Automated alpha factor discovery is critical for modern quantitative research. While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been integrated into quantitative workflows, existing agent-based approaches remain highly susceptible to severe backtest overfitting. To address this challenge, we propose EvoQuantLab, a training-free, dual-loop self-evolving framework for robust factor discovery. Instead of relying entirely on LLM generation, EvoQuantLab deploys an inner genetic-programming (GP) loop that dramatically improves token efficiency while evolving typed factor expressions under structural and diversity constraints. An outer diagnosis loop then systematically audits evidence across cycles to drive protocol-level improvements. Furthermore, our evaluation pipeline applies multi-metric validation to rigorously filter out spurious factors before deployment. Extensive out-of-sample experiments across both daily and hourly frequencies -- covering equities and cryptocurrency -- demonstrate the robustness of EvoQuantLab. Specifically, on daily CSI 500 and S&P 500 tasks, EvoQuantLab achieves leading annualized returns of 18.34% and 21.30%, consistently outperforming existing agent baselines. On high-turnover hourly cryptocurrency data, EvoQuantLab delivers a 37.91% annualized return while effectively avoiding execution collapse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17130
Real-time monocular human pose estimation is an important sensing component for human-centered intelligent systems. While recent camera-based methods have achieved impressive accuracy, fundamental challenges persist, particularly when visual observations are incomplete, such as during lower-body occlusion or short out-of-frame intervals. In these challenging but common scenarios, vision-only systems often struggle to reconstruct physically plausible lower-limb motion and reliable foot-ground contact. Due to the highly unobtrusive and wearable nature of smart insoles, this paper investigates whether simple plantar pressure and acceleration sensors can effectively resolve these visually induced limitations. To systematically investigate this, we first collect a synchronized multimodal dataset and then propose a part-decoupled temporal fusion framework. The proposed model fuses foot-sensing features into the lower-body branch to compensate for incomplete visual evidence, while a lightweight coordinator exchanges information between the upper- and lower-body temporal representations to maintain whole-body consistency. The framework is evaluated with three representative real-time visual backbones based on 2D keypoints, 3D landmarks, and SMPL-based human mesh recovery. We evaluate our framework on three representative real-time visual backbones. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that incorporating simple foot sensors consistently improves pose accuracy, motion smoothness, and gait-related measurements over vision-only baselines, with the most significant gains observed under occlusion and short visual-dropout conditions. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that unobtrusive foot sensing provides vital and complementary physical observability when camera observations are temporarily unavailable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19494
Training LLMs to act as capable agents requires learning from multi-turn interactions with environments. However, multi-turn interaction trajectories generated by heterogeneous agent runtimes are difficult to transform into structured, high-quality training data that training engines can readily consume. In this paper, we propose AgentWorld, a data factory that bridges heterogeneous agent runtimes and training engines through a Gateway Server and a Data Pool, reframing LLM agent training around a unified data lifecycle from interaction collection to training consumption. The Gateway Server captures multi-turn interactions through an LLM API proxy, while the Data Pool organizes them into standardized step records for curation and training. An interactive dashboard supports trajectory monitoring, step inspection, and data review. In our demonstration, users integrate ready-to-use white-box and black-box agents, trace and curate their interaction data across the pipeline, and extend the factory to new agents and datasets through lightweight configuration. Quantitative experiments across multiple datasets and RL methods demonstrate training support for different agent runtimes. AgentWorld provides a practical foundation for transforming heterogeneous multi-turn experience into training-ready data for LLM agents. Our code is available at this https URL and the demonstration video can be found at link this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09138
