Egocentric video and body-worn inertial sensors are increasingly recorded together, and the video is usually encoded by pretrained models. What these embeddings represent when the camera sits on the head, and how they should be combined with inertial sensing, has received little attention. Across VideoMAEv2, CLIP, DINOv2 and the egocentric VC-1, the leading principal directions of the embedding are dominated by where the camera looks. Measured head orientation explains them on Ego-Exo4D for egocentric (R^2 0.49-0.70) but not exocentric cameras, and the scene layout explains them on WEAR. The part that the limbs' inertial signals predict separates activities across people. In a set-level probe, the rest separates exercise sets within a participant but not activities across people. This is consistent with separate roles: the video finds the clips of the same set, and the inertial classifier labels them. On WEAR, with temporal order removed and one random limb per one-second clip, we propagate inertial predictions over a within-participant video graph whose leading components are removed. This raises subject-wise cross-validated macro-F1 from 0.648 to 0.852. In our comparisons, propagation helps only over the video graph, and fusing the modalities in one classifier, or adding inertial edges to the graph, performs worse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12926
In continuous diffusion language models (DLMs), latents generated by the diffusion prior are mapped almost deterministically to tokens, either by a decoder or through a token embedding matrix. Unlike in image generation, where visual details can vary continuously, the diffusion prior must capture fine-grained discrete token choices in continuous space, which can make the joint latent distribution difficult to model. We argue that generative roles should instead be divided: the diffusion prior should generate high-level predictive information, while the decoder should resolve the remaining token-level choices. Based on this view, we introduce Predictive-State Flows (PSF), which partitions a sequence into blocks and associates each block with a predictive state computed solely from the preceding context. A rectified-flow prior generates the sequence of predictive states, after which a block-causal decoder generates all blocks in parallel, autoregressively only within each block. This design reduces diffusion from L token-level states to K << L predictive states and reduces token-level sequential depth to L/K. On unconditional OpenWebText generation, a 197M-parameter model with K=8 achieves a generative perplexity of 22.8 at entropy 5.16 using 0.31 TFLOPs per 1024-token document, versus 24.0 and 7.2 TFLOPs for ELF-B with 32 sampling steps. The corresponding measured operating points yield MAUVE@512 of 0.93 and 0.73, respectively. Controlled comparisons further show that content states, which additionally encode their own blocks, yield 8-16% higher generative perplexity than predictive states, and that replacing sampled predictive-state trajectories with a shared mean lowers MAUVE@512 by 0.11. These results suggest that latent design for continuous DLMs should consider not only how compactly text is represented, but also how generative roles are divided between the prior and the decoder.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12898
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn compact latent world models without pixel reconstruction. Existing JEPA pipelines typically train visual representations and action-conditioned dynamics before adding a control policy or solver. We introduce LeWAM, an end-to-end JEPA for control with: (1) a joint training objective over next latent state prediction and action flow matching, and (2) an isotropic Gaussian constraint on the latent state, enabling a single model to support direct policy execution and efficient planning by evaluating sampled actions with its learned latent dynamics. Compared with prior JEPAs in visual planning, LeWAM improves success rate from 28.6% to 89.7% on contact-rich tasks and from 10.9% to 46.2% on long-horizon tasks, and plans 32.3 times faster. On behavior cloning tasks in simulation and physical robots, LeWAM is also competitive with established methods. Interpretability analyses show that LeWAM learns control-relevant representations and action distributions effectively guiding test-time planning and control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12818
Referring Audio--Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS) is an emergent multimodal task requiring the precise identification and segmentation of a specific object based on a natural language expression grounded in both visual and auditory cues. Unlike traditional AVS, which segments generic sound sources, or referring video object segmentation (Ref-VOS), which relies solely on visual--textual grounding, Ref-AVS necessitates fine-grained tri-modal interaction across vision, audio, and language. However, existing methods often fail to maintain consistency when subjected to target shift, a phenomenon where the model erroneously transfers its focus between objects due to transient occlusions, acoustic fading, or identity ambiguities. To address this, we propose a novel Shift-Aware Identity-guided Latent (SAIL) refinement framework. It introduces a dual-token strategy that decouples frame-level dynamics from a global semantic anchor to explicitly model target-shift cues. We design a shift-aware refinement module that rectifies drift by aligning tokens with domain-specific evidence. Finally, we leverage a decoder that integrates the refined embeddings with a continuous memory update to maintain spatio-temporal coherence and identity consistency throughout the video sequence. Extensive experiments conducted on two Ref-AVS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, significantly outperforming existing AVS, Ref-VOS, and Ref-AVS approaches. The code will be released after publication.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12783
