Optimization
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FedBST: Bilateral Self-Training for Unsupervised Federated Classification
2026-10-22 02:56:05Aijing Yu, Kuangpu Guo, Jian Liang, Xiao-Yu ZhangAbstract
Unsupervised federated learning with Vision-Language Models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising solution for label-free classification, yet its performance often degrades under severe non-IID shifts. A pioneering method, FedCoPL, typically relies on self-training strategies that exclusively prioritize high-confidence predictions for pseudo-labeling. However, this selective approach neglects the information of ambiguous samples (often referred to as ``waist" samples), leading to the underutilization of data and biased decision boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose FedBST, a bilateral self-training framework that effectively exploits both high-confidence and ambiguous data. Specifically, for local optimization, we introduce uncertainty-aware confidence penalization (UACP). UACP targets ambiguous samples by penalizing overconfident predictions to implicitly promote higher uncertainty, thereby preventing erroneous pseudo-labeling. At inference, we employ a visual-text ensemble strategy. This approach aggregates uncertainty-aware local visual prototypes and ensembles them with textual prototypes, achieving lightweight adaptation to local distributions via prototype-based calibration. Experiments demonstrate that FedBST achieves consistent improvements over existing methods with standard federated aggregation protocols.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30634
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Motion Retargeting with Spatiotemporal Preferences for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
2026-10-21 23:54:17Xiongbo Shi, Shihang Du, Zongyou Yu, Ao Zhou, Xudong Zhang, Ziyu Lin, Haodong Zhang, Junqiao Zhao, Guang ChenAbstract
Human motion retargeting bridges the embodiment gap between humans and humanoid robots by converting human demonstrations into reference trajectories for whole-body control and loco-manipulation. For object-interaction tasks, successful execution depends on accurately preserving body--object relations at critical stages. However, uniform per-frame iteration budgets do not account for these localized accuracy requirements, limiting the computational efficiency of retargeting. To address this limitation, we present Spatiotemporal Retargeting (STR), which uses keyframes and key body parts to allocate optimization effort. Specifically, a vision-language model selects relevant motion signals and body parts, and keyframes are identified from changes in the selected signals. Based on these selections, STR assigns additional solver iterations to keyframes and higher interaction weights to the selected parts. To further improve contact fidelity, we introduce Mechanics-Aware Contact Anchoring (MCA) to refine object-surface contact positions using an approximate object-wrench model while retaining the selected surface directions. Building on the resulting references, we develop Spatiotemporal Reinforcement Learning (STRL), which combines adaptive key-stage sampling with a contact reward based on target proximity and object contact forces for downstream control. Simulation experiments on a Unitree G1 and real-world experiments on a Unitree R1 demonstrate that STR improves geometric contact coverage and continuity at lower computational cost, while the resulting references improve downstream task completion across diverse object-interaction motions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30540
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What Do Verifiable Rewards Teach Video-Language Models About Time? A Controlled Multi-Model Study
2026-10-21 23:30:17Avyay Sadhu, Patrick CooperAbstract
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has produced large reasoning gains in language models, and verifiable video benchmarks make it applicable to causal-temporal video question answering. We study what RLVR teaches video-language models about time. We fine-tune four open models (Qwen3-VL-8B/4B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Gemma-3-12B) with group relative policy optimization under three data recipes: verified (synthetic CLEVRER questions with exact answer and event-order rewards), unverified (self-supervised pretext tasks over 43,751 real web videos), and a 1:1 mixture, plus a verified+real arm that adds 4,000 verifiable questions on real video. Each cell is evaluated in-domain and on out-of-domain real video (a NExT-QA temporal stress set and an MVBench subset), with frames in order, shuffled, and absent. (1) Verified training yields large in-domain gains that shrink as base competence grows (+14 to +19 points on weaker models; +6 on the strongest). (2) Much of the gain is non-visual: accuracy with no frames rises nearly as much as with frames. (3) Verified-only training can severely degrade out-of-domain accuracy with no sign during training: Qwen3-VL-8B loses 26.7 and 25.2 points on the two real-video sets, while the mixture never significantly degrades a model trained on it. Adding real verified questions removes that loss (-2.3 points, within noise of base) and keeps a +9.3 in-domain gain, so the cause is narrow synthetic-only data, not verification. (4) No recipe induces temporal-order grounding: across 41 evaluations the ordered-versus-shuffled gap is indistinguishable from zero in 39 and marginal in two, despite an event-order reward. Verifiable rewards improve benchmark accuracy without temporal understanding. Report no-frame controls, and mix in real video to guard against out-of-domain degradation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03792