Mixed methods research offers established strategies for integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence, but less guidance for integrating two computational representations of the same qualitative corpus. This methodological study introduces Parallel-Then-Integrated (PTI), a four-step procedure for explicit and traceable integration. We present PTI using 1,203 interview paragraphs from 29 mothers in Nepal. The two representations were ontology-guided Patient Voice (PV) coding with PVminer and data-driven themes generated through non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). A theme-complete crosswalk documented convergence, divergence, and preprocessing-sensitive differences. Depression status, based on Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) scores, served as a secondary external anchor for exploratory association checks. PTI provides a structured approach for integrating computational representations of qualitative text within mixed methods research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19164
As the Arctic transitions toward a seasonally ice-free state, capturing the complex morphology of submerged sea ice is crucial for advancing models of ocean-ice-atmosphere heat exchange and monitoring under-ice habitats. Currently, sub-surface ice mapping is predominantly achieved through acoustic sensors such as multibeam sonar. While sonar provides robust large-scale geometry, it lacks spectral and high-resolution textural information required to record fine morphological features - a critical limitation in under-ice environments, where sparse visual features and degraded sensing conditions challenge the capture of detailed structural and optical surface properties. We present a benchmark for vision-based under-ice 3D reconstruction using real-world data from the MOSAiC expedition and synthetic data generated in an Unreal Engine-based underwater robotics simulator. The benchmark evaluates Structure-From-Motion (SfM) and monocular depth estimation, with quantitative comparison enabled through cross-modal registration to upward-looking multibeam sonar.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19097
Virtual footwear try-on (VFTON), a critical yet underexplored area in virtual try-on (VTON), aims to synthesize faithful try-on results given diverse footwear and model images while maintaining 3D consistency and texture authenticity. Unlike conventional garment-focused VTON methods, VFTON presents unique challenges due to (1) Data Scarcity, which arises from the difficulty of perfectly matching product shoes with models wearing the identical ones, (2) Viewpoint Misalignment, where the target foot pose and source shoe views are always misaligned, leading to incomplete texture information and detail distortion, and (3) Background-induced Color Distortion, where complex material of footwear interacts with environmental lighting, causing unintended color contamination. To address these challenges, we introduce MVShoes, a multi-view shoe try-on dataset consisting of 7305 well-annotated image triplets, covering diverse footwear categories and challenging try-on scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a dual-stream DiT architecture, ShoeFit, designed to mitigate viewpoint misalignment through Multi-View Conditioning with 3D Rotary Position Embedding, and alleviate background-induced distortion using the LayeredRefAttention which leverages background features to modulate footwear latents. The proposed framework effectively decouples shoe appearance from environmental interferences while preserving high-quality texture detail through decoupled denoising and conditioning branches. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method substantially improves rendering fidelity and robustness under challenging real-world product shoes, establishing a new benchmark in high-fidelity footwear try-on synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18325
Randomly initialised neural networks of width $m$ converge to Gaussian processes as $m \to \infty$, with two types of quantitative bounds characterising this convergence. Finite-sample bounds compare the network with its Gaussian limit at a fixed finite sample set, on an arbitrary domain, in the quadratic Wasserstein distance $\mathcal W_2$, achieving a convergence rate of $m^{-1/2}$ with explicit constants. However, these constants grow with the number of samples, so the bound becomes uninformative as the sample set is refined. Functional bounds remove that dependence by comparing the two as random functions, at the price of spherical input, metrics weaker than $\mathcal W_2$, or slower rates. In this paper, we therefore lift a finite-sample bound to a functional one. The lifting refines the sample set until it is dense in the domain, so the bound must first be made independent of the number of samples. We achieve this by measuring the error per sample, which makes the constant uniform. For a polynomial activation and any compact input set, this gives a rate of $m^{-1/2}$ in the supremum norm, with an explicit constant.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18166
