Quantitative
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Quantifying Mechanical Intelligence in Legged Robots with Information Theory
Abstract
Mechanical intelligence, loosely defined as the reduction in control burden afforded by a robot's physical form, has become a prominent concept in robotics, with instantiations in bioinspired robotics, soft robotics, robotic swarms, and many other areas. However, rigorous theoretical understanding and quantitative measures of mechanical intelligence have lagged behind the engineering systems that the community has developed. In this work, using modern legged robots as a benchmark and exemplar, we propose several information-theoretic metrics for quantifying mechanical intelligence. By viewing body dynamics as both a computational process and a communication channel, we show that several prior insights in legged-robot engineering can be described using information theory, and we quantify how bits are processed by mechanical modes and across robot coordinates. Specifically, we examine the trade-off between explicitly incorporating compliance through series-elastic actuation and using so-called proprioceptive, low-gear-ratio transmissions, and we explore how these mechanisms interact with control policies during locomotion. We develop these results on systems of increasing complexity: a simplified linear model of a robot-leg transmission, a nonlinear single-leg simulation, and simulated quadruped robots controlled by a learned policy while navigating challenging terrain. These results lay the groundwork for broader study of robot mechanisms and their role in embodied computation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19588
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Compression Hurts, Pooling Helps: Information Loss in Rayleigh-Scale Estimation from B-Mode Ultrasound
Abstract
Clinical B-mode images are widely available as potential data sources for quantitative ultrasound (QUS) analysis for tissue characterization. However, standard clinical ultrasound devices apply unknown log-compression to RF envelope data before display and storage. Previous work has demonstrated estimation of the underlying RF envelope statistics in the presence of an unknown compression law. Using Fisher information analysis, we show that finite-offset log compression causes severe information loss when estimating the Rayleigh scale $\sigma$, which controls diffuse speckle. For a single image window, unknown compression raises the minimum achievable variance for unbiased estimation of $\sigma$ by a compression-independent factor of approximately $\FisherMinInflation$. When $M$ equal-sized windows share the same unknown compression settings, the excess variance decays as $1/M$; even in the most favorable regime, reducing the variance inflation factor below $1.1$ requires $\FisherBestCaseWindows$ windows. Our analysis treats the contrast parameter $a$ as unknown and the boundary offset $b$ as known; estimating $b$ experimentally shows even larger variance. We validate this theory using synthetic estimation experiments and demonstrate RF-scale recovery on real RF-envelope windows from the OASBUD dataset. Together, these results clarify the limitations of using routine B-mode images for QUS.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19525
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Kinematics-Grounded Agentic AI for Robotic Additive Manufacturing Process Planning
2026-09-16 19:22:58Jingzhan Ge, Ruimin Chen, Azadeh Haghighi, Jiong Tang, Farhad ImaniAbstract
Robotic additive manufacturing (AM) extends material-extrusion printing beyond gantry kinematics but makes process planning robot-dependent. A slicer-generated plan that appears favorable in part coordinates can become infeasible or robotically unfavorable on a manipulator because slicer-process decisions and part orientation determine the generated path, while part orientation and workspace placement affect its kinematic realization. Existing AM tools, large language model (LLM)-based decision-support methods, and digital-shadow systems do not provide integrated pre-execution evaluation of these coupled decisions. This paper presents agentic robotic additive manufacturing (A-RAM), an agent-specialist-tool framework that converts user intent and a part file into traceable, execution-ready plans. The LLM interprets manufacturing objectives and constraints, identifies prescribed and searchable planning variables, and encodes this reasoning in a schema-constrained request; a deterministic Planning Agent instantiates the corresponding search workflow, while domain tools compute quantitative evidence for slicing, placement, inverse kinematics, trajectory timing, Joint-6 jerk, and extrusion. The framework is evaluated on a six-axis robotic-arm AM cell through three case studies covering expert-specified planning, goal-only planning, objective-dependent infill screening, and geometry-dependent orientation-placement selection. Across the evaluated candidate sets, selected plans achieve up to 53.5% lower maximum Joint-6 jerk and 48.3% lower mean absolute Joint-6 jerk than the least favorable valid candidates, while objective-specific infill screening yields motion-plan completion times up to 40.1% shorter and extrusion paths up to 12.7% shorter than the corresponding least favorable screened patterns.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19347
