Semantic audio applications increasingly require controllable generation on commodity and embedded hardware rather than through framework-heavy datacenter stacks. We present \textit{aria}, a dependency-free native runtime that runs the complete text-to-music pipeline of Stable Audio~3 (SA3) on ordinary GPUs, CPU-only machines, and a Raspberry~Pi~5, with no Python or deep-learning framework underneath. Our main contribution is a study of quantization: running the model at lower numerical precision to fit tight memory budgets, saving memory in place rather than adding to it. Because the runtime owns every internal tensor, it also exposes activation steering, a low-cost way to steer what the model generates. We judge the quality cost with three independent measures of the output (prompt adherence, overall audio quality, taste preservation), each compared against the ordinary variation between random seeds. Eight-bit precision shows no measurable quality loss on any measure while sharply cutting memory, and it is the fastest mode on the GPU; four-bit adds a small, bounded cost but shrinks the footprint enough to run the $1.2$-billion-parameter model on an $8$\,GB Pi. Against the official implementation, aria matches or exceeds generation speed and starts about seven times faster. A case study of the steering interface generates music carrying taste associations (\emph{sonic seasoning}), with genuine but bounded control for a subset of attributes. These results make a compact, quantized runtime with built-in control a practical basis for on-device semantic audio in Internet-of-Sounds settings. The \textit{aria} runtime is released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08526
Text-to-image (T2I) models have been shown to exhibit social biases. Prior work has mainly focused on gender, skin tone, and cultural representation within restricted occupational associations, and emerging benchmarks increasingly incorporate these dimensions. However, disability remains systematically underexplored. Current evaluation practices often fail to align with sociologically grounded definitions of stereotyping, limiting principled assessment of representational harms toward people with disabilities (PWD). To address this, we introduce INCLUDE-BENCH, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating disability-related bias in T2I models. INCLUDE-BENCH comprises 119K generated images based on prompt design across multiple bias dimensions and both static and dynamic contexts. We evaluate 15 open-source and 2 closed-source models. Our key findings reveal that: (1) mobility-impaired and default disability prompts predominantly yield wheelchair depictions across all models; (2) disability-conditioned generations consistently exhibit less diversity; (3) stereotypical portrayals demonstrate stronger disability-text alignment; and (4) we introduce the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) Score, demonstrating that T2I models reflect real-world stereotypical associations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08515
Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08514
Choosing a learning rate scheduling strategy is critical to neural network training, but manual selection is costly and rarely exhaustive. While classical AutoML approaches often treat the scheduler as a secondary hyperparameter, we systematically investigate its impact on classification accuracy across a diverse pool of architectures. We evaluated 30 representative architectures from convolutional and transformer families within the LEMUR neural network dataset. Through automated source-code injection, we applied 25 scheduler configurations across nine PyTorch families, evaluating a total of 3,938 model variants on CIFAR-10. Our best configuration achieved a top-1 accuracy of 86.45%, with 237 variants exceeding 80%. The results show that the choice of scheduler depends heavily on the architecture: CosineAnnealingWarmRestarts and CyclicLR consistently outperform basic decay strategies. The resulting accuracy landscape, contributed to the LEMUR nn-dataset, provides a practical reference for principled scheduler selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08511
Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods assume unlimited communication, not considering real-world applications where bandwidth is restricted and information efficiency is critical. We introduce \textbf{bandwidth-constrained cooperative VLN} and propose \textbf{hindsight gating}: a lightweight supervised gate that labels communication-critical steps post-hoc from navigation failures, avoiding the high variance of REINFORCE. Contrary to the intuition that agents should communicate when uncertain, we observe a consistent counter-intuitive pattern: trained gates fire predominantly in early episode steps and more often when agents are confident, across all budget levels ($B \in \{1,3,5\}$). We explain this through \textbf{recurrent hidden-state alignment}: early communication injects grounded trajectory representations that persist and compound through subsequent Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) updates, achieving $+0.072$ cumulative alignment gain with $B{=}3$ transmissions, approaching unconstrained communication ($+0.078$) at 260\% greater alignment efficiency than random gating ($+0.020$) and 320\% greater efficiency than entropy-based gating ($+0.017$). Our results establish a new communication regime for bandwidth-limited embodied agents: synchronise representations early, navigate independently later. Our codebase is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08504
