Memory-augmented assistants retrieve evidence from stored conversations and documents to answer queries. Most embedding-based retrievers compare single-vector representations of queries and memories, even when relevance depends on a small part of the content. Such local evidence can be matched to queries using the contextual token representations already computed by the same embedding models. Our method uses sparse token matching to improve retrieval without additional training. Each query token retrieves a small set of matching tokens across candidate memories. The matching scores are aggregated for each memory and combined with whole-memory similarity to rank memories. An optional low-rank query adapter can be trained with supervision while keeping the encoder and stored memory representations fixed. Our method improves retrieval across eight benchmarks and multiple model families without additional training. Query adaptation further increases the gains to 13.3 and 14.3 percentage points in average Recall@10 and NDCG@10 on Qwen3-Embedding-4B. These retrieval gains translate into higher question-answering accuracy on long-term memory benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13277
Multimodal large language models process the complete visual token sequence, increasing prefill cost even when many tokens are irrelevant to the instruction. Token-wise saliency captures limited inter-token dependence; graph-based selection instead depends on how relations govern importance propagation and ranking. We study support-constrained propagation with node-degree correction. Inspired by sheaf geometry, SheafPrune uses modality-specific maps and a sparse text--visual graph to transfer relevance, then propagates scores on a separate visual graph and corrects them for degree. It retains a hard top-$k$ subset once before the frozen language model. The selector has about $4.5$M parameters and is trained end-to-end through the frozen LLaVA-NeXT-8B backbone using only the language-modeling objective. Explicit retention-ratio conditioning lets one checkpoint serve every budget. Across four backbones, ten benchmarks and seven pruning ratios, with all baselines re-implemented under one protocol, SheafPrune achieves the best retention at $22$ of $28$ backbone--budget settings, with monotonically growing margins in the moderate-to-aggressive regime. On LLaVA-NeXT, retaining $10\%$ of visual tokens yields a $5.15\times$ net prefill speedup and an $84.0\%$ end-to-end FLOPs reduction. Together with component ablations, these results support graph-constrained importance propagation and degree correction as a design for visual token selection across the evaluated backbones and tokenization schemes, improving the trade-off between accuracy retention and inference cost. code:this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13263
Actions specify what a robot should execute, but do not describe what those commands will achieve. Vision-language-action (VLA) policies nevertheless learn primarily by predicting action chunks from images, language, and state. We introduce Action--Future Coupled Effect Learning (AFCE), which makes a future-grounded physical Effect the policy's primary prediction target. An offline tokenizer constructs temporally ordered Effect tokens from demonstrated actions, realized robot responses, and sparse visual transitions. Reconstruction objectives encourage the representation to retain executable detail and observed physical change. A flow-matching VLA predicts Effects from current images, instruction, and robot state, while a state-conditioned decoder converts them into action chunks. Embodiment-specific interfaces allow single- and dual-arm tasks to share the Effect model. On DexJoCo, AFCE achieves $50.97\%$ overall success, improving over $\pi_{0.5}$ and UVT by 11.82 and 15.21 percentage points, respectively. It leads on all five bimanual tasks, highlighting the value of Effect supervision for coordinated dexterous manipulation. The project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13212
Fast rollout generation for long-context reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) requires reducing KV-cache traffic without changing the response groups used for policy optimization. In our profiled RLVR workloads, attention accounts for 72--76\% of autoregressive decoding kernel time. Sparse attention reduces these reads, but sampling directly from a sparse policy changes the response groups used for learning. For group-relative optimization, we show that even exact response-wise reweighting does not generally recover the expected dense-policy update because the advantage of each response depends on the rewards of other group members. We propose Self-Sparse Speculative Rollouts (S$^3$R). It uses sparse attention to propose tokens, then generates responses through full-attention verification and exact speculative sampling. Drafting and verification share the same policy parameter, eliminating the need to train or update a separate drafter. The resulting response groups follow the dense-policy distribution. Under S$^3$R, we characterize speedup conditions and the costs of drafting and verification. We found that dense verification still requires the complete historical KV cache. A KV-aware scheduler therefore limits KV-cache repeated offloading and restoration while maintaining rollout parallelism. % OR thrashing In a matched ablation with an aggressive sparse drafting budget, S$^3$R maintains stable training while direct sparse sampling with training-side correction becomes unstable. On long-context mathematical reasoning, S$^3$R achieves $1.39\times~1.35\times$ the end-to-end training throughput of autoregressive rollouts on Qwen3 model, with comparable task performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13202