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PhysibleMDM: Enforcing Inference-Time Physical Feasibility Constraints on Motion Diffusion Models via Noise Optimization
2026-10-21 22:31:27Maximilian St\"olzle, David M\"uller, Agon Serifi, Ruben Grandia, Espen Knoop, Moritz B\"acherAbstract
Motion Diffusion Models (MDMs) can generate diverse and visually appealing human motion; yet, the resulting trajectories frequently violate physical constraints, limiting their downstream use in simulation and control. We present PhysibleMDM, a framework that promotes physical feasibility of MDM output by optimizing at inference time the diffusion noise without retraining the generative model. We introduce a set of surrogate feasibility constraints that can be evaluated without full trajectory simulation. These constraints combine kinematic checks (e.g., ground penetration, slip, and self-collision) with dynamic feasibility tests computed via an inverse-dynamics inner loop formulated as a cone program. We solve the resulting black-box noise optimization problem using the Separable Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (Sep-CMA-ES), thereby avoiding reliance on computationally expensive and discontinuous gradients. An autoregressive scheme then chains optimized segments to synthesize long motion sequences. Across 100 motion styles on an SMPL humanoid, PhysibleMDM reduces mean ground penetration, self-collision penetration, and ground slip by 75%, 92%, and 74%, respectively, relative to unoptimized diffusion output. Across 11 sequences for a custom bipedal robot, it achieves median reductions of 89.5% in per-sequence mean acceleration-reconstruction error and 79.5% in the mean inverse-dynamics residual.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30500
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HeyGen Voice: Scene-Aware Voice Cloning for Talking Videos
2026-10-21 21:42:44Pavel Andreev, Andrei Gusev, Adithya Narayan, Yi Ren, Ivan Somov, Zijian Li, Sergey Demyanov, Viktor Goriachko, Alan Tan, Nik Nolte, Sam Prokopchuk, Andy Pan, David Chou, Kirill Leonov, Penghan Wang, Jiewei Yuan, Zhibin Hong, Rong YanAbstract
Most voice-cloning systems are built for audio alone: they copy the reference recording's delivery and acoustics, so a voice cloned on a phone sounds like a phone recording whether the speaker is pictured in a studio, on a street, or in a cathedral. Speech for a talking video should sound like the pictured person speaking in the pictured place. We present HeyGen Voice, a scene-aware voice-cloning model that separates who is speaking from how and where: it keeps the speaker's voice from an everyday recording while the target image sets the delivery and acoustics. Prior image-conditioned TTS does half of this job: it either adds scene acoustics without keeping a specific speaker or infers a voice from a face. HeyGen Voice is a multimodal autoregressive transformer conditioned on the image, speaker and scene captions, and the voice recording, trained in five stages that move from multilingual TTS pretraining through simulated and real cross-scene adaptation to reinforcement and preference optimization. Two clone policies trade scene adaptation against fidelity to the original recording, and an audio anchor holds long scripts in one voice and one acoustic environment. Listeners prefer HeyGen Voice over leading commercial systems across a third-party arena, production votes, and talking-video studies: it ranks first (Elo 1201) on the public Artificial Analysis controlled-voice TTS leaderboard (October 2026); in a blind test, users cloning their own voice chose it over ElevenLabs v4 and Cartesia Sonic 3.6 in 62% and 54% of votes; and volunteers rated talking videos of their own digital twin about 10 to 30 points higher (out of 100) when voiced by HeyGen Voice than by leading commercial alternatives. Try HeyGen Voice and hear samples at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30470
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Foundation4D: Towards a unified perception and reconstruction model for autonomous vehicles
2026-10-21 19:00:46NVIDIA, , S\'ergio Agostinho, Maximilian Apodaca, Emmanuel Attia, Guillem Braso, George Dong, Ilya Fedorov, Michele Fenzi, Gang Huang, Jiahui Huang, Shengyu Huang, Bingxin Ke, Laura Leal-Taix\'e, Kuan-Ting Lee, Mingxuan Liu, Tian Liu, Tim Meinhardt, Aljo\v{s}a O\v{s}ep, Naveen Kumar Rai, Kefei Ren, Cristiano Saltori, Keqiang Wu, Ning Xu, Fei Xue, Jin-Bey Yu, Lei Zhang, Qunjie ZhouAbstract
