Long-context language models support ever longer context windows, and evaluations typically treat context length as the main indicator of difficulty. However, context length alone cannot explain why models fail on long-context tasks that require reasoning over complex information. Contexts of equal length can pose very different challenges: a task may be solvable from a single local passage, or it may require integrating evidence distributed across the full context. We quantitatively characterise this difficulty through three properties: evidence scope, how much necessary information must be found; evidence dispersion, how widely that information is scattered within the context; and reasoning depth, how many dependent steps are needed to derive an answer from it. We construct LURCH, a multi-domain question-answering benchmark of 6,550 instances with supporting evidence and reasoning graphs, enabling all three properties to be quantified. Evaluations of proprietary and open-weight models show that: (1) at fixed context length, all our three properties are strongly negatively correlated with model performance; (2) as context length increases, performance degrades sharply on samples with dispersed evidence, whereas it remains relatively stable on samples with localised evidence; and (3) difficulty compounds across properties, as questions with moderately high values on all three are harder than those with an extreme value on just one. These findings establish evidence scope, dispersion and reasoning depth as measures of long-context reasoning difficulty that complement context length.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22067
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a compelling pathway toward energy-efficient artificial intelligence, fundamentally anchored in presynaptic input-driven sparsity. However, a substantial yet chronically overlooked source of computational overhead persists: the continuous subthreshold dynamics of postsynaptic neurons. Quantitative analysis reveals that up to 44% of neurons in an ImageNet-trained ResNet-18 model reside in a deeply inhibited state, imposing a persistent computational burden despite having a negligible probability of firing. To address this inefficiency, the Dormant Spiking Neuron (DSN) model is introduced. By incorporating a state-driven dynamic gate, the DSN allows a neuron to enter a dormant state when its membrane potential falls below a predefined negative threshold, dynamically pruning redundant computations at the instance level. Crucially, this dormancy mechanism is directly integrated into the neuronal dynamics and trained end-to-end via backpropagation through time using surrogate gradients, enabling the network to actively learn a robust dormancy policy that adaptively preserves critical information flow. Extensive experiments across static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate that the DSN framework consistently reduces computational energy by 40% to over 70%. Notably, on the large-scale ImageNet dataset, the DSN outperforms state-of-the-art static pruning techniques at comparable reported cost reductions and simultaneously improves the corresponding baseline SNN accuracy by 1.34%. By establishing a trainable, state-driven sparsity paradigm orthogonal to conventional input-driven methods, the DSN unlocks synergistic efficiency gains, presenting an effective approach for advancing neuromorphic computing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21748
Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is crucial for accurately diagnosing and segmenting brain tumors. However, the acquisition of CE-MRI requires injecting contrast agents, which poses potential health risks and increases scan costs. Here, we propose a CE-MRI synthesis method from non-contrast sequences, reducing both risk and cost. Unlike existing methods that rely on channel-wise concatenation to fuse multi-sequence information for synthesis, we introduce a Mixture of Feature Difference (MoFD) module. The proposed module uses a dynamic weighting strategy to adaptively select and aggregate informative features from both individual source sequences and explicit differences among them. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of image fidelity and perceptual quality on the UCSF-PDGM and UPenn-GBM datasets. Our method successfully reconstructs tumor regions and achieves segmentation performance comparable to that obtained with real CE-MRI. Our ablation studies show that although adversarial learning improves perceptual quality, a regression-based variant of our method achieves higher structural fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21703
Language-conditioned humanoid motion generation enables users to create and refine robot movements through natural language. The central challenge is to connect an underspecified request to concrete motion structure that can subsequently be revised relative to an accepted reference. We present TRACE, a generation and editing framework for the Unitree G1 humanoid robot built around typed, measurable kinematic quantities. Our insight is to ground generation conditions in paired training motions and editing goals in the current motion. A language model learns to predict support, root, and hand events from motion-derived supervision; their time-aligned encodings complement the original text in a diffusion generator. Gravity-referenced states and trajectory--contact objectives improve kinematic consistency. For editing, typed requests define body--time scopes and source-relative goals. A separate reference-conditioned diffusion editor uses these goals and revised events to realize changes, while sampling-time projection preserves protected state coordinates. Quantitative evaluation and human assessment show improved semantic alignment and motion quality over the compared methods. Controlled ablations support the value of motion-grounded conditioning and kinematic consistency, while multi-turn editing evaluations demonstrate more reliable execution of successive relative requests under shared preservation constraints. Together, these results support typed kinematic structure as a common basis for motion generation and reference-aware revision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21515