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Examining the Difference in Human Behavior Between Virtual and Real-World Human-Robot Teaming
2026-09-16 16:38:57Sean Dallas, Absalat Getachew, Motaz AbuHijleh, Andrea Macklem-Zabel, Douglas Zytko, Mark Brudnak, Wing-Yue Geoffrey LouieAbstract
Prototyping and evaluating human-robot teaming (HRT) scenarios in the real-world is costly. Virtual simulation of HRT scenarios has been adopted as an alternative to conducting user studies in the real-world to investigate user perceptions, behaviors, and performance during human-robot interactions. The consistency of human behavior between the real and virtual-worlds is integral to the validity of utilizing such virtual experimentation. This paper presents a user study examining the difference in human behavior between an HRT scenario conducted in a virtual vs real environment. We employed mixed-methods to examine team performance and human factors during the HRT. Our quantitative results showed a significant difference in workload between the two modalities. Our qualitative analysis expanded on the quantitative results and found differences in participants' strategy, their mental model of robots, and the type of trust they had for robots between modalities.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18900
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Toward Markerless Video-based Tremor Analysis: Objective Quantification of Pathological Tremor in Mouse Preclinical Models
2026-09-16 14:44:11Yota Koshimoto, Akihiro Tsukahara, Yasuhiro Moriwaki, Mariko IsogawaAbstract
Tremor is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary, rhythmic oscillations of body parts and is a hallmark of several neurological conditions, including Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. Elucidating its underlying mechanisms relies heavily on mouse models, which offer genetic manipulability and translational relevance to human neural circuitry. Accordingly, these models are indispensable for studying tremor pathophysiology. So far, electromyography and accelerometers have been used as methods to quantitatively observe tremors in mice. However, these methods have several drawbacks, such as high costs and complex setups. In particular, the invasive surgical implantation of devices causes significant stress to the animals. Although RGB-based methods offer non-invasive and cost-effective alternatives, they often lack the sensitivity required to detect subtle tremors. Therefore, this paper addresses these challenges by achieving mouse tremor severity estimation using conventional RGB cameras only. To address the challenging task of isolating tremor-related vibrations while the mouse itself is also in motion, our pipeline incorporates segmentation-based pre-processing to extract the mouse region and a Tremor Score Estimation Module that captures subtle tremors with high sensitivity. In the experiments, we assessed tremors in unrestrained mice using a non-invasive method with two standard cameras. The results demonstrated a strong correlation with accelerometer measurements and confirmed that the method accurately captured the intensity-dependent characteristics of tremors. The project page is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18753
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From Gameplay to Policy: Towards Scalable Robot Data Collection via Gamified Robot-Free Interaction
2026-09-16 13:33:06Zheng Li, Liang Zhu, Junzhe Wang, Huayuan Chen, Ziyun Liu, Jiahang Cao, Xinyu Sheng, Pei Qu, Yufei Jia, Ximeng Zhang, Jiarui Xie, Zizhao Yuan, Haoang Li, Yi Cai, Jinni Zhou, Jun MaAbstract
Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse interaction data, yet collecting real-world demonstrations remains costly and difficult to scale. Existing approaches to data collection are either dependent on specific robot hardware that limits crowdsourcing and transferability, or suffer from incomplete annotation and limited behavioral diversity. Inspired by how games sustain long-term human engagement, we explore an alternative paradigm that turns data collection into an engaging gameplay experience and transfers the resulting human manipulation experience to real robots. We present Project Kitchen, a VR-based gamified egocentric data collection platform that elicits diverse, goal-directed manipulation while remaining independent of specific robot embodiments and hardware, making