We introduce Foundation4D, a unified feed-forward model for geometry estimation, 3D detection, semantic occupancy, and Gaussian reconstruction from multi-camera driving video. A shared backbone uses factorized spatiotemporal attention to efficiently combine observations across cameras and time. Our video inference pipeline uses pose graph optimization to refine camera trajectories and assembles object tracks across input windows. We also develop a data annotation pipeline and release PAI-Foundation4D, a benchmark with dense depth and semantic occupancy labels for 1,253 driving clips. With benchmark-specific fine-tuning, Foundation4D achieves the lowest depth AbsRel on Waymo and nuScenes, the highest detection mAP on nuScenes, and the highest occupancy mIoU on OpenOccupancy among the compared methods. Our task-combination study shows benefits for both detection and geometry: co-training detection with geometry and occupancy improves top-class mAP by 1.2 points over detection-only training, while co-training geometry with detection reduces camera-to-rig translation error by $13.4\%$ relative to geometry-only training. We further use the predicted geometry and trajectories as priors for lidarless NuRec, supporting reconstruction of driving scenes for simulation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30340
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R4DGS: Referring Segmentation in 4D Gaussian Splatting
2026-10-21 18:42:09Bangpu Chen, Yaxuan Li, Shirui Peng, Xiangtian Si, Liuxin Chu, Xitong Cao, Hongbo Jin, Jiayu DingAbstract
Dynamic representations based on 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) have shown strong capabilities in reconstruction and rendering, yet current methods remain limited in supporting complex natural-language referring in dynamic scenes. Existing 4D Gaussian methods are primarily designed for rendering-oriented dynamic modeling, while current semantic extensions often rely on scene-specific semantic optimization or are evaluated on relatively simple query settings. In this paper, we study Referring 4D Gaussian Splatting (R4DGS), a task for grounding temporally varying, multi-target or reasoning-intensive, and zero-target or distractor expressions in dynamic 4D scenes. To support this task, we introduce R4D-Bench-QA, a benchmark with structured query annotations. We further present ReferGaussian, a unified framework built upon 4DGS that converts low-level dynamic Gaussians into persistent, language-addressable entities for training-free referring inference. ReferGaussian organizes mask-supported Gaussian entities in an EntityBank, uses Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to decompose complex queries into trackable object phrases and structured referring constraints, and performs constraint-aware grounding without scene-specific semantic optimization. Experiments on R4D-Bench-QA and the 4D LangSplat protocol demonstrate improved temporal target selection and competitive spatiotemporal grounding without scene-specific semantic training. Project resources are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30326
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AtomicRL: Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-21 17:45:24Likui Zhang, Zhe Zhu, Zhihao Zhan, Yibo Bai, Hanlin Wang, Dongwei Li, Bin Wang, Tianle Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Liang LinAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, but imitation learning (IL) alone often struggles to master complex long-horizon skills. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an effective avenue for further improving VLA policies. However, existing VLA-RL methods typically suffer from delayed and biased credit assignment due to trajectory-level sparse rewards, while imbalanced subtask mastery creates bottlenecks that limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicRL, an RL post-training framework that leverages atomic task structures for reliable credit assignment and adaptive exploration. AtomicRL introduces Semantic-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses semantic-aware gating to constrain TD residuals from failed atomic subtasks from propagating across task boundaries, mitigating credit contamination while preserving intra-subtask credit assignment and value bootstrapping. In addition, Bottleneck-Adaptive Target Exploration (BATE) dynamically coordinates task sampling and local exploration incentives based on the mastery of individual atomic subtasks, directing learning toward the remaining bottlenecks. Finally, we develop a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that bridges online RL in simulation with real-world deployment, facilitating practical transfer to physical robots. On LIBERO-LONG, AtomicRL achieves absolute performance gains of 3.6% and 4.0% over PPO across two VLA architectures. On CALVIN ABC-D, it improves full-task performance by up to 9.5% over PPO. Combined with the Real2Sim2Real pipeline, AtomicRL further improves real-world task performance by an average of 21.3%. These results demonstrate that AtomicRL effectively improves the learning efficiency and manipulation performance of VLA policies on long-horizon tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30097