One-shot Font Generation (OFG) aims to synthesize a target glyph by transferring the stylistic characteristics of a single reference glyph while preserving the structure of the target character. However, accurately capturing font style from a single reference image remains challenging due to the limited stylistic information available in a single glyph, and this challenge is further amplified for complex scripts. We propose CoDeFont, a script-agnostic OFG framework that addresses this challenge through multi-level style-content factorization and progressive style-content reconciliation. CoDeFont independently aggregates complementary style and structural information across multiple spatial levels to obtain factor-specific representations, while a contrastive objective explicitly encourages separation between style and content embeddings. During reconstruction, the disentangled representations are progressively injected through multi-level style conditioning, enabling stylistic information to be incorporated at different decoding resolutions while preserving the underlying glyph structure. We evaluate CoDeFont on structurally distinct Bengali and Latin scripts across seen and unseen font styles. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate consistent improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed framework for OFG across diverse writing systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21364
Text-to-video models often generate the visual concepts requested in natural language prompts but fail to satisfy their intended ordering, timing, and persistence requirements. We propose representing these requirements as specifications in a formal Temporal Logic, and introduce Temporal Specification Guidance (TSG), a training-free inference-time framework that turns temporal specifications into executable objectives for guiding video generation during sampling. TSG scores traces of visual concept evidence using differentiable quantitative semantics and uses the score's gradients to construct a specification-guided denoising direction. We instantiate this framework with video-text attention traces, efficient differentiable scores for Metric Temporal Logic, and gradient-derived attention biases. This instantiation requires neither an external concept classifier nor backpropagation through the video transformer. Its attention-steered forward pass yields a denoising direction that augments classifier-free guidance (CFG). On a benchmark of 220 prompts spanning 11 categories of temporal constraints, including ordered object entry and state transitions, this instantiation improves specification satisfaction accuracy over CFG by 9.5-20 percentage points across five models, with minimal memory overhead. These results demonstrate the potential of temporal specifications and differentiable satisfaction objectives as a flexible interface for controlling video generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20822
The closed world asks AI for specialized competence and lets it manufacture the iid data its theory assumes: a fixed criterion licenses collecting examples until the task is covered. The open world asks for versatility --- taking up tasks a machine was not built for, from few examples and with little prior from a human designer --- and offers data that is grouped, not shuffled. Its tasks are not known in advance, so a machine must do inference-time learning (1st requirement). Modeling tasks as sharing latent factors and decomposing the training objective, we derive two more: a *rich representation*, retaining more than iid generalization requires, and a predictive disentanglement that aligns inputs and outputs into matched low-dimensional groups. The analysis further predicts the need for a consistent inner learner, and the benefit of long contexts spanning related tasks. We test these claims on language models up to 8B, asking whether a model has a property (qualitative) rather than how much it wins (quantitative). Models that meet the requirements improve as data from related tasks accumulates; the rest degrade, and neither scale nor layer-type interleaving repairs this.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20782
Reliable brain-mask transfer into native fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) space can fail when T1-to-FLAIR rigid registration is unstable. We developed A$^3$PreCore, a six-degree-of-freedom rigid-registration strategy that aligns the full bias-corrected T1-weighted image to native FLAIR using normalized mutual information while preserving the established T1-space anatomical mask. We also introduced extended quantitative quality control (E-QC), which characterizes mask extent, field-of-view-relative position, FLAIR intensity support, boundary support, inferior morphology, and pairwise geometric disagreement. In 78 participants with paired T1-weighted and FLAIR imaging, A$^3$PreCore was compared with fsl_anat and the Brain Extraction Tool (BET). Gross rigid-body misregistration occurred in 21/78 fsl_anat outputs (26.9%) and 0/78 A$^3$PreCore outputs (exact two-sided McNemar p=9.54 x 10^-7). Among 57 participants without gross fsl_anat misregistration, A$^3$PreCore preserved close agreement (median Dice=0.993; median paired Delta NMI=-0.00007, p=0.429). A$^3$PreCore remained broadly concordant with BET (median Dice=0.955), with less inferior and extracranial extension in representative comparisons. Method-blinded neuroscientists ranked A$^3$PreCore first in 35/40 participants (87.5%). E-QC additionally exposed severe orientation-related disagreement not evident from global descriptors or centroid displacement alone. These findings support A$^3$PreCore as a robust native-FLAIR brain-mask transfer strategy and E-QC as a complementary framework for multidimensional mask characterization and participant-specific geometric quality control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20561