The relationship between odor chemistry and perception remains incompletely understood. Many existing studies focus on the perception of single molecules, whereas natural odors contain tens to hundreds of components, adding extra layer of complexity to percept formation. Here, we explore the relationship between molecular composition and perceived similarity in natural odor objects. We study this using a database of more than 1,200 volatile-compound-in-food mixtures containing more than 8,000 molecular components, and use large language models (LLMs) as a scalable surrogate for deriving mixture-level perceptual descriptions. We find that language-derived representations provide useful supervision for predicting held-out mixture similarities from molecular composition. The prediction was consistently strongest when perceptual targets were derived from chemosensory prompts than from other sensory prompts. Further, during the mixture-level training, we learned low-rank molecular embeddings that enabled better prediction of held-out mixture similarities than component-overlap metrics, even for mixture pairs with no shared molecules. Although no single-molecule labels were used during training, the learned molecular geometry showed significant alignment with the independent human odor-descriptor space. Finally, we explored the use of external molecular features in our mixture-similarity prediction task. These features showed modest zero-shot alignment with mixture-level perceptual similarity. They improved prediction under limited supervision but offered little additional predictive benefit with the full training set. Together, these results show that language-derived descriptions can provide scalable supervision for predicting the perceptual organization of complex natural mixtures, contributing to a quantitative understanding of how molecular composition gives rise to odor perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17164
Standard hate speech detection datasets often emphasize explicit harmful language, but directed harm can also be expressed indirectly, without clearly hateful wording. Sarcasm is one such form of indirect expression, as it can convey harmful intent through mock praise, exaggeration, humor, or apparent politeness. In this paper, we introduce SarcasTraps, a targeted external test set for analyzing the effect of sarcasm on Turkish hate speech detection. SarcasTraps contains 479 entries annotated along two dimensions: hate speech and sarcasm. We train classifiers using BERTurk and XLM-RoBERTa on two existing Turkish hate speech datasets and evaluate them on SarcasTraps, using it strictly as an external test set. We also evaluate GPT-4.1 and Llama-3.3-70B in a zero-shot setting on SarcasTraps. Results show that sarcasm substantially affects hate speech detection. Fine-tuned encoder models lose recall on sarcastic hate, while zero-shot LLMs maintain higher recall but suffer substantial precision drops on sarcastic examples. These findings show that both fine-tuned hate speech detectors and zero-shot LLMs struggle when sarcasm is involved, and SarcasTraps provides quantitative evidence of this challenge through a targeted Turkish test set. Due to the presence of sensitive and hateful language, SarcasTraps will be shared upon request for academic research purposes. Warning: This paper has examples from the dataset which contains offensive and hateful content towards groups of people.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16957
Spatial transcriptomics jointly captures molecular state, tissue morphology, and spatial organization, yet spatial-domain methods are typically compared only at late training checkpoints, obscuring differences in convergence efficiency. We introduce MP-MNCA, a morphology-prior masked neighbor cross-attention framework that preserves the full 3,000 dimensional highly-variable-gene representation while selectively routing molecular information across spatial neighbors, with histological similarity incorporated as a continuous attention prior under a self-supervised masked neighbor-contrastive objective. Across 12 heterogeneous human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) sections, MP-MNCA is evaluated against established spatial-domain baselines using both convergence trajectories and epoch-wise spatial-domain visualizations. Our results show that MP-MNCA (i) reaches coherent spatial-domain structure in substantially fewer training epochs, as reflected quantitatively by convergence curves and qualitatively by progressive spatial grids, and (ii) maintains strong clustering quality, achieving a mean peak refined ARI of 0.546 versus 0.549 for the strongest baseline (STAIG), while attaining the highest mean refined NMI of 0.657 versus 0.640. Moreover, MP-MNCA outperforms STAIG on 7 of 12 sections in ARI and 11 of 12 in NMI, demonstrating faster convergence without sacrificing spatial-domain quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16212
Evaluation of text generated by large language models (LLMs) is increasingly delegated to LLMs acting as judges, yet what such a judge must be shown remains unresolved. We treat a judge whose reports are acted on as a regulator, in the sense of cybernetics, and ask what it must be shown, how much, in what form, and what its reports must get right. On seven public benchmarks we varied only what the judge was shown. Across three judges whose prices differ 10- to 17-fold, what the judge was shown mattered more than which judge it was. When a system revised its answers on feedback from a judge denied the material they had to respect, it ended below its starting point on instruction following and question answering. On instruction following the loss grew with each round, and it persisted when the judge saw the user's request but not the constraints and with a second judge family. On news summarisation, a correct reference summary beside the source undid most of the source's contribution, whereas on single-answer questions a reference helped. About a tenth of the source did almost all of its work, and a small entailment graph matched an LLM judge at finding errors in grounded text. We committed 83 testable clauses before running; of the 81 that ran, 32 met their bar and 50 went in the predicted direction, and most quantitative predictions from the theory failed. We report every shortfall and derive design rules tied to measured effects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15938