Accurate prognosis prediction is important for treatment planning in lung cancer, but deep learning-driven survival modelling is often limited by the scarcity of curated imaging cohorts with reliable outcome data. This study evaluates whether representations from a domain-specific foundation model can be used for multimodal survival prediction in data-constrained clinical settings. We assess the foundation model CT-CLIP as a feature extractor for pretreatment computed tomography images and clinical variables from 242 diagnosed lung cancer patients. The evaluation includes adaptation strategies based on frozen encoders, full fine-tuning, and low-rank adaptation, together with modality ablations and comparisons with clinical and multimodal baselines. The results show that a frozen CT-CLIP model combined with a trainable lightweight survival head outperforms the clinical baseline and achieves comparable or improved performance relative to other multimodal approaches, and separates patients into clinically meaningful high- and low-risk groups.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08503
We present a Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) for extracting cross-seed universal features from independently trained BERT models. Cross-seed feature universality is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability: because dictionary learning is non-convex, independently trained networks learn misaligned feature spaces, so apparently identical features may differ by random initialization. We address this by computing an orthogonal Procrustes rotation between seeds' activation spaces before joint SAE training, combining Top-K sparsity, end-to-end downstream optimization, and an auxiliary dead-feature revival loss based on previous SAE literature. Evaluating on five independent seed pairs (ten BERT models) across three benchmark datasets (SST-2, Stanford Politeness, TweetEval Emotion), our full pipeline produces more universal features (Pearson r $\geq$ 0.70 across seeds) than post-hoc alignment baselines on all three datasets. A minimal qualitative analysis confirms that high-universality features encode interpretable sociolinguistic patterns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08499
Recent unified multimodal models show a single architecture can jointly perform vision/language understanding and image generation/editing. However, they repeatedly feed all historical visual and textual inputs into a shared context window, limiting long-horizon multimodal dialogue due to visual token explosion and unreliable cross-turn referencing. We propose a Cognitive-structured Multimodal Agent that externalizes visual information into an Episodic Visual Memory and selectively reactivates relevant episodes during reasoning. The agent consists of a Perceptual Abstraction Engine for structured visual abstraction, a Cognitive Retrieval Engine for cross-turn memory retrieval, and a Multimodal Executive Controller for autonomous task inference and action planning. To address the lack of turn-level retrieval supervision in existing datasets, we develop a Unified Scenario Engine that programmatically generates structured multi-turn conversations with fine-grained retrieval annotations, enabling reinforcement learning to optimize abstraction and retrieval policies. We also construct a long-horizon visual-dialogue benchmark stratified by difficulty to evaluate episodic visual recall. Our 8B agent achieves 91.4% retrieval accuracy over 20-turn sessions, surpassing 32B baselines by +8.2% while nearly halving per-turn inference time (23.1s -> 12.7s). We further present the Cognitive-structured Multimodal Agent Harness (CMA-Harness), a tool-augmented deployment of the same cognitive structure integrating persistent multimodal memory, web access, image generation/editing/composition tools, and OpenAI-compatible serving. Structured memory and modular decision-making offer a more scalable, efficient paradigm for long-horizon multimodal agents than monolithic parameter scaling. Code: this https URL ; Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08497
Sharp et al. (2025) introduce "agentic inequality" as a framework for analyzing disparities in access to AI agents across three dimensions: availability, quality, and quantity. These person- and organization-level dimensions characterize who can access agents and at what capability, but do not address a structurally important divide operating at a finer level: the individual interaction. Two users with nominally equivalent agent access may experience qualitatively different AI utility depending on whether the system can autonomously retrieve context from the user's knowledge corpus (Dynamic Context Retrieval) or requires the user to manually identify and attach relevant documents at each query (Manual Attachment). We term this the Context Access Divide (CAD). For knowledge-intensive