Accurate nuclei segmentation underpins quantitative computational pathology, yet remains challenging due to morphological variability, weak boundaries, nuclear crowding, and pronounced domain shifts arising from differences in tissue preparation, staining, and acquisition. While deep learning and recent foundation models have improved segmentation performance under matched distributions with the original training data, their generalization across heterogeneous histopathology domains remains limited. We introduce GDBA-Net, a parameter-efficient nuclei segmentation framework built around the proposed Gated Dual-Branch Adapter (GDBA). GDBA-Net adapts a frozen SAM2 encoder by integrating pretrained semantic representations with explicit frequency-derived structural priors. The complementary representations are independently transformed through Grid MLP branches and dynamically integrated using sample-adaptive channel-wise gating, selectively emphasizing structural cues relevant to nuclear delineation. Despite using only 4.3 million trainable parameters, GDBA-Net achieves state-of-the-art in-dataset performance and consistently superior cross-dataset generalization across six diverse nuclei segmentation benchmarks under fully supervised, cross-dataset, and five-shot adaptation protocols, outperforming competing CNN-, transformer-, and foundation model based methods. Comprehensive ablations confirm that these gains arise from the coordinated design of semantic-frequency complementarity and adaptive gating rather than increased model capacity. By uniting transferable semantic representations with explicit structural priors, GDBA-Net provides a robust, annotation-efficient solution to domain variability in nuclei segmentation. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20073
The rapid advancement of large vision language models (LVLMs) has made geolocation inference from images highly accurate and accessible. This poses serious privacy risks: a passive adversary with black-box LVLM access can infer a user's location from a single photo with no metadata. Existing protection methods rely almost exclusively on adversarial perturbation, which introduces perceptible visual artifacts and utility degradation. We identify the visual-geolocation asymmetry: geolocation-decisive clues, such as street signs, tend to be visually peripheral but dominate location inference. Exploiting this asymmetry, we propose GeoCloak, an agentic framework for semantics-preserving geolocation privacy protection. It acts as a clue-aware planner that analyzes each image to identify geolocation-relevant clues, dispatches targeted semantic edits to directly suppress peripheral clues, and autonomously configures adversarial perturbation to further suppress residual geolocation features, all under iterative utility-aware feedback. We evaluate GeoCloak on four diverse datasets spanning 108 countries and 576 cities against five LVLMs and three inference methods. GeoCloak reduces overall city-level accuracy from 41.2% to 9.9%, approximately half of the best-performing baseline, while achieving substantially superior utility preservation both qualitatively and quantitatively. We hope this work takes a meaningful step toward practical, semantics-preserving geolocation privacy protection, giving users greater control over the location information inadvertently embedded in their shared images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20055
Automated alpha factor discovery is critical for modern quantitative research. While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been integrated into quantitative workflows, existing agent-based approaches remain highly susceptible to severe backtest overfitting. To address this challenge, we propose EvoQuantLab, a training-free, dual-loop self-evolving framework for robust factor discovery. Instead of relying entirely on LLM generation, EvoQuantLab deploys an inner genetic-programming (GP) loop that dramatically improves token efficiency while evolving typed factor expressions under structural and diversity constraints. An outer diagnosis loop then systematically audits evidence across cycles to drive protocol-level improvements. Furthermore, our evaluation pipeline applies multi-metric validation to rigorously filter out spurious factors before deployment. Extensive out-of-sample experiments across both daily and hourly frequencies -- covering equities and cryptocurrency -- demonstrate the robustness of EvoQuantLab. Specifically, on daily CSI 500 and S&P 500 tasks, EvoQuantLab achieves leading annualized returns of 18.34% and 21.30%, consistently outperforming existing agent baselines. On high-turnover hourly cryptocurrency data, EvoQuantLab delivers a 37.91% annualized return while effectively avoiding execution collapse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17130
Real-time monocular human pose estimation is an important sensing component for human-centered intelligent systems. While recent camera-based methods have achieved impressive accuracy, fundamental challenges persist, particularly when visual observations are incomplete, such as during lower-body occlusion or short out-of-frame intervals. In these challenging but common scenarios, vision-only systems often struggle to reconstruct physically plausible lower-limb motion and reliable foot-ground contact. Due to the highly unobtrusive and wearable nature of smart insoles, this paper investigates whether simple plantar pressure and acceleration sensors can effectively resolve these visually induced limitations. To systematically investigate this, we first collect a synchronized multimodal dataset and then propose a part-decoupled temporal fusion framework. The proposed model fuses foot-sensing features into the lower-body branch to compensate for incomplete visual evidence, while a lightweight coordinator exchanges information between the upper- and lower-body temporal representations to maintain whole-body consistency. The framework is evaluated with three representative real-time visual backbones based on 2D keypoints, 3D landmarks, and SMPL-based human mesh recovery. We evaluate our framework on three representative real-time visual backbones. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that incorporating simple foot sensors consistently improves pose accuracy, motion smoothness, and gait-related measurements over vision-only baselines, with the most significant gains observed under occlusion and short visual-dropout conditions. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that unobtrusive foot sensing provides vital and complementary physical observability when camera observations are temporarily unavailable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19494