Unlearning in large reasoning models (LRMs) requires removing forget-set information from both the reasoning trace and the final answer. Existing approaches achieve this objective at the cost of reasoning collapse, where the model fails to produce a coherent chain-of-thought (CoT) and does not properly terminate its reasoning process. To address this challenge, we propose REDaCT (REgenerate via Detection and Corrective Tuning), an inference-time unlearning framework for LRMs. REDaCT consists of two key components: (1) a binary leak detector that identifies sentences in the reasoning trace that leak forget-set information, and (2) an embedding optimization module that learns a corrective embedding offline, such that when injected at the first detected leak during inference, it guides subsequent reasoning towards sentences that do not leak forget-set information. Experimental results show that REDaCT completely avoids reasoning collapse, substantially improving reasoning preservation compared to state-of-the-art unlearning methods while maintaining perfect answer forgetting and near-perfect CoT forgetting. Our code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12769
Semantic query engines evaluate natural-language filters with a large language model, and every evaluation is a costly oracle call. Optimizers that reduce these calls face a dilemma: cascades that trust a cheap proxy miss their precision and recall targets on many queries, methods with finite-sample guarantees save little, and all of them discard the oracle's labels when the query ends. We present SemViews, a certified semantic filter that orders tuples by signals that cost no oracle calls (the labels that earlier queries left behind as semantic views, a local embedding, and a helper model's score), refines that order with labels it must pay for anyway, and certifies its answer with fresh stratified oracle samples. The answer meets user precision and recall targets with probability at least $1-\delta$ for every workload and every catalog, so a stale or misleading view can cost oracle calls but never accuracy. On four workloads replayed against 725,000 recorded oracle labels, SemViews meets both targets on 99.63% of queries and saves 28%-45% of the oracle calls, whereas the only prior method in our study with the same guarantee needs 1.32x-1.71x as many calls. When a question returns in different words, views cut its calls by a further 27%-36%, with both targets met on at least 99.8% of such queries; similarity caches and entailment-based reuse meet them on only 17%-47%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12768
Efficient autoregressive generation is increasingly limited by the memory footprint of the key-value (KV) cache, which grows linearly with sequence length, batch size, and model depth. Existing approaches such as Multi-Query Attention (MQA), Grouped-Query Attention (GQA), Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), and Tensor Product Attention (TPA) reduce this cost through different trade-offs, but often sacrifice expressivity, require additional positional-encoding machinery, or impose restrictive low-rank structure. We propose Kronecker Product Attention (KPA), which represents key and value activations as sums of Kronecker products of compact, token-dependent matrix factors. KPA strictly generalizes TPA: rank-one vector-outer-product factorization arises as a degenerate Kronecker split, while non-degenerate matrix factors can represent richer block-structured patterns. We further show that a structured rotary embedding operator matched to the Kronecker representation preserves the relative-position property of RoPE while rotating only the compact factors, removing the need for a decoupled RoPE branch as in MLA. Empirically, KPA matches or exceeds TPA, MHA, MQA, GQA, and MLA across four model scales and nine downstream benchmarks under identical training conditions, while achieving up to 10x KV cache compression. The Kronecker head split is a tuneable hyperparameter that allows practitioners to navigate the compression-accuracy trade-off at design time without architectural changes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12657
When you ask a vision-language model (VLM) a question with an image, it answers your question based on the image. But to act means to choose: saying one thing means choosing to respond not say another. This becomes an issue when the image contains multiple features that equally relate to the question at hand: how would VLMs choose to respond? This problem is precisely studied by the classical Stroop task in psychology: among a set of deliberately designed images whose text and color conflicts (e.g., \textcolor{blue}{RED}), participants are instructed to report the color. We adapt this psychological paradigm to a benchmark and prompted a range of contrastive and generative VLMs on their behavior. Across models, we observe a persistent bias toward the feature of text in Stroop images: when text and color disagree, models preferentially generate responses centered to the text rather than color. We then opened the black box and examined the source of this bias and why certain features influences the model's behavior more than others. In the embedding space, we found that textual cues are represented more strongly and separably than color cues. This representational asymmetry predicts intervention success: steering models toward text-related directions is substantially easier than steering them toward color-related directions. Using a classical psychological paradigm, we demonstrate, at both behavioral and representational levels, that distinct features within the same image can exert unequal influence on VLM behavior. Our findings suggest that VLMs assign different degrees of saliency to different features within the same image, highlighting the need to understand how cue-specific saliency shapes their performance in widely used downstream applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12650
