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H-2DGS: Height-Field Gaussian Splatting for Sharp and Deformable Neurosurgical Surface Reconstruction
2026-10-22 08:33:14Zhang Zichuan, Bart Brouwers, Rembrandt Bakker, Maud Landers, Geert-Jan Rutten, Maxime ChamberlandAbstract
Neurosurgical navigation commonly presents magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as 2D slices, making it difficult to relate the anatomy in those slices to the cortical surface observed through the surgical microscope. We seek a common 3D visualization that combines a photorealistic reconstruction of the exposed cortex during tumor surgery with whole-brain MRI context and diffusion tractography pathways. This requires the reconstructed cortex to form a clear boundary around the brain anatomy rather than a diffuse volume that obscures internal structures. Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) can reproduce observed views but, under limited surgical view coverage, may distribute opacity through a thick and geometrically ambiguous band. We introduce height-field 2D Gaussian Splatting (H-2DGS), a three-stage pipeline that concentrates a robust 3DGS reconstruction, fuses its depth into a shared truncated signed distance field (TSDF) surface, and represents that surface with curved, surface-oriented Gaussian primitives. Separate height, color, and opacity bases provide local geometry and appearance, while a neighbor-transition objective coordinates overlapping patches. The explicit surface further supports postoperative alignment: MRI-derived depth deforms the reconstruction, and tracked-color supervision with alternating optimization preserves its appearance. Across five real neurosurgical cases, H-2DGS gives low multi-view depth inconsistency, a compact 7.97MB representation, and interactive rendering at 29--42ms per frame. The resulting sharp, deformable surface integrates clearly with tractography and MRI anatomy, including a postoperative resection cavity.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30910
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Silicon Samples Match the Answers but Not the Respondents
2026-10-22 08:22:50Yusuke Kumagae, Masahiro KanekoAbstract
Silicon sampling generates survey respondents by having a large language model (LLM) answer a survey as a person with given demographic attributes, and the resulting synthetic populations are increasingly used in place of human ones. Existing evaluations focus on individual-answer accuracy, per-question answer distributions, and correlations across questions. None of these compares the respondents themselves, so a generator whose respondents have combinations of answers found in no human respondent can still score well if it reproduces every answer distribution. We propose the respondent coverage gap (RCG), which represents each respondent as a point defined by their complete answer profile and measures how far each human respondent is from the nearest generated one, relative to the distance between human samples. On two US social surveys, all six LLMs we evaluate leave human respondents uncovered, and under our main settings, they fall behind a baseline that samples each answer independently from the human marginals. Across the prompting and inference settings we test, every LLM has a higher RCG than a Gaussian copula fitted to the human data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30900
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From Perpetrators' Digital Footprints to Behavioral Communities: An Ontology-Driven Framework for Bengali Cyberbullying Analysis--- FULL VERSION
2026-10-22 08:04:48Md. Nesarul Hoque, Md Hanif Seddiqui, Miskatul Anwara, Rudra Pratap Deb NathAbstract
Cyberbullying involves behavioral and contextual patterns beyond isolated abusive messages. However, existing approaches remain fragmented across content detection, semantic representation, and network analysis, with limited interpretable perpetrator representations, multi-scale structural modeling, and explanations of behavior-driven similarity and influence propagation. These limitations hinder the identification of persistent perpetrators, characterization of behavioral communities, and assessment of potentially influential users. This paper proposes Ontology-Driven Cyberbullying Behavior and Network Analysis (ODCBNA), a perpetrator-centric framework integrating requirements-driven ontology design, knowledge graph construction, behavioral modeling, community analysis, and influence modeling. Using the Bengali Contextual and Diverse Cyberbullying (BenCoDiC) corpus as a use case, ODCBNA identifies $1{,}063$ users with at least three bullying comments or replies as perpetrators and represents each through a $64$-dimensional behavioral and contextual feature vector. Cosine similarity and $k$-nearest-neighbor modeling produce a weighted network with $27{,}554$ edges. Louvain analysis identifies six communities with a modularity of approximately $0.495$ and $27$ sub-communities. Feature-contribution analysis identifies the Video, Impact, and User Profile groups as the strongest contributors to behavioral similarity and community separation, while contextual dimensions support interpretation. Community-constrained influence analysis shows that IM Greedy achieves small positive gains in all six communities, although different seed-selection methods produce comparable diffusion spreads despite limited seed overlap. These findings provide an interpretable basis for understanding perpetrator behavior, community organization, and potential influence patterns in Bengali online environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30885