Industrial IoT sensors produce continuous, high-volume data streams that predictive maintenance needs to analyse in real time. Cloud-centric architectures send all raw telemetry to central servers, which costs latency, bandwidth and resilience. This paper presents a hybrid cloud-edge architecture for manufacturing predictive maintenance built on AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass v2, with local machine learning inference at the edge and selective cloud synchronization. We deploy two configurations on real AWS infrastructure and compare them: a cloud-only baseline (Configuration A) and the proposed hybrid edge architecture (Configuration B). We measure end-to-end inference latency, bandwidth consumption and inference accuracy. Configuration B cuts cloud-bound bandwidth by 86.8% (63.6 KB to 7.2 KB per 200-reading window) and decision latency by 256x (23.1 ms cloud round trip to 0.09 ms local inference). At the edge, with no cloud involvement, it keeps an anomaly-class F1 score of 0.84 and 91% recall. The evaluation also instruments system uptime and Stream Manager queuing under cloud disconnection; the quantitative disconnection experiment is left as planned work. Our review of the literature points to four gaps that this work addresses: the lack of empirically validated Greengrass v2 deployments for predictive maintenance, unquantified bandwidth savings from selective edge synchronization, unmeasured resilience under cloud disconnection, and the open MLOps feedback loop at the edge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14815
LLM-powered data analytics aims to translate natural language instructions into executable analytical programs over underlying data. However, existing approaches, whether treating LLMs as intent-to-code translators or as standalone analytical engines, often fail to reliably align domain semantics with complex schemas and heterogeneous metadata, resulting in brittle execution and semantically inconsistent analytical outputs in real-world workloads. We present LYNX, a multi-agent framework that formulates LLM-driven analytics as a schema- and knowledge-constrained analysis problem rather than a single-pass generation task. LYNX organizes analytical synthesis into a closed-loop workflow of planning, generation, verification, and refinement through three role-specialized agents that collaboratively enforce schema grounding, semantic consistency, and execution correctness. To address domain ambiguity and schema misalignment, LYNX integrates Semantic-Structural Distillation and Stage-Aware Allocation (SSD-SAA). A delta-guided iterative revision continuously diagnoses and repairs semantic and execution-level failures, substantially improving synthesis robustness. We evaluate LYNX on two NL-to-SQL benchmarks, BIRD-SQL Mini-Dev and the more challenging Spider 2.0-Lite. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance and efficiency, achieving 10.66% to 59.54% execution accuracy across lightweight and commercial models, while reducing token consumption by 70.53% compared with the prior most efficient method. Our framework displays high generalization over different backbones, from open-source, lightweight models to the latest commercial models. Additional case studies on quantitative finance analytics and complex multi-relational SQL workloads further demonstrate the framework's robustness, scalability, and practical applicability in real-world analytical scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14777
Leveraging the strong generative capabilities and stable training dynamics of diffusion models, diffusion-based recommender systems (RSs) have recently emerged as a novel recommendation paradigm, attracting increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, despite the rapid growth of diffusion-based RSs, a critical issue has emerged: the lack of a unified and systematic quantitative evaluation benchmark, which often results in irreproducible experimental results and unfair comparisons across studies due to inconsistent data processing, training configurations, inference procedures, and evaluation protocols. To address this challenge, we propose Eval4DiRec, the first unified and open-source evaluation framework specifically designed for diffusion-based RSs. Eval4DiRec supports 14 representative diffusion-based RS models across five different recommendation scenarios, providing consistent and reproducible experimental settings to systematically assess their performance. Built upon this framework, we conduct extensive empirical studies to benchmark these models under unified protocols. The results highlight the strong potential of diffusion models for recommendation while also revealing key factors and practical challenges that substantially affect their performance, thereby establishing a solid foundation to facilitate fair evaluation and guide future research in this promising field. Our code and data are available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34404