Geopolitical and strategic intelligence reports constitute a rich source of expert knowledge and have increasing value in the current political climate, but their heterogeneity and analytical complexity pose challenges for retrieval-augmented question answering. We introduce a benchmark for grounded question answering over 415 open-source geopolitical and strategic intelligence reports, comprising 5,525 document-grounded question-answer pairs spanning factual, inferential, comparative, and risk-oriented questions. We propose a document-aware generation pipeline that profiles reports before generating questions and validate dataset quality through expert annotation and an LLM-as-judge protocol. Using the benchmark, we evaluate 15 retrieval systems and six open-weight LLMs for RAG. We find that models perform similarly on document-level retrieval, while at the harder chunk level retrieval quality is not driven by embedding-model scale: bge-m3, a mid-size open encoder matches an order of magnitude larger ones and outperforms commercial embedding APIs. In contrast, answer generation remains challenging even given the gold evidence, particularly for inferential and risk-oriented questions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12617
Event ontology is the foundational framework for defining events in a dataset. Event type induction generally involves domain experts who define guidelines for creating event types and their names based on the dataset's domain and scope. However, this process is resource-intensive in terms of annotation costs and is prone to human biases. To alleviate the need for manual event ontology creation, we propose the CLUE framework for event type induction, naming, and annotation. Our main contributions in this work are: 1) designing a novel joint embedding representation for expressing both the verb-centric view and the semantic view of events; 2) event type induction using contrastive loss guided clustering; 3) event naming and refinement. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12580
World models improve sample efficiency by training policies on imagined trajectories, but their usefulness depends on learning representations that capture the information needed for future control. We study whether self-supervised joint-embedding prediction (JEPA) can provide this learning signal for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We introduce MA-JEPA, a stochastic world model that replaces observation reconstruction with prediction of target representations, enabling model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning with centralized training and decentralized execution. A categorical latent state and a causal Transformer are trained with posterior and action-conditioned dynamics prediction objectives and are then used for actor-critic learning from latent imagination. A training-only joint predictor conditions on all agents' local states and actions to predict each agent's next local observation embedding. These predictions are passed through the same local posterior used during real interaction with a centralized critic that is used only for value learning, with execution remaining decentralized. Our experiments show that this architecture performs strongly on SMAC, matching or exceeding the strongest reported comparator mean win rate on four of eight evaluated maps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33563
Close-proximity multi-arm manipulation requires collision models that are both geometrically accurate and differentiable enough for real-time optimization. Classical geometry checkers provide reliable distances but are difficult to use inside gradient-based model predictive control, while conservative proxy models can restrict tightly coupled motion. We present PI-UDF, a physics-informed unified differentiable framework for body-to-body collision distance prediction between articulated robots. PI-UDF combines analytical forward kinematics with learnable link-geometry embeddings and a shared residual network to predict pairwise inter-arm distances directly from robot configurations. To improve safety-critical fidelity, we combine quota-driven boundary mining with an asymmetric boundary-crossing penalty that emphasizes false-safe sign errors near the collision boundary. The learned distance field is integrated into nonlinear MPC as a differentiable inter-arm clearance term. We validate the framework on a real dual-Franka platform through high-speed close-proximity 14-DoF dual-arm swapping, sustained single-arm dynamic evasion, and dynamic-evasion planning configurations with frozen, predicted, and target-switching treatments of the moving arm. Hardware experiments and offline Drake/FCL replay show that PI-UDF provides a differentiable inter-arm clearance estimate suitable for closed-loop collision-aware collaborative robot motion generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12404