Efficient visual tokenization requires balancing representation compactness with the preservation of fine-grained image content. Conventional grid-based tokenizers allocate tokens uniformly across spatial locations despite non-uniform visual complexity, whereas compact 1D tokenizers aggregate global information but can struggle to preserve local details. We introduce MixTok, a hybrid visual tokenizer that combines a compact 1D global representation with sparse 2D tokens for local refinement. A content-adaptive router ranks candidate locations by refinement priority and determines the number of 2D tokens for each image under a target average token budget. At the highest-scoring locations, 2D token features replace the spatial features recovered from the 1D representation, and a shared decoder reconstructs the image from the resulting mixed features. On ImageNet 256 x 256, MixTok achieves highly competitive reconstruction and generation performance, with an rFID of 1.195 and a gFID of 1.95 at respective average budgets of approximately 128 and 131 content tokens per image.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13181
Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse views without per-scene optimization remains highly challenging, especially for recovering accurate geometry and fine textures. While recent feedforward approaches leverage generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for scene generation, they typically assign one or multiple Gaussians to each pixel. Such uniform allocation not only produces highly redundant representations by wasting primitives in homogeneous areas, but also fails to exploit the inherent geometric priors of planar surfaces, often resulting in sub-optimal structural modeling. To address these limitations, we present CompactSplat, a novel feedforward framework that enables a content-aware allocation of 3D Gaussians. By integrating texture-guided spatial partitioning with hierarchical sampling, CompactSplat adaptively distributes primitives - concentrating dense Gaussians in complex regions while tiling flat areas with expanded, scale-modulated primitives. Moreover, our framework inherently supports dynamic sparsity control at inference time, enabling seamless trade-offs between rendering fidelity and memory footprint without requiring network retraining. Extensive experiments on RealEstate10K, DL3DV, and ScanNet demonstrate that CompactSplat consistently outperforms prior methods on both standard metrics and high-resolution rendering consistency, achieving high-fidelity reconstructions with significantly fewer primitives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13177
Power sampling improves large language model (LLM) reasoning at test time by sampling from a sharpened version of the base model's distribution. Its sampler, PowerMH, is slow because its Metropolis--Hastings (MH) updates are sequential: each accept/reject decision sets the state from which the next proposal is generated. Prior work reduces this cost by changing the sampler or the model (e.g., sequential Monte Carlo, approximate lookahead, distillation). We propose Predictive SubTree Prefetching (PreSTO), which accelerates PowerMH by prefetching future proposals and provably leaves its MH transition kernel unchanged. PreSTO views future MH outcomes as a tree of accept/reject decisions: in each model call, it generates the proposals of a \textit{prefetched subtree} of this tree in one batch, then follows the realized path with the original MH acceptance rule. We also observe that MH reaches only a sparse, nearly unary part of each prefetched subtree, we further design a \textit{predictive traversal rule} that chooses the subtree to maximize the predicted number of completed transitions. Across seven datasets and five base LLMs, PreSTO achieves median speedups of $1.71\times$, $1.91\times$, and $2.33\times$ on PowerMH and its follow-ups EntropyCut and MultiTryMH, respectively; on the first two, it makes a median of $3.9\times$ fewer model calls, each only $2.1\times$ longer. On LCB V6 with Qwen3.5-9B, the predictive traversal rule is a further $1.25\times$--$1.37\times$ faster than the default breadth-first traversal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13171
Recent image-to-3D models generate complete, high-quality assets from a single image, with global shape and appearance that are already convincing; what remains is the fine scale, where small, thin, elongated, or detail-rich regions are reconstructed softly and under-resolved. This gap can arise in generators with fixed-resolution spatial grids: the same spatial sampling density is used for a large, smooth, low-curvature surface and for a thin, high-curvature structure that carries most of the perceived detail. To this end, we introduce NOFACE3D, a training-free framework that refines these detail-critical regions while preserving the rest of the asset. Given a generated mesh, its input image, and a refinement box, NOFACE3D extracts the selected submesh, scales it up to fill the generator's input volume, and re-encodes it into the full-resolution latent grid. Conditioned on the image crop, it refines the region through flow-based sampling with a spatially varying noise schedule that anchors boundary latents. The refined region is then integrated back into the original asset, preserving the surrounding geometry and appearance. We implement NOFACE3D on TRELLIS.2 and its sparse voxel representation; all of it operates purely at inference time on the frozen pretrained generator. We evaluate NOFACE3D on PAniC-3D, TexVerse and BigDetail, a new benchmark of 339 assets with annotated detail-critical regions. On all three, it generates sharper geometry and finer texture detail than the baselines. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13050
