Knowledge
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Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?
2026-09-10 17:57:32William Zhou, Mayukha Siripuram, Xiao Yan, Ziqi Liu, Yi DingAbstract
Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification. We test whether models in this deployment-relevant 2--8B range carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, evaluating four such VLMs (Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B, Gemma3 4B) against the domain-specific specialist BioCLIP (300M parameters) on a 96-species task, comparing clean iNaturalist photographs against camera-trap imagery from 6 this http URL collections, on two independently-sampled evaluation sets. All models identify species far above chance, but every model -- general-purpose or specialist -- degrades sharply on field imagery (domain gaps of 9.6--26.6 percentage points, consistent across taxonomic levels and both evaluation sets), indicating the degradation reflects general image legibility rather than fine-grained discrimination failure. BioCLIP substantially outperforms every VLM tested (by 33.2--59.2 percentage points across an expanded 200-image sample for every model) despite its far smaller size, suggesting the gap reflects specialized training data rather than model scale; yet BioCLIP's own domain gap (18.0 points) is statistically indistinguishable from the best VLM's (22.3 points), suggesting the clean-to-field degradation itself is a property of the image-quality shift rather than a general-purpose-model weakness. Under open-set prompting, 5.9--9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names; the relative fabrication-rate ranking across models replicates exactly across both evaluation sets, a more robust finding than any single point estimate.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11916
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Domain-Specific Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models
2026-09-10 17:45:36Varun Teja Chundru, Debasmita BiswasAbstract
Large language models generate fluent text that can contain unfaithful claims -- a phenomenon known as hallucination. We present a multi-signal detection pipeline combining fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3 classification, Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout uncertainty quantification, and temperature-scaled calibration for response-level hallucination detection. Evaluated on the HaluEval benchmark, our pipeline achieves F1=0.915 and AUROC=0.977 on general-domain tasks, with per-task F1 scores of 0.97 (QA), 0.96 (Summarization), and 0.82 (Dialogue). MC Dropout inference further improves accuracy to 93.2%. A context ablation study confirms the model performs genuine entailment reasoning rather than exploiting surface patterns, with summarization F1 dropping 24% when knowledge context is removed. Learning curve analysis reveals that 25% of training data captures 77% of full-data performance. Beyond detection, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to a Qwen2.5-0.5B generator, reducing its hallucination rate from 85.5% to 37.7% (55.9% relative reduction) as measured by our detector. Cross-domain evaluation on the SciFact biomedical benchmark shows that general-domain training transfers poorly (F1=0.52), motivating domain-specific fine-tuning. PubMedBERT fine-tuned on SciFact achieves F1=0.63 and AUROC=0.81, demonstrating that domain-matched pre-training is the strongest adaptation strategy. Code and models are available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11878
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Biology-in-the-loop: Amortized Adaptive Hit Discovery in CRISPR Screens
2026-09-10 17:45:18Carl Edwards, Edward De Brouwer, Xiner Li, Namkyeong Lee, Ehsan Hajiramezanali, Anne Biton, Sara Mostafavi, Gabriele ScaliaAbstract
Many biological discovery problems require experiments to be selected sequentially under constrained budgets. CRISPR screening is a prominent example, as exhaustive perturbation testing is often infeasible and candidate perturbations must instead be prioritized over multiple experimental rounds. Despite the importance of this problem, existing benchmarks for adaptive hit discovery remain limited in scale and diversity. Here, we introduce AssayBench-Loop, a large-scale benchmark for adaptive hit discovery comprising 1,389 CRISPR screens across five phenotype categories. Beyond enabling systematic evaluation, its scale makes it possible to learn acquisition strategies across historical experiments. Building on this resource, we introduce AssayLoop, a sequential experimental design framework combining AssayFormer, a transformer-based amortized acquisition policy trained across historical screens to adapt from experimental feedback, with LLM-derived biological priors through an adaptive handoff. In this view, completed experiments become training data for learning how accumulated evidence should guide what to test next, while LLMs provide prior biological knowledge to seed the search. We further introduce AssayLLM, showing that the same principle can be extended directly to an LLM through task-specific post-training. On temporally held-out screens, AssayLoop achieves a 5.67-fold enrichment over random selection and recovers 27.7% of hits after assaying approximately 5% of the candidate library, outperforming existing adaptive-design methods and standalone LLMs, and AssayFormer alone. Performance improves with increasing historical training data and transfers to phenotype categories excluded from training. These results demonstrate the value of learning acquisition policies across historical experiments and combining them with broad biological priors for efficient adaptive hit discovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11877
