AI News Today

arXiv:2608.17247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized agents must decide whether retrieved user memory should be used, ignored, updated, or queried before it affects a current task. We use this setting to develop an empirical audit protocol for structured intermediate outputs: first audit dataset shortcuts, then isolate bundled prompt changes, check whether intermediate labels are answer-associated, test decomposed semantic evidence, and audit provider-level execution failures. A 480-exam

arXiv:2608.17270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for scientific hypothesis generation. However, evaluating generated hypotheses remains a challenge for trustworthy AI-enabled scientific workflows. Existing approaches often use LLMs as judges or rely on semantic similarity, which can favor familiar ideas over novel ones. We propose a logit-based energy scoring method that evaluates hypotheses using a language model's intrinsic confidence rather th

arXiv:2608.17271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial superintelligence (ASI) requires AI to move beyond mastering existing knowledge toward exploring the unknown, creating new knowledge, and turning new ideas into verifiable results. However, the capabilities of today's AI systems are still largely built on learning, compressing, and applying existing human knowledge. Accordingly, existing benchmarks primarily test whether AI can produce correct answers based on learned knowledge, or wheth

arXiv:2608.17282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing agentic reasoning systems typically rely on centralized protocols. This design introduces routing bottlenecks and static role allocations that often fail when handling complex multimodal queries. We propose DeAR (Decentralized Agentic Reasoning), a framework that shifts from central control to autonomous peer-to-peer collaboration. DeAR is built on three mechanisms: (1) decentralized capability grounding for query-dependent agent specializ

arXiv:2608.17289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group-relative policy optimization has emerged as a key paradigm for training agentic large language models (LLMs) on multi-turn interactive tasks. However, most existing variants fail to distinguish advantages among successful trajectories even when these trajectories differ substantially in their interaction efficiency. For instance, circuitous successes are often assigned the identical outcome reward, causing advantage collapse and severe perfor

arXiv:2608.17299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently emerged as a highly promising paradigm for cross-domain zero-shot forecasting. However, existing evaluation protocols predominantly rely on static benchmarks with fixed historical test windows. While these benchmarks provide a valuable baseline snapshot, they evaluate an average performance on a fixed history, failing to capture how models behave in continuously evolving real-world environments ch

arXiv:2608.17301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training with supervised chain-of-thought fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has substantially improved the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, their application to signal processing problems remains relatively under-explored. This report investigates reinforcement fine-tuning strategies for adapting Qwen2.5-3B-Base to graduate-level signal mathematical problems from Wireles

arXiv:2608.17095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) driving models couple a reasoning stage with a diffusion-based trajectory decoder, but do not give a direct way to redirect attention toward safety-critical actors at inference time without retraining. We studied a bounded additive pre-softmax attention bias on the visual tokens of detector localized traffic actors on Alpamayo-R1's Qwen3-VL backbone. It is applied as a fail open forward pre-hook with no weight changes.

arXiv:2608.17129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language Models (VLMs) excel at 2D grounding, spatial reasoning and agentic tool-based planning in static scenes. However, consider asking a home robot "Is my medication still in the cabinet?" The answer may be physically hidden behind a row of containers that must first be moved aside. Answering such questions in real-world cluttered environments requires reasoning in dynamic scenes: distractors must be manipulated to reveal occluded object

arXiv:2608.17151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cell mimicry arises when different cell types appear morphologically similar. Human pathologists resolve this ambiguity using surrounding tissue context, whereas current vision models either lack contextual reasoning (cell foundation models) or cannot operate at the cell level (pathology MLLMs). We present Loki-OT, which propagates region-level tissue reasoning to individual cell predictions via Unbalanced Optimal Transport, using MLLM-derived dens

arXiv:2608.17178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video self-supervised learning through masked spatiotemporal prediction has emerged as a promising paradigm for learning feature representations from unlabeled data. However, existing methods typically rely on random masking, which indiscriminately removes regions irrespective of their semantic or temporal relevance. In ego-centric driving videos, this can weaken the pretext signal since safety-critical cues such as pedestrians, vehicles, lane boun

arXiv:2608.17224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training query-propagation end-to-end multi-object tracking (MOT) models requires dense bounding-box and identity annotations across video sequences, making dataset construction expensive. Clip-level active learning reduces this cost by selecting video clips for annotation, but prior acquisition criteria based on output-level temporal uncertainty may miss clips whose informativeness comes from association instability in propagated track states. We

arXiv:2608.17254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intra-tumoural heterogeneity (ITH) reflects spatial variation in tumour biology and is an important determinant of tumour behaviour, prognosis, and treatment response. Radiomics and deep learning have shown promise for tumour classification from multiparametric MRI (mp-MRI), but radiomics relies on handcrafted features, while most deep learning methods use whole-tumour representations or manually defined sub-regions, limiting scalable modelling of