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Parallel AI Agent Collaboration as Graph-Structured Distributed Block Optimization
2026-10-21 17:27:17Hanmin Li, Yury Demidovich, Peter Richt\'arikAbstract
Parallel AI agents can produce useful local edits yet degrade a shared solution when their edits are combined. We model this coordination problem as discrete block optimization with an exactly evaluable objective and a known dependency graph. Independent sets certify compatible edits whose verified gains, measured against the same current solution, add exactly. A coordinator constructs a safe compatible candidate and can also evaluate interacting edits to capture favorable interactions. We prove that an optimal fractional coloring yields a merger that preserves a $1/\chi_f(G)$ fraction of the total verified local improvement, where $\chi_f(G)$ is the graph's fractional chromatic number. This guarantee is tight among mergers that select a subset of the same proposals. Under conditional local-improvement guarantees and a block error-bound condition, repeated collaboration converges geometrically in the objective gap. The rate separates task structure, agent allocation, and computation cost, yielding a linear program for agent assignment and an explicit time-cost trade-off. Code-repair experiments show that verified merging resolves conflicts between individually useful edits that cause naive merging to fail. On larger conflict-free tasks, parallel agents reduce modeled completion time at higher input-token-equivalent cost. On three public road networks, fractional integration retains 922 units of verified graph-cut improvement across 90 paired runs. For route-search agents sharing exclusive access to vehicle routes, fractional scheduling reduces measured wall time by a median of 15% across twelve paired runs, with route-cost changes varying across runs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30074
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HGM-Dual: Lineage-Aware Guided Agent Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Planning
2026-10-21 17:02:28Sudipta Paul, Pengrui Quan, Aounon Kumar, Nicholas Tzou, Vivek Kulkarni, Srinivas ChappidiAbstract
Harness optimization, which improves an agent's prompts, tools, and workflows, is an increasingly effective way to enhance agents built on frozen or closed-source LLMs. Leading approaches such as the Darwin--Godel Machine and the Huxley--Godel Machine (HGM) rely on recursive self-improvement and were developed mainly for coding, where the competence needed to improve the agent coincides with the competence being improved. Planning tasks, in which an agent must produce a sequence of tool calls that jointly satisfies interacting constraints, break this alignment. There, open-ended self-modification repeatedly explores ineffective changes and consumes substantial evaluation budgets. We introduce HGM-Dual, a diagnostic-guided framework for budget-efficient harness evolution for planning agents. First, HGM-Dual represents agent evolution as lineage-aware context. This context records what each ancestor changed, which behaviors improved or regressed, and which modifications were ineffective, giving the editor explicit edit-outcome attribution instead of an unstructured archive of past agents. Second, HGM-Dual introduces error-conditioned dual-path child generation. For each selected parent, it generates a general child that preserves open-ended exploration and specialized children that target the harness components most likely responsible for the parent's highest-ranked constraint violations. HGM-Dual outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 14.45% relative improvement in case accuracy while matching HGM variants' final performance with 2x-4x fewer evaluation budget.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30042
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GuideEvolve: Self-Evolving Agent Framework with Expert Guidance and 3Ts Mechanisms
2026-10-21 16:46:22Meihong Jia, Yasemin Timar, Jonathan TawsAbstract
This study introduces GuideEvolve, a self-evolving agent framework incorporating expert guidance and three autonomous regulatory mechanisms, collectively termed the 3Ts: Think Fast and Slow, Throwback, and Termination by choice. The framework addresses critical limitations in extant self-evolving agent paradigms through dual innovations: (1) a task-specific expert-evaluation-driven evolutionary pipeline, and (2) the integration of 3Ts mechanisms to facilitate cognitive optimization, performance recovery via temporal rollback, and adaptive termination protocols. Empirical validation across the MGSM and MMLU benchmarks demonstrates that GuideEvolve attains performance metrics comparable to current state-of-the-art models (89.8% accuracy versus Gödel Agent's 90.6% on MGSM; 89.1% versus 87.9% on MMLU), while exhibiting notably reduced variance (25-59%) and enhanced robustness. Furthermore, the framework achieves a 100% evolution success rate, superior to the baseline's 82%, diminishes required optimization iterations by approximately 50% (from 30 iterations in baseline to 15.1 and 13.4 across tasks), and provides improved stability for production deployment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30017