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PortraitAes: Intent-Conditioned Structured Portrait Aesthetic Assessment
2026-10-22 07:58:01Junzhou Xie, Haozhong Xiong, Xunyun Tian, Kaile Du, Tianchen Yu, Qiang Li, Wei Liu, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Yang Shi, Guangcan LiuAbstract
Portrait aesthetic assessment assigns comparable scores according to how effectively human-centered images fulfill their photographic intent. These scores support data filtering, candidate selection, and preference modeling in image-generation pipelines. Existing methods typically predict a single aesthetic score or use general-purpose MLLMs without conditioning on photographic intent. This omission matters because the same blur, pose, lighting, or framing choice may serve one photographic intent but undermine another. These models thus learn context-agnostic aesthetic priors and yield inconsistent, inaccurate, misleading judgments for portraits with distinct photographic objectives. We introduce PortraitAes-Bench, an 11K-scale benchmark that decomposes this task into intent-conditioned subjudgments. Expert-authored rubrics define nine photographic intents, six first-level dimensions, and 22 secondary criteria. They support a structured pipeline for intent routing, specialist assessment, verification, and score fusion. Following this structure, we train PortraitAes with multi-task supervision. We then improve score comparability through Gaussian score calibration and within-dimension cross-image ranking. On the standard benchmark, PortraitAes achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.924 and a Spearman rank correlation of 0.934. On the hard-case set, its Pearson correlation is 0.829 and its Spearman rank correlation is 0.795. Across both sets, PortraitAes outperforms the evaluated general-purpose MLLMs and specialized aesthetic baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05010
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When Do Self-Supervised Representations Help Speech Restoration?
2026-10-22 07:52:03Yongjoon Lee, Younghoo Kwon, Jung-Woo ChoiAbstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) representations are widely used in speech restoration (SR), and the prevailing trend is SSL feature cleansing: fine-tuning the SSL to recover clean features from degraded speech, then conditioning the restoration model on them. However, the representational capability of SSL when encoding degraded speech has been underexplored, and we ask whether cleansing always benefits SR training. Across SSL encoders and perceptual quality proxies, we discover perceptual correlation collapse---under severe degradation, cleansing degraded SSL features toward clean ones misaligns with the SR objective. We hypothesize the restoration backbone can supply the SSL with clues to resolve this collapse, since its intermediate layers already produce partially restored features. We therefore propose Early Restoration Injection (ERI), which routes intermediate features from the restoration backbone into the SSL through a lightweight conditioning network. ERI excels over the unconditioned baseline and, on the VoiceFixer benchmark, achieves competitive performance among multiple baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30869
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Parallelizable Probabilistic Latent Reasoning for Diverse Reasoning Trajectories
2026-10-22 07:41:12Seokhyun Lee, Seongjun Lee, Changhee LeeAbstract
Language models relying on verbalized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) are constrained to token-by-token generation in the language space, where many tokens serve textual coherence rather than core reasoning. This entangles genuine differences in logical trajectories with superficial variations in verbalization. Moving reasoning into a compact, continuous latent space offers a promising alternative for efficiently representing and exploring diverse reasoning trajectories. However, current latent models remain largely deterministic, capturing only a single reasoning trajectory rather than modeling a distribution over multiple valid alternatives. While stochastic approaches parameterize distributions over latent reasoning steps, they frequently suffer from unstable optimization and limited empirical performance. Furthermore, their reliance on autoregressive latent prediction during training precludes effective parallelization, leading to prohibitively long training times. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose Probabilistic Latent Reasoning Models (PLRM), a parallelizable variational framework for probabilistic latent reasoning. PLRM adopts a JEPA-style objective in which the posterior infers latent distributions in parallel from observed reasoning trajectories, while the prior learns to predict the subsequent latent distribution via teacher forcing. To model heterogeneous reasoning processes, we introduce a discrete strategy variable together with a mixture-based prior, allowing the model to preserve the Gaussian-mixture structure induced by multiple distinct reasoning trajectories rather than collapsing them into a single Gaussian. Across diverse benchmarks, PLRM achieves performance competitive with deterministic latent reasoning models on single-trajectory datasets while enabling efficient training and consistently outperforming competing stochastic baselines on multi-trajectory datasets.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29385