Training LLMs to act as capable agents requires learning from multi-turn interactions with environments. However, multi-turn interaction trajectories generated by heterogeneous agent runtimes are difficult to transform into structured, high-quality training data that training engines can readily consume. In this paper, we propose AgentWorld, a data factory that bridges heterogeneous agent runtimes and training engines through a Gateway Server and a Data Pool, reframing LLM agent training around a unified data lifecycle from interaction collection to training consumption. The Gateway Server captures multi-turn interactions through an LLM API proxy, while the Data Pool organizes them into standardized step records for curation and training. An interactive dashboard supports trajectory monitoring, step inspection, and data review. In our demonstration, users integrate ready-to-use white-box and black-box agents, trace and curate their interaction data across the pipeline, and extend the factory to new agents and datasets through lightweight configuration. Quantitative experiments across multiple datasets and RL methods demonstrate training support for different agent runtimes. AgentWorld provides a practical foundation for transforming heterogeneous multi-turn experience into training-ready data for LLM agents. Our code is available at this https URL and the demonstration video can be found at link this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09138
Mixed methods research offers established strategies for integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence, but less guidance for integrating two computational representations of the same qualitative corpus. This methodological study introduces Parallel-Then-Integrated (PTI), a four-step procedure for explicit and traceable integration. We present PTI using 1,203 interview paragraphs from 29 mothers in Nepal. The two representations were ontology-guided Patient Voice (PV) coding with PVminer and data-driven themes generated through non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). A theme-complete crosswalk documented convergence, divergence, and preprocessing-sensitive differences. Depression status, based on Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) scores, served as a secondary external anchor for exploratory association checks. PTI provides a structured approach for integrating computational representations of qualitative text within mixed methods research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19164
As the Arctic transitions toward a seasonally ice-free state, capturing the complex morphology of submerged sea ice is crucial for advancing models of ocean-ice-atmosphere heat exchange and monitoring under-ice habitats. Currently, sub-surface ice mapping is predominantly achieved through acoustic sensors such as multibeam sonar. While sonar provides robust large-scale geometry, it lacks spectral and high-resolution textural information required to record fine morphological features - a critical limitation in under-ice environments, where sparse visual features and degraded sensing conditions challenge the capture of detailed structural and optical surface properties. We present a benchmark for vision-based under-ice 3D reconstruction using real-world data from the MOSAiC expedition and synthetic data generated in an Unreal Engine-based underwater robotics simulator. The benchmark evaluates Structure-From-Motion (SfM) and monocular depth estimation, with quantitative comparison enabled through cross-modal registration to upward-looking multibeam sonar.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19097
Virtual footwear try-on (VFTON), a critical yet underexplored area in virtual try-on (VTON), aims to synthesize faithful try-on results given diverse footwear and model images while maintaining 3D consistency and texture authenticity. Unlike conventional garment-focused VTON methods, VFTON presents unique challenges due to (1) Data Scarcity, which arises from the difficulty of perfectly matching product shoes with models wearing the identical ones, (2) Viewpoint Misalignment, where the target foot pose and source shoe views are always misaligned, leading to incomplete texture information and detail distortion, and (3) Background-induced Color Distortion, where complex material of footwear interacts with environmental lighting, causing unintended color contamination. To address these challenges, we introduce MVShoes, a multi-view shoe try-on dataset consisting of 7305 well-annotated image triplets, covering diverse footwear categories and challenging try-on scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a dual-stream DiT architecture, ShoeFit, designed to mitigate viewpoint misalignment through Multi-View Conditioning with 3D Rotary Position Embedding, and alleviate background-induced distortion using the LayeredRefAttention which leverages background features to modulate footwear latents. The proposed framework effectively decouples shoe appearance from environmental interferences while preserving high-quality texture detail through decoupled denoising and conditioning branches. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method substantially improves rendering fidelity and robustness under challenging real-world product shoes, establishing a new benchmark in high-fidelity footwear try-on synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18325