workers whose intellectual capital spans tens of thousands of files, the CAD constitutes a qualitative threshold in AI usefulness: below it, the cognitive burden of context curation falls on the human, reproducing the inefficiencies AI is meant to eliminate. We propose contextuality -- the degree to which an AI system autonomously accesses a user's accumulated knowledge capital -- as a dimension of AI-mediated inequality that complements, but is not reducible to, the Sharp et al. framework. We formalize the CAD with a probabilistic model grounded in the fan effect literature in cognitive psychology, demonstrating that manual context attachment leads to a combinatorial collapse in task-success probability as corpus size and task conjunctivity grow, while dynamic retrieval architectures are structurally insulated from this collapse. We analyze the technical basis of this divide in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and examine its implications for knowledge-work stratification and AI platform governance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08495
Subjective NLP tasks often exhibit systematic annotator disagreement, requiring models that represent uncertainty rather than collapse it. We introduce Ensemble Diversity Optimization (EDO), a prediction-space framework that jointly optimizes ensemble weights, effective cardinality, and calibration through a unified differentiable objective. EDO learns ensemble composition and size end-to-end via Gumbel-Softmax relaxation and incorporates a signed diversity regularizer, tuned on validation data, to steer optimization toward either preserving or suppressing disagreement. This regularization prevents ensemble collapse and enables controlled navigation of the utility-calibration trade-off. The framework integrates a soft F1 surrogate, class-weighted cross-entropy to address imbalance, and reliability-weighted diversity to regulate intra-ensemble variability. Experiments on four subjective text-classification benchmarks (ArMIS, ConvAbuse, HS-Brexit, MD-Agreement) show that EDO substantially improves probabilistic calibration, reducing cross-entropy (40-78% depending on baseline) and lowering Brier scores relative to Soft-CE, Soft-MD, Top-5 Voting, and WEL, while maintaining competitive F1 and better alignment with annotator distributions. These results demonstrate that jointly optimizing ensemble structure with a signed diversity regularizer provides an efficient, model-agnostic approach for modeling human subjectivity in supervised learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08493
Biomedical language evolves rapidly as new discoveries emerge, causing traditional text models to lose semantic fidelity over time. Static embeddings and co-occurrence graphs cannot capture such evolution, leading to performance degradation in retrieval and knowledge discovery tasks. This paper introduces a Drift-Aware Temporal Graph Rewiring (DATGR) framework that models concept evolution by dynamically updating co-occurrence edges based on estimated semantic drift. Instead of retraining embeddings for each time slice, DATGR performs lightweight, feedback-driven rewiring using a logistic update rule applied to edge weights. Evaluated on the Biomedical Multi-Relation Corpus (BIOMRC), the method achieved a mean Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) improvement of approximately 0.066 absolute difference (0.699 vs. 0.633) over a static baseline. Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) remained comparable (0.738 vs. 0.744), showing that drift-aware adaptation enhances link-prediction recall without a loss in precision. These results demonstrate that edge-level adaptation effectively captures temporal semantic change in evolving biomedical text while remaining computationally efficient and interpretable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08490
Vision-language models excel at video captioning, yet typically generate descriptions that fail to capture individual viewers' attention. We propose VEGAS (Video caption Evaluation via GAze Score), a training-free metric that leverages test-time gaze to sample personalized, attention-aligned text. It is a cross-modal, information-theoretic metric that quantifies how well a candidate caption matches a viewer's focus. To evaluate VEGAS, we curate a dataset of egocentric activities and instructional slides paired with synchronized gaze and reference annotations. We then select captions based on VEGAS via rejection sampling without model retraining. Experiments show that VEGAS-selected captions align significantly better with human focus and improve downstream caption-to-video retrieval, demonstrating the practical utility of incorporating viewer attention during inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08489
