Online data selection has demonstrated substantial efficiency gains for LLM pretraining by training on the most valuable candidates within each batch. Since a candidate's value is realized through its effective model update, principled selection should account for the optimizer step, which reshapes the raw gradient before it updates model parameters. We formalize this optimizer-aware selection paradigm as OptiSelect and present the first systematic study of how the optimizer shapes data selection. Our theory establishes a selection gain principle in which the advantage of online selection is governed by the discriminability of the optimizer-induced utility scores. We prove that sign-based and polar-tangential preconditioners of Lion and Muon would suffer from a discriminability collapse which caps attainable gains from OptiSelect, whereas diagonal-adaptive optimizers such as AdamW and Sophia admit strictly better upper bounds. The proposed principle also yields a quantitative derivation of the optimal candidate oversampling ratio. Pretraining experiments on 124M and 720M models are consistent with our theoretical analysis and show that AdamW's diagonal-adaptive scoring geometry remains the strongest scoring geometry even with Muon as optimizer. We further demonstrate that OptiSelect retains its benefits under data rephrasing, a technique used in modern data processing pipelines. Our findings provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance for co-designing optimizers and data selection in LLM pretraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03432
\textit{Gromov-Wasserstein Distances} (GWDs) provide quantitative ways of comparing probabilistic distributions defined on different metric spaces by applying techniques from the optimal transport theory. As such, GWD can be potentially useful in a large variety of applications ranging from graph matching problems to 3D object detection. However its practical use at scale is significantly limited by cubic time complexity computations involving dense intra-space distance matrices. Even though in the Euclidean metric spaces several techniques (e.g. involving scalable kernel methods) were proposed to address it, to the best of our knowledge, analogous techniques for general geodesic distances on manifolds, or shortest-path distance on graphs in their discretized variants, were not developed. In this paper, we present \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{G}eodesic \textbf{Gro}mov-\textbf{W}asserstein methods (EGGroW), a new class of efficient algorithms designed to calculate geodesic Gromov-Wasserstein distances with entropic Sinkhorn-like approaches, leveraging recently introduced \textit{GenusSink} methods \citep{genussink} and the theory of random features. We provide important downstream applications, namely: 3D pose estimation and 3D template detection. In the latter setting, we formulate a partial 3D template recovery as a staged problem: capacity-constrained scene selection is followed by semi-relaxed recovery of template visibility and correspondence. Our empirical findings show that EGGroW provides accurate solutions when standard Euclidean-based techniques fail and is characterized by light computational footprint, as our theoretical analysis predicts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32824
Diffusion models can synthesise contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) from non-contrast CT (NCCT), avoiding contrast administration and its environmental and patient-access costs. However, visually realistic images are not necessarily anatomically correct, and the pixel-intensity and feature-space similarity metrics used to assess generation quality do not directly measure anatomical correctness. In this work, we investigate whether uncertainty can serve as a proxy for semantic correctness in diffusion-based medical image synthesis. We study NCCT-to-CECT synthesis using AortaDiff, a multitask diffusion framework that jointly generates CECT images and lumen segmentations. The segmentation output provides an explicit representation of the generated vascular anatomy, enabling segmentation-derived errors to be used as a quantitative measure of generation correctness. Six methods spanning weight (Ensemble, HyperDiff, BayesDiff), architecture-perturbation (MCDropout), generative-stochasticity (RDS) and input-perturbation (TTA) uncertainty are compared at the pixel, region and image levels, and for detection of clinically relevant out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. Uncertainty proves informative at all three spatial scales, remains informative on an external multi-centre dataset under distribution shift, and supports OOD detection. MCDropout stands out among the six: it ranks among the leading methods at every scale, generalizes well on the external dataset, and can be enabled at inference on any model already trained with dropout, so reliable uncertainty comes at no extra training cost. Uncertainty reliably flags severe failures but discriminates poorly among already high-quality images. These findings support uncertainty as a practical and computationally economical signal for quality filtering, reliability assessment and OOD detection in NCCT-to CECT synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03224