arXiv:2608.17279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This report presents a two-stage, training-free solution for the MeViS-Text track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge. The task requires a model to localize and segment the object specified by a natural-language expression throughout a video. Such expressions often depend on temporal cues, including actions, interactions, directions, and relative positions. Our first stage uses Gemini-3.1 Pro via API to decompose a video-level event into instance-level targ

arXiv:2608.17318v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language navigation agents are often evaluated on their ability to follow route-like instructions toward a fixed goal. Yet, real navigation instructions often depend on observed states of the environment: if a condition holds, then follow one path, otherwise take another. Such instructions require an agent to evaluate scene evidence, select the correct logical branch, and execute the corresponding navigation behavior. Existing evaluations pr

arXiv:2608.17328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Facial biometric recognition systems currently face compound threats intertwining generative AI and high-fidelity physical spoofing. Existing defenses suffer from systemic bottlenecks, including poor generalization, non-auditable reasoning, and reliance on massive, low-quality datasets. To address these challenges, we propose Multimodal Large Language Models (MFAD) for face anti-spoofing detection, an explainable reasoning system for Unified Face A

arXiv:2608.17351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-world face anti-spoofing must address both covariate and semantic shifts: source and target domains differ in imaging conditions, while target domains contain diverse attack types absent from training. Existing prompt-based approaches often express spoofing through category semantics or language guidance, which is effective for modeling high-level concepts but is less suited to explicitly capturing the evolving fine-grained and spatially heter

arXiv:2608.17389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-sequence 3D reconstruction from RGB videos requires both accurate local geometry and globally consistent camera motion. Feed-forward models provide strong depth and pose predictions, but their memory cost prevents joint inference over long sequences. Chunk-wise processing improves scalability, yet independently predicted chunks often exhibit scale drift, pose errors, and point-cloud misalignment. We present GeoWeaver, a unified framework compr

arXiv:2608.17394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs), characterized by bio-inspired neuronal dynamics and event-driven communication, have attained significant progress in recent years. Nevertheless, training deep SNNs remains challenging due to spatiotemporal information loss and gradient mismatching. To simultaneously address these issues, we propose a noisy group neuron (NGN) model, which incorporates population-level synchronous resetting and neural stochasticity as

arXiv:2608.17398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent clouds blind optical satellites during floods. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) penetrates clouds, its raw data is noisy and lacks clear contrast. To mitigate this, recent studies utilize deep learning models to translate SAR into cloud-free synthetic optical imagery for downstream tasks like water body segmentation. However, because raw SAR is the original source for both of these operations, a critical methodological dilemma arises

arXiv:2608.17402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision encoders are a critical component of vision-language models, and scaling their capacity effectively improves performance. However, dense scaling increases compute cost and inference latency. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a compelling alternative, having enabled efficient scaling in LLMs, yet the MoE design space for CLIP-style vision encoders remains underexplored at State-of-the-Art (SOTA) levels. In this work, we systematica

arXiv:2608.17415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differentially private training adds isotropic Gaussian noise to clipped gradients, corrupting every singular direction equally. In vision models, where spatial correlation concentrates gradient energy into a low-rank subspace, most of this noise falls in directions that carry little signal. Spectral gradient orthogonalization via polar decomposition is introduced as a post-processing step that recovers directional signal from the noisy gradient's

arXiv:2608.17420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving scene reconstruction and rendering, especially with 3D Gaussian Splatting, has become an important component of autonomous driving simulation. However, rendered views often degrade under extrapolated ego trajectories and scene edits, producing blurry structures, temporal flicker, and foreground-background misalignment. Existing refinement methods are commonly designed for a specific setting, such as image-level novel-view repair or object-e

arXiv:2608.17421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep snake is a promising family of instance segmentation methods that accurately predicts object-level contours, thereby overcoming common pixel-level misclassification issues such as mask cavities and jagged edges in semantic segmentation approaches. However, existing deep snake methods face challenges in handling complex morphological variations, accurately capturing fine-grained organ details, and correcting base detection errors. To mitigate t

arXiv:2608.17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective segmentation of multi-modal MRI is central to improving neural network accuracy in brain tumor recognition. Existing methods typically compress 3D volumes into token sequences via fixed patch encoding or learned attention pooling (e.g., TokenLearner). However, these compression schemes discard explicit spatial shape information; the resulting tokens convey no notion of lesion morphology or spatial extent. Meanwhile, end-to-end evaluation

arXiv:2608.17475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision foundation models have recently advanced multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD) through parameter-efficient tuning and prompt learning. However, existing Segment Anything Model (SAM)-adapted MSOD methods often rely on dual-stream encoders or auxiliary prompt generators, leading to redundant computation. Although a single-stream alternative can reduce this cost, early fusion may also propagate noisy or misaligned auxiliary high-frequency

arXiv:2608.17490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation-model hubs turn multi-view fusion into a selection problem: from a large heterogeneous encoder pool, which views should be fused, and how many? We show that downstream performance is non-monotonic in the number of fused encoders; later views can be redundant or task-misaligned, causing accuracy to saturate or decline. We formalise this setting as view-set composition and propose KAGES (Kernel-Alignment Greedy Encoder Selector), a label-a