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ClunoGS: Compact Language 3D Gaussian Splatting via Unified Optimization
2026-10-21 16:43:53Jian Xu, Yi Li, Ying Huang, Siyi Wu, Bingzhe Li, Yuede Ji, Miao YinAbstract
Language 3D Gaussian Splatting enables open-vocabulary scene understanding by associating Gaussian primitives with language features. These semantic attributes increase model storage, while most existing 3DGS compression methods are designed mainly to preserve RGB rendering quality. One straightforward approach is to apply sparsification and quantization sequentially. However, pruning based only on rendering quality can remove Gaussians that have small RGB contributions but are important for semantic prediction. Once removed, their semantic information cannot be recovered by later quantization. We propose ClunoGS, a compact framework for Language 3DGS that combines semantics-aware Gaussian sparsification and vector quantization in a unified constrained objective. Semantic supervision is used during sparsification, and the objective jointly considers rendering quality, semantic accuracy, and compactness. We optimize the unified objective with alternating primal, sparsification, quantization, and dual updates. We evaluate ClunoGS on open-vocabulary localization and segmentation using the LERF and ScanNet-10 benchmarks. Under aggressive compression, our unified, semantics-aware formulation substantially alleviates the degradation of semantic representations caused by sequential compression and semantics-agnostic Gaussian sparsification. Ablations further show that jointly coordinating sparsification and quantization better preserves semantic accuracy than applying them independently.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30013
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DONIC: Generalist Dexterous Bimanual Tracking Control from Human Demonstrations
2026-10-21 16:36:02Mingze Sun, Ziang Cao, Yuan Fei, Qiankuan Tao, Zihan Wang, Tianqi Liu, Junhao Chen, Haiwen Diao, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei LiuAbstract
Despite recent progress in dexterous reference tracking, existing models focus primarily on single-hand manipulation and a limited range of interactions, leaving the bimanual dexterous behaviors common in real life unaddressed. The scarcity of contact-rich bimanual manipulation data and the increased complexity of coordinating contacts make developing a generalist bimanual tracker particularly challenging. Therefore, we present 1) DONIC, the first generalist bimanual tracker jointly trained across operation categories and human-motion sources, together with 2) BiHOI, a multi-view dataset of 1,575 sequences spanning 229 objects and emphasizing sustained bimanual interaction, where reconstructed interactions are retargeted into robot references. DONIC combines proximal policy optimization with behavioral cloning in a feedback loop that recycles verified successful executions into training demonstrations. An object-centered per-hand reward maintains object-motion feedback while supervising each hand according to its reference contact role. Clip-Centered Advantages remove reference-dependent advantage offsets while preserving within-trajectory differences. Together, these designs enable one single policy to learn coordinated manipulation across heterogeneous references. Without finetuning, a single checkpoint achieves 86.79% success on unseen trajectories of training objects and 57.32% on held-out objects, surpassing the state-of-the-art bimanual tracking baselines by 77.36 and 45.73 percentage points.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29997
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HuMiT: Low-Latency Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation via Compact Reference Tracking
2026-10-21 15:45:03Liu Cao, Botian Xu, Ruoqu Chen, Jiajun Liu, Mingzhi Pei, Zihao Wang, Zhongyu Li, Mengdi XuAbstract
Real-time whole-body humanoid teleoperation remains challenging due to the computational latency introduced by optimization-based retargeting pipelines and future-frame conditioning. Existing motion tracking policies typically require dense reference targets including full joint positions, body-part transformations, and even future frames, which tightly couples the controller to expensive upstream modules. In this work, we present HuMiT, a whole-body teleoperation system built on a unified tracking policy that requires only a compact reference target, consisting of root height, root velocity, and the SE(3) poses of four sparse keypoints at the current frame, yet achieves competitive tracking fidelity compared to methods relying on more diverse reference states including complete joint positions, dense body-part transformations, and even future frames. Experiments show that our policy achieves a communication-to-inference latency of $\sim$20 ms measured between headset streaming and policy output and a video-based optical flow latency of 65 ms (median) across different motion types. We validate the system on a Unitree G1 humanoid, showcasing split-second reactive responses such as catching a tossed ball, as well as coordinated loco-manipulation capabilities. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29903