Quantitative trading strategy design aims to discover trading programs from historical data that remain effective in future markets, which can be viewed as a black-box program optimization problem. LLM-based textual gradients offer a promising approach by providing explicit optimization directions for iterative strategy refinement. However, directly applying textual gradients faces two challenges: (1) optimization is myopic, underutilizing experience from previous evaluations; and (2) aggregate backtest feedback overlooks temporal robustness, potentially favoring strategies that perform well only in specific market periods. To address these challenges, we propose TradeGrad, an experience-guided textual-gradient framework for robust trading strategy optimization. TradeGrad leverages accumulated optimization experience to estimate textual gradients and employs multi-scale revisions for both strategy exploration and refinement. It further introduces the Cross-Period Robust Objective (CPRO), which emphasizes performance in unfavorable historical periods to promote temporal robustness. Experiments on cross-sectional and time-series strategy design in Chinese A-share and U.S. equity markets show that TradeGrad achieves the best in-sample and out-of-sample performance across all four settings. Notably, its Chinese cross-sectional strategy achieves 27.99% annualized return, 12.19% maximum drawdown, and a Sharpe ratio of 1.63, approximately 68% higher than the CSI 300 benchmark. Further analyses validate the proposed components and show consistent improvements in both in-sample and out-of-sample performance throughout optimization. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03128
Long-term agents must remember not only what is true about a user, but also how a particular agent should work with that user as their shared history evolves. Existing benchmarks primarily supervise user facts and preferences or experience reusable across users, leaving this relationship-specific agent memory implicit. Additionally, most prior works measure the model solely with final-answer QA over long interaction histories, making the assessment still incomplete and unreliable. To this end, we introduce DyadMem with the proposed new definition User-conditioned Relational Agent Memory (URAM). DyadMem jointly annotates user-side memory and URAM along the same multi-session trajectories, resulting in 6 memory categories. To summarize, it includes 3,065 episodes, 50,961 sessions, and 61,210 QA instances, with extensive session-level Capture and Update gold annotations, query-level Recall support, and two QA settings: Gold-Memory and Full-Pipeline. Across 16 open-weight and 4 proprietary models, Gold-Memory QA is consistently strong, yet Full-Pipeline QA drops sharply. Such a gap explicitly supports our fine-grained evaluation design. Additionally, several quantitative results further reveal low Capture recall, incomplete Recall, and unsafe-deletion issues arising from even the frontier LLMs. We further conduct a rigorous experiment to validate the effectiveness of our URAM and observe the positive effects for all 20 models. In summary, DyadMem is a dual-domain, full-pipeline memory benchmark with extensive annotation efforts for advancing the domain's development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03020
This work presents an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system personalized for a Czech speaker with a permanent tracheal stoma and severe dysarthria rendering their speech unintelligible to untrained listeners. We release a public dataset containing 33 annotated hours of the speaker's speech, collected using a novel "artificial conversation" protocol designed for high engagement and dialogue realism. We propose a multi-stage training pipeline based on Whisper Base: fine-tuning on standard Czech speech, acoustically simulated tracheostomic speech, and the speaker's data. We evaluate the system across three near real-time scenarios: scripted conversations, question answering, and spontaneous dialogue, achieving a 50\% relative reduction in Character Error Rate compared to Whisper Base baseline and surpassing the average recognition accuracy of their assistants in acoustic recognition of isolated utterances. We demonstrate that even for severely impeded speech, a helpful ASR is achievable, as evidenced by the quantitative results and the feedback from the speaker.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03017
