Universal multimodal retrieval typically encodes a query once and ranks independently indexed items by embedding similarity. This design supports efficient search, but leaves the query representation unchanged even when retrieved items could help clarify the information need. We introduce the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that learns both to select informative items and to use their content to refine subsequent retrieval. ARR alternates between retrieving an item and updating the query embedding, then uses the final embedding to rank the collection. Supervised fine-tuning teaches the encoder to use feedback through stepwise contrastive supervision. Reinforcement learning treats feedback items as actions and optimizes their selection using the final reciprocal rank of a relevant item. A query-side adapter enables this optimization against a fixed item index. ARR demonstrates strong retrieval performance on both in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks, outperforming the compared baselines on average. Further analyses show that feedback improves retrieval at inference time and that training with feedback also improves the initial query embedding, before any item is observed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11666
Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining highlight the role of high-quality training data in improving performance. While model-based filtering has proven effective in selecting high-quality subsets from web-scale corpora, especially for high-resource languages, low-resource languages face challenges due to limited availability of annotated data. This work explores extending quality filtering to over 100 languages by proposing a multilingual adaptation approach that converts an existing English quality classifier into a multilingual variant. Our approach proposes training a small multi-layer perceptron on top of Transformer encoder-only model embeddings, using multilingual text as input and scores obtained from English classifiers applied to machine-translated text as labels. Our 1B, 3B and 8B scale experiments show that our approach maintains the downstream LLM benchmark performance of existing multilingual model-based filtering baselines, without harming regional and cultural knowledge benchmarks. To further evaluate cross-lingual generalization, we compare classifier scores of high-quality synthetic data and web samples, and the correlation of classifier scores with LLM-based ones, revealing that the classifier can learn the scoring criteria of its original English variant, even for languages not included in its training data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11585
Graph clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, aiming at grouping nodes with similar characteristics in the graph into clusters. This problem has been widely explored using graph neural networks (GNNs) due to their ability to leverage node attributes and graph topology for effective cluster assignments. However, representations learned through GNNs typically struggle to capture global relationships between nodes via local message-passing mechanisms. Moreover, the redundancy and noise inherently present in graph data may easily result in node representations lacking compactness and robustness. To address these issues, we propose a conjoint framework CoCo, which captures compactness and consistency in the learned node representations for deep graph clustering. Technically, our CoCo leverages graph convolutional filters to learn robust node representations from both local and global views, and then encodes them into low-rank compact embeddings, thus effectively removing the redundancy and noise as well as uncovering the intrinsic underlying structure. To further enrich the node semantics, we develop a consistency learning strategy based on compact embeddings to facilitate knowledge transfer from the two perspectives. Our experimental results indicate that our CoCo outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts on various datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11506
Multimodal Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis benefits from integrating heterogeneous clinical, imaging, genomic, and biomarker evidence, but clinical cohorts frequently suffer from irregular modality missingness. Existing fusion methods often synthesize absent inputs, risking the introduction of artificial surrogates, or pool available signals into uninterpretable latent spaces. We present CoPoE (Disease-Coordinate Product-of-Experts), a disease-coordinate framework that maps multimodal evidence into a structured latent space partitioned into four distinct biological and clinical axes: genetic Risk, molecular Pathology, Neurodegeneration, and clinical Stage (R/P/N/S). Each observed modality parameterizes a diagonal Gaussian expert over the full RPNS vector, and a masked Product-of-Experts architecture fuses only the available modalities. Consequently, absent modalities add no factor to the fusion path, allowing the network to preserve a robust, decomposable posterior for any non-empty modality subset without synthetic imputation in the RPNS path. Through extensive missing-modality experiments on the ADNI dataset, CoPoE achieves the best all-modality performance and the highest mean AUROC across all 15 observed-subset evaluations among standardized missing-modality fusion baselines under a shared non-PET ADNI embedding benchmark, while substantially improving raw-probability ECE, Brier score, and NLL. Furthermore, PET-supervised probing shows evidence enrichment within the pathology (P) block under full modalities, with tau-related signal retained even when direct fluid biospecimen inputs are withheld. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11394