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CAVC: Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache for Modality-Asymmetric Diffusion Generation
2026-10-22 07:30:21Lifan Jiang, Yibo Zhao, Senlin cheng, Bolei Xu, Xiaobo Li, Can Ye, Dehai Zhao, Deng Cai, Boxi WuAbstract
Diffusion-based audio-visual generation methods typically perform joint denoising of audio and video latents throughout the entire sampling trajectory, repeatedly executing modality-specific denoising branches and cross-modal attention at every timestep. However, we observe that such uniform joint computation is not always necessary. The key is a modality-asymmetric recoverability: audio-side drift introduced by mid-stage caching can be substantially reduced by only a few terminal joint denoising steps, whereas video-side degradation caused by caching leads to persistent loss of motion and temporal details. This asymmetry suggests that inference acceleration should selectively cache recoverable audio-side computation while preserving full video refinement. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache (CAVC)}, a training-free modality-asymmetric caching framework. CAVC adopts a sandwich-structured computation allocation: after detecting that audio denoiser outputs enter a cache-tolerant regime, it caches and reuses the audio denoiser output to bypass audio denoising and cross-modal attention in the middle stage, while the video branch continues independent spatio-temporal refinement; a few joint steps are then restored at the end to reduce accumulated cross-modal drift and improve synchronization. Experiments across multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that CAVC achieves 1.10--1.35x wall-clock acceleration, improves several visual dynamics and temporal statistics, and maintains competitive audio fidelity and audio-visual alignment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30854
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ProTrav: Probabilistic Traversability with Elevation Uncertainty Propagation for Risk-aware Off-road Navigation
2026-10-22 07:08:09Chuanlin Zuo, Milo\v{s} Pr\'{a}gr, Arun Kumar Singh, Mohammad Loni, Reza GhabchelooAbstract
Reliable traversability estimation is essential for autonomous navigation on unstructured terrain. State-of-the-art approaches typically evaluate traversability from deterministic terrain elevation, thereby overlooking spatial correlations in the terrain and failing to account for how elevation uncertainty propagates through nonlinear traversability mappings. We propose ProTrav, a probabilistic terrain representation that uses function-space sampling to generate spatially correlated terrain realizations and propagate elevation uncertainty to traversability cost. First, a Sparse Variational Gaussian Process (SVGP) reconstructs a probabilistic elevation field from observations. Then, posterior function-space sampling generates spatially correlated terrain realizations, preserving spatial dependencies between neighboring locations while propagating elevation uncertainty through geometric features into traversability cost. Consequently, a distribution of traversability cost at arbitrary location is established, where the mean and standard deviation quantify the expected traversability cost and associated uncertainty, respectively. A risk term is defined by moment-based Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and incorporated into a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller for risk-aware navigation. Simulation experiments demonstrate navigation success rates exceeding 90\% on different terrains, compared with below 40\% for a baseline, while reducing attitude variations. Furthermore, the proposed approach is validated on a robot traversing real-world off-road terrain.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30839
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RECAP: Looking Once Is Not Enough for Vision-Language Reasoning
2026-10-22 07:04:23Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Chenxin Li, Yingjie He, Zhenyu Yu, Fengyu Zhou, Jiachen Qian, Lei Wei, Shuang Chen, Jiachen Li, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Rongchao Zhang, Zhengtao Yao, Hoi Leong Lee, Guansu Wang, Kaiyue ZhouAbstract
Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves vision-language models (VLMs), but it also exposes a temporal grounding failure: as generation unfolds, models may drift from image evidence while reinforcement learning still provides only a final-answer reward. We study this gap through visual revisit, a temporally localized reactivation of image evidence during reasoning. Across three VLM backbones, revisit peaks are predictive of correctness and causally linked to performance: masking them degrades accuracy more than masking non-peaks, while injecting revisit-like peaks into failed rollouts partially restores correct answers. Control analyses show that this signal is not explained by raw attention strength, uncertainty, logit margin, or hidden-state norm. We propose RECAP, a GRPO-compatible training method that turns detached revisit traces into a credit-assignment signal. RECAP uses revisit-conditioned advantage estimation, dynamic discounting, and gated value prediction to propagate final rewards through visually important reasoning steps, without extra rewards, additional rollouts, or inference-time changes. Across Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-8B, and LLaVA-OV-7B, RECAP consistently improves over GRPO and VPPO, yielding $+6.1$--$+6.5$ HallusionBench gains over the SFT base while preserving reasoning and text-only performance. Results on larger LoRA-tuned models, Chinese zero-shot benchmarks, visual perturbations, and human evaluation further demonstrate robust improvements in image-grounded reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30834
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Loop to Look Better: Learning Adaptive Depth for Question-Guided Perception in Vision-Language Models
2026-10-22 06:53:13Wencheng Ye, Anning Hu, Hongye Fang, Tianyi Wang, Junchi YanAbstract
Visual perception should be iterative and task-directed, with representations refined in response to the question and the need for further processing. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly support extended reasoning, their visual tokens are still typically acquired in a single, task-agnostic encoder pass. This creates an evidence-acquisition bottleneck: models may reason longer without refining the visual evidence needed to answer the question. We propose LoopLook, a lightweight encoder-side recurrent perception framework that equips pretrained VLMs with adaptive visual depth. LoopLook recurrently revisits a middle-to-late window of the vision encoder, injecting question representations at each loop to guide visual refinement. A learned stopping mechanism adaptively determines the recurrent depth, while a token-wise Mixture-of-Looks (MoL) combines representations from different loops, allowing each visual token to selectively integrate information acquired across recurrent steps. Across four backbones and eight benchmarks, LoopLook consistently improves performance over the baseline, yielding gains of up to 8.6% on MMStar and 8.1% on HallusionBench. Our analysis shows that LoopLook progressively refines visual attention and adaptively allocates depth according to task difficulty. It also better preserves task-relevant visual information under reduced input resolution, while increasing time to first token (TTFT) by only 5.1-6.5%. By bringing recurrence from reasoning back into perception, LoopLook transforms visual perception from a one-shot glimpse into an adaptive process of recurrent refinement.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30824
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Robot Motion Transition with Human Motion Prior
2026-10-22 06:45:34Taehyun Byun, Taemoon Jeong, Yoonbyung Chai, Woojin Wie, Insu Park, Kyungjae Lee, Sungjoon ChoiAbstract
Humanoid motion-tracking policies can reproduce diverse behaviors, yet connecting independently acquired motions into a continuous sequence remains challenging. Interpolation connects boundary poses without considering whether their relative position, heading, and timing provide suitable conditions for a transition. A generative motion prior can produce richer motion, but poorly arranged boundaries may cause it to generate excessive locomotion, turning, or another unintended action. We present Spatio-Temporal Alignment with a Motion Prior (STAMP), a framework for connecting independently acquired humanoid motions through a Robot-to-Human-to-Robot process. STAMP uses human motion space to draw on rich motion priors and reuse transition knowledge across robot embodiments. Its key component is a learned alignment model that determines the boundary conditions for motion inbetweening. Given the two motions retargeted to a human rig, the alignment model ranks candidate positions, headings, and transition durations for the following motion. A human motion prior generates the transition under the selected alignment. The completed sequence is retargeted to the robot and used as a reference to train a motion-tracking policy. We evaluate the tracking success of the generated transitions on Unitree~G1 and~ROBOTIS K1. Physical robot demonstrations further show that STAMP connects independently acquired motions into long-horizon sequences. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30817
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DRILL: Training World Models to Improve Policies, Not Predict Pixels
2026-10-22 06:40:31Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Lei Wei, Guangyuan Dong, Sihan Liu, Yingjie He, Siheng Wang, Shuaibo Li, Rongchao Zhang, Zhen Tian, Richeng Xuan, Zhichao HuAbstract