AI-enabled systems must remain dependable when the conditions under which they operate change (e.g., due to input perturbations, distribution shifts, or changes in external dependencies). This makes robustness auditing of such systems important for judging whether the available evidence is sufficient to support a defined robustness conclusion. However, designing an AI robustness auditing framework is challenging. A key unresolved issue is determining the requirements such a framework should support; these requirements have not yet been consolidated. We address this gap through meta-requirements: higher-order requirements specifying what a class of auditing frameworks should support. In design science research, literature and domain experts are common sources of meta-requirements; accordingly, we derive the initial set from literature and validate and refine it with practitioners. Our systematic literature review retained 74 of 2,890 records and derived 43 meta-requirements across 16 categories. We evaluated them with 128 practitioners, obtaining 5,504 ratings and 586 substantive comments. Overall, 81.20% of ratings indicated agreement or strong agreement. In particular, 41 of the 43 literature-derived meta-requirements were classified as strongly supported. Practitioner feedback refined the requirements and identified an additional requirement concerning external components and supply chain dependencies. The final set comprises 44 meta-requirements across 16 categories, of which 43 received quantitative validation. These meta-requirements can help organizations implement AI robustness auditing frameworks, assess existing frameworks for completeness, and refine them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14356
Digital libraries increasingly host scientific publications whose figures encode primary research findings, yet making this visual content searchable, accessible, and reusable remains an open challenge. Large language and multimodal models (LLMs/LMMs) provide the possibility to automate many figure parsing tasks such as determining data trends or extracting data from plots. In this work, we consider if these models can reliably support task-oriented visual data analysis when presented with synthetic, but realistic, scientific figures that contain multiple charts. Our Visual Question Answering (VQA) process scaffolds our tasks along a four-level description model from basic conceptual answers to interpretive and analytical understanding. Additionally, we outline our process for synthetically generating our single and multi-panel (charts in which there are multiple panels present) plots and testing the data with various LMMs using quantitative analysis. In general, we find LMMs become less accurate with increasing figure complexity as the number of panels, number of plot elements, and difficulty of questions increase. Finally, because LMM accuracy is expected to change rapidly, our analysis also considers cost relative to performance as a metric to inform future user decisions. We provide the detailed question-answer pairs used in this analysis, along with the code used to generate random plots, question-answer pairs and detailed bounding-box metadata for chart elements. The code and data are available at this https URL and this https URL\_qa\_multipanel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14173
Thyroid nodule malignancy assessment relies on ultrasound imaging, yet current risk stratification systems suffer from substantial interobserver variability, contributing to a high rate of unnecessary biopsies. We propose a radiomics-based framework combining quantitative feature extraction via PyRadiomics with a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) classifier, selected among six candidates for its favorable trade-off between discriminative performance and interpretability. To complement point predictions with uncertainty estimates, Cross-Conformal Prediction with label-conditional guarantees is applied, flagging ambiguous cases for clinical review rather than forcing a binary decision. Experiments are conducted on TN5000, a publicly available ultrasound dataset of thyroid nodules. After Spearman correlation filtering, 36 features are retained and the GAM achieves an AUC of $0.89$, a sensitivity of $0.83$, and a specificity of $0.82$ on the validation set. At a significance level $\epsilon=0.09$, selected to ensure empirical coverage guarantees on both classes, 63\% of nodules on the test set receive a certain (i.e., single-label) prediction, with conditional precision of $0.94$ for certain malignant and conditional Negative Predictive Value (NPV) of $0.73$ for certain benign cases, while the remaining 37\% are referred to the clinician.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13387