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Automated Materials Data and Knowledge Extraction using Machine Learning and Large Language Models
2026-10-21 15:38:05Aravindan Kamatchi Sundaram, B. Pabitramohan Prusty, Rohit BatraAbstract
Over the past decade, substantial efforts have been devoted to developing machine learning (ML) methods for extracting materials data and, where possible, materials knowledge directly from the scientific literature. This review traces the evolution of these methods from heuristic, rule-based pipelines through natural language processing (NLP) models and transformer-based encoders to, lastly, large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems capable of extracting materials information across multiple modalities, including text, tables, and figures. Beside construction of large, queryable materials databases and knowledge graphs that support downstream materials discovery, we discuss how these advances have enabled new capabilities, such as, generic question answering across materials science, AI co-scientists and chatbots for research assistance, and closed-loop optimization and discovery when integrated with autonomous laboratories. We critically assess the datasets generated using these approaches, their extraction accuracy and computational costs, and the respective strengths and limitations of different methodologies, and even provide practical guidelines for developing more reliable and scalable materials data extraction pipelines. Finally, we identify key open challenges, including the extraction of full materials structure-property-processing-performance tetrahedron at the sample level, the scarcity of reliable benchmark datasets for systematic evaluation, and the resolution of non-standard materials terminology across different document modalities.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29895
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Stochastic Nonlinearities Improve Uncertainty Estimation
2026-10-21 15:26:12Mohammad Sarhangzadeh, Amirreza M. Shebly, Doruk OnerAbstract
Reliable uncertainty estimation is important across visual recognition tasks, providing information about the confidence and reliability of model predictions. Many uncertainty estimation methods obtain predictive diversity through mechanisms that can suppress intermediate features, perturb the input, or require substantial additional computation. Stochastic activation functions, where network units randomly select between multiple nonlinearities during a forward pass, have previously been used to improve optimization behavior, mitigate limitations of fixed ReLU activations, and increase output diversity. In this work, we reframe stochastic activation switching as a lightweight mechanism for uncertainty estimation. The proposed method samples between nonlinear activation functions, inducing predictive diversity while keeping intermediate feature pathways active. This enables uncertainty estimation from a single trained model without the training cost of ensembles, task-specific uncertainty heads, or architectural redesign. We evaluate the proposed approach across classification, semantic segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection using convolutional and transformer-based architectures on diverse datasets. Across these settings, stochastic activation switching improves uncertainty quality while preserving competitive primary-task performance, showing that stochastic nonlinearities provide an effective and information-preserving source of predictive variation for visual recognition.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29875
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Exploring Post-Training Alignment of Small Language Models for Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation: A Case Study of Medication Leaflet
2026-10-21 15:03:37Xi Yang, Guodong Liu, Chuqin Li, Fan Wu, Ergin Soysal, Min Jiang, Xing He, Jiang Bian, Yi Guo, Shams Zaman, Thomas Fuchs, Yonghui WuAbstract
Translating structured biomedical information into accurate, patient-friendly narratives remains a challenging biomedical data-to-text (D2T) task. While small language models (SLMs) are attractive for healthcare applications because of their lower computational cost, easier deployment, and improved data governance, the impact of post-training alignment on biomedical D2T generation has not been systematically studied. In this work, we compare four alignment methods: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), and group relative policy optimization (GRPO), using Qwen-2.5 models for medication leaflet generation. We further introduce FDALeaflets, a dataset derived from OpenFDA drug labels, to evaluate cross-regulatory generalization in a zero-shot setting. Selected aligned SLMs outperform GPT-5 on several reference-based metrics, whereas GPT-5 achieves better hallucination and adequacy scores on FDALeaflets under LLM-as-judge evaluation. Among RL-free alignment methods, ORPO achieves the best in-domain semantic performance, reaching a semantic textual similarity (STS) score of 0.9752. GRPO achieves the highest FDALeaflets STS (0.9407), exceeding GPT-5 (0.9295). These findings show that post-training alignment is a key factor in improving both semantic fidelity and generalization for biomedical D2T generation, while clinical safety and patient readability require human verification.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13430
