Cognitive psychology has studied how people encode, use, and learn concepts that describe categories, and how they represent, recognize, and acquire chunks for familiar patterns of elements. The literatures on these two topics are nearly disjoint, which poses a challenge for unified theories of cognition. In this paper, we review Cobweb, a computational account of categorization and concept formation, and propose an extended theory that incorporates chunks and their acquisition. The theory makes no commitments about modality, applying to any experience that decomposes into elements and relations among them. We also present \trellis/, an implementation of this theory, and illustrate its application to learning context-free grammars, which we adopt as a testbed because they involve both concept-like and chunk-like elements. In addition, we report experimental results on three synthetic grammars that demonstrate the system's ability to represent syntactic knowledge, use it to parse and generate sentences, and learn compositional structures from sample parses. We conclude by discussing related work on concepts and chunks, along with directions for future research in the area.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30414
Real-time tiny object detection in aerial imagery is constrained by the weak spatial evidence of very small objects and the loss of high-resolution detail in lightweight detectors. This study presents Cross-Scale Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation (CSCWD), a training-time framework that transfers high-resolution spatial representations from a YOLO11m-P2 teacher to a compact YOLO11n student without altering the student's inference architecture. Unlike conventional same-scale feature distillation, CSCWD transfers supervision from teacher P2 to student P3 after feature alignment while retaining same-scale distillation at deeper pyramid levels. Under the unified seven-sequence Drone-vs-Bird validation protocol, YOLO11n-CSCWD achieves 50.17% mean average precision at an intersection-over-union threshold of 0.5 (mAP@0.5) and 59.73% recall, improving the matched CA-YOLO11n baseline by 2.92 percentage points in mAP@0.5 and 3.55 points in recall. Cross-scale alignment further increases mAP@0.5 by 2.09 points over the corresponding same-scale channel-wise distillation configuration. In zero-shot evaluation on DUT-Anti-UAV, mAP@0.5 increases from 48.29% to 50.06% without target-domain fine-tuning. This domain was included because its challenging small targets make low-latency, computationally efficient detection particularly relevant. On Raspberry Pi 5 using NCNN-FP16 at 640x640 resolution, the 2.58-million-parameter student achieves 50.32% mAP@0.5 at 82.32 ms mean wall-clock latency, or 12.15 frames per second, while retaining essentially the same runtime and memory requirements as the matched baseline. The results support cross-scale distillation for improving tiny-target detection without increasing inference-time model complexity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30395
Existing point tracking models face a fundamental tradeoff: they can either track a sparse set of query points over long horizons, or track all points across only short clips. We introduce TrackEverything, a 3D point tracker that breaks this trade-off by representing videos as persistent 3D scene tracks in world coordinates. Grounded in the insight that videos are 2D projections of an underlying 3D world, TrackEverything decouples model complexity from video duration, allowing it to scale with unique physical scene geometry instead. Our approach introduces three key innovations. First, we employ a voxelization-based de-duplication mechanism at sliding-window boundaries to merge co-located tracks, preventing repeated observations of the same surface from redundantly accumulating. Second, we decompose tracking into an endpoint refiner that predicts each point's destination and static-versus-dynamic classification, followed by a lightweight trajectory refiner that decodes dense trajectories exclusively for dynamic points. Third, we propose 3D WAFT, replacing memory-prohibitive 4D correlation volumes with efficient feature sampling in the scene cloud. To the best of our knowledge, TrackEverything is the first 3D tracker capable of tracking all visible points across videos exceeding 1000 frames within 40 GB of GPU memory. On TAPVid-3D, TrackEverything outperforms all open-source all-frame dense 3D trackers by more than 20% APD on short clips, while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art sparse trackers on long sequences, despite tracking far more points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30222
Scientific discovery begins where known problems end. There, AI systems must engage in exploration: framing hypotheses, designing experiments, and iterating on the results. However, evaluating this ability is difficult: (1) how to verify whether a genuinely new hypothesis holds, and (2) how to determine whether a system has discovered it through exploration or merely recalled related knowledge from pre-training data. To this end, we introduce ExplorationBench, which turns the wicked problem of evaluating scientific exploration into a concrete and tractable framework built on verifiable Alien Worlds: their rules are executable, so every answer can be checked exactly, and they conflict with familiar knowledge, so recall alone cannot solve the tasks. The benchmark contains two sandboxes, AlienCode (31 discovery targets, 70 tasks) and AlienLogic (24 discovery targets, 70 tasks). Each sandbox provides a flawed manual, task-specific environmental feedback, and a dedicated tool-call schema. Systems use these resources to explore the sandbox, then solve held-out tasks. We evaluate 10 AI systems and find that the strongest systems can acquire and apply unfamiliar rules, while performance varies substantially across trajectories and continued exploration can stall or reverse earlier gains. ExplorationBench represents a step towards AI systems that can acquire and apply genuinely new knowledge through exploration in unknown environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30199
