points across proprietary and open-source backbones, yielding state-of-the-art performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28323
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28173
Smartphone clinical images provide a low-cost data source for computer-aided skin lesion classification in resource-constrained settings, but images alone cannot fully capture patients' medical histories and lesion symptoms. To address the lack of structured organization among heterogeneous clinical variables, the ambiguity between observed and imputed values, and the risk that clinical information may interfere with visual evidence, we propose GAMF-Net, a grouped availability-aware multimodal fusion network. Ten clinical variables are divided into three semantic groups---demographics, history-related risk, and lesion presentation---and each group jointly encodes field values and field-level availability masks. The image branch produces the base classification logits, while each clinical group generates image-conditioned class-level residual evidence. Only available groups participate in availability-normalized equal-weight fusion; when all clinical information is unavailable, the model reduces exactly to the image-only pathway. We evaluate the method on PAD-UFES-20 under a patient-disjoint five-fold protocol with separate training, validation, and test partitions. GAMF-Net achieves an Accuracy of $74.17\pm2.85\%$, a balanced accuracy (BACC) of $70.11\pm2.11\%$, a Macro-F1 of $68.85\pm0.85\%$, and a Macro-AUROC of $93.42\pm1.20\%$, outperforming all image-only and multimodal baselines reimplemented under a unified protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline, MetaBlock, the corresponding improvements are 2.37, 2.59, 4.14, and 1.02 percentage points, respectively. Ablation results show that clinical information substantially improves class-balanced performance, constrained equal-weight fusion is more effective than dynamic fusion, and the lesion-presentation group provides the most informative clinical complement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28129
Scenario planning is a foresight practice in which analysts construct a small set of plausible futures and prepare an organisation for each. Each scenario is a narrative that must be plausible, internally consistent, relevant and challenging, and the set as a whole must be differentiated. The practice remains manual: a workshop (i.e., a facilitated meeting in which a small group of experts writes the narratives) considers only the factors it has time for, carries the biases of the experts who run it, and cannot be redone whenever conditions change. In this paper, we automate scenario planning by casting it as a diversity planning problem, in which two scenarios differ when they end in different narratives on the analyst's drivers. The result is a set of scenarios, one for each narrative that the topic can reach within a budget. Our implementation, Polyscene, is a generic engine that generates scenarios from a topic. We use geopolitical conflicts and shipping-route disruptions as case studies. For the first, we build the planning problem's initial state from the GDELT Project so it reflects current relationships among the countries involved. Polyscene then generates scenarios showing how relationships among those countries change. With a board of six countries as of 1 January 2021 and a budget of five events, the conflict set puts five of the 15 country pairs at war, and each of the three wars that break out among these countries by 1 January 2026 ends a scenario. For the second, we build the initial state from ship traffic, a supply-pressure index, and the news, and Polyscene generates scenarios showing what a closed or diverted route could do to a manufacturer's parts stock. With four routes per board and the same date and budget, each set includes three outcomes, and the Suez Canal set includes the March 2021 blockage and the December 2023 Red Sea container diversion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28102
Memory systems for persistent personal agents must move beyond isolated memories, maintaining both personal memory about whom they serve and procedural memory about how to act. Crucially, in harness-based personal assistance, procedures or skills are inherently user-conditioned: personal context determines which procedures apply, how they are instantiated, and when they should change. Existing benchmarks typically emphasize either personal or procedural memory, leaving their interaction underexplored. We introduce PraxisMemBench, a harness-based benchmark for persistent personal assistance across daily-life and work trajectories, where personal and procedural memory evolve together and later tasks depend on both. Experiments show that maintaining two memory types separately is insufficient, with completion dropping from single-type to interdependent dependencies (84.6% to 77.9%). More broadly, across existing methods, relation-related failures increase from early to late sessions as interaction history grows (59.8% to 72.9%), revealing a continual-maintenance challenge: writing correct memories is not enough if their evolving content and organization cannot be preserved for later retrieval. To address this, we propose PraxisMem, which uses privileged joint-state supervision to internalize the ability to maintain memory content and organization into the memory manager, with location-aware GRPO and dynamic residual-routed OPSD. PraxisMem reaches 40.78% overall Session Success Rate, compared with 20.60% for Claude Code's native memory. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20022