arXiv:2608.14556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical fields on meshes require a separation between topology and geometry: conservation laws are topological and should be exact, while geometry, material response, and anisotropic coupling must be learned from data. Existing neural surrogates often mix these roles inside unconstrained message passing. We introduce Riemannian Hodge Message Passing (RHMP), which turns this separation into an architectural principle. RHMP fixes the cellular coboun

arXiv:2608.14563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forward-Pass-Only MLP training (FPO) adapts large language models without a backward pass through the model body, achieving 2.7--3.2x the throughput of standard fine-tuning at ~40% less peak training memory, while leaving off-domain benchmarks within seed-noise of baseline, a property that full-network fine-tuning does not reliably reproduce. FPO rests on a single empirical observation: at late layers of a transformer, the output-layer prediction e

arXiv:2608.14570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding human mobility is critical for a wide range of urban applications, including traffic management, epidemic control, and urban planning. However, due to privacy concerns, the availability of large-scale public trajectory data remains limited, posing challenges for downstream mobility analysis. Existing methods for synthetic trajectory generation primarily focus on matching global distribution similarity, while often overlooking mobility

arXiv:2608.14614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI datacenters retire functional GPUs, vast quantities of still capable accelerators enter secondary markets. This paper investigates whether these retired GPUs can find a productive afterlife to form a DumpsterCluster that can serve modern LLM inference, and under what conditions such repurposing is economically viable and environmentally sustainable. We physically built a 128-GPU DumpsterCluster from scratch using only second-hand components a

arXiv:2608.14617v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A recurring proposal in legal AI is to improve case-outcome prediction by fusing uncertainty tools (evidence graphs with belief propagation, sequential Bayesian odds updating, Dempster-Shafer combination, and conformal prediction) into one pipeline. We test this on 1,000 real European Court of Human Rights cases from LexGLUE and FairLex, predicting whether the Court found a Convention violation from the case's fact paragraphs. We compare three fami

arXiv:2608.14619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work proposes a new interpretable neural operator framework, termed the Physics Informed Kernel Function Neural Operator (PIKFNO), which explicitly incorporates physics informed kernel functions derived from governing equations into the neural operator architecture. Unlike traditional neural operators such as DeepONet, which rely on deep networks to implicitly learn basis functions, PIKFNO constrains the trunk network through physics informed

arXiv:2608.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been extensively used in autonomous and self-* systems, but RL policies, especially deep RL ones relying on neural networks, lack transparency and are difficult to understand. This can lead to diminished user trust, and makes for a more challenging verification of systems. To address this challenge, this paper introduces Explanations using Alternative Realities for Reinforcement Learning (EARL), a Python library to p

arXiv:2608.14634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological intelligence naturally prevents catastrophic forgetting through Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory, a macroscopic consolidation process driven at the local level by synaptic metaplasticity: the continuous, history-dependent neuromodulation of individual synapses. While artificial neural networks struggle with the stability-plasticity dilemma in non-stationary environments, existing solutions often require task labels or incur ma

arXiv:2608.14636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fractional optimization methods and fractal activation functions are two independent directions for improving neural network training. Fractional optimizers extend first-order optimization through fractional derivatives and memory effects, whereas fractal activations introduce multi-scale nonlinear representations based on self-similar Weierstrass- and Blancmange-type functions. Here, we investigate their interaction within a unified experimental f

arXiv:2608.14637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-duration stationary energy storage requires batteries whose degradation can be detected before substantial capacity loss has accumulated. Iron-chromium redox flow batteries are attractive for this role because they use abundant and low-cost active species, yet their operation is shaped by slow chromium kinetics, hydrogen evolution, membrane crossover and electrolyte imbalance. These coupled processes gradually reshape the full charge voltage/c

arXiv:2608.14638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we study autoencoders, a special class of deep neural nets (DNNs) whose performance can be characterized via their fixed points. This perspective naturally raises questions of existence, stability, and basins of attraction of these fixed points. These questions are addressed via the contractive properties of autoencoders, and are closely related to the notion of edge-of-chaos. Edge-of-chaos (EoC) is an important notion in the theory o

arXiv:2608.14639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-field accept/review with selective risk at most alpha -- accept a field only if the error rate among accepted fields is controlled -- is the trust contract document-extraction systems need, and the natural procedure silently violates it on real documents. On 13,859 genuine claude-sonnet-5 fields from 800 CORD receipts (49.0% correct) we diagnose three failure modes: document clustering (design effect 1.84-2.45), score-refit leakage (coverage 0.

arXiv:2608.14642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents trained on a single reward signal exploit the gap between the designed reward and the intended behavior. This is particularly a problem when we are trying to imbue ethical behavior into RL agents. An agent can look ethical on average while concentrating its violations in a few bad episodes, and a creature in the environment harmed in one episode is not restored by good conduct in another. We compare four ways of t