World models are increasingly used to reduce environment interaction when post-training vision-language-action (VLA) policies with reinforcement learning. Yet they are typically trained to predict pixels one step ahead, even though their role here is not merely to render visually faithful videos but to produce learning signals from imagined rollouts that improve the policy. We show that this mismatch is substantial: lower pixel MSE can produce worse policy gradients, and a world model trained for policy utility can yield better downstream policies despite 17% higher pixel MSE on the next frame. We propose the Downstream-Return Imagination Learning Loop (DRILL), a bilevel framework that updates the world model to maximize the policy's return after an inner GRPO update on imagined rollouts. DRILL has two instantiations. DRILL-VWI is a closed-form surrogate, requiring no additional simulator rollouts, that reweights prediction errors by policy visitation, the group-relative GRPO advantage, and model confidence. DRILL-IMG is a full meta-gradient method that differentiates through the inner update using truncated Hessian-vector products. We show that DRILL-VWI recovers the local one-step component of the DRILL-IMG meta-gradient under score-compatibility and small-residual assumptions. Across five manipulation simulators and two VLA backbones, DRILL-IMG raises mean success rate by 13.1 points over WMPO and 7.9 points over RLVR-World, and complements RLVR pretraining rather than competing with it. More broadly, we believe video world models for VLA reinforcement learning can be productively trained by the policy gradients they produce, not only by pixel-level prediction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30814
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Adaptive Aerial Loco-Manipulation Policy Learning via LLM-Assisted Proactive Task Generation
2026-10-22 06:36:39Jingyu Ru, Xiangyuan Xie, Lixuan Jin, Jian An, Xingming Zhang, Binghao Li, Siyu Wang, Xiang Zhou, Lei Yuan, Hongli Xu, Yang YuAbstract
Loco-manipulation extends the workspace of conventional manipulation by combining mobility with physical interaction, while aerial loco-manipulation further expands this capability into three-dimensional space, enabling robots to reach environments inaccessible to ground-based systems. Moving to an aerial platform, however, gives rise to a demanding control problem, since the vehicle must track trajectories accurately in three dimensions while the motion of the arm and its interaction with the environment continuously shift the center of mass, alter the inertia, and impose force and moment disturbances on the body. Conventional controllers address these effects through explicit models and estimation, whereas learning-based controllers infer dynamics from experience, yet control rewards provide no direct target for the response information retained from history, and fixed task sampling can leave persistent tracking difficulties insufficiently explored. We present ALMA, an aerial loco-manipulation framework for adaptive flight control under external arm commands. ALMA employs a contextual flight policy that adapts from recent measurements and actions, using action-conditioned prediction of future measurement representations to train its context to retain response information relevant to flight control. To expand the experience available for this adaptation, an evolutionary process uses a large language model (LLM) to analyze observed control difficulties and propose new structures of arm motion for subsequent training. In simulation, ALMA reduces position root-mean-square error (RMSE) by up to 24.7% relative to the strongest baseline, while the same policy transfers zero-shot to the aerial manipulator and reduces hover position RMSE by 79.6% during periodic arm motion relative to the real-world baseline.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30810
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WovenAnchor Matcher: Specialized Intra- and Inter-Image Context Modeling for Feature Matching
2026-10-22 06:24:39Zhiyang Li, Ruijiang Jin, Thibaut Klenke, Yusuke Sekikawa, Nakamasa InoueAbstract
Semi-dense local feature matching commonly aggregates contextual information before coarse-to-fine correspondence estimation. However, intra-image and inter-image aggregation serve different roles: the former should propagate spatial evidence within each image while retaining structured two-dimensional dependencies, whereas the latter should gather information from plausible corresponding regions while limiting noise from unrelated locations. We propose WovenAnchor Matcher (WAM), a semi-dense matching framework based on role-specialized context aggregation. WAM introduces two complementary operators. WovenMamba performs intra-image aggregation through horizontal-then-vertical state-space propagation, allowing vertical updates to operate on horizontally contextualized features and thereby encouraging a structured two-dimensional receptive-field bias. AnchorCrossAttention performs inter-image aggregation by using cross-attention to gather context from plausible corresponding regions across the image pair. It performs this exchange over local representative anchors that aggregate feature evidence within each window. On MegaDepth, WAM achieves 66.1 pose AUC@5$^\circ$, improving on the JamMa baseline by 2.0 AUC points under the same evaluation setup. Ablations show that removing or replacing either specialized component reduces accuracy, providing evidence that intra-image propagation and inter-image retrieval benefit from role-specific aggregation designs. Code and pretrained weights are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30799