it applicable to broader and potentially large-scale deployment. To bridge the game-to-real gap, we further introduce Game2Policy, which extracts embodiment-invariant affordance cues, including contact points and sub-goal states, from gameplay trajectories. An affordance model is pre-trained on game-collected data and then jointly fine-tuned with downstream policies using only a handful of real-robot demonstrations. Experiments show that Game2Policy improves average success rates by 10.0 points in simulation and 18.3 points on real robots in the few-shot setting. User studies and quantitative analyses further show that Project Kitchen promotes diverse manipulation behaviors and provides an engaging data collection experience. These results demonstrate the potential of gamified virtual environments as a scalable source of manipulation knowledge. The platform and code will be released upon acceptance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18650
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DiT-Garment: Garment Dynamics with Diffusion Transformers
2026-09-16 11:44:03Antoine Dumoulin, Laurence Boissieux, Joao Regateiro, Pierre Hellier, Stefanie WuhrerAbstract
We present DiT-Garment to model dynamic 3D clothing over human body models in arbitrary motion. Unlike existing methods, DiT-Garment can animate garments with unseen designs and physical materials, while allowing for direct inference of deformations for any target pose. To achieve this, we leverage a 2D diffusion transformer architecture to learn 3D deformations in a 2D UV-space. As the result is non-deterministic, our generative model learns the distribution of possible outcomes. The template garment is represented as a 3D triangle mesh spatially aligned with a 3D human body model in a standardized pose. To work with different garment designs without the need of a common template or complex graph convolution operations, the diffusion transformer is conditioned on a 3D position map of the template, represented in UV-space, which allows to implicitly learn a deformation of the 3D space around the body in standard pose. Further conditioning on body motion and physical parameters allows to physically ground the model. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate DiT-Garment on both synthetic and real data. While only trained on synthetic simulations of automatically generated cloth designs, our method generalizes to captured and artist-made garment designs. Code and data are available for research purposes at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18510
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Can VLMs Reliably Assess Sidewalk Accessibility Attributes from Pedestrian-Level Imagery?
2026-09-15 22:15:04Seung Jae Lieu, Diego Morra, Chiara Cadoni, Wonseop Song, Martina Mazzarello, Carlo RattiAbstract
An important component of urban accessibility, particularly for wheelchair users and people with reduced mobility, is sidewalk compliance with measurable requirements. We test whether effective width, longitudinal slope, cross slope, and pavement condition can be assessed reliably from pedestrian-level imagery using vision-language models (VLMs). We present the first application of sampling-based conformal prediction (CP) for VLM-based accessibility assessment. We evaluate four VLMs on 514 sidewalk images from Seoul, South Korea, with field-measured ground truth. Conformal calibration attains the nominal 90% coverage for all models and attributes, but the calibrated regions differ in informativeness. Effective width yields the most informative estimates, with a mean interval half-width of about 1.0 m for the best model. Since every model overestimates width, asymmetric calibration shortens the intervals by up to 33% at unchanged coverage. Longitudinal slope is marginally informative, cross-slope intervals are too wide to resolve regulatory thresholds, and pavement-condition sets degenerate to all five grades (A-E) for three of the four models. Uncalibrated intervals from raw sampling dispersion cover only 17-47% of field-measured values at a nominal 90% level. Among the images with the most self-consistent responses, these intervals miss the field-measured value in up to 96% of cases. Response self-consistency is therefore not evidence of accuracy, and sampling dispersion cannot be interpreted as uncertainty until it has been calibrated against field-measured ground truth. No quantitative attribute reaches the precision required for general compliance assessment, but CP identifies from calibration data alone which attributes can support screening of segments far from the thresholds. We release the annotated pedestrian-level images and their corresponding field-measured attribute values.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17882
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Is Luke the Author of a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles?