Self-supervised multimodal representation learning has achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, yet capturing synergistic information remains challenging due to the complexity of cross-modal interactions. Unlike the shared information across individual modalities, synergy arises when task-relevant signals emerge only from the joint configuration of multiple modalities and cannot be recovered from any modality in isolation. This work focuses on how to preserve the information capacity for such synergistic signals in multimodal representations. The key observation is that synergistic information is reflected in higher-order statistical dependence among modalities, which provides a principled target for explicitly modeling joint interactions. Motivated by this insight, we propose Higher-order Representation and Information Learning (HRIL), which constructs an empirical cross-moment tensor over modality embeddings to represent multi-way interactions. HRIL employs Tucker decomposition to obtain a core tensor, complemented by a synergy-aware regularizer that prevents energy concentration and preserves higher-order coupling capacity for synergistic information capture. Experiments on the controlled synergy task and real-world benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing multimodal contrastive methods, with notable gains on tasks dominated by synergistic interactions. Code is released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12393
Omnimodal embeddings naturally involve both shared representations and modality-specific features across heterogeneous inputs. However, existing omnimodal embedding methods often rely on a single shared parameter space over mixed-modality data, limiting structural separation between universal and modality-specific representations. To address this, we propose Syn-Omni, a unified framework for structured omnimodal adaptation with modality specialization and controlled cross-modal collaboration. Specifically, we introduce Orthogonal Modality-Expert LoRA (OME-LoRA), which decomposes adaptation into a shared LoRA path for universal semantics and modality-expert LoRA paths for modality-aware specialization. Furthermore, Progressive Synergy Routing (PSR) enables experts to first establish modality-specific priors, then gradually interact with other modality-experts for cross-modal synergy. Evaluated across 81 diverse tasks spanning image, video, audio, and audiovisual modalities, Syn-Omni consistently outperforms omnimodal baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured specialization and cross-modal progressive collaboration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12256
Pretrained audio encoders are reused for downstream tasks that are often unknown when the encoder is trained, so their usefulness depends partly on which signal properties survive the pretext objective. We study this retained information through paired source reconstruction. Using a shared Stable Audio Open latent diffusion decoder, we reconstruct five-second, 44.1-kHz stereo music from frozen representations produced by supervised classifiers (VGGish, ConvNeXt), an audio-text contrastive model (CLAP), and a waveform-reconstruction model (EnCodec). These objectives impose different pressures to preserve source detail, while their exposed interfaces vary substantially in temporal and spectral resolution. Evaluating on the Million Song Dataset (MSD), we find clear differences in reconstructability across encoder families, while within encoder comparisons show improved recovery when finer temporal or spectral structure is exposed. Even compressed task oriented embeddings support reconstructions that preserve measurable source specificity and high level musical content.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12250
Pre-trained transformer models are increasingly being used to study scientific and technological progress. Encoders tuned to paper or patent text outperform general-purpose models on downstream classification, regression, and proximity tasks within science and technology. However, the applicability of these models for studying time-dependent or archival properties of science, technology, and their interface is limited due to lookahead and domain biases inherent to these pre-trained models. These limitations arise from training on corpora with unconstrained chronological and text source distributions. We introduce SciTBERT: a family of chronologically consistent BERT-derived language models trained on text from scientific papers, patents, and high-quality educational web text with training data cutoff dates spanning each year between 2013 and 2025. We also post-train these models in a chronologically-consistent manner using paper and patent citations, creating SciTBERT-CI model family. We find that these models generally outperform predecessor domain-specific encoder models even when training data is limited by early year restrictions in the corpus. To further investigate the extent to which this class of models can learn representations that bridge science and technology, we introduce the PatRepEval benchmark, a suite of patent-related text embedding tasks at the science-technology interface. Performance in a variety of classification, regression, and retrieval tasks spanning papers and patents highlights the importance of aligning encoder model representations with the domain distributions of their downstream tasks, and chronologically consistent encoders can match or exceed models trained without temporal constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12207