In repeated human-AI interaction, a single observation can be quoted, summarized, and returned to a model as multiple reports, making repetition look like independent corroboration. We study whether language models can use supplied report lineage to update according to evidence provenance rather than report count. We introduce Latent Quotient Evidence Training (LQET), a relational objective that combines sparse Bayesian supervision with constraints that encourage stable predictions when reports add no new evidence and consistent updates to the same new evidence across relay histories. On a controlled binary benchmark, LQET reduces new-evidence update RMSE by 41-44% and log-odds drift after eight relay steps by 89-91% relative to task-only training across Qwen3-4B and Phi-4-mini, with three paired training seeds per backbone. The gains extend to a closed-loop simulation in which model confidence controls how many relayed reports re-enter the model's context in later rounds. By grounding belief updates in supplied provenance, LQET offers a route toward dynamic human-AI systems in which influence follows new evidence, not the number of times the same evidence returns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13008
We investigate whether language models contain internal components that contribute to representing narrativity, the degree to which a text exhibits narrative properties. Across GPT-2-Small, Gemma-2-2B, and Llama-3.1-8B, we identify attention heads, MLP neurons, and sparse autoencoder features whose activations correlate with narrativity. Ablating selected neuron and feature sets increases next-token prediction loss more for high-narrativity than for low-narrativity texts, and reduces the narrativity of open-ended generations. On downstream benchmarks, the largest effects occur in story completion and narrative question answering, although they vary across models and languages; results on confabulation and hallucination benchmarks are mixed. These findings provide causal evidence that selected sets of narrative-associated components contribute to model behaviour, while their internal organisation, relation to narrative theory, and broader functions remain open questions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12989
Video large language models (VLLMs) rely on long visual token sequences to understand complex temporal content, which makes visual token compression important for efficient inference. Existing training-free compression methods mainly reduce the number of tokens sent to the language model, but the compression process itself can still require many visual feature comparisons, especially for intra-frame token protection and inter-frame temporal token merging. This paper proposes a video codec-guided training-free token compression method for VLLMs that uses coding information already available in compressed video as a low-cost search prior. The method aligns reference-frame dependencies, motion vectors, and residuals with the visual token grid. Residual information forms compact candidate pools for token protection, while motion information is propagated along reference-frame chains to construct localized candidates for temporal token merging between sparsely sampled frames. Local visual feature similarity comparison is then used within these candidates to make the final compression decisions, without modifying the base VLLM. Experiments on three representative VLLMs and four video-understanding benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art training-free baseline FlashVID, and in some settings surpasses it, while substantially reducing the feature comparisons required by token protection and temporal matching. These results demonstrate that codec information can effectively improve the accuracy-complexity tradeoff of video token compression.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12959
Action-chunking policies predict future controls but execute only a prefix before replanning. How should a fixed action-token budget be organized to support execution? We propose LeapBot-JAC, which allocates sparse future-control references and dense execution targets within one shared action expert. Both chains are supervised by demonstrated controls and jointly denoised at aligned physical-time positions. Directed attention allows execution tokens to read reference tokens subject to the host's visibility constraints. JAC adds neither action tokens nor parameters and retains the host's world-modeling process; both chains participate in inference, while only the execution chain drives the robot. On LIBERO, JAC reaches 98.3% success with FastWAM and LeapBot-WA, up from 97.0% and 97.3%. On zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, their success rates improve from 53.5% to 70.4% and from 73.1% to 77.3%, respectively. RoboTwin and two real-world tasks provide additional deployment evaluations. Single-training-seed comparisons and FastWAM ablations support action-role organization as a practical design choice under a fixed action-token budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12886
Gradient-based attribution provides input-specific information about model parameters, but computing it via backpropagation for many samples is expensive, while static importance scores discard input dependence. We derive KPSA (Kernelized Parameter Sensitivity Atlas) from a block decomposition of the empirical neural tangent kernel. It measures normalized parameter-group sensitivity, embeds those sources in an explicit query space, and uses a lightweight kernel to estimate sensitivities for unseen inputs. We derive bounds that separate finite-source from irreducible representation error and give margin-based top-$k$ recovery. This paper studies two interpretability applications. Firstly, KPSA identifies parameter groups with high susceptibility to perturbations across vision, forecasting, and protein-modeling setups. Across a fivefold range of parameter budgets ($0.02$-$0.1\%$), its selected groups