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Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model
2026-09-10 17:43:09Lisa BylininaAbstract
A language model normally begins training with random word embeddings: whatever 'banana' means must be learned from training corpora. I implement St. Augustine's picture of word learning, meaning by ostension, for a small masked language model (DeBERTa) trained on 10M words: before training, visually grounded tokens receive embeddings derived from the image regions they label; other tokens start random. Visual initialization leaves a measurable imprint that lasts until the end of training. At the same time, the effect remains invisible under most BabyLM benchmarks, which probe abstract grammatical knowledge: visual initialization does not affect performance there. The only zero-shot exception is object-property knowledge (COMPS, Misra et al. 2023), where seeding helps in every configuration. To follow up on this result, I build a corpus-tailored version of the Visual-Property Swap benchmark (Lin et al., 2026), which tests color, material, size, and shape knowledge, with per-item training frequency and seeded status. Here, vision-seeded models have a persistent, seed- replicated advantage, confined to the seeded words. As a causal test, I show that synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words transfers the advantage to exactly those words. Function words and abstract vocabulary also receive strong visual seeds and retain them throughout training, and the training objective draws on them: held-out mask-prediction loss falls for these words in every seed. However, no benchmark I run registers this. What evaluation would pick this up remains an open question.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11870
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From Parameters to Answers: How LLMs Retrieve and Use Their Internal Knowledge
2026-09-10 17:39:55Wenkang Wei, Yuan Fang, Renhe Jiang, Hong Cheng, Xingtong YuAbstract
How does a language model's dependence on query-routing information and target knowledge change as it answers a question? We study this question through layerwise interventions on the hidden state at the end of the question. Across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma, we compare country-continent questions with noun, adjective, and code answers while keeping several fitted measurements distinct. A pair-conditioned request direction describes which country is queried in natural single-country questions; a global request direction describes first- versus second-country requests in paired questions; separate selection candidates test control among contents already available in the hidden state. A diagnostic reanalysis of frozen Qwen natural-question states shows that the pair-conditioned direction grows stronger before interventions on it begin to alter later fitted knowledge, with this causal window opening while answer-supporting content is still forming. The paired three-model trajectories are not uniform: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing-content profile, whereas Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates. In the paired protocol, dependence on the global request direction decreases from fixed earlier to later layer sets while dependence on fitted content persists. A matched Qwen comparison shows that the pair-conditioned direction retains a late effect, so this operational handoff concerns the global fitted direction rather than all request information. These results separate early readability, natural strength, causal steering, and later content dependence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11859
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Rapid Learning of Dexterous In-Hand Pen Writing through Real-Time Jacobian Estimation
2026-09-10 16:29:00Kai Stewart, Yasunori Toshimitsu, Robert K. KatzschmannAbstract