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Spacetime Splines for Adaptive Robot Motions
2026-10-21 15:01:04Boxuan Zhang, Ante Mari\'c, Sylvain CalinonAbstract
Movement primitives commonly represent robot mo- tions through basis functions indexed by time or phase. Inspired by spacetime representations employed in physics, we propose a spline-based formulation in which spatial geometry and temporal progression are represented within a common set of continuous variables. The proposed method jointly estimates a shared Bezier curve, while allowing spatial and temporal model complexity to be adapted independently (e.g., demonstration-specific phase modulation). As use case, we consider an alternating optimization process that simultaneously estimates path intervals observed in partial demonstrations. Simulation experiments demonstrate accurate joint recovery, refinement through modifications in model complexity and continuity, and improved robustness to variance in the demonstration set. Finally, we demonstrate online retiming and synchronization capabilities in a patient-turning task assisted by a robot, evaluated with a physical manikin.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29839
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RocketAgent: A Long-Horizon Engineering Agent for Multidisciplinary Design of Liquid-Rocket Thrust Chambers
2026-10-21 14:25:23Junxiang He, Runze Mao, Kun He, Teng Zhang, Liming Zheng, Ke Xiao, Zhi X. ChenAbstract
Liquid-rocket thrust-chamber design involves interdependent analyses in which downstream constraints can require earlier design decisions to be revisited. Managing these dependencies across heterogeneous tools requires consistent design information and coordinated updates throughout the workflow. We present RocketAgent, a long-horizon engineering agent for multidisciplinary preliminary design of liquid-rocket thrust chambers. A single plan-owning Coding Agent coordinates engineering skills for performance sizing, subsystem optimization, geometry generation, and multiphysics assessment. A provenance-aware knowledge graph supports method selection, while a typed Design Intermediate Representation maintains shared parameters, artifacts, and decisions. Revision-aware checks invalidate affected results and block superseded inputs, with consequential changes subject to engineering approval. In a representative simulation-based design, RocketAgent continued from an infeasible cooling search through an engineer-authorized operating-point revision, identified feasible subsystem designs, and coordinated subsequent geometry generation and multiphysics assessment to support final configuration selection. Separate module tests assessed surrogate predictions and nozzle adaptation. A two-configuration comparison across three controlled scenarios verified the expected dependency invalidations and superseded-input blocking before solver execution. The representative case demonstrates sustained coordination across a multidisciplinary design workflow, while the controlled tests establish the behavior of the revision mechanisms supporting that execution.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06044
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Learning to Measure and Diagnose: A Clinical-Dictionary Radiomic Bottleneck Model for Thyroid Nodule Classification
2026-10-21 13:38:14Guibin Zhang, Weier Luo, Lei CaoAbstract
Thyroid ultrasound supports the assessment of nodule malignancy, but classification predictions often lack evidence linked to familiar clinical descriptions. Radiomics provides explicitly defined measurements that can support such explanations through a clinical dictionary. However, using these measurements as interpretable evidence requires reliable estimation from ultrasound images and preservation of measurement fidelity when optimizing classification performance. We propose a clinical-dictionary radiomic bottleneck model for thyroid nodule classification. Within this model, Family-Aware Radiomic Learning (FARL) estimates measurements with balanced supervision across feature families. Fidelity-Guided Bottleneck Modeling (FGBM) constructs a fixed bottleneck, followed by joint optimization of measurement estimation and classification under fidelity guidance. Decision evidence decomposition then traces feature contributions through a linear classifier and organizes them by clinical dictionary categories. Experiments on ThyroidXL and TN3K show competitive classification performance, while case studies illustrate feature contributions for benign and malignant nodules. These findings indicate interpretable classification with inspectable quantitative evidence informed by clinical knowledge. Code is available online.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29738
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