attain $39$-$85\%$ of the perturbation susceptibility of a first-order backpropagation oracle. In vision and forecasting, these parameter groups form sparse sensitivity circuits that extend across depth and vary systematically with the input. Secondly, we use KPSA on an activation-attribution problem for MLP features in transformers. It retains $81\%$ of the gap between a backpropagation oracle and a constant-sensitivity baseline on vision while increasing batched query-time throughput from 551 to 2,041 images/s and reducing peak GPU memory from 4.55 to 0.44GB. On the protein-modeling task, it recovers $68\%$ of this gap. An ablation of KPSA's kernel aggregation shows that nearest-neighbor retrieval in KPSA space can remain competitive. The empirics show that compact kernel atlases can store useful input-dependent parameter sensitivity while amortizing repeated gradient attribution, a step toward scalable conditional interpretability. Code can be found at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12737
Feed-forward 3D foundation models reconstruct scenes from unposed images, but the quadratic cost of global attention limits their scalability to large view sets. We present Zebra3D, a layerwise sparse-linear hybrid attention framework that improves the efficiency of pretrained 3D foundation models without training from scratch. Across VGGT, HunyuanWorld-Mirror, and $\pi^3$, we observe a broadly consistent depth-wise pattern: early stages are relatively tolerant to linear replacement, while sensitive middle-to-late stages tend to exhibit more concentrated attention. Zebra3D exploits this structure by assigning linear-centered attention to tolerant stages and tile-sparse attention to sensitive stages, using landmark summaries to preserve unselected context. Closed-form affine fitting enables training-free conversion, while optional post-conversion training combines task supervision with output and relational feature distillation. Across all three backbones, Zebra3D achieves strong reconstruction and camera-pose accuracy at high attention sparsity, with training-free variants remaining close to their dense counterparts. End-to-end speedups increase with input view count, reaching up to $7.1\times$ at 1,024 views. After post-conversion training, Zebra3D-VGGT reaches 80.5\% RealEstate10K AUC@30 at 94\% mean attention sparsity, within 1.1 percentage points of dense VGGT fine-tuned on the same data and schedule.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12727
Embodied world models predict the visual consequences of candidate actions before execution. However, existing action-conditioned world models often adopt uniformly weighted visual generation objectives that can be misaligned with embodied prediction needs. Even with explicit motion conditioning, these objectives can underemphasize spatially sparse changes that are critical to interaction. We propose KineWorld, a transport-aware world-modeling framework that extends robot kinematics from motion conditioning to the spatial allocation of generative supervision. Kinematic Transport Lifting (KTL) constructs renderer-derived, camera-aligned transport fields from commanded robot motion. Transport-Aware World Diffusion (TAWD) calibrates their motion support on the video-latent grid and reweights future-RGB flow matching through a normalized mixture of uniform and transport-focused distributions. We train KineWorld using ALOHA-AgileX bimanual manipulation data from RoboTwin 2.0. KineWorld achieves an EWMScore-P of 68.95 in single-view evaluation and a TWB-Score of 54.82 in multi-view evaluation. These results support a shift from appearance fitting toward action-consequence modeling for embodied decision-making.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06349
Prior outdoor LiDAR registration works are commonly limited by the pair-wise input paradigm, which neglects temporal correlations inherent within streaming sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-frame outdoor point cloud registration network for streaming LiDAR scans enhanced with pose-related memory buffers. The key observation is that long-term temporal LiDAR sequences can provide rich global contextual information to complete sparse measurements, filter outliers, and address low-overlap problems, thereby boosting registration performance. Specifically, two hybrid memory buffers are designed, including an implicit memory feature buffer and an explicit memory pose buffer, to store and dynamically update pose-related temporal features. Moreover, a novel dynamic history weighting module is developed to adaptively fuse current and history pose-related features. Extensive experiments on three outdoor datasets, including KITTI, nuScenes, and Apollo-Southbay, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of MemReg, surpassing all previous pair-wise methods and also multi-frame SLAM systems. Our method also generalizes surprisingly well to multiview indoor registration scenarios with rather competitive performance on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, and ScanNet. Code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12624