Dexterous in-hand manipulation of a grasped object with an anthropomorphic hand is an unsolved frontier for robot dexterity. The contact-richness and highly dynamic nature of object-hand interactions tend to require extensive modeling or data-collection efforts for learning-based approaches. Modern simulators used for reinforcement learning (RL) cannot fully replicate the required contact complexity, while collecting dexterous demonstrations for imitation learning (IL) remains an open problem. In this research, we present an embodied control approach based on real-time task Jacobian estimation of the combined hand and object system on the physical robot. Using only the CPU on a laptop, the proposed controller begins in-hand pen writing after approximately 18 s of initialization and continues to adapt online, without an analytic hand--object kinematic/contact model, simulation training, or precollected task demonstrations. We demonstrate that the same estimator/controller formulation works on three anthropomorphic robotic hand systems (one physical, two simulated) to show human-like, in-hand articulation of a grasped pen by an embodiment-independent formulation. Sub-millimeter in-plane precision (mean 0.6 mm across runs) is achieved across letters and shapes written in the air and on paper on a physical robot. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an anthropomorphic hand writing arbitrary single-stroke trajectories with a grasped pen through purely in-hand motion, and it showcases an alternative to compute- and data-heavy approaches such as RL and IL for achieving dexterous manipulation through computationally simple and data-efficient algorithms.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11775
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A Unified Per-Token Gating Family for On-Policy Distillation: FKL/RKL Mixing with Multi-Channel and Bias Coefficients
2026-09-10 16:22:35Suwan Wu, Yumeng Lin, Pengcheng Yuan, Xiaolong JiangAbstract
Per-token gating of forward/reverse KL losses has become a standard technique for on-policy knowledge distillation (OPD), but existing methods such as EOPD (Jin et al., 2026) and ToDi (Jung et al., 2025) each fix a single gating signal and a single gating direction, and the two have never been compared directly. We introduce a four-coefficient parameterization lambda_t = sigma(a * h_t + b * u(x) + c + d * gap_t) in which direction-aligned proxies of EOPD and ToDi appear as one-dimensional (1D) restrictions, and which adds multi-channel composition and an explicit bias as further degrees of freedom. On TweetEval (Barbieri et al., 2020) emotion and hate, with a Qwen3-32B teacher and a Qwen3-4B student, configurations in the full family reach higher accuracy than the matched-magnitude single-channel (entropy-only / gap-only) 1D restrictions in 33 of 36 comparable cells, and a 26-cell mean-match isolation experiment places dynamic gating ahead of effective-KL-matched static baselines in 19 of 26 cells. Because cells share training data, models, and parameter substructure, we report both counts as exploratory aggregate directional evidence rather than as independent hypothesis tests. Targeted three-seed paired replications of the nine headline comparisons singled out by that sweep -- including a third task, offensive -- are directionally consistent, but individually smaller than the single-seed estimates and not significant at n=3. We therefore present the parameterization primarily as a shared coordinate system for comparing per-token gating designs in short-output classification OPD.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11768
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RAG-Safety-Bench: Reliable Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented LLM Safety
2026-09-10 16:12:25Adithiyan Rajan Indira Saravanan, Kathleen C. FraserAbstract
Allowing large language models (LLMs) to retrieve information from a set of trusted documents can increase reliability and reduce hallucination. However, recent work has demonstrated that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can have unintended side effects on the overall safety of the generated responses, when prompted for harmful or dangerous content. A clearer understanding of the mechanisms leading to this result is needed, as increasing numbers of end users turn to RAG to incorporate corporate documents and knowledge bases into LLM-based systems. We introduce RAG-Safety-Bench, a benchmark to measure the safety impact of RAG on LLM models. By removing the confounding effect of retriever quality, and cleanly separating the problem into four conditions -- non-RAG, RAG with an oracle document containing the answer to the harmful request, RAG with documents related to the harmful request but without the specific answer, and RAG with random, safe documents -- the benchmark isolates the impacts of different factors in the observed safety degradation. We report results across five open-source LLMs, showing an inverse relationship between benign and unsafe capability, strong evidence that baseline safety guardrails do not lead to downstream safety guarantees in the RAG case, and model-specific support for previous findings that even benign documents can lead to unsafe generation in retrieval-enabled systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11758
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The Eloquence submission for Task 2 of the Interspeech 2026 MLC-SLM challenge