Epidemic intervention policies are textual artefacts that human decision-makers interpret, justify, and revise through natural language, making large language models a natural candidate for epidemic policy reasoning. A naive LLM, however, lacks the epidemic dynamics needed to project intervention consequences, the quantitative surveillance signals required to assess severity, and the institutional constraints that define admissible actions. We present EpiWorld, a closed-loop framework that grounds an LLM policy actor in a learned action-conditioned epidemiological world model and a tiered skill library of public-health protocols, surveillance tools, and adaptive lessons accumulated through after-action analysis. Given a candidate intervention, the world model predicts regional epidemic evolution and enables fast counterfactual rollouts that provide feedback for policy selection and refinement. Outcomes of simulated futures are distilled into reusable lessons while protocol constraints remain fixed, allowing the decision process to improve without sacrificing interpretability or controllability. We evaluate both the world model and the end-to-end framework on retrospective COVID-19 and Influenza datasets: the world model achieves the best out-of-distribution Peak-MAE among all forecasting baselines, and the closed-loop framework reduces cumulative hospitalisation by up to 59% across datasets and by an average of ~16% across six LLM backbones, outperforming reinforcement-learning and optimal-control policy baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02744
Automatic horizon tracking is a foundational task in 3D seismic interpretation. Most existing deep learning approaches formulate it as dense semantic segmentation, typically using U-Net-based architectures. The model produces a probability map over all pixels that must be post-processed to extract precise horizon coordinates, while horizon picks in time/depth must be converted into dense masks for training. Unpicked seismic traces are consequently treated as background, which can hinder convergence, and both pre- and post-processing can introduce errors into the final interpretation. Moreover, 2D segmentation models do not inherently capture inter-slice context, while 3D models are often computationally prohibitive. We instead formulate horizon tracking as a bounded coordinate regression problem, where the model directly predicts the time/depth coordinate of the target horizon at each lateral position. We propose a lightweight regression head compatible with any pretrained vision backbone, coupled with an LSTM module to model inter-slice context and produce a continuous horizon surface across the volume. A combination of L1 and L2 losses supervises predictions at valid horizon picks, while a geology-informed regularization enforces lateral continuity between successive traces. Under controlled experimental conditions, we evaluate four pretrained vision backbones under both segmentation and regression configurations on a seismic volume from New Zealand. The proposed approach consistently outperforms its segmentation counterparts quantitatively, using metrics including RMSE and PCC, and qualitatively, while also demonstrating greater robustness to increasing sparsity of training picks. Finally, we show that prediction variation across successive traces captures local variations in geological complexity, providing an automated quality control measure for downstream seismic interpretation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02494
Androgenetic alopecia (AGA) is characterized by patterned follicular miniaturization, increased single-hair follicular units, and altered hair-shaft diameter. We present an automated quantitative scalp-analysis and clinical decision-support framework combining FU localization, ordinal visible-shaft counting, calibrated shaft-width estimation, regional aggregation, and an interpretable rule layer. The clinical cohort comprised 243 patients (127 AGA, 116 non-AGA), while the computer-vision experiments used 160 expert-annotated patients, 2,400 trichoscopic images, and approximately 158,000 FU annotations. Under patientdisjoint evaluation, YOLOv8m achieved test mAP@0.5=0.920 and recall=0.860; EfficientNet-B5 with a support-map channel achieved 87.0% expert-box count accuracy (macro F1=0.85). A separate 500-image set was processed end-to-end with detector-generated boxes, yielding MAE of 6.56 for follicle detection and 16.59 for follicle classification relative to human-expert annotations. The system is intended to assist, rather than replace, dermatologist interpretation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02421