U.S. employment-discrimination complaints describe complex event sequences that are not explicitly captured by lexical or embedding-based representations alone. We present ARGUS, a source-grounded pipeline that combines a 5W1H-inspired schema, legal-domain models, and LLM-based structured generation to construct document-level Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) from CourtListener complaints. ARGUS extracts fact-bearing statements, builds chunk-level event graphs with participant, temporal, and causal structure, and merges them into document-level representations. We evaluate graph quality through human and multi-model assessment and test downstream utility on claim classification and legal QA. The graph-structured classifier outperforms raw and linearized baselines on the held-out set, and EKG-only retrieval improves document-scoped QA, while open-retrieval gains remain limited by low first-stage candidate recall. These results suggest that EKGs are most useful for organizing and reasoning over evidence once relevant material has been retrieved.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30184
Agent skills provide reusable knowledge and instructions, yet agents must repeatedly infer how to apply them and which operation should follow. This couples task reasoning with control decisions, allowing prescribed steps to be omitted or applied incorrectly. We introduce HEXIS, which compiles agent skills into extended finite state machines that separate knowledge from control flow. Skill knowledge is incorporated into local instructions that guide reasoning and generation within states. The machine records execution progress and intermediate results, while explicit transition conditions determine subsequent operations. Our incremental compiler first maps skill clauses and tool interfaces to state operations, local instructions, data bindings, and transitions. It then aligns development traces with existing states to identify missing operations and dependencies. These are incorporated by adding or reusing states and refining their connections. Updates are accepted only after static checks and replay of the current and all previously accepted traces. Across four benchmarks and four executors, HEXIS improves success over Skill + ReAct by 16.1 percentage points on average. Qwen3.8-27B reduces execution tokens by 38.4-88.9% across benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30123
Advances in language modeling have been driven by scaling pretraining on ever more data. Yet, the training data is still largely curated on the model's behalf. A more general approach to pretraining would let the model learn to generate the data most useful for its own improvement. This would provide an effectively unbounded source of training data, limited by compute rather than human knowledge. We introduce Self-Play Pretraining with Zero Data, an initial proof-of-concept towards realizing this vision. Our procedure casts synthetic data generation as a search over the space of all computable structure, taking inspiration from Solomonoff induction. Starting from random initialization, two models learn in tandem: a generator proposes programs interpreted by a universal Turing machine, generating byte sequences, while a learner autoregressively predicts these byte sequences. The learner is trained with standard cross-entropy, while the generator is trained with reinforcement learning to produce sequences at the frontier of the learner's capabilities, yielding an adaptive curriculum. A universal Turing machine gives us a search space over all computable data-generating processes, imposing little domain-specific structure, and self-play searches over this space for useful training data. We test whether zero-shot performance on natural data improves predictably with self-play compute; this is a clean test of transfer since neither generator nor learner is trained on natural data. Across several natural datasets, zero-shot loss exhibits predictable scaling in compute. The models also exhibit in-context learning, and discover recognizable mathematical sequences during training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30063
In the Era by Eon benchmark, each question states the rules for its answer, and code computes the answer from a generated company's data. When agents can run code, the four strongest models each answer 22 to 25 of 27 such questions, so the benchmark barely separates them. We add eight question templates that depend on hidden facts. No question or document states a hidden fact, and the records that seem to hold it show something else. Other data implies it. For example, the sales system says a customer dropped a purchase because of timing. On a recorded call, the customer blames an outage. For each generated company, code fills each template and computes an exact answer without a language model. We evaluate 12 agents. Each pairs a model with an agent program, which connects it to the company's systems. The best agent answers 18 of its 24 attempts, three per question, correctly. Four of the six models answer at most 6 of 24 with any program. The hardest questions require picking one of several similar records, such as which of three renewal offers a customer signed. All agents together answered two such questions correctly in only 1 of 84 attempts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30055