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, while capable of producing highly fluent outputs, remain vulnerable to hallucinations, which are translations that are natural yet semantically unrelated to the source. This vulnerability is acute in low-resource settings like Sinhala-to-English, where weak cross-lingual alignment leads to hallucinations. This paper introduces a framework for reference-free hallucination detection in this language pair. We present a 45,000-sample synthetic dataset generated through a probabilistic chain of five linguistically motivated corruption strategies, with a semantic rescue mechanism that uses character-level similarity to distinguish hallucinations from morphological variants. We fine-tune mDeBERTa-v3 for token-level sequence labelling, reaching a token-level F1 of 0.841 +/- 0.001 over three seeds on a source-disjoint test set, and study a three-signal ensemble integrating neural risk scores, sequence log-probabilities, and cross-lingual semantic embeddings (LaBSE). A source-ablation control shows that the detector relies on the Sinhala source rather than on surface artefacts of the corruption process: shuffling or removing the source reduces sentence-level AUROC from 0.970 to chance. We benchmark eight NMT systems spanning five model families and find that detector firings vary by an order of magnitude across architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11389
In an image latent space, the embeddings of high-resolution, natural, and sharp images form a manifold. Degradation of high-resolution images pushes their embeddings off this manifold. Real-world super-resolution (SR) then becomes the task of mapping the degraded embedding back onto this manifold --- not anywhere on the manifold, but to the point that preserves what the input still carries, both its semantics and pixel details. Every published method implements this mapping in a reconstruction-oriented latent space or pixel space. We claim these spaces are the wrong substrates for SR. Low-resolution and degraded images are embedded far from the manifold, making the mapping difficult and expensive. The lack of semantic information in these substrates also makes it difficult to navigate to the faithful point on the manifold, causing severe hallucination when degradation is heavy. Thus, restoring in a suitable latent space is crucial to the SR task. We show that the latent space of 23 fused layers of a frozen DINOv3-L is one such space that makes the SR task easier. Degraded images are embedded near the manifold. Moreover, this substrate contains a hierarchy of information, from pixel record to degradation robust semantics, guiding the model to find the faithful point on the manifold. On this substrate, a 415M decoder is trained under reconstruction and adversarial objectives to map the degraded embeddings back and decode to pixel space in one pass. The resulting model, RAESR, attains the best fidelity--perception trade-off among state-of-the-art adversarial and diffusion-based restorers on RealSR, DRealSR, LSDIR and DIV2K-Val, at 37 ms per 512 by 512 image on a single H20 GPU. Swapping the substrate for a VAE latent under an identical recipe loses on every metric.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04781
A trained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene ships as a portable parameter array that can be copied, pruned, requantized, or repackaged outside its training pipeline, so ownership evidence is most useful when it lives in the released parameters and remains checkable long after the embedding tooling is gone. Existing 3DGS watermarks typically tie embedding or extraction to scene optimization, a learned decoder, or rendered views, so the evidence survives only as long as a second trained artifact does. FlyMark instead writes a keyed message into the parameters a 3DGS file already stores. Its carrier directions are derived from the photoreceptors of a published connectome, a citable versioned artifact that fixes the geometry exhaustively and leaves nothing to tune per scene. A virtual observer reads cone-wise apparent luminance along a scene-normalized orbit from stored centers, colors, and opacities; a keyed dithered quantization-index-modulation code replicates each message bit across these observations; and one sparse bounded least-squares solve realizes the targets through achromatic shifts of existing degree-zero colors under a hard per-channel linear-RGB bound. All geometry and higher-order appearance parameters are preserved bit-identically, and extraction needs only cone queries, rounding, and majority voting. Under a model-domain threat model on synthetic and real scenes, FlyMark attains high clean bit accuracy and visual fidelity while cleanly separating matched from wrong keys.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11364
Pathology vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong visual perception ability, but their robustness in the language domain remains poorly characterized. Existing pathology VLM benchmarks largely rely on canonical closed-set prompts or perturb only generic templates, treating language as a fixed evaluation component rather than a variable axis of model behavior. In clinical practice, however, diagnostic language varies across reports, institutions, and candidate diagnoses. We introduce PathLang, a language-centered and clinically grounded zero-shot benchmark. PathLang holds the underlying slides, ground-truth labels, and image-text evaluation direction fixed while systematically varying only the diagnostic language, so that performance differences reflect how a diagnosis is phrased rather than what is imaged. The language variation follows how pathologists actually rephrase diagnoses (terminology, specificity, and reporting style), and all prompts and candidate pools are validated by six board-certified pathologists. PathLang covers four task families: (1) zero-shot classification with image-text alignment analysis, (2) cross-modal retrieval, (3) paraphrase robustness, including semantic-equivalence paraphrases, length and reporting-style variation, and prompt ensembling, and (4) open-vocabulary diagnosis retrieval over four candidate pools with distinct forms of semantic competition. Across nine VLMs and five public datasets spanning four organs, we find that performance is highly sensitive to clinically equivalent paraphrases, varies substantially across forms of semantic competition, and that image-text alignment quality does not necessarily translate into inter-class separability. We release the prompt corpus, candidate pools, pre-computed text embeddings, and evaluation code at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11329