2026-09-10 15:41:11Jordi Luque, Lorenzo Concina, Marco Matassoni, Alessio Brutti, Filippo VellaAbstract
This paper details the Eloquence team's approach to Task 2 of the 2nd MLC-SLM challenge at Interspeech 2026, which involves multilingual Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) across 21 languages. Three approaches are explored. First, we fine-tune Voxtral-Mini-3B via LoRA with cross-lingual data augmentation, ASR transcript augmentation and timestamp-aware audio cropping, achieving 0.72 macro-accuracy on evaluation Phase 2. Second, we apply multimodal in-context learning (ICL) to the frozen Voxtral-24B model to correct a strong label bias, reaching 0.81, our best result. Third, a training-free retrieval system based on a three-layer voice-anchored memory combining acoustic identity, semantic content, and a knowledge graph achieves 0.68. All three systems substantially outperform the official baseline.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11724
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Aerodynamic Prior-Free Coordinated Trajectory Generation and Tracking Control for a Tail-Sitter UAV
2026-09-10 15:22:59Erchao Rong, Zihao Liu, Junning Liang, Jianguo Wang, Xiao Jie, Haoran Fu, Ziliang Chen, Ximin LyuAbstract
This paper presents a coordinated trajectory generation and tracking control framework for a tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which does not require aerodynamic priors identified for a specific airframe while addressing the challenge of flight control under highly nonlinear aerodynamics across the full flight envelope. The core innovation lies in employing phase-specific aerodynamic modeling strategies for planning and tracking, tailored to their distinct functional characteristics, without requiring airframe-specific aerodynamic priors. Specifically, the phi-theory model under coordinated flight is employed to derive an analytic differential flatness mapping, and a simplified but locally accurate model is established for predictive control to enable real-time aerodynamic parameter estimation. The proposed framework is evaluated extensively through both simulation and challenging real-world flight tests under mild wind conditions, showing high-precision tracking and adaptability across the tested aerodynamic conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world demonstration of accurate trajectory tracking over tested flight regimes spanning the full envelope of a tail-sitter UAV without relying on aerodynamic identification campaigns. The source code of our framework is available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11698
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Geospatial AI, Dataverse Metadata, and the Study of Place-Based Government
2026-09-10 15:08:58Danny EBanks, Devika JainAbstract
Harvard Dataverse hosts over 150,000 research datasets, but the geographic information those datasets carry is entered as free text by depositors and has never been assembled into a searchable structure. We construct a knowledge graph from the repository's public data and metadata, organizing 102,650 datasets within a 215,985-node network of 528,003 edges linking datasets to keywords, publications, subjects, journals, and locations. Of those datasets, 43,991 (42.9 percent) carry at least one geospatial field, geographic coverage, geographic unit, or a bounding box and 96.9 percent of all nodes sit in a single connected component, so datasets remain reachable from one another even when their geospatial metadata share nothing in common. A conservative keyword search identifies 7,654 geospatially tagged datasets (17.4 percent) as directly policy-relevant, with elections and legislatures the largest cluster, followed by government administration, health policy, transportation, and education. Five datasets illustrate how this metadata behaves across policy domains and spatial scales, and an extended use case shows how community language models, stance detection with geographic aggregation, and partisan language bridging tools can attach discourse to place. The central obstacle is place resolution: the same location appears as many disconnected nodes. We argue that the graph provides a concrete setting for developing AI-driven metadata enrichment and entity resolution, and we document its coverage skew toward American, city-level data.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11674
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Autonomy, Social Norms, and Alignment: Towards a Developmental Framework for Autonomous Artificial Agents
2026-09-10 15:02:52Marica Notte, Ludovica Marinucci, Vieri Giuliano SantucciAbstract