Vietnamese speech research is constrained by resources that isolate automatic speech recognition from speaker, dialect, code-switching, and deepfake analysis. We introduce VietPrism, an open, multi-domain corpus that brings these dimensions together at scale: 993.4 hours and 403,941 bona fide utterances from 1,262 verified speakers across 8,388 real-world videos. To our knowledge, it is the first large-scale Vietnamese corpus to jointly provide transcripts, consistent speaker identities, five dialect groups, and naturally occurring Vietnamese--English code-switching, which constitutes nearly half of the corpus by duration. We further create over 3.1K hours of spoof speech with four open-source and commercial synthesis systems. Every spoof is conditioned on a verified speaker reference and paired with a transcript- and speaker-matched bona fide utterance, enabling unique controlled evaluation with reduced lexical and identity confounds. Zero-shot evaluation of five pretrained multilingual detectors reveals striking brittleness: EER greatly varies across detector--generator pairings, while recent multilingual detector DFA-1B degrades from 16.3% to 33.6% as speaker similarity increases. Dialect-stratified results expose further model-dependent disparities. By unifying natural linguistic diversity with controlled spoof generation, VietPrism provides a challenging foundation for Vietnamese speech modeling and trustworthy audio-deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30005
Generative recommendation reformulates item retrieval as sequence generation, allowing a unified model to directly generate the next item from a user's interaction history. Semantic IDs further make this paradigm effective and scalable by representing each item as discrete codes, enabling knowledge sharing among semantically related items. Recent studies introduce explicit reasoning before Semantic-ID generation, helping models summarize user interests and infer possible preference transitions. However, reasoning is not inherently beneficial: Inaccurate or uninformative reasoning may mislead subsequent item generation and ultimately degrade recommendation performance. This raises a central challenge: how can a recommender select and learn effective reasoning traces and progressively evolve toward better reasoning from its own generations? In this work, we propose Evo-Rec, a three-stage framework for learning better reasoning and further enhancing it through reinforcement learning. First, we align Semantic IDs with their textual and behavioral contexts, enabling the model to understand and generate item identifiers. Second, we sample multiple candidate reasoning traces and retain those that improve the prediction of the ground-truth item, providing a stronger reasoning initialization through supervised fine-tuning. Third, we further optimize the reasoning policy through reinforcement learning with catalog-constrained item generation and ranking-aware recommendation feedback. Experiments on three Amazon Review benchmarks show that Evo-Rec consistently outperforms discriminative, generative, and reasoning-enhanced recommenders across all evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in learning better reasoning for SID-based generative recommendation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29973
General-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) bring broad knowledge and spatial reasoning to robot manipulation, yet existing systems either use them indirectly, to predict constraints or write programs, or give them a view of the scene rather than a world in which to act. We present World Action Agent (WAA), a multi-agent harness through which VLMs pilot robots with basic tools, making every decision within a visual action workspace. The workspace has three properties. Contact views, selected automatically from the scene geometry, present the scene around the current interaction. Action rehearsal turns each action into an editable proposal that the agent, alone or through an Imagination Agent, previews and revises against planning feedback before execution. In-view correction closes the loop between observation, rehearsal, and low-level execution, letting the agent remove residual offsets in the view where it observes them. Through the same workspace, WAA acquires embodied procedural knowledge in two ways: it evolves multimodal skills from expert videos and human teaching under evidence-based review and consults them through a Skill Agent, and its interaction traces train smaller VLMs to pilot the same harness. On LIBERO-Pro, WAA with skills evolved only from LIBERO-90 reaches a state-of-the-art 75.6% average success, outperforming end-to-end VLAs, code-as-policy agents, and a visual-harness baseline with the same backbone; the same skills remain effective on robosuite without further learning. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on harness traces raises its out-of-domain success from 1.7% to 43.3%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29964
Before a product or policy change ships, the question that matters is how people will react to it. Augur rehearses that reaction offline: it builds a typed knowledge graph from the change documents, populates a grounded persona market, simulates the interaction, and returns an auditable decision memo recommending one of five actions. We assemble Gold-50, fifty real product and policy episodes whose real-world outcome is known, adjudicated against the public record, and score the five-way release verdict against it. Our central finding is methodological and negative: most of the measured gap between frontier cloud models and open-weight models we fine-tune and serve offline is attributable to an under-specified evaluation, not a difference in capability. We show this three ways. First, the prompt envelope alone can dominate the score: holding weights, cases and scorer fixed, one system -- a LoRA-SFT adapter on Qwen3-32B -- swings from 0% to 73%. Second, in a matched 2x2 ablation, defining the decision taxonomy in the prompt -- with no model change -- lifts every frontier model by +24 to +34pp; under the under-specified prompt, Qwen3-32B LoRA-SFT served offline beats all three frontier models (paired McNemar, Holm-corrected), and once the prompt is fair no significant difference from any of them is detected. Third, agreement with the distillation teacher rises without accuracy following, and the full pipeline amplifies a systematic "over-doom" bias rather than improving the verdict. Separately, we validate the reaction layer on its own terms: blind judges across four model families find the synthetic reaction recovers 67-90% of the concerns the public actually raised, and a pre-registered ablation locates its value -- largest where the decision is hardest, redundant near ceiling. The pipeline that regenerates every number and figure here is available from the authors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29952