Radiology report generation can automatically generate clinical descriptions from X-ray images, thereby significantly improving the efficiency of radiologists. This task is challenging because it requires medical knowledge to accurately identify diseases and describe them in a professional manner. However, existing methods often overlook the importance of enhancing medical knowledge in describing pivotal areas, a capability that requires models to effectively extract and aggregate knowledge at multiple levels of granularity. Accordingly, we herein propose a novel and compact Efficient Multi-Granularity Knowledge Transfer (\textbf{EMGKT}) method to address the above issues. First, we encode global knowledge embeddings using a medical vision-language model, which provides contextual medical knowledge. Moreover, we devise a novel Fine-Grained Knowledge Distillation (FGKD) training task which efficiently extract fine-grained knowledge. Specifically, the FGKD training task contains teacher embeddings and student embeddings. Teacher embeddings are encoded using extra priors; while student embeddings are learned from the teacher embeddings through knowledge distillation. During inference, the student embeddings are used to enhance fine-grained knowledge while the teacher embeddings are discarded, resulting in negligible computational costs and no need for extra priors. Finally, we further develop a mixture of disease diagnosis expert classifiers to enhance knowledge extraction. The classifiers are initialized using disease embeddings and are modeled as different experts to address various granularity features. Notably, \textbf{EMGKT} can be efficiently applied to most existing methods. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely-used public datasets and various baselines, which demonstrates the effectiveness and transferability of \textbf{EMGKT}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11303
Time-series diagnostic systems rarely rely on retrieving relevant historical cases, and when they do, retrieval is evaluated only indirectly through downstream prediction. We introduce READ-Bench, a benchmark for historical-case retrieval across 12 diagnostic datasets, centered on multivariate time series, that defines relevance by shared fault or event type rather than signal shape, so visually different traces of the same fault count as relevant while similar-looking traces of different faults do not. Treating retrieval as a base retriever followed by a reranker, we evaluate classical distances, symbolic retrievers, self-supervised and foundation-model embedders, and their fusion, plus label-aware and language-model rerankers, under one protocol that varies supervision, pollution, and corpus scale with significance testing. Under a common channel-independent interface, pretrained representations offer no statistically detectable advantage over strong classical and symbolic baselines for search alone. The decisive factor is a small amount of resolved-case supervision at reranking, namely a Gaussian-process reranker that propagates a few neighbor labels in embedding space, which helps far more than more sophisticated representations or language-model reasoning and holds under pollution and at full corpus scale. Guided by these findings, we fuse a normal-residual-scored embedder with a dynamic time warping leg via reciprocal-rank fusion, then rerank with the Gaussian-process reranker, improving NDCG@10 over its own search stage on all 12 datasets, by +0.11 from reranking and +0.16 over the strongest single base retriever.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32123
Representation structure is crucial for understanding Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures and their generalization behavior. However, prior studies neither isolate nor analyze module-level features nor investigate how their interactions contribute to performance estimation. In this work, we conduct the first rigorous analysis of feature information across diverse architectural scales, empirically uncover the relationship between ViT representation and generalization behavior, and leverage these insights to guide efficient ViT design. Our contributions are fivefold: Across diverse architectural scales, 1) We identify feature collapse at initialization, which leads to redundancy, and propose a reduction scheme to mitigate this issue. 2) We quantify feature information using entropy and the minimum eigenvalue, demonstrating that these metrics serve as reliable indicators for generalization prediction. 3) We show that feature in the token space provides a more faithful representation than those in embedding space. 4) We discover an unexpected finding: features produced by linear submodules within ViT layers are critical for the prediction of generalization performance. 5) Our proposed proxy improves the correlation ranking by 18-48% over prior baselines and can effectively identify ViT architectures that achieve higher accuracy at lower or comparable computational cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11205
Speech-to-LLM systems often connect a frozen speech encoder to a frozen large language model (LLM) through a small trainable bridge. The bridge is usually treated as plumbing, but it in fact defines the geometry of the speech-to-LLM interface, and the pretraining objective decides whether that interface provides a reusable initialization for downstream tasks. We study a transferable bridge through two complementary properties: global alignment with the text side, and local lexical manifold compatibility, where bridge embeddings remain close to the frozen LLM's input-embedding neighbourhoods. We make this property measurable with a fixed, head-free, timestamp-free diagnostic that applies to any objective, and show that next-word prediction (NWP) and sentence-level contrastive pretraining do not fully capture token-level lexical compatibility. We then introduce Local Prototype Reconstruction (LPR), a lightweight training-only regularizer that requires each aligned bridge token to be reconstructable from a small neighbourhood of frozen LLM token embeddings, with a hard single-prototype anchor as its limiting case. On multilingual ASR and speech translation, LPR improves transfer, with the largest gains on translation and low-resource adaptation. Crucially, our independent diagnostic correlates with downstream gains across objectives, suggesting that lexical manifold compatibility is predictive of reusability for speech-to-LLM bridges.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11159
Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a fundamental and safety-critical task in computer vision. Recent generative approaches detect anomalies from a distributional perspective, but remain limited by local anomaly modes. Meanwhile, video anomaly anticipation (VAA), as a proactive extension beyond post-hoc detection, introduces additional challenges. In particular, the contrastive inference paradigm in VAD, which relies on ground-truth frames, is not applicable to VAA, hindering its development. To address these challenges, we propose a unified score-driven framework, termed Uni-DSM, based on denoising score matching (DSM), which models anomaly patterns through likelihood estimation and score functions over the learned data distribution. Within this unified framework, we adopt a shared noise-conditioned score transformer backbone with scene-dependent embeddings and motion-aware weighting for distribution-level modeling. Instead of introducing separate architectures, Uni-DSM unifies VAD and VAA through different inference and supervision paradigms built upon the same score-based formulation. For VAD, we instantiate an autoregressive denoising score matching (ADSM) mechanism, which progressively accumulates anomalous evidence via autoregressive denoising, enabling enhanced perception of local modes beyond visual cues. For VAA, we extend the same architecture by incorporating a lightweight auxiliary decoder and a novel self-distilled denoising score matching (SDSM) mechanism. By constructing supervision from output discrepancies instead of relying on unavailable future ground truth, our method achieves efficient training suitable or early anomaly anticipation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both VAD and VAA while maintaining high efficiency, establishing a unified and scalable pipeline from anomaly detection to anticipation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11149
Recent latent reasoning methods move beyond discrete Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by replacing sampled tokens with continuous soft embeddings or hidden states, enabling richer intermediate representations and preserving alternative reasoning paths. However, the need for latent reasoning varies across decoding steps: confident predictions favor discrete commitment, whereas ambiguous steps benefit from preserving multiple plausible alternatives. Existing approaches typically handle this variation through either global soft activation or hard switching based on uncertainty thresholds, treating latent intervention as an all-or-nothing decision rather than continuously adapting its strength. To address this limitation, we propose Competitive Token Selection (CoTS), a training-free framework that reframes latent intervention from binary mode selection into continuous allocation at the token level. CoTS uses the probability competition between the two most likely candidates to dynamically balance discrete commitment and soft exploration at each reasoning step. The second candidate represents the strongest alternative to the model's preferred continuation, so the separation between the two directly reflects the stability of the current discrete choice. When one candidate clearly dominates, CoTS keeps the representation close to the sampled discrete token to preserve a stable reasoning trajectory; as the competition strengthens, it increases the contribution of the soft representation to retain plausible alternatives. This competition-based allocation requires neither manually tuned switching thresholds nor mixing coefficients, and introduces no additional forward passes. Experiments across six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that CoTS consistently outperforms standard CoT and state-of-the-art training-free latent reasoning methods. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20642
Speaker verification (SV) performance degrades under language mismatch due to the entanglement of speaker identity with language-specific acoustic cues. To address this problem, we leverage large-scale self-supervised pre-trained models (PTMs) to learn language-agnostic speaker representations. We utilize PTMs as robust front-end feature extractors, capitalizing on their rich acoustic and linguistic knowledge acquired from vast, diverse audio data. These generalized features are then used to train a downstream speaker embedding network, effectively disentangling speaker identity from language-specific characteristics. We validate our approach on the TidyVoice2026 benchmark, which benchmarks SV under language mismatch. Our proposed system (team T02) achieves equal error rates (EERs) of 2.21% on tv26_eval-A and 2.99% on tv26_eval-U.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11099