On-policy distillation (OPD) reveals versatility and convenience during VLM post-training, providing dense supervision for student from teacher. However, we observed an anomaly that the distilled VLM could still answer the questions accurately even when the related visual regions were masked or replaced with noise. Building on this observation, our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that OPD, which uses the answer as a hint, has failed to teach students to genuinely seek out and rely on visual evidence. Our theoretical analysis suggests that this failure arises from a shortcut enabled by the lack of visual constraints during distillation. To address the issue, we introduce Contrastive Vision On-policy Distillation (CV-OPD), which compares teacher distributions induced by positive and negative crops while conditioning on the same student prefix and augments optimization with a margin-based contrastive constraint, which is modulated with discrepancy gating across token and sample level. Specifically, CV-OPD first introduces a negative teacher unrelated to the answer and designs a Contrastive Divergence Loss (CDL) that constrains the feature distribution of student by contrasting the positive and negative teachers, correcting how the student exploits visual regions. The CV-OPD introduces a Discrepancy Aware Gate (DAG) that uses token-level and sample-level discrepancies to select visually relevant tokens for optimization, directing the student's attention toward visual content. Extensive experiments across a broad range of fine-grained visual benchmarks demonstrate that CV-OPD substantially alleviates shortcut and consistently improves the visual reasoning capabilities of existing VLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13264
Expressive humanoid interaction requires speech, facial animation, and body gestures to form a coherent response. However, many full-body humanoid robots produce speech and gestures without a visually expressive face, while talking-face animation and robot gesture generation are typically developed separately. We present Talk, Render, Act (TRABot), an agent-based framework comprising specialized agents for motion-atom construction, dialogue generation, motion planning, and facial animation. First, to produce natural and semantically meaningful gestures, we construct Robot-Ready Semantic Motion Atoms by segmenting long-form, G1-retargeted BEAT2 motion into units with natural gesture boundaries, human-verified communicative functions, and feasible trajectories. Second, to preserve semantic order and coordinate body motion with the spoken response, we introduce a Semantic-Conditioned Compositional Planner. Given an ordered semantic function sequence and an estimated response duration, the planner selects approved atoms to realize the longest feasible action sequence while accounting for transitions and neutral recovery. Finally, we deploy a Streaming Face-Speech-Body Integration system on a physical G1 humanoid, combining streaming dialogue audio, audio-driven facial animation, and semantically planned body motion in a unified real-time interaction loop. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TRAbot achieves the best overall performance among all compared conditions in terms of naturalness, expressiveness, and multimodal coherence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06153
Image-based 3D reconstruction provides a scalable representation for building inspection and maintenance. However, photorealistic reconstruction alone does not fully provide the geometric measurability, semantic structure, and interactive information access required for engineering applications. This study proposes a measurable semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework with region and depth supervision for interactive building inspection from multi-view imagery. Mask-based region supervision suppresses irrelevant backgrounds and focuses optimization on target regions. Point-wise depth supervision guides Gaussian centers toward physical surfaces using reference geometry derived from multi-view stereo (MVS) point clouds, providing geometric anchors for measuring physical dimensions and areas. A semantic Gaussian field associates learnable class features with individual Gaussian primitives, enabling semantic rendering and component-level inspection. These capabilities are operationalized through AEC-SplatTwin, an interactive building inspection platform supporting real-time visualization, semantic analysis, quantitative measurement, and multimodal large language model (MLLM)-assisted interaction. On the synthetic UAV-inspection QuakeCity and smartphone-captured HKUPB datasets, the framework reduces Gaussian-center depth MAE by 58.1% and 86.8%, while its semantic field achieves mIoU values of 0.8529 and 0.8642. On HKUPB, the mean relative errors for height, width, and area measurements are 0.33%, 1.07%, and 0.60%. These results show that the proposed framework extends 3DGS beyond visual reconstruction into a measurable, semantically structured, and interactive engineering representation for building inspection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13143