In recent years, artificial intelligence has made extraordinary progress thanks to large-scale models capable of generalization and the generation of complex outputs. However, transferring this potential into embodied agents reveals a significant limitation: the most advanced systems rely on pre-existing datasets and human feedback strategies that are powerful but insufficient in dynamic or unknown contexts. To adapt, an agent must acquire knowledge through direct interaction with its environment. One strategy to address this challenge involves introducing higher-level mechanisms, such as intrinsic motivations, which leverage curiosity and competence, to guide exploration and learning in complex environments. While this flexibility expands autonomy, it complicates the task of ensuring agents remain aligned with human goals. Alignment, already a challenge for artificial systems in general, becomes even more complex in unstructured and dynamic contexts where predefined rules prove insufficient. To be effective and adaptable, norms must be rooted in experience through an epistemological process that starting from simple, situated principles allows for the gradual construction of more complex rules through experience, autonomous learning, and cooperation with other moral agents. Similarly to children learning social norms by exploring their environment and participating in collective practices, artificial agents must also be educated toward alignment. Following Dennett, the status of a moral agent is not innate but is attributed gradually based on the ability to responsibly manage increasing degrees of freedom. From this perspective, the regulatory sandboxes can be viewed as pedagogical environments for AI: dynamic spaces where alignment develops as a formative process, progressively shaping autonomous behaviors through interaction and cooperation in scenarios of increasing complexity.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11660
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Enabling Knowledge Graph Understanding at Scale with the EXplore Your Graphs ENgine
2026-09-10 14:03:32Harshdeep Singh, Yurui Zhu, Giovanni Colavizza, Matteo RomanelloAbstract
We present EXYGEN (EXplore Your Graphs ENgine), a framework for knowledge graph (KG) understanding that enables conversational access to KGs at scale. We address two questions in sequence. First, how effectively can LLMs perform text-to-SPARQL generation given only automatically derived structured metadata and small graph samples, rather than task-specific fine-tuning? We integrate VoID descriptions and ShEx schemas into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline and ablate KG-derived context on the SciQA benchmark. Our best configuration -- combining ShEx schemas, retrieved triples, and example question-query pairs -- reaches an exact match of 0.419 on execution results without any LLM fine-tuning. We further find that lexical metrics such as F1 poorly predict query correctness, and that larger general-purpose LLMs can outperform smaller code-specialized ones once given sufficient context. Second, we ask how to generate the structured metadata that this method relies on from very large KGs, where KG metadata generation becomes computationally intractable. We introduce a predicate-coverage-aware parallel graph sampling strategy that preserves structural diversity while remaining computationally tractable. On OpenCitations Meta and GESIS, it retains high predicate coverage with minimal triple loss and reduces runtime by over 80x; on ORKG, sampling is not just faster but the only tractable path to obtain complete metadata. Together, these results show that structured schema context and lightweight prompting can substantially reduce reliance on fine-tuning for scalable conversational access to KGs, though closing the remaining gap to fully fine-tuned approaches will likely require reducing dependence on curated question-query exemplars -- whether through synthetic generation or an execution-feedback-driven approach -- and validating these findings beyond a single benchmark.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11569
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Learning Interaction between Image and Layout Priors for Joint Image-Layout Generation in Design Templates
2026-09-10 13:22:23Shirong Yang, Bo Yang, Ying CaoAbstract
In this paper, we address the problem of graphic design template creation, which generates a background image and a layout of foreground elements over the background to form a harmonious composition from an input text. Prior work on graphic design generation mostly adopts a sequential paradigm, where design elements are generated sequentially. We argue that such a sequential scheme falls short of faithfully capturing the dependency between the background and layout (and thus the joint image-layout distribution), which limits the quality of generated design templates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a model, InterIL, which jointly generates the two modalities, background image and layout, in a single generative process. The novel design of our joint model connects the backbones of pretrained image and layout diffusion models with a learnable communication module to explicitly model bidirectional image-layout interaction. During training, the image and layout backbones are frozen to maintain and leverage the vast pretrained single-modality prior knowledge, while only the communication module is updated, so that the model can focus on learning image-layout interaction and thereby better capture the joint image-layout distribution for improved composition harmony. Our model has no design-specific inductive bias, which allows it to better preserve the original characteristics of realistic designs. We further introduce a test-time guidance strategy to enable users to impose their specific preferences on generated results. Our experiments show that, compared with prior approaches, our model can generate significantly better results in terms of image, layout and image-layout harmonization, producing outputs closer to real samples. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our model in enforcing user preferences at inference without retraining.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11519
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From Document Silos to Process Intelligence: A Multi-Layer Knowledge Graph for CMC Process Development
2026-09-10 12:59:04Reza Amirmoshiri, Faryad Sahneh, Yasser JangjouAbstract
Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) process development generates an enormous body of technical information across a multi-stage, knowledge-intensive continuum from drug discovery to commercial manufacturing. This knowledge is traditionally fragmented across functions and heterogeneous formats, causing traceability gaps and significant knowledge-management costs during technology transfer and regulatory filing. We present a modular agentic-AI platform that converts a heterogeneous corpus of process-development documents into a queryable, dual-layer knowledge graph. A base knowledge layer builds a lexical graph with a Document-Section-Chunk hierarchy through lossless ingestion of digital, scanned, handwritten, and multilingual documents, while an intelligence layer extracts ontology-aligned entities and bridges cross-document concepts through a provenance-anchored domain graph. LLM agents operate across both layers, selecting the retrieval path best suited to each question. We evaluate the lexical layer with a novel three-tier protocol measuring the deployment-fidelity of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system on proprietary data, demonstrated on 505 questions curated from 38 development reports of a Sanofi small-molecule program. Tier-1 multiple-choice accuracy of 95% signals strong platform reliability; the stricter Tier-2 LLM-judge pass rate of 85%, which degrades on comparative and corpus-wide questions, reveals a failure taxonomy that Tier-1 accuracy alone fails to capture. A router agent selects between layers according to question type. We anticipate this protocol will enable future designers of agentic platforms to assess their systems against nonpublic databases, and that graph-based architectures will see broader adoption in pharma as a means of transforming fragmented document repositories into structured process intelligence.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11493
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BruNet: A Cross-Domain Transfer Framework for Bruise Segmentation
2026-09-10 12:35:20Qiming Wang, Richard J. Motley, Ebube E. Obi, Xianfang Sun, Paul L. RosinAbstract
Segmenting bruises is a challenging task in medical imaging due to limited data and annotations, diffuse boundaries, and highly variable appearance. In this work, we propose BruNet, a segmentation framework that combines a ViT-based visual encoder (a self-supervised DINOv3 or a pretrained LingBot-Vision backbone) with a SAM-based mask decoder. BruNet is trained on the HAM10000 skin lesion dataset and evaluated on a separate bruise dataset without additional fine-tuning. Although a small number of prior studies have explored machine learning and computer vision for bruise analysis, existing work has primarily focused on detection, classification, or colour analysis rather than pixel-level localisation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to address automatic bruise segmentation. Our results show that BruNet outperforms CNN-based models, state-of-the-art segmentation models, ChatGPT-4o/5-assisted SAM2 zero-shot baselines, and the medical-oriented MedSAM model, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalisation to bruise segmentation.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11463
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From Queries to Narratives: Cultural Heritage Data Stories for Knowledge Graph Exploration and Quality Assessment
2026-09-10 11:34:36Tabea Tietz, Torsten Schrade, Etienne Posthumus, Linnaea S\"ohn, Jonatan Jalle Steller, J\"org Waitelonis, Harald SackAbstract