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a wide range of generative tasks. Yet their probabilistic nature makes them, in isolation, fundamentally unsuited for industrial product configuration, where outputs must be syntactically valid, semantically consistent with a knowledge base of hundreds of features and rules, and producible by an existing manufacturing chain. We argue that Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI methods lay out a promising path towards industrial-grade configurators that are reliable by design, explainable, and trustworthy. This paper describes a taxonomy of three NeSy integration strategies, namely hybrid inference, hybrid fine-tuning, and hybrid training, exploring their usage in the configuration domain. We report our effort to operationalize NeSy concepts in an industrial configuration copilot and derive a set of practical design choices for deploying trustworthy AI in engineering environments. We close with a discussion of open research challenges we consider most pressing, in particular how to scale NeSy methods from small academic demonstrators to the size of industrial configurators.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29947
Recent non-autoregressive (NAR) zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models generate in parallel but typically require the target sequence length to be specified before generation. We introduce EditVoice, to our knowledge the first variable-length NAR zero-shot TTS model, which uses Edit Flows to jointly update speech content and sequence length through insertions, deletions, and substitutions. EditVoice adopts speech-infilling training, which unifies zero-shot TTS and text-based speech editing and allows both prefix and suffix speech prompt placements at inference. We introduce Complementary Prompt Sampling (CPS) to leverage the complementary Edit Flow predictions induced by the two prompt placements. We further find that EditVoice can edit source and model-generated speech beyond its training sources. We use this generalization for end-to-end editing and training-free post-generation refinement. With the Edit Flow model trained on 10K h of GigaSpeech, EditVoice demonstrates competitive zero-shot TTS performance on Seed-TTS Eval EN and LibriSpeech-PC and speech editing performance on RealEdit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29889
Search quality evaluation provides essential supervision and diagnostic signals for the development and iteration of industrial search systems. Although large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative to manual assessment, reliable automatic evaluation remains challenging: users experience search results at the page level, while the applicable evaluation criteria are multi-dimensional and continuously evolving. Packing all evaluation criteria into a unified prompt introduces irrelevant context and potential criterion interference, whereas internalizing them through post-training tightly couples rule updates with costly model retraining cycles. To address these issues, we propose Skill-routed Evaluation with Evolvable Knowledge (SEEK). Specifically, SEEK externalizes specific search evaluation criteria into a skill bank, dynamically routes relevant skills for each query-result list pair, and employs a task-adapted listwise evaluator to produce page-level judgments and failure mode attribution. A two-stage training pipeline teaches the evaluator to align evaluation criteria with human preferences, while a replay-gated skill bank allows recurring evaluation knowledge gaps to be incorporated without model retraining. Experiments on industrial short-video search show that SEEK improves listwise quality evaluation accuracy and achieves significant progress in attribution diagnosis. SEEK has been deployed at Kuaishou, a short-video platform with over 400 million daily active users, significantly improving the scale and quality of online search evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29803
We present TimeBraid, a series of unified time-series and language models that align pretrained language models and pretrained time-series foundation models through interleaved global residual attention layers. Each model inherits knowledge, instruction following, and reasoning from one side, continuous-signal perception and zero-shot forecasting from the other, and fuses the two in a shared representation space where both modalities are understood and generated. We study the design choices that make such unified modeling work: where to align the two representation spaces, how to ground language in temporal structure, how to balance understanding with generation, and how to keep joint optimization stable. The resulting recipe combines a unified prompting scheme for diverse time-series and text tasks, stabilized joint training, and supervision from 2.2M curated series--text pairs and 4.9M instruction-tuning samples. Across benchmarks spanning time-series perception, understanding, reasoning, and both context-aided and unimodal forecasting, TimeBraid remains competitive with far larger general-purpose models and task-specific counterparts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29792