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Evaluation of Front-End Feature Matching for Lunar Visual SLAM
2026-10-22 05:52:13Guillem Casadesus Vila, Grace GaoAbstract
Lunar rovers will primarily rely on cameras for localization until navigation satellite services are deployed, and will continue to need them afterwards for relative navigation, hazard detection, and surface operations. Visual odometry (VO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) mostly estimate motion by matching features between frames. However, feature matchers are developed on urban, indoor and driving scenes, planetary studies compare them on orbital registration or within complete SLAM systems, and real lunar imagery with reference poses is scarce, so matching between rover frames on low-texture, harshly lit terrain, and its effect on VO, has not been compared. We benchmark eleven classical and learned detector-matcher combinations on nine synthetic, lunar-testbed, and terrestrial-analogue datasets, and a feature tracker, scoring pairwise pose accuracy against baseline and the trajectory error of the resulting VO. Under a common rotation-only metric, the SuperPoint pairings outperform SIFT with ratio-tested FLANN matching on both lunar testbeds and one analogue site, with smaller or unresolved differences on synthetic data. When rotation and translation direction are scored jointly, this SIFT pairing exceeds both SuperPoint pairings on four synthetic datasets, so synthetic results alone do not establish relative performance on real rover imagery. In stereo VO, the SuperPoint pairings are not consistently more accurate than SIFT, but only they keep tracking on all eight sequential datasets. Pairings with classical detectors depend on lighting while SuperPoint changes little: a low spotlight makes them more accurate than diffuse light on the same testbed views, consistent with more contrast and detected keypoints. SuperPoint with LightGlue is the fastest learned combination (16 ms per frame), and DINOv2 retrieval proposals still need geometric verification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30774
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How Firm Are AI Models' Ethical Boundaries? A Pay-Stub Editing Test of 15 Models
2026-10-22 05:19:49Simiao Ren, Xingyu Shen, Tommy Duong, Tsang Ng, Ankit RajAbstract
Can a small change in wording move an AI model from refusing a sensitive request to acting on it? We test 15 models on the same request to increase the income shown on a pay stub. Across 445 observable trials, models issue editing calls in 14.1% of cases when a loan purpose is stated, 33.1% when the purpose is omitted, and 66.2% when the change is described as fixing a printing error. Astra refuses all ten loan-purpose requests but issues calls in all ten purpose-omitted trials. Fable, Opus, and Muse Spark issue none across all three wordings; Sonnet issues some under the latter two. Response excerpts illustrate different ways of refusing, redirecting, or justifying an edit. The file is a marked test document and all tools are simulated. These results probe how boundaries behave in one setting; they do not prove an overall ethics ranking or that a harmful real-world edit succeeded.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30751
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UniGuard: Multi-View Guardrail Learning for Cross-Interface Safety Generalization
2026-10-22 05:14:30Viet-Thanh Pham, Thuy-Trang Vu, Junae Kim, Rollin Omari, Dinh Phung, Gholamreza Haffari, Lizhen QuAbstract
Guardrail models are increasingly used as safety layers for LLMs and agentic systems, but most are trained on fixed prompt or response interfaces and become unreliable when the same safety case appears as a conversation, agent trajectory, multi-agent trace, or policy-conditioned input. We propose UniGuard, a training framework that learns interface-invariant safety representations from multiple semantically aligned views of the same safety case. We also construct the UniGuard-FT dataset by transforming 1,000 public safety cases into prompt, response, multi-turn conversation, agent-trace, and multi-agent-trace views, and train UniGuard-0.6B with classification, supervised contrastive learning, and asymmetric confidence calibration losses. Across unseen-interface benchmarks ATBench, PolicyGuardBench, and DynaBench, UniGuard-0.6B improves over its pretrained guardrail by 45.12 F1 points on average and reduces expected calibration error by 35.41 points, while remaining competitive with much larger guardrails such as Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and GPT-5.2 - despite being a 0.6B model and trained only with synthetic data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30742