Abstract
According to Christian tradition, Luke is credited with authoring a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, even if his name does not appear in either book, both originally written in Koine Greek. Several biblical scholars assume that both texts were written by a common author, while others deduce the presence of two authors. Different studies have been found to support either finding, some based on qualitative evaluation, while a few others consider the occurrence frequency differences between the two books. To propose an enhanced quantitative analysis, this study is grounded on two recent authorship attribution models. The Burrows' Delta, applied with eleven different feature sizes, demonstrates common authorship. An author verification model confirms this finding. The following experiments consider several stylistic representations, feature sizes, and distance functions to confirm that Luke is the true author of both books.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17762
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LiLi: Lie Theory Based 3D LiDAR Scan Alignment Degeneracy Detection
2026-09-15 13:10:08Vsevolod Hulchuk, Jan Bayer, Jan FaiglAbstract
In this paper, we study 3D LiDAR scan alignment in challenging scenarios with degeneracies, such as straight corridors or flat fields, where the alignment solution is not unique and compromises localization and mapping accuracy. Existing degeneracy detection methods that neglect the potential for reassociating data points are prone to being sensitive to noise and complex degeneracies. Therefore, we propose LiLi - a novel method that leverages Lie theory to identify the full set of degenerate transformations within the SE(3) Lie group of rigid transformations. The method employs perturbations of the optimized solution and compares the resulting optimized poses to ensure robust detection of degeneracies. By leveraging generators from the Lie algebra se(3), the method provides a systematic approach to describing the set of degenerate transformations. Quantitative evaluations on synthetic data show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art Hessian-based method, reducing alignment error by 50%, with more significant improvements for datasets featuring noise. In the real-world degenerate datasets, the proposed method integrated into LiDAR-based odometry yields superior localization performance compared to the reference solution based on the Hessian-based degeneracy detector on a 260 m long trajectory, and succeeds on a 430 m long round-trip tunnel trajectory where the reference fails.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17145
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BioPhys-Bridge: A Benchmark for Interdisciplinary Scientific Reasoning in Physics-Grounded Biological Research
2026-09-15 12:53:16Qingyang XuAbstract
Language models face unique challenges in analyzing interdisciplinary scientific research literature. In biophysics research, faithful answers require grounding observed data in source evidence, interpreting it through a quantitative physics model, and linking it to a biological mechanism. To address this challenge, we introduce BioPhys-Bridge, a novel benchmark dataset for evidence-grounded scientific reasoning over biophysical literature. Each case contains evidence blocks, stable evidence IDs, quantitative values, units, equations, assumptions, mechanisms, and next decisions as grounding targets for question answering (QA) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The initial release contains 500 cases, 1,517 agent-facing tasks, and covers six biological domains and nine physical model families, including three sparse families reserved for future expansion. We enforce strict quality gates for all cases in schema, evidence-integrity, quantitative-grounding, source-license, duplicate, unit-normalization, with domain expert review and annotation for 81 cases. Preliminary evaluations show that DeepSeek-V4-Flash obtain the highest evidence-ID $F_1$ score (0.360), followed by Qwen3.7-Max (0.316) and GPT-4o-mini (0.294). BioPhys-Bridge is an interdisciplinary benchmark for evaluating attribution, faithfulness, hallucination reduction, and biological experiment design with complex, multi-step scientific reasoning. Future works will increase the size and complexity of the dataset and perform comprehensive evaluations. Code and data are available in the GitHub repository and on Hugging Face.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19180
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PaperDoctor: Evidence-Grounded and Actionable Feedback for Scientific Papers in Progress
2026-09-15 11:08:11Kevin Qinghong Lin, Siyuan Hu, Pan Lu, Yu Chen, Yanzhe Chen, Owen Queen, Yupeng Chen, Jialin Yu, Junchi Yu, Zifeng Ding, Yuanfeng Ji, Sheng Liu, Jindong Gu, Linjie Li, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, James ZouAbstract