Streaming Video Large Language Models (VLMs) enable continuous video understanding, yet existing benchmarks focus on low-dynamic scenarios. Under bounded context budgets, models must balance temporal history, spatial resolution, and temporal granularity; sparse sampling at 1--2 FPS misses fast events. We introduce FastBench to evaluate high-dynamic perception in real-world video streams. Its trajectory-grounded pipeline combines QA generation from high-FPS clips, filtering of questions answerable at 2 FPS, answer verification using SAM3 and CoTracker3 trajectories, and three rounds of human inspection. FastBench contains 306 QA pairs across eight domains, six capabilities, and forward, instant, and backward temporal scopes, with human-annotated evidence intervals. We also present ProactiveFrame, a training-free baseline that adjusts incoming frame rates through text tokens. A dual-tier sliding window retains recent high-FPS observations while downsampling older ones into sparse history. Experiments reveal substantial limitations: the strongest model, Gemini-3.5-Flash, scores only 50.7%. Denser sampling improves Qwen3-VL-8B from 32.9% at 2 FPS to 44.6% at 24 FPS, but gains saturate as history is compressed. ProactiveFrame outperforms sparse uniform sampling by 5.4 and 1.5 percentage points, yet remains well below oracle-guided focusing, showing that current VLMs struggle to determine from the stream alone when finer temporal perception is needed. FastBench provides a testbed for high-dynamic streaming video understanding. Code and data: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12427
Reconstructing complete 3D object assets from monocular or sparse multi-view observations remains challenging. Generative 3D foundation models can complete object geometry beyond the observed views, but their predictions may not faithfully reproduce the observed geometry, appearance, or pose. We introduce GenIA, a framework for test-time input-aligned generation that grounds SAM3D's generative prior in geometric and photometric observations without retraining the foundation model. We improve object pose by deriving translation and scale from geometry while retaining the learned rotation prior, and align appearance through visibility-biased attention, cross-observation fusion, and differentiable rendering guidance during denoising. An optional post-denoising refinement further adapts the appearance latent, lightweight decoder adapters, and object placement to the observations. Our framework also supports externally supplied geometry; when given temporal shapes of dynamic objects, it recovers a shared, input-aligned canonical appearance and stable world-space placement. Across synthetic and real benchmarks, GenIA improves pose prediction and object reconstruction from monocular, multi-view, and dynamic inputs, outperforming recent optimization-based, per-frame image-to-3D, and video-to-4D methods. Our project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12388
Training and evaluating interactive language agents typically requires rich user interactions, yet collecting human feedback is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulated users offer a scalable alternative, but they must both resemble real user behavior and provide useful learning experiences for agents. In contrast, most agent-training frameworks rely on off-the-shelf assistant LLMs, whose helpfulness can make them overly cooperative, explicit, and behaviorally homogeneous compared with real users. We introduce MIMESIS, a purpose-built user simulator trained on human conversations with explicit reasoning supervision and 13 realistic behavioral patterns derived from real user interactions. Empirically, our 9B model achieves a SOUL-Index of 65.7, surpassing the strongest frontier model. Compared with Claude-Opus-5, the strongest baseline on RealUserSim and SimulatorArena, MIMESIS improves behavioral fidelity by 13.4 points and reduces Turing distance by 3.6 points, respectively. We then freeze the simulator and train an agent by interacting with the frozen simulator using multi-turn reinforcement learning. Across eight environments, training with MIMESIS yields better agent performance than training with GPT-5.5 under all nine unseen user simulators, demonstrating stronger generalization to new user simulators. Moreover, we propose Coached On-Policy Self-Distillation (CSD), which leverages simulator-generated private reasoning traces and subsequent utterances as feedback on how well the agent addresses user needs. A coach converts this information into concise coaching notes that describe how the agent can better anticipate user needs and adapt its behavior over the course of an interaction. CSD turns this feedback into dense, token-level supervision beyond sparse task rewards, yielding further gains across all nine evaluation user models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09484
Anatomical continuity provides complementary information for medical image restoration, but its use requires accounting for local anatomy and variations in slice sampling. We introduce ContiLNN, which augments two-dimensional restoration backbones with bidirectional closed-form continuous-time (Bi-CfC) modules for cross-slice modeling while retaining in-plane feature extraction. Slice-index intervals modulate gates determined by local features and hidden states, enabling propagation to respond to sampling variations without numerical ODE integration. Reference-guided consistency aligns first- and second-order cross-slice intensity differences to preserve anatomical variation, while distillation from a frozen backbone helps retain in-plane fidelity. Across five training seeds, ContiLNN improves mean PSNR over Restore-RWKV by 0.1907, 1.0176, and 1.2482 dB for CT denoising, MRI super-resolution, and reduced-count PET restoration, respectively, with lower RMSE in all three tasks. CT results are descriptive for one held-out patient. PET ablations support ordered propagation beyond additional pointwise capacity. Under contiguous training, Bi-CfC achieves higher fidelity than a Bi-GRU with similar parameter counts and arithmetic costs across all tested sampling conditions. Matched seven-slice profiling shows 52.8% lower latency and 57.0% lower peak GPU memory use than Bi-GRU. Mixed-gap training improves sparse and irregular-context performance for both operators, without a uniform ranking across metrics and contexts. Experiments with fewer training patients and a second backbone further support data efficiency and backbone compatibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12337