Image retrieval methods often rely on a single global semantic descriptor extracted from an image, e.g., the [CLS] token in vision transformers. However, trying to squeeze all the semantic information of an image into a single descriptor can hurt downstream retrieval performance, especially for fine-grained retrieval tasks. In this work, we augment the semantic tokens in the newer visual transformers, the global [CLS] token and the four register tokens, with a carefully selected collection of spatial tokens, aiming to capture the spatial region representation that characterizes the contents captured in each of the semantic tokens. We leverage the DINOv2-reg model, which includes register tokens that emergently learn object and part-based representations. For each "cue" token ([CLS] and each register token), we find a "buddy" image patch token and extract an N x N patch region to produce a set of localized ROI tokens. Our approach automatically captures important regions of interest without any external bounding boxes or saliency modules, purely by matching semantic tokens with their spatial representation regions. Furthermore, we incorporate these tokens into a multi-vector retrieval framework inspired by ColBERT, enabling fine-grained matching via a per-token alignment mechanism while avoiding the large storage cost of keeping all patch embeddings. Through extensive experiments, we find that (1) register tokens encode useful fine-grained details that can complement the [CLS] token; (2) automatically pooled ROI tokens further improve fine-grained discrimination; and (3) multi-vector retrieval with a small set of tokens improves over a DINOv2-reg single-vector baseline while remaining tractable for large-scale search. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10991
Muon has motivated a growing family of optimizers that compose multiple matrix normalizations, but these methods remain fragmented and lack a unified perspective. We introduce chained linear minimization oracles (chained LMOs), which cast these methods as compositions of LMOs. Despite their empirical success, many chains fall outside the standard LMO framework and can diverge on smooth convex objectives. To explain why composition can nevertheless help, we turn to linear associative memory and show that chaining can improve over Muon under anisotropic embeddings. Empirically, we propose TensorChain, a novel optimizer within the framework that stacks compatible weight matrices across different layers and normalizes the 3d tensor across its axes. In Qwen3 0.6B and 1.7B pretraining, TensorChain outperforms all chained baselines in average token efficiency, with average token savings of 9.6% over Muon at matched validation loss.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10975
Conditional memory architectures such as DeepSeek Engram use input n-grams to look up learned embeddings, expanding the capacity of large language models (LLMs) with limited additional computation. Beyond model scaling, this architecture has demonstrated the potential to decouple factual knowledge storage from general-purpose computation, offering a promising route to updating factual knowledge while keeping the Transformer backbone fixed. Realizing this potential is challenging because different expressions of a fact may activate different n-gram embeddings, while updating shared embeddings can unintentionally change the model's predictions about other facts. We propose EngramEdit for decoupled knowledge updates through conditional memory. EngramEdit first computes target memory representations that make the model predict the updated fact across multiple expressions. It then jointly updates the shared n-gram embeddings to match these targets across expressions and edits, penalizing updates to frequently reused embeddings more strongly to preserve unrelated knowledge. Experiments show that EngramEdit enables independent factual knowledge updates through conditional memory, achieving near-perfect editing success. Revised knowledge is usable across unseen expressions and in multi-hop reasoning, with nearly three times the strongest baseline's accuracy under chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Unrelated knowledge and general capabilities are largely preserved even as factual updates accumulate. These findings show that EngramEdit turns conditional memory into an editable knowledge interface, extending its role beyond model scaling to support decoupled knowledge updates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10533
Latent world models have shown a remarkable ability to predict future states and to plan in the real world. In practice, however, we lack a principled way to estimate how their capabilities scale with model size, data, and compute, an open problem that slows progress in the field. In this work we present RoboJEPA, a world model based on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and trained on a large-scale dataset spanning 12 robotic embodiments. We show that RoboJEPA's imagination error, the error of its latent rollouts, follows a second-order power law in compute, allowing us to predict model quality well beyond the scale at which the law is fit. We further show that downstream robotic planning performance improves predictably with compute, and that imagination error is strongly correlated with it, making it a reliable proxy for real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate that latent world models can be deployed zero-shot as robotic agents, planning toward a single goal image to solve tasks requiring long-horizon planning on real hardware. We release all model checkpoints together with our training and robot deployment code. To our knowledge, this is the first work to establish scaling laws for multi-embodiment robotic world models trained on real robot data, and RoboJEPA, at 8B parameters, is the largest JEPA predictor model trained to date.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10515
Prompted embedding models have recently received increasing attention, particularly for retrieval, where detailed retrieval instructions are provided as part of the retrieval prompt. Several new datasets and studies have examined this setting, showing that the current embedding models often struggle to follow such instructions reliably. In this paper, we study the mechanism of how instructions actually affect the representations of retrieval queries in asymmetric retrieval tasks. We show that models can fail to follow even simple task instructions when query-side distractors are included in the evaluation. We hypothesize that this behavior is driven by the training setup of current embedding models and their evaluation, and show that fine-tuning with added query-side distractors leads to substantial improvements, with minimal effect on other tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10508