Text-to-video retrieval usually represents a video clip by a single embedding. This embedding often loses important relations between people. E.g., an interaction "Anna confronts Mark" is regularly filmed as alternating shot and reverse shot of both (Fig. 1a). No single shot or averaged embedding over clip shots captures this relation. Thus, we propose SALI (Shot-Aware Late Interaction). It extracts the subject and object from a single-sentence query, and matches the query, its subject and object text embeddings against each visual shot embedding of a video clip. The matching operator is greedy max or optimal transport. A film-grammar penalty in fine-tuning adds a small, consistent shift. Built on CLIP4Clip-meanP, SALI keeps overall recall on par on Condensed Movies and ActivityNet while raising R@1 on multi-shot relation queries by 3 and 12 points, the most among all compared methods, and improves such queries on MSR-VTT at a cost of 1.4 R@1 overall.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29721
Future orbital infrastructures, such as deployable antennas, solar farms, and large orbital platforms will require autonomous inspection systems able to operate with limited prior knowledge and without cooperative markers. Current on-orbit servicing approaches often rely on predefined trajectories, standard interfaces, fiducial markers or accurate target models, which limits scalability for large, heterogeneous or partially unknown structures. This paper presents a markerless autonomous robotic inspection pipeline in which 3D reconstruction is used as an inspection-support representation. The system integrates a Kinova Gen2 manipulator with an end-effector-mounted multimodal sensor head composed of an RGB-D camera, a thermal camera and a 2D LiDAR. The pipeline estimates an approximate inspection volume, generates viewpoints, plans collision-free motions with MoveIt, and synchronously records RGB-D images, thermal data, and robot poses in ROS2. Candidate reconstruction methods were evaluated to select a practical method for this pipeline, with Nerfacto used for geometric reconstruction and Thermal-Nerfacto used to demonstrate thermal-aware rendering for inspection. Validation in a Gazebo-based simulator and preliminary laboratory tests reveal that the proposed system can autonomously acquire spatially coherent inspection data and produce reconstructions suitable for visual and geometric assessment, representing a step towards inspection of large non-cooperative space structures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29644
Public software repositories, like GitHub and Software Heritage Archive, store billions of files, yet extracting their implicit engineering knowledge ---i.e., the algorithms they implement, the paradigms they follow, the patterns they instantiate, and the application domains they serve--- remains challenging, as current tools are constrained to syntactic and token-level analysis. We present a pipeline for building an open-taxonomy semantic annotation of source code using a code-specialised Large Language Model. The extracted entities are grounded in Wikidata through a three-stage linking procedure: a deterministic SPARQL stage handles unambiguous entities, a Deep Research Agent resolves the residual long tail, and a hierarchy-rollup stage imports the parent-of closure of each resolved Wikidata identifier. The resulting annotations are materialised as a source-code-specific open-taxonomy knowledge graph. We further introduce a calibrated quality-assurance protocol that quantifies annotation precision by combining a small human gold set with an LLM-as-a-judge filter. We applied our pipeline to the 167 million files of the Stack-Edu corpus, creating the first known large-scale open-taxonomy knowledge graph for source code. Our graph, named CodeGraph, contains approximately 158 million nodes, which include around 145 million files, about 63,000 extracted concept entities (such as algorithms, paradigms, design patterns, and application domains), and roughly 19,800 grounded Wikidata entities. Furthermore, CodeGraph features approximately 1 billion typed edges that connect files to their respective concepts, link these concepts to their grounded Wikidata identifiers, and relate them to their parent categories, covering 14 programming languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29474
Handclaps provide an equipment-free excitation for room acoustics, but their unknown and variable source waveform makes room impulse response (RIR) estimation challenging. In this work, we investigate whether RIRs can be estimated directly from handclaps. To this end, we introduce an anechoic handclap dataset containing 2,540 claps from 17 participants, designed to capture variability across natural claps and different hand configurations. We first establish the performance attainable when the excitation clap is known using regularized deconvolution, and show that approximating the unknown excitation by windowing the direct sound from the reverberant recording is insufficient. To estimate the RIR without a known excitation, we propose using the anechoic handclap recordings to train a deep neural network with a supervised regression objective. Evaluated on a controlled synthetic benchmark, the proposed neural regressor significantly outperforms windowing-based baselines across all instrumental metrics. Furthermore, we test the proposed method on handclap recordings measured in real acoustic spaces, showing that the inferred RIR spectra are consistent across different handclap measurements taken in the same room location. These results showcase the feasibility of directly estimating RIRs from natural handclaps without requiring knowledge of the excitation signal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35839