Autoresearch agents are reshaping the research ecosystem, but they can also let flawed claims enter the literature at scale. Human advisors catch such issues in drafts through careful, traceable feedback, yet advisor-style assessment requires extensive manual effort and does not scale. To shift automated paper assessment from a judge to a diagnostician, we introduce PaperDoctor, an agent framework for pre-submission feedback with three key innovations. First, a holistic hierarchical framework evaluates writing, layout, references, code, theory, prior work, and experiments through three layers: L1 surface screening, L2 typed verifiers that route each claim to the appropriate evidence, and L3 reproducers that rerun experiments by priority. Second, each finding contains an observation, a pointer to specific evidence such as a sentence, equation, or code line, and a revision suggestion, making critiques auditable and actionable. Third, PaperDoctor selectively rebuilds and reruns experiments based on claim importance and compute budget, surfacing reproducibility gaps and quantitative limitations that are invisible from the manuscript alone. We evaluate PaperDoctor on 30 in-progress papers, yielding 70.6% agreement and all positive holistic scores, and on 40 manuscripts across machine learning, natural science, and social science, covering human- and AI-authored papers with code. Overall, PaperDoctor produces more auditable feedback than human and other agentic reviewers, pairs critiques with concrete suggestions by design, and complements dimensions often overlooked by human reviewers. We also develop an interactive interface that lets authors browse findings grounded in their paper. PaperDoctor reframes automated paper assessment as diagnosis rather than verdict, taking a concrete step toward AI advisors for more rigorous AI-assisted scientific discovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16995
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Evaluating Mesh Reconstruction Methods for Crop Phenotyping
2026-09-15 10:02:29Karanvir Singh, Theo Morales, Binh-Son Hua, Mukesh SainiAbstract
Phenotyping an agricultural crop is crucial for studying its entire life cycle, as it provides vital insights to improve yield and, ultimately, food production. Doing the same for crops grown on remote sites is a challenge for the specialists who cannot be available on-site. 3D reconstruction techniques offer a promising solution to this problem by enabling crop digitization, allowing specialists to access the resulting 3D crop models from anywhere at any time. In this work, we evaluate recent 3D reconstruction pipelines for crop phenotyping. We focus on 7 mesh reconstruction pipelines and measure the fidelity and consistency of their outputs qualitatively and quantitatively. Our results suggest that the meshes produced by the GGGS, PGSR, and 2DGS are preferable to the other pipelines, owing to their quantitative metrics and visually pleasing outputs. The GGGS pipeline is better than the second-best pipeline (2DGS) by about 27\% on the radar chart with 5 dimensions, namely, User ratings, Chamfer distance, LPIPS, PSNR, and SSIM.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16926
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Disrupted Companionship: A Risk Assessment Framework and Cross-Platform Quantitative Analysis of Psychosocial Responses to AI Companion Disruptions
2026-09-15 09:37:29Chau Do, Yunhao Yuan, Koustuv Saha, Renwen Zhang, Talayeh AledavoodAbstract
AI companions can provide meaningful relationships, yet these relationships remain vulnerable to platform-initiated changes. We study AI companion disruptions: platform changes that alter or terminate users' ongoing companionship with an AI. We compile 30 disruption events across major platforms, develop a taxonomy of six disruption types, identify three broad reasons for disruption, and propose a risk-assessment framework comprising four dimensions: relational discontinuity, population vulnerability, communication deficit, and transition-support deficit. Using longitudinal Reddit data, we estimate community-level psychosocial responses with a hierarchical Bayesian interrupted time-series model incorporating predictive controls. Across events, disruption onset was associated with immediate increases in anxiety, stress, suicidal expression, and grief activation, with relational discontinuity and transition-support deficit being associated with more adverse immediate responses across several outcomes. Our findings provide a cross-platform characterization of AI companion disruptions, quantitative evidence of their psychosocial impacts, and a prospective framework for assessing their potential risks before implementation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16907
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The Robot Data Factory
2026-09-15 06:30:11Sami Haddadin, Ivan Laptev, Ian Reid, Dezhen Song, Cesare Stefanini, Abdalla Swikir, Xingxing Zuo, Lyes Saad Saoud, Mahmoud Hamandi, Mohamed Heshmat, Oualid Doukhi, Abdeldjallil Naceri, Attique Bashar, Abdelrahim Mohamed, Teodor Tomic, Yue Peng, Samuel Schneider, Cheng-Chung Lee, Janine Guo, Qinghao Zhang, Kim JefferyAbstract
Physical AI requires more than increasingly large robot datasets: intelligent robots acquire knowledge through continuous interaction with the physical world. We argue that the defining scientific resource of Physical AI is therefore not raw robot data alone, but robot experience - physically grounded interaction whose observations, actions, embodiment, context, and outcomes preserve the perception-action-consequence loop. We introduce the Robot Data Factory (RDF), a mission-driven infrastructure and methodology for continuously generating, validating, benchmarking, and reusing such experience. RDF organizes heterogeneous robots and environment-specific training grounds through reproducible missions, skill curricula, synchronized multimodal sensing, external ground truth, an agentic robot network, data pipelines, and