A comparative explainability framework is presented to audit DeBERTa-v3 under zero-shot classification of medical abstracts. The work addresses the disagreement problem in Explainable Artificial Intelligence, where different attribution methods produce divergent explanations for the same input and prediction. A natural language inference engine is implemented over the Medical Abstracts corpus with five enriched hypotheses per diagnostic category and a balanced sample of one thousand texts per class. Five explanation methods are compared: SHAP and LIME as model-agnostic approaches, occlusion and Input x Gradient as deep-learning-specific approaches, and Attention x Gradient as a transformer-specific approach. Explanations are standardized through top-token attribution, and pairwise agreement is quantified using the Jaccard index. High predictive accuracy is achieved across well-defined clinical domains, whereas performance degrades under high semantic ambiguity. Explanatory stability directly mirrors predictive certainty, exhibiting strong convergence in univalent categories and a marked drop under diagnostic uncertainty. Furthermore, qualitative error auditing uncovers three systemic failure mechanisms: lexical hypersensitivity, semantic overlap, and loss of attribution coherence. The results support the combined use of several explanation methods and quantitative agreement metrics when auditing transformer-based models in medical text classification, and suggest prioritizing specific clinical ontologies over broad diagnostic labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02116
Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental to sequential decision-making. Prior work establishes asymptotic convergence to optimal policies, but only through model-based methods that must explicitly estimate the transition probabilities of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP). We present Quasar, the first model-free algorithm with asymptotic guarantees for reachability on the fragment of MDPs free of non-terminal maximal end components (MECs), a building block to which every MDP reduces by the standard MEC quotient. Our algorithm follows the classical Q-learning approach, using temporal-difference updates to converge to an optimal policy without ever learning the transition probabilities. The resulting learner reduces the memory footprint from the O(|S|^2|A|) that model-based methods require to O(|S||A|). On the standardized Quantitative Verification Benchmark Set, our algorithm converges to the optimal policy with orders of magnitude fewer samples than the previous model-based state-of-the-art. Together these results are a concrete step toward the practical deployment of reachability learning and, with it, of specification-guided RL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01781
Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR), including cine imaging, is a reference standard for the noninvasive assessment of cardiac morphology and ventricular function. Cine CMR interpretation integrates qualitative visual assessment with quantitative measurements of ventricular volumes, ejection fraction, myocardial mass, wall thickness, and regional wall motion. Current medical vision-language models (VLMs) cannot reliably derive quantitative measurements from multidimensional cine images without analysis tools. We present CineMR, a tool-augmented VLM that invokes cardiac image-analysis tools and integrates their outputs into interleaved reasoning for quantitative CMR assessment. We also construct a multi-cohort visual question answering benchmark covering quantitative metric extraction, multiclass diagnosis, and differential diagnosis, together with tools for segmentation, phase selection, volumetry, morphometry, and regional wall motion analysis. CineMR is trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on tool-interaction traces followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with conditional tool-use rewards. On the multi-cohort cine CMR benchmark, CineMR achieves 35.9% pass@1 and 58.9% pass@4, compared with 1.5% pass@1 for the Qwen3-VL-8B backbone and 0.0% and 7.0% pass@1 for LLaVA-Med v1.5 and MedGemma-4B, respectively. Correct tool invocation reaches 99.8% after GRPO, up from 78.9% after SFT. Live tool outputs improve ventricular measurement accuracy by 20.4--23.7% over direct model predictions, and removing all tools reduces pass@1 from 35.9% to 27.9%. These results highlight the importance of reliable tool use for quantitative cine CMR reasoning and support CineMR as a promising approach for assistive cardiac image assessment. Code, benchmark resources, and model weights are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01166
Background and Objectives: Fluorescence-labeled cellular arbors provide readouts of neuronal and microglial morphology, but fine and weakly labeled processes are prone to fragmentation and false connections that bias skeleton-based measurements. We present MorphoBranch, a fine-structure-preserving, human-reviewable workbench for morphometry of branched cellular structures. Methods: MorphoBranch combines a deterministic Morphometry Engine with an LLM-assisted Refinement Engine. The Mor- phometry Engine implements an image-to-graph workflow integrating multiscale structural evidence extraction, hysteresis segmen- tation, evidence-constrained skeleton refinement, and graph-based morphometry. The Refinement Engine maps natural-language requests to registered actions for parameter adjustment, preview execution, metric reporting, and unsupported-request handling, while image processing and quantitative computation remain deterministic and reviewable. Results: MorphoBranch was evaluated on two public neuronal axon datasets, AxonMIP and AxonStack, and the in-house Cell- Morph dataset of microglial fluorescence images. It achieved the highest Skeleton F1 and clDice and the lowest length-estimation error among the evaluated methods on all three datasets, while also achieving the highest Dice and IoU on AxonMIP and Axon- Stack. Across 150 natural-language tasks, the Refinement Engine achieved a 94.0% end-to-end success rate. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that MorphoBranch provides a reproducible, human-reviewable workflow for mor- phometric analysis of branched cellular structures. It supports fine-structure-preserving quantification across neuronal axon and microglial fluorescence images while maintaining inspectable and reproducible analysis workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00860
Robot brain models integrate vision, language, and robot state to generate actions for complex manipulation tasks. Most predict fixed-length action chunks that may span multiple task phases. This can obscure phase transitions and favor frequent action patterns, compromising action timing in dynamic environments. We propose \method, an ordered future-phase planning method for robot brain models. From current multimodal observations, it predicts the task phase at each future action position. The resulting planning representations condition the corresponding actions, preserving temporal alignment between task progress and action generation. Training first learns the planner, then freezes it during action-model adaptation to maintain stable phase representations. We instantiate \method on pretrained $\pi_{0.5}$ and AcrossWAM1.0 robot brain models. Detailed quantitative evaluation uses the $\pi_{0.5}$ implementation. On conveyor-belt manipulation, \method reduces offline joint-action error by approximately 22.5\% relative to the original $\pi_{0.5}$ model. It also improves phase-transition modeling and cross-phase action prediction. These results demonstrate the value of ordered future-phase planning for continuous action generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39970
Cross-lingual transfer describes how knowledge in a source language benefits a target language. Measuring it quantitatively requires broad multilingual pre-training, as prior work has done with cross-lingual transfer matrices. We ask whether transfer is predictable from freely available typological features, and whether the prominence of high-resource source languages reflects typology or data quality and quantity. We show that typological databases contain cheap and dense signals about cross-lingual transfer. Our typology-only random forest on a 24-language prior-work transfer matrix scores leave-one-language-out $\rho{=}0.705$ and $R^2{=}0.49$, beating a non-typological control at $\rho{=}0.62$, which verifies the ability of typology-only predictions to reconstruct costly measured cross-lingual transfer. The signal survives leave-one-script-out and leave-one-family-out protocols, so script and family confounding do not explain the effect. By decomposing the transfer into a typology term and a resource-and-script bias term, we find the best-source ranking sensitive to this bias. In contrast, typology is not affected by this bias, which makes it a zero-compute screening tool that replaces hundreds of training runs with a model fit. Our code is available \href{this https URL}{here}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39640
This work proposes a mutual feedback architecture, MEQ, that refines the two inputs, of possibly different modalities, into a pair of coupled embeddings such that each embedding reflects the information of the other. The core idea is to incorporate continuous interchange of information between the two inputs. This idea leads to a mutual feedback architecture consisting of two components whose outputs are fed back into the other. The final output of this model is defined as the fixed point of this interaction. We provide theoretical analysis that offers interpretation of this model as well as design choices to prevent failure cases. We show the benefits of MEQ through classification and visual grounding tasks spanning various datasets. Quantitatively, our model outperforms or shows competitive performance on concatenation-based multimodal classification problems. Qualitatively, the proposed interactive mechanism allows the model to progressively refine the visual grounding when paired with complementary modality, thus demonstrating the power of mutual feedback under such settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39456