The rapid growth of scientific literature makes survey writing increasingly challenging, motivating automatic survey generation. Yet, existing systems must search an open space of papers and an open space of concepts with no trace of how the community itself has navigated them, leading to incomplete scope, weak taxonomies, and unreliable citations. Our core insight is that author-written Related Work sections contain the human judgments needed to address both limitations: authors curate the citations relevant to their contributions and explain how the cited works relate, yielding paths for scope reconstruction and relational evidence for organization. We propose InsightRAG. Its insight-guided retrieval follows author-supported citation relations to reconstruct a verified research scope and structure the resulting relational evidence. It aggregates these judgments under a minimum-conflict objective into a taxonomy that reflects recurring author-written perspectives in the retrieved literature, guides generation, and bounds each section's evidence. Results on ten topics show gains in scope reconstruction, taxonomy quality, citation support, and reference reliability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28085
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28074
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables adaptive and autonomous decision-making in embedded, edge, and heterogeneous computing systems. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and integrated circuits (ICs) offer low latency, energy efficiency, and architectural flexibility for RL deployment, while introducing challenges in resource constraints, implementation complexity, and hardware-algorithm co-design. This review surveys more than 100 studies on RL implementations across FPGA and IC platforms, emphasizing architectures, implementation strategies, performance evaluation, and applications. The literature is organized by RL family, including model-based Markov decision processes, classical value-based methods, deep RL, actor-critic, policy-gradient, and multi-agent approaches. We further classify studies by abstraction level, hardware realization strategy, and application domain, examining how RL algorithms map onto reconfigurable and fixed hardware. Unlike surveys restricted to particular algorithms or platforms, this work provides a unified analysis of FPGA and IC implementations, covering acceleration, reconfigurable architectures, energy-aware control, and system-level optimization. Comparative assessments consider resource utilization, latency, throughput, power consumption, and reported performance gains. Finally, we identify recurring architectural patterns, practical limitations, open challenges, and research directions for efficient RL-driven hardware systems. The survey offers a consolidated reference for researchers developing and evaluating RL solutions on specialized hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28699
In contact-rich manipulation, actions that appear equally plausible from vision can produce different contact outcomes, while reactive control based on current tactile feedback may respond too late to prevent failure. We present ForeTac, a predictive contact-guidance framework organized as a represent-predict-evaluate-guide loop. ForeTac encodes the current tactile state, predicts future tactile latent trajectories conditioned on candidate action sequences, and evaluates each predicted trajectory with a contact-quality objective learned from successful and failed physical interactions. At inference, gradients of this objective are backpropagated through the tactile predictor to guide action generation before execution while keeping all model parameters frozen. We evaluate ForeTac on four real-robot tasks (planar and curved-surface wiping, card swiping, and fragile-object grasping) with diffusion and flow-matching policies. Compared with vision-only Diffusion Policy, ForeTac improves the average task success rate (SR) from 36.3% to 71.3% and the average contact success rate (CSR) from 20.0% to 66.3% across these tasks, and yields gains in both metrics with a flow-matching policy. Component analyses support the learned tactile representation, action-conditioned foresight, and generation-time gradient guidance, while predicted tactile latent trajectories preserve contact-quality ordering. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18118
AI-assisted dementia detection usually requires multimodal fusion of diverse data, such as clinical tabular assessments and neuroimaging data. However, most existing approaches perform feature fusion in Euclidean space. This overlooks the geometric structure of representation, including hierarchical organization in clinical assessments and multi-scale anatomical patterns in neuroimaging data. Recent studies have proved hyperbolic space provides a natural geometry for modelling hierarchical and multi-scale structures due to its exponentially expanding space. Motivated by these, we propose HypTI, a hyperbolic geometry-aware multimodal fusion framework for dementia detection based on clinical tabular assessments and MRI scans. HypTI extends hyperbolic representation learning to an underexplored tabular-MRI setting, jointly modelling clinical tabular, MRI scans, and cross-modal interactions in hyperbolic space. Specifically, clinical tabular variables are represented through learnable Lorentz prototypes to capture hierarchical relationships among assessments, while MRI scans are encoded using ROI-guided multi-scale representation learning to capture anatomical patterns across brain regions and spatial scales in Lorentz space. The multimodal representations are integrated through an adaptive fusion module generates subject-specific scale and shift coefficients to dynamically modulate and integrate the multimodal embeddings, enabling effective patient-level tabular-image representation learning for dementia detection. Experiments on OASIS-3 dataset show that the proposed framework achieves strong performance compared with representative approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27941
Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models have achieved remarkable progress through large-scale training and strong learned priors. However, they remain fragile when applied to dynamic in-the-wild videos, where non-rigid motion, occlusions, and illumination changes are prevalent. A key limitation lies in their reliance on expensive depth and camera pose annotations, which hinders scaling to diverse real-world dynamic data and restricts generalization. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{PURE}, an unlabeled post-training refinement framework that improves depth and camera estimation without requiring ground-truth supervision. Instead of relying on annotations, PURE elegantly distills robust structural knowledge from state-of-the-art 2D priors into 4D feed-forward architectures. PURE leverages relative depth constraints, affine-invariant geometry distillation, and pose refinement based on feature correspondences to stabilize geometric predictions under challenging dynamic conditions. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world dynamic benchmarks demonstrate that PURE delivers consistent improvements across multiple state-of-the-art architectures. Furthermore, our data-efficient paradigm effectively mitigates domain shifts, successfully unlocking the architectural limits of these base models in challenging, in-the-wild dynamic scenes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14698
Anticipating how users will interact with their surroundings is essential for proactive systems that provide timely assistance in AR, VR, and embodied applications. Prior work typically forecasts hand-object interactions directly from historical observations, leaving intention and contact geometry implicit. However, similar observation histories can precede semantically or geometrically distinct futures. Inspired by behavioral evidence that gaze can provide early cues for underlying intention, we propose Gaze2HOI, a gaze-aware framework that formulates hand-object interaction forecasting as a hierarchical problem comprising intention inference, contact grounding, and coupled hand-object motion generation. Specifically, Gaze2HOI first weights gaze cues by fixation strength and recency, and uses them to modulate the visual representations of a vision-language model (VLM) through Temporal Gaze Saliency Modulation (TGSM), thereby reducing semantic ambiguity in intention inference. Subsequently, an Anticipatory Contact Grounding (ACG) module maps these structured intentions into explicit contact, support, and placement fields, effectively mitigating geometric ambiguity. Driven by these explicit conditions, a diffusion-based model jointly generates the 6-DoF object trajectories and future articulated motion of both hands. To evaluate Gaze2HOI, we further introduce EgoAIM, a phase-aware benchmark that organizes egocentric hand-object interactions into four phases defined by evolving hand-object relations and provides fine-grained intention annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaze2HOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intention inference and motion forecasting, even approaching oracle-level end-to-end performance in specific interaction phases. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27877
In many human-AI systems, candidate actions are not executed directly but are first evaluated by another decision-making entity under a potentially different objective or decision model. Standard decision-theoretic frameworks do not require this interaction to be represented explicitly, as they define transition dynamics directly over state-action pairs, allowing evaluation to be absorbed within the transition model. We introduce a semantics-aware decision framework in which a candidate action is proposed, evaluated under an interaction context, and then resolved into an executed outcome. We formalize this through a joint action language and an interpretation function that maps each joint action and context to a semantic outcome. Transition and reward dynamics are induced through these semantic outcomes, thereby introducing an explicit representational layer for interaction semantics. Semantic outcomes provide explicit units for organizing interaction principles, which can be instantiated through application-specific evaluation mechanisms and reused across distinct interaction instances. This provides a structured interface for specifying context-dependent evaluation separately from the resulting execution dynamics, without requiring changes to the underlying planning algorithm. We instantiate the framework in shared human-AI autonomy, capturing interaction patterns such as advisory and authorization, and illustrating how interaction context influences decision making. The resulting formulation remains compatible with standard Markov decision process (MDP) planning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25496