living benchmarks. Rather than treating datasets as static end products, RDF implements a closed Deploy-Measure-Learn-Repeat cycle in which validated physical experience supports world models, vision-language-action models, embodied policies, digital twins, and subsequent robot deployment. We further formalize robot experience and its quality, introduce a mission-task-skill-episode-dataset-benchmark-capability hierarchy, and derive quantitative scaling laws and an algorithmic synthesis procedure connecting robot fleet size, sensor rates, storage, learning representations, tokenization, training compute, inference, and latency to Embodied-AI cluster requirements. The framework is instantiated in three complementary physical training grounds for domestic, environmental, and energy applications. RDF thus reframes robot data generation as a continuous scientific production process and provides a pathway toward reproducible, scalable, and eventually federated infrastructure for Physical AI.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16705
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Lesion-centered 3D mapping of colonoscopy procedures: validation of a hierarchical ensemble pipeline on public benchmark videos
2026-09-15 05:54:24Hyunjun Kim, Hyeonwoo Na, Jaewoo LeeAbstract
Background and Objective: Colonoscopy recording practice preserves text reports and still photographs, while the spatial information already present in the recorded video - where the scope traveled, where a lesion was observed, and whether the same lesion was seen again - is discarded when the procedure ends. This study determines whether a lesion-centered spatial record can be assembled and validated without full-colon 3D reconstruction. Methods: A four-layer hierarchical pipeline was assembled - (1) a global topological map, (2) lesion-level spatio-temporal tracks, (3) on-demand local 3D reconstruction, and (4) persistent lesion identity across repeated observations - and ran end to end on four public videos (two C3VDv2 sequences with ground-truth depth and two full REAL-Colon procedures; 40,245 frames). All components are published, individually validated methods; the contribution is their lesion-centered assembly, linking rules, and evaluation. Results: Revisits, impossible under forward-only mapping by construction, were detected by entry-map Bayesian localization: 5,614 and 4,043 revisit events (56 and 68 distinct nodes) in the two full procedures. Lesion-identity merging at the adopted threshold 0.5 maintained ground-truth purity 1.0 while auto-merging 20 of 231 candidate pairs. The endoscopy-specific geometry engine outperformed a general-purpose foundation model on all metrics (overall absolute relative error (AbsRel) 0.2276 vs. 0.3523). Conclusions: The results are partial but establish a concrete near-term path: revisit detection, lesion identity, and local 3D each returned quantitative, reproducible output without waiting for complete geometric reconstruction; validating the record on clinical data is the next step.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16672
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AURA: Agentic Diagnosis and Refinement for Production Recommender Systems at Scale
2026-09-15 04:38:06SungGeun Kim, Abhinav Narain, Daniel NemirovskyAbstract
How and why does a recommender system fail the users it serves? Oftentimes, practitioners are left to improve their algorithms based on a combination of feedback from stakeholder teams, domain expertise, and insights from data analyses. Yet the nuances of how and where recommendations perform well or poorly for end users are difficult to discern from aggregate quantitative metrics. Whereas these metrics provide a high-level and incomplete picture, further granularity into the quality of recommendations and their patterns requires reasoning with domain understanding and objectivity, at scale. We contemplate this complex conundrum and describe a method and implementation that uses the latest AI agentic advances to provide actionable diagnoses and improvements for production recommender systems. We present AURA (Agentic Understanding and Refinement of recommender Algorithms), an end-to-end agentic system that performs qualitative evaluation at scale and can then generate improvements to our algorithms at the code level. Specialized agents read production engagement logs, from thousands of sessions to millions, and surface patterns and examples of how the recommender fails real users. The next step uses those diagnoses and context about the recommender's own code, data, and training pipeline to propose and implement refinements grounded in that codebase. We report the system design, initial tests on production data from two large consumer platforms at a major media-streaming company, safeguards, operational learnings, and early results toward a self-improving recommender system. Finally, the diagnostic gap AURA closes is not specific to streaming. The architecture is built to transfer: every domain-specific element enters through the configuration layer that already ported it between our two platforms. We map it concretely to e-commerce and online-retail recommendation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16625
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FRPSS: Feature Rearrangement in Pre-Shape Space for Single-Image Generation
2026-09-15 03:38:28Yuexing Han, Haoxuan Zhang, Bing WangAbstract