Precise numerical reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for expanding their applicability to complex real-world tasks. However, text-based tokenization often fragments numbers, significantly hindering precise arithmetic reasoning. Meanwhile, numerical embeddings, despite arithmetic precision, rely on context-agnostic substitution that disregards the semantic role of numbers as identifiers. To combine the complementary strengths, we propose \textbf{ANI (Adaptive Numerical Injection)}, a hybrid framework that governs the selective injection of numerical features based on the semantic context. By employing a context-aware gating mechanism, we selectively inject numerical embeddings (specifically FoNE) into the latent space, explicitly preserving nominal identifiers while enhancing quantitative operands. Through extensive evaluations across various LLMs, we demonstrate that ANI enhances MATH performance by 9.5 points over the official reference model, while maintaining robust performance on general linguistic benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39294
Analytical charts in multimodal deep research encode quantitative claims, requiring every visualized value to be faithfully grounded in supporting evidence. Unlike retrieved images that mainly provide contextual information, charts require numerical fidelity: visualized values should not only match retrieved evidence quantitatively but also preserve its original meaning and scope. However, achieving such fidelity remains challenging because current systems usually construct visualization plans before knowing what quantitative evidence can actually be retrieved from the web. As a result, predefined plans may require entities, temporal ranges, or comparison dimensions that the retrieved evidence only partially supports. Existing approaches mainly address this issue through post-hoc verification after chart plans are fixed, enabling unsupported values to be identified but leaving the underlying visual frames unchanged. To address this challenge, we propose Frame-Evidence Co-Adaptation (FECA), an evidence-adaptive visual planning framework for multimodal deep research. Inspired by the bidirectional sensemaking process in Data-Frame Theory, FECA models chart generation as an iterative interaction between visual frames and retrieved evidence. Each visual frame is adaptive: the frame guides evidence acquisition, while retrieved evidence determines whether the frame should be accepted, revised, or dropped before rendering. By coupling visualization planning with evidence availability, FECA shifts chart generation from fixed-plan verification to adaptive evidence-grounded visual reasoning. Experiments on 100 real-world research topics show that FECA substantially improves numerical fidelity while preserving report quality and chart utility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00374
Reconstructing and animating water scenery from nature produces compelling and immersive visual experiences. Previous work examined this task from the perspective of 2D video textures, with the goal of creating a looping video. In our work, we tackle the problem from a 3D perspective, creating a looping 4D dynamic reconstruction which can be interactively rendered from novel viewpoints from a single non-looping 2D source video. We represent motion as a 3D static \textit{Eulerian} motion field that advects canonical Gaussian splats that are cyclically reborn at fixed time periods, supervised using rendering losses. To model non-periodic and stochastic dynamics present in real-world scenes, we add a non-periodic, time-varying residual term to capture deviations from the static Eulerian motion field. We show quantitatively and qualitatively that our framework enables photorealistic animation of water scenes better than prior art.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38622
Co-speech gestures for robots must adapt not only to speech and embodiment, but also to the workspace available for performing the motion. Since the same speech can be accompanied by different gestures, a robot can respond to workspace constraints, e.g., gestures for speech next to a wall. In these scenarios, the robot should gesture in a suitable motion rather than simply correcting an unconstrained one. To achieve this goal, we present GestAdapt, a workspace-conditioned framework that conditions co-speech gesture generation on a prescribed wrist workspace. The GestAdapt framework learns from six complementary co-speech corpora through a shared motion representation and supports retargeting to different robot embodiments. Quantitative evaluation shows that generated motions remain close to the real-motion distribution while respecting the workspace. In a user study, gestures generated under modified workspace constraints receive a mean quality score of 3.24/5, above our no-workspace variant (2.43/5) and below the reference motions (3.68/5). In a real robot evaluation, all compared motions are retargeted to the Reachy2 humanoid robot under identical workspace constraints. Motions generated with our framework rank first in 69.7\% of comparisons, higher than our no-workspace variant baseline and retargeted ground-truth motions constrained afterward. Overall, the results support adapting gestures to the available workspace during generation, rather than modifying unconstrained trajectories afterward to satisfy workspace constraints, potentially compromising gesture naturalness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38400