Randomly initialised neural networks of width $m$ converge to Gaussian processes as $m \to \infty$, with two types of quantitative bounds characterising this convergence. Finite-sample bounds compare the network with its Gaussian limit at a fixed finite sample set, on an arbitrary domain, in the quadratic Wasserstein distance $\mathcal W_2$, achieving a convergence rate of $m^{-1/2}$ with explicit constants. However, these constants grow with the number of samples, so the bound becomes uninformative as the sample set is refined. Functional bounds remove that dependence by comparing the two as random functions, at the price of spherical input, metrics weaker than $\mathcal W_2$, or slower rates. In this paper, we therefore lift a finite-sample bound to a functional one. The lifting refines the sample set until it is dense in the domain, so the bound must first be made independent of the number of samples. We achieve this by measuring the error per sample, which makes the constant uniform. For a polynomial activation and any compact input set, this gives a rate of $m^{-1/2}$ in the supremum norm, with an explicit constant.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18166
The relationship between odor chemistry and perception remains incompletely understood. Many existing studies focus on the perception of single molecules, whereas natural odors contain tens to hundreds of components, adding extra layer of complexity to percept formation. Here, we explore the relationship between molecular composition and perceived similarity in natural odor objects. We study this using a database of more than 1,200 volatile-compound-in-food mixtures containing more than 8,000 molecular components, and use large language models (LLMs) as a scalable surrogate for deriving mixture-level perceptual descriptions. We find that language-derived representations provide useful supervision for predicting held-out mixture similarities from molecular composition. The prediction was consistently strongest when perceptual targets were derived from chemosensory prompts than from other sensory prompts. Further, during the mixture-level training, we learned low-rank molecular embeddings that enabled better prediction of held-out mixture similarities than component-overlap metrics, even for mixture pairs with no shared molecules. Although no single-molecule labels were used during training, the learned molecular geometry showed significant alignment with the independent human odor-descriptor space. Finally, we explored the use of external molecular features in our mixture-similarity prediction task. These features showed modest zero-shot alignment with mixture-level perceptual similarity. They improved prediction under limited supervision but offered little additional predictive benefit with the full training set. Together, these results show that language-derived descriptions can provide scalable supervision for predicting the perceptual organization of complex natural mixtures, contributing to a quantitative understanding of how molecular composition gives rise to odor perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17164
Standard hate speech detection datasets often emphasize explicit harmful language, but directed harm can also be expressed indirectly, without clearly hateful wording. Sarcasm is one such form of indirect expression, as it can convey harmful intent through mock praise, exaggeration, humor, or apparent politeness. In this paper, we introduce SarcasTraps, a targeted external test set for analyzing the effect of sarcasm on Turkish hate speech detection. SarcasTraps contains 479 entries annotated along two dimensions: hate speech and sarcasm. We train classifiers using BERTurk and XLM-RoBERTa on two existing Turkish hate speech datasets and evaluate them on SarcasTraps, using it strictly as an external test set. We also evaluate GPT-4.1 and Llama-3.3-70B in a zero-shot setting on SarcasTraps. Results show that sarcasm substantially affects hate speech detection. Fine-tuned encoder models lose recall on sarcastic hate, while zero-shot LLMs maintain higher recall but suffer substantial precision drops on sarcastic examples. These findings show that both fine-tuned hate speech detectors and zero-shot LLMs struggle when sarcasm is involved, and SarcasTraps provides quantitative evidence of this challenge through a targeted Turkish test set. Due to the presence of sensitive and hateful language, SarcasTraps will be shared upon request for academic research purposes. Warning: This paper has examples from the dataset which contains offensive and hateful content towards groups of people.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16957
Spatial transcriptomics jointly captures molecular state, tissue morphology, and spatial organization, yet spatial-domain methods are typically compared only at late training checkpoints, obscuring differences in convergence efficiency. We introduce MP-MNCA, a morphology-prior masked neighbor cross-attention framework that preserves the full 3,000 dimensional highly-variable-gene representation while selectively routing molecular information across spatial neighbors, with histological similarity incorporated as a continuous attention prior under a self-supervised masked neighbor-contrastive objective. Across 12 heterogeneous human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) sections, MP-MNCA is evaluated against established spatial-domain baselines using both convergence trajectories and epoch-wise spatial-domain visualizations. Our results show that MP-MNCA (i) reaches coherent spatial-domain structure in substantially fewer training epochs, as reflected quantitatively by convergence curves and qualitatively by progressive spatial grids, and (ii) maintains strong clustering quality, achieving a mean peak refined ARI of 0.546 versus 0.549 for the strongest baseline (STAIG), while attaining the highest mean refined NMI of 0.657 versus 0.640. Moreover, MP-MNCA outperforms STAIG on 7 of 12 sections in ARI and 11 of 12 in NMI, demonstrating faster convergence without sacrificing spatial-domain quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16212