I-JEPA and V-JEPA learn by matching latent predictions to target encoder outputs rather than regenerating the original input, and this has worked well for images and video. We explore whether the same objective works for compact network fingerprints. We built JA4-JEPA, a Transformer-based model trained on JA4, JA4H, JA4S, and JA4X subfields drawn from JA4DB and CIC-IDS- 2017. The training data combines roughly 397K samples from both sources, though no single sample contains all four view families. We evaluated the learned representations with a frozen kNN probe on protocol-family classification across TLS, DNS, and SSH. On 39,416 heldout samples the model achieved a cosine similarity of 0.9899 and a kNN accuracy of 0.9220. These results indicate that JEPA-style predictive learning can produce useful embeddings from JA4-derived fingerprints, even with incomplete view overlap across sources. Keywords: JA4, network fingerprinting, JEPA, predictive representation learning, self-supervised learning
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08465
A model should refuse two different things: answers it would get wrong, and questions it should not answer at all, such as unanswerable ones or ones resting on a false premise. The usual recipe thresholds a single confidence score, which cannot tell these apart. Across five instruction-tuned models from three families (2B to 14B), we find they are separate axes. Ordinary answer-confidence tracks whether an answer is right but is nearly blind to whether the question is answerable; a linear probe on hidden states does the reverse. The blind spot does not shrink with scale. It is worst on naturally occurring false-premise questions (CREPE). There, answer-confidence, P(IK), P(True), and even asking the model outright whether a premise is false all stay near chance, while a hidden-state probe reaches 0.69 to 0.77 AUROC: the model represents a problem it will not report. This turns out to be fixable. Instructing a model to check premises backfires, because it then disputes sound and false premises alike (57% false challenges), unable to tell them apart; routing the same instruction with the probe roughly triples challenge precision. We turn the two axes into a calibrated policy that answers only when an answerability score and a correctness score each clear a separately certifies behave differently: the unanswerable-answer rate is controllable at every scale, while the wrong-answer rate is capped by model accuracy, so the guarantee tightens as threshold policy certifies both budgets at 0.75 coverage of correct answers, against 0.31 for a single threshold; at 14B it is the only policy that certifies at all.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08456
Coordinated beamforming in distributed 5G networks relies on the timely exchange of inter-cell scheduling information, but backhaul latency makes this information stale. Even a single transmission time interval (TTI) of delay can reduce CBF-SLNR performance below the uncoordinated baseline, because the precoder suppresses interference toward users that are no longer active. Coordination on stale information is therefore worse than no coordination at all. To address this, we propose a two-stage predictive framework in which a Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network (StemGNN) predicts future user equipment (UE) scheduling states from delayed historical observations, and the predictions replace stale inputs to the CBF-SLNR precoder. Evaluated on a three-cell massive MIMO downlink with 60 UEs and 64 antennas per base station under Quadriga Urban Micro (UMi) channels and a proportional fair scheduler, StemGNN achieves a mean scheduling prediction accuracy of 87.57%, outperforming LSTM, GRU, Simple RNN, and Markov chain baselines at all evaluated horizons, with gains of up to 7.71% over LSTM at longer horizons where inter-UE structural dependencies dominate over temporal autocorrelation. When integrated into coordinated beamforming, the predictions recover 57-73% of the sum rate loss caused by one TTI of backhaul delay, improving sum rate by 9.58-14.35% over the no-prediction baseline and recovering up to 83% of the Lag-1 fairness loss for cell-edge users, with fairness gains persisting at higher lag values where throughput gains diminish. These results show that treating backhaul latency as a spatio-temporal forecasting problem is an effective approach for robust inter-cell coordination in delay-constrained networks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08454
Determining agricultural potential is fundamental to sustainable land management and agricultural planning. Remote sensing data is increasingly valuable as an avenue for agricultural potential due to the cost of traditional methods (surveys, in-situ measurements, soil testing, etc). ImageCLEF AI4Agri 2026: Subtask 1 is concerned with the prediction of viticulture potential in Southern France. The DS@GT ARC's submission for Subtask 1 introduces an ensemble of U-Net and a Geospatial Foundation Model (Prithvi-2.0). Our best model achieved a $\pm$1 accuracy of 68.32 on the leaderboard, ranking 2nd among 7 teams. The implementation for this work is publicly available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08449
Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong local visuomotor skills, but they are trained on in-distribution task trajectories and often fail under deployment perturbations such as semantic retargeting, goal re-binding, spatial-layout shifts, and unstable local contacts. LLM coding agents provide complementary semantic and compositional reasoning, but purely analytic primitives struggle with irregular grasping, constrained placement, and articulated-object interaction. We present Harness VLA, a memory-augmented agentic framework that exposes a frozen VLA as a retryable contact-rich primitive and composes it with a small fixed library of analytic primitives for grounding, staging, transport, navigation, and release. Rather than expanding the skill library, the harness learns the operating range of these fixed primitives from task-specific execution traces, global success rules, and failure models. By lifting semantic re-grounding, non-contact execution, and VLA re-staging to the planner while reserving the frozen VLA for local contact-rich phases, Harness VLA extends pretrained VLAs beyond their original trajectory distribution without finetuning. Across perturbed tabletop, household kitchen, and clean-to-randomized bimanual manipulation, Harness VLA improves over the strongest relevant baselines by 38.6 and 25.4 percentage points on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa365, respectively, and reaches 58.4% on RoboTwin C2R.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08448
Dynamic traffic variations in Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) lead to drift, which degrades the performance of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) models. Traditional retraining approaches maintain forecasting accuracy but incur high computational cost and may lead to violations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This work proposes a Q-learning-based adaptive retraining approach that formulates the retraining decision as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent learns a policy that balances forecasting accuracy and retraining cost. The proposed approach incorporates a multi-expert Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) ensemble to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and improve robustness across diverse traffic conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively reduces retraining overhead compared to greedy and random baselines, while maintaining system performance within predefined limits.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08443
Current Unified Large Multimodal Models (ULMMs) support interleaved multimodal reasoning through textual reasoning and intermediate visual states, but typically generate each visual state as a full image. This full-image generation paradigm introduces substantial visual-token redundancy and dilutes supervision on sparse yet reasoning-critical state transitions. We propose DeltaV, a ULMM that replaces full-image generation with visual updates. Conditioned on historical visual states, DeltaV incrementally predicts compact update tokens that capture the visual changes across reasoning steps, avoiding repeated modeling of unchanged content. To align the token budget of each update with the magnitude of visual change, DeltaV introduces a temporal similarity (TSIM) Router, which stops allocating tokens once the marginal reconstruction gain falls below a threshold. To support more diverse and generalizable reasoning, we further construct StructCoT, a large-scale interleaved multimodal reasoning dataset with 1.05M samples spanning 44 task domains. Experiments show that the visual-update paradigm reduces newly generated visual tokens by 55.6\% on average without compromising reconstruction fidelity, and improves multimodal reasoning by 3.3\% over full-image generation. Trained with StructCoT and large-scale multimodal data, DeltaV-2B further outperforms substantially larger open-source models by 8.4\% on in-domain multimodal reasoning evaluations and surpasses the comparable-scale Qwen3-VL-2B by 5.9\% on external multimodal reasoning and understanding benchmarks. Code, models, and StructCoT will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08434
Male infertility is a significant yet often underdiagnosed aspect of reproductive health, with semen analysis serving as the cornerstone of clinical evaluation. To address this problem, this study investigates the use of machine learning algorithms to classify male fertility status based on key semen parameters, i.e., sperm concentration, motility, and morphology, using the VISEM dataset. This dataset includes semen samples from 85 participants, classified into three categories, i.e., Fertile, Sub-Fertile, and Infertile, according to the World Health Organization's criteria. After pre-processing and feature engineering, the dataset was used to train and assess multiple classification models using the LazyPredict framework. Among the more than 40 algorithms tested, the Nearest Centroid classifier achieved an accuracy of 94.2%, outperforming other models such as Support Vector Machines and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis. The model's robustness was validated using 5-fold cross-validation and multiclass ROC-AUC analysis. This study illustrates that machine learning models can provide fast, accurate, and objective assessments of semen quality, potentially supporting clinical decision-making in andrology and assisted reproductive technologies. These findings emphasize the growing potential of machine learning to enhance fertility diagnostics and inform patient-specific treatment strategies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08429