Generative models trained on a single image often struggle to balance global structural integrity and local diversity. Existing single-image generation methods commonly rely on random noise to drive the generation process and lack explicit global structural constraints, making the generated results prone to spatial structural misalignment when structural variations occur. To address the issue, Feature Rearrangement in Pre-Shape Space for Single-Image Generation (FRPSS) is proposed in this paper. The core of FRPSS is the Manifold Structural Rearrangement with Feature Augmentation on Geodesic Surface (MSR-FAGS) module. MSR-FAGS replaces the randomly initialized features of the low-scale generator with rearranged Pre-Shape features and uses the features to guide image generation at subsequent scales, thereby reducing the risk of structural misalignment. To support downstream tasks such as stylization, a Scale-adaptive Sliding-window Patch Extraction (SSPE) strategy is further designed, and a directional Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training supervision module with SSPE (CLIP-SSPE) is constructed. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that FRPSS achieves the best Single Image Fréchet Inception Distance (SIFID) scores on all three datasets while maintaining competitive Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS). Further qualitative experiments verify the effectiveness of FRPSS across multiple downstream tasks with the CLIP-SSPE module.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16594
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A Framework for Generating Valid Context-Specific Benchmarks through Expert Guidance
2026-09-15 03:36:35Kimberly Le Truong, Nari Johnson, Anna Kawakami, Hoda HeidariAbstract
This paper presents an end-to-end approach for generating context-specific large language model (LLM) benchmark datasets by combining expert input with synthetic data generation. Existing benchmark construction methods often trade off validity and scalability: datasets designed with domain experts can produce high-quality evaluations but are slow and costly to create, while synthetically generating data may scale efficiently but often results in unrealistic, redundant, or out-of-scope examples. To address this gap, we introduce a schema eliciting key information about the goals, scope, and context of an evaluation task, and use this information to guide synthetic data generation. We further define four criteria grounded in measurement validity for assessing dataset quality: coverage, diversity, content realism, and stylistic realism. Using these criteria, we show how expert-informed scaffolds can guide synthetic data generation toward more valid benchmarks. Through quantitative evaluations and a real-world case study with domain experts, we demonstrate that our approach improves benchmark data quality over existing methods while preserving validity. We additionally analyze how different types of schema information affect different dataset quality criteria, and provide practical guidance on which information to prioritize collecting under resource constraints.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16592
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Do LLMs Have Values? A Quantitative Analysis and Alignment Framework for Values in Large Language Models
2026-09-15 03:35:04Keqing Zhang, Jingyu Chen, Yufan Liu, Yongqiang Zhu, Nai Ding, Lai Jiang, Congyan Lang, Bing Li, Weiming HuAbstract
As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly handle complex subjective tasks, aligning their intentions and behaviors with human values has become a critical scientific challenge. However, current efforts are confounded by a striking behavioral paradox: they fluctuate unpredictably under minor wording changes ("swing"), yet stubbornly ignore explicit instructions to correct ingrained biases ("rigidity"). Resolving this duality is critical for reliable AI alignment. To systematically understand and safely steer these latent subjective preferences, our study is structured around three fundamental questions. First, do LLMs possess an intrinsic value system? By projecting responses from 106 LLMs (150,000 queries per model) and 95,000 human survey profiles into a shared sociological space, we empirically confirm that they do. However, they do not mirror human diversity, instead crystallizing into a highly concentrated, idealized value core. Second, how can these values be quantified? We propose the Prior-Environment-Cognition (PEC) framework. This model mathematically defines value expression as the joint outcome of inherent dispositions like parameter weights (Prior), external contexts such as user prompts (Environment), and internal reasoning processes like Chain-of-Thought (Cognition). Finally, how can LLMs' values be aligned toward a desired target? Using PEC diagnostics, we establish an adaptive "Alignment Prescription". Rather than blindly applying resource-intensive training, this method identifies the minimum effective intervention needed for each dimension, ranging from zero-cost prompts to targeted parameter updates. Extensive empirical validation confirms that our approach successfully verifies the presence of LLM values, accurately quantifies their shifts, and achieves more efficient and precise steering than conventional blind training, all without degrading general capabilities.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16589
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