Electromagnetic spectrum monitoring increasingly requires flexible analysis beyond task-specific recognition and detection. Multimodal large language models offer a unified interface, but extending vision-language models (VLMs) to raw I/Q signals requires tokenization that balances fidelity against a strict budget. For signals, dense encoding causes token costs to grow with observation length, whereas fixed-resolution compression may discard short-duration or localized signal evidence. Thus, we propose \textbf{BATok}, a budget-adaptive signal tokenizer that adjusts token capacity to the input length while allocating that capacity according to the signal content. BATok constructs candidate representations from signal-derived features using lightweight multi-resolution branches, then combines a local energy prior with learnable queries to resample these representations into compact signal tokens. The number of tokens adapts to the input length while remaining strictly bounded. The resulting tokens are projected into the language embedding space of VLMs. We further introduce \textbf{EMSpec-Instruct}, a multimodal instruction dataset aligning raw I/Q signals, waterfall images, and language supervision for modulation recognition, structured detection, and language-conditioned signal grounding. Experiments show that BATok learns effective signal representations and achieves competitive performance across all tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12142
Automated methods have been proposed to overcome the limitations of human verbal deception detection, but evidence remains fragmented across disciplines. We systematically reviewed 25 years of research (289 reports, 6,136 classification models) and meta-analyzed 3,653 models nested within 97 datasets. Pooled accuracy was 74.4% (95% CI: 71.2%-77.4%) with substantial heterogeneity. Accuracy was driven by methodological quality (ground truth, data source, class balance, evaluation procedure) more than by model complexity: the adoption of embeddings and large language models has not translated into improved predictive performance. Only 12.46% of reports used data with verifiable ground-truth, and only 23.96% of models were evaluated on independent data. The pooled accuracy aligns with meta-analyses of manual approaches, suggesting a ceiling of 70-75%, unlikely to be lifted by current research conventions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12118
World action models (WAMs) aim to answer a coupled physical question: given a task instruction, what motion should the robot execute, and how will that motion change the surrounding world? Most existing WAMs build on pretrained video generators and represent world evolution through images or visual latents. Robotic interaction, however, takes place in metric three-dimensional space, while images are view-dependent projections whose pixel distances do not directly encode physical distances. We introduce UNITAS, to our knowledge the first 3D-native world action model that unifies observations, actions, and scene dynamics in a shared metric 3D frame within each interaction, using a common representation across robot embodiments and human hands. Action flow represents human hands and robot grippers as 3D point trajectories, while scene flow describes scene-point displacements conditioned on these trajectories. World-aligned 3D positional embeddings ground visual tokens with or without depth input, and a physical-time trajectory tokenizer encodes each point trajectory as one token anchored at its current 3D position. This interface supports both direct action execution and action-conditioned scene prediction. With 1.7B parameters, UNITAS achieves the best action-conditioned scene prediction on RoboTwin among the compared methods, with up to 49% lower displacement errors than PointWorld, and state-of-the-art manipulation success, including 99.8% on LIBERO and an average of 85% across real-world tasks. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12099
Detecting intra-operative speech impairment during awake craniotomy is essential for preserving language function. However, automated detection remains challenging because operating-room recordings contain substantial acoustic interference, clinically relevant speech events are rare, and available cohorts are small and heterogeneous across speakers. This study presents a systematic component-wise evaluation of a pipeline for distinguishing dysarthric from no-trouble speech in the DATABRASE corpus of awake-craniotomy recordings. The pipeline incorporates speaker diarization to isolate patient speech, a multi-view representation combining handcrafted acoustic descriptors with multilayer wav2vec 2.0 embeddings, speaker-conditional normalization and transferability-based feature selection to improve cross-speaker robustness, and a cascaded classifier comprising a gradient-boosted first stage and a neural second stage. Evaluation was conducted under strict speaker-independent conditions using leave-one-speaker-out cross-validation. The results show that cross-speaker performance is influenced more strongly by the speech representation than by classifier choice. The AUCs of three classifiers differed by no more than 4.7%, whereas replacing conventional acoustic descriptors with the multilayer self-supervised representation produced AUC improvements of 18.2%-26.1%. Diarization-conditioned feature extraction and the proposed classifier cascade provided additional consistent gains. These findings indicate that reliable patient-specific speech isolation and strong pretrained representations are more important than increased classifier complexity in low-resource intra-operative settings. They also quantify the potential performance gains that may be achieved through patient-specific preoperative calibration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11825