Cultural-heritage KGs such as the NFDI4Culture-KG contain millions of triples about artworks, music, inscriptions, historical events, and the people and places connected to them. For many users, however, discovering this knowledge can be difficult. While SPARQL can be learned, writing meaningful queries first requires an in-depth understanding of the graph's data model, an investment many domain researchers and practitioners are unwilling to make. Even with existing user interfaces, a starting point and some guidance are usually needed, because the data contained in the graph is highly specialized, heterogeneous, and constantly growing, making it challenging to know what it contains or which questions it can answer. In this paper, we present data stories as a way not only to lower this barrier, but also to turn exploration into data-quality assessment, and thus combine accessible querying with the discovery of issues that remain hidden in aggregate statistics. In this contribution, a data story is understood as a narrative document that integrates explanatory text and images with executable SPARQL queries and their visualized results. It is described how they are authored against the graph and how they serve several purposes: guiding users through an unfamiliar graph, creating reproducible narratives, and surfacing data-quality issues previously hidden in aggregate statistics. The authoring platform LODEON including its Sparnatural and AI-supported authoring assistants is introduced as a proof-of-concept. Within the authoring environment, every claim made about the data can be backed by an explicit query, making these narratives transparent and reproducible. This paper also reflects on lessons learned from hands-on seminars and workshops. Early experience suggests that such data stories make cultural-heritage knowledge graphs more accessible for both exploration and quality assessment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11403
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VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents
2026-09-10 11:25:59Peiyuan Gao, Gaoyuan Zhang, Haojie Qin, Yahui Sun, Qianyi Zhang, Yunhao Zhang, Zeyu Wang, Wei LuAbstract
State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11390
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R4Tun: LLM-guided adaptive segmental tunnel lining segmentation in point clouds
2026-09-10 10:46:18Xinghui Tao, Zehao Ye, Guangming Wang, Jelena Nini\'c, Brian SheilAbstract
Automated inspection of segmental tunnel linings requires adaptive segmentation from 3D point clouds, yet expert-tuned pipelines often degrade when tunnel conditions vary. This paper presents R4Tun, a large language model (LLM)-driven adaptation framework that extends an expert-designed pipeline (SAM4Tun) with bounded parameter tuning informed by structured context: memory ($m$), state ($s$), and knowledge ($k$). Evaluated on 30 selected Seg2Tunnel subsets (13 regular, 17 complex) across three LLMs, the full $m+s+k$ design raised mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) from 0.18 to 0.43--0.48 and overall accuracy (OA) from 0.42 to 0.59--0.65 relative to the static SAM4Tun baseline, with the near-reference regular (staggered) subsets reaching mIoU 0.784--0.796 across LLMs. Across 270 (30 tunnels $\times$ 3 different LLMs $\times$ 3 context settings) runs, the LLMs showed similar parameter-adjustment trends (with overlapping 95\% CIs on mean gains) and consistently adjusted a shared set of critical parameters. These results support R4Tun as a controlled, label-free, cross-LLM adaptation mechanism in the tested SAM4Tun--Seg2Tunnel setting, demonstrating consistent accuracy gains; we position R4Tun as a mechanism contribution rather than a deployable final-inspection system, in which each bounded parameter change is auditable via logged rationales.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11360
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Reification as a Transferable Vocabulary: Zero-Shot Link Prediction with Vanilla GNNs
2026-09-10 10:26:09Camille PradelAbstract
Knowledge graph foundation models such as ULTRA achieve zero-shot link prediction on unseen graphs through dedicated architectures that hard-code a transfer mechanism. In this work we move that mechanism out of the architecture and into the representation, by \emph{reifying} the input graph: every fact becomes a node, connected to its subject, object, and relation type through a fixed vocabulary of six meta-relations, with relation types as anonymous shared nodes rather than model parameters. On this representation, five textbook GNNs (GAT, GINE with sum and with mean+max aggregation, GraphSAGE, R-GCN), each trained on a single knowledge graph of 4,245 triples for 30 minutes on one NVIDIA A100, transfer zero-shot to 40 inductive link-prediction benchmarks. The best of them, an off-the-shelf GAT, matches ULTRA, a dedicated foundation model pretrained on three graphs, across ULTRA's own evaluation suite. The same fixed vocabulary extends to relational databases, a row becoming an entity and a foreign-key column a relation type; a preliminary probe on two unseen databases, with no cell values, schema text or in-context labels, shows a model of this family pretrained on three knowledge graphs ranking foreign-key targets far above random-initialization and degree controls. We release the code, the checkpoints, and the evaluation pipeline for all 40 benchmarks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11347
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