Recent agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating images from textual prompts, motivating their utilization for scientific diagram generation. Scientific diagrams naturally span diverse types, each characterized by distinct visual structures and content organization. Consequently, during peer review and other scientific evaluation, human experts naturally consider type-specific criteria when assessing their quality. However, existing VLM-based evaluation benchmarks fail to reflect the above human evaluation practices for two main reasons: 1) benchmark datasets typically lack a systematic categorization of different diagram types and thus adopt the same generic criteria for all diagrams, and 2) their evaluation criteria are often designed heuristically, without explicit alignment to human evaluation preferences. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce SciDiagBench, which consists of a benchmark dataset that systematically categorizes scientific diagrams into 11 types and a human preference-guided evaluation method. Specifically, SciDiagBench contains 165 scientific diagrams across 10 broad domains, with types including graphical abstracts, technical roadmaps, and illustrative cases. Based on this dataset, SciDiagBench develops an evaluation method that leverages a preference-guided calibration process to incorporate human preferences into the generation of type-specific criteria. Ultimately, SciDiagBench enables more reliable automated evaluation that better aligns with human evaluation across diverse scientific diagrams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27841
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit both knowledge of language, rendered by, for example, grammatical judgment ability, and abilities to perform tasks through language, such as math-word problem solving. Motivated by neurolinguistic studies of their neural dissociation in human brains, in this study, we investigate the overlap of their circuits in large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we examine the overlap and causal effects between the circuits extracted for linguistic and arithmetic tasks, using controlled materials and circuit discovery methods from the mechanistic interpretability field. Our experiments with five LLMs show that circuit similarity is mostly explained by task domains (linguistic vs. arithmetic), rather than by their input and output vocabularies or by the syntactic similarities between natural-language sentences and arithmetic expressions. This finding suggests that LLMs may process linguistic and arithmetic information using largely separate neural circuits, highlighting an ability-based modular organization of circuits within these models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27790
Human skin contains diverse mechanoreceptors, including Merkel cells and Pacinian corpuscles, each localized in specific regions. Although their spatial organization is known to be shaped by molecular signaling and neural induction during development, experimentally examining its functional significance under controlled conditions in living systems remains challenging. In particular, physically comparing alternative receptor arrangements that do not occur biologically is difficult. In this study, we developed a layered biomimetic robotic skin designed to mimic key structural features of human skin tissue by embedding receptor-analog sensors within compliant soft media. Using this platform, we implemented both biologically motivated and counterfactual sensory arrangements and quantitatively evaluated their performance across three passive tactile tasks: detection of weak contacts, a two-point discrimination-like assessment, and texture identification. Arrangements reflecting key features of the biologically motivated sensory organization exhibited higher performance than the alternative configurations examined. This study addresses a biological question concerning how spatial organization influences tactile function by presenting a biomimetic robotic approach that enables physical and empirical comparison of biologically motivated and counterfactual sensory arrangements that are difficult to investigate in living systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26680
Unified audio-video creation requires a single model capable of text-conditioned joint synthesis, bidirectional cross-modal generation, and instruction-guided editing across both modalities. Existing methods rely heavily on paired corpora, which are scarce for joint generation and even rarer for editing. Consequently, they are spent learning single-branch generative and editing capabilities that abundant unimodal data could readily teach, rather than on the cross-modal coupling. Furthermore, prevailing systems apply a single shared noise schedule to both modalities, neglecting two critical limitations. First, due to the significant discrepancy in information density, video requires prolonged high noise to organize spatial and motion structure, whereas the sparser audio signal can settle earlier during the synthesis process, the dynamics a uniform schedule might compromise. Second, lockstep denoising leaves asymmetric workflows, such as conditioning on one modality to synthesize or edit another, untrained. We present UniAVC, which addresses both obstacles. It first trains each branch on unimodal dataset to full generative and editing competence, and subsequently dedicates paired data to exploit cross-modal correspondence. Modality-decoupled schedulers meanwhile warp the noise schedule independently from a shared timestep, while subtasks with one clean modality directly supervise asymmetric configurations. These settings respectively enable intent-aware editing, which preserves one modality intact while enlisting it to constrain the other, and post-inference self-refinement, which regenerates only an unsatisfactory branch against an accepted one. UniAVC thus spans multiple creation tasks from a single set of weights without task-specific adapters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24791