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Where Did the Light Come From? Diagnosing Cast-Shadow Reasoning in VLMs and Borrowing the Missing Shadow Prior from Image Generation Models
2026-10-22 05:11:07Ryugo Morita, Shunsuke Kitada, Stanislav Frolov, Brian Bernhard Moser, Ko Watanabe, Riku Takahashi, Jinjia Zhou, Andreas DengelAbstract
Shadows are observable consequences of latent physical causes, arising from the interaction between illumination, object geometry, and scene structure. A model that understands shadows should be able not only to read a shadow's direction, but also to infer where a shadow should fall when it is absent, and to judge whether a shadow is physically consistent with the scene. We introduce ShadowBench, built from real photographs, which poses these three questions to vision-language models (VLMs). From each scene, we build a correct-shadow, a shadow-removed, and a human-annotated wrong-direction state. Evaluating 19 open VLMs (2B to 78B) and frontier proprietary models, we find that VLMs read a visible shadow's direction well above chance and improve with scale, yet infer the absent direction only weakly and fall to chance at judging physical consistency even under a bias-free two-alternative test that removes the yes-bias of single-image naturalness questions. Only Gemini-3.1-pro exceeds chance on validity, and even then only modestly and far below humans. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) does not help. The missing ingredient is not reasoning but knowledge that image generation models (IGMs) already hold. Routing a VLM through an IGM lifts its inference well above its direct attempt and helps it flag the wrong-direction shadows it otherwise accepts. Cast-shadow direction is a single facet of illumination understanding, but the sharp gap it reveals between VLMs and IGMs suggests image-generation or reconstruction objectives as a route toward illumination-aware VLMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30740
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Causal Analysis of Failures of Cyber-Physical Systems with Continuous Inputs
2026-10-22 05:08:54Tom Yaacov, David A. Kelly, Khen Elimelech, Hana ChocklerAbstract
Modern autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), such as self-driving cars, operate in increasingly complex environments while expected to maintain high reliability. The black-box nature of many of these systems makes it impossible to fully verify their behavior prior to deployment. When a failure occurs, it is important to analyze it to guide improvements to system robustness. A recent work introduced the novel concept of leveraging the framework of actual causality for CPS failure explanation. However, that work considered only a discrete, binary causal model that cannot capture continuous changes in system inputs. In this paper, we address these limitations by extending the actual causality framework with the notion of distance to account for the continuous characteristics of the system. Specifically, we introduce the novel concepts of distance-weighted actual cause and distance-weighted degree of responsibility, enabling causal influence to account for the magnitude of changes required to avoid a failure, rather than only its cardinality. While motivated by the continuous nature of CPSs, this constitutes a general extension of the theory of actual causality and enables more fine-grained analysis of continuous inputs in any causal model. Building on these notions, we present an efficient, practical, system-agnostic explanation-derivation algorithm that uses distance-weighted responsibility to guide the explanation search. We experimentally evaluate our approach across a number of environments from two autonomous-driving simulators with black-box neural controllers. The results show that the proposed extension provides more effective guidance than the current discrete approach.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30737
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When One Step Is Enough: An Empirical Study of Euler Integration in Flow-Matching Policies
2026-10-22 05:05:29Shivakanth Sujit, Luca Nunziante, Rousslan Fernand Julien Dossa, Kai ArulkumaranAbstract
Flow matching is now the dominant approach for vision-language action (VLA) robot policies, thanks to its expressiveness and simple training objective. However, inference for standard flow matching requires iteratively solving an ODE, limiting the control frequency at deployment. While several works have proposed novel methods to allow for single-shot action generation, we ask whether such additional objectives are actually necessary. We find that across six flow matching VLAs, one-step action generation largely matches multi-step sampling at scale: multi-step integration confers little to no consistent advantage at inference. We empirically find that this holds as long as models are sufficiently trained and have enough capacity. Practically, the implication is that for large VLAs, the single-step policy comes essentially for free from the multi-step model, enabling low-latency deployment without retraining, distillation, or auxiliary objectives.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30735
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