Sparse
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RiCo: Neural Simulation of Rigid-Body Interactions via Local Contact Reasoning
2026-10-08 17:11:54Ruixiang Ouyang, Guanren Qiao, Fansen Meng, Yueci Deng, Ruixing Jin, Kui Jia, Guiliang LiuAbstract
Accurate simulation of rigid-body interactions is essential for predictive physical world models. Despite recent progress in modeling object dynamics, capturing how local contacts between surfaces shape object motion remains challenging. While end-to-end world models predict interactions across entire scenes or objects, in practice, rigid-body contact is inherently local, and only nearby surfaces can directly exchange contact forces. Motivated by this observation, we introduce Rigid-body Contact Reasoning (RiCo), which represents interactions between objects through sparse neighborhoods of contact surface points. RiCo combines each point's state with the relative geometry, motion, and physical properties of nearby surfaces, then reasons across the object's points to determine how these local contacts jointly affect its motion. By confining cross-object reasoning to nearby surfaces while propagating contact information within each rigid body, RiCo retains fine-grained interaction details without the cost of modeling every pair of scene points. Such properties enable RiCo a higher accuracy and contact fidelity. Experiments on MOVi-benchmark demonstrate that RiCo reduces 100-frame position and orientation errors by 31-35% and approximately 38%, respectively, compared with baselines. Moreover, RiCo achieves high contact fidelity, with ground-truth-relative penetration-time and mean-depth differences of 11.0% and 2.22 mm, respectively. RiCo further generalizes zero-shot from small-scale training scenarios to scenes containing 270 objects. Our real-world multi-ball collision experiments further provide preliminary evidence of sim-to-real transfer.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12333
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SparseDecoding: Decoding-Aware Pruning for Accurate and Efficient LLM Inference
2026-10-08 17:06:32Qitong Wang, Xinwei Niu, Mingluo Su, Shanwei Zhao, Shiai Zhu, Huan WangAbstract
The memory-bound nature of the decoding stage of large language model (LLM) inference incurs significant latency. Layer-wise training-free network pruning approaches guided by the Hessian have been a prominent solution to this problem, as pruning reduces the number of nonzero parameters read from memory during decoding. Nevertheless, typical methods in this line compute the Hessian using pre-collected natural sequences, whereas the model is fed self-generated tokens during decoding, creating a distribution shift between the two sequences. The Hessian calculated on the natural sequence is different from that calculated on the generated sequence. We observe that this discrepancy causes the activation distribution during generation to deviate from that used for pruning, further hurting the pruned model performance. Moreover, most existing LLM pruning methods that bring actual speedup primarily target the sparse matrix-matrix (SpMM) multiplication, providing limited support for the sparse matrix-vector (SpMV) operations, which dominate decoding. To solve these problems, we introduce SparseDecoding, a principled decoding-aware pruning framework tailored for accurate and efficient LLM decoding. Specifically, at the algorithmic axis, SparseDecoding constructs calibration matrices from layer-wise activations collected during the dense-model autoregressive generation, excluding prefill, thereby aligning the pruning objective with the decoding activations. At the system axis, we develop an optimized N:M sparse matrix-vector kernel with bitmask indexing and fixed-step traversal. Substantial empirical results on representative LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.3-70B, Qwen3-14B / 32B) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms standard fixed-text calibration on the long-form generation benchmarks while achieving up to 1.48x end-to-end wall-clock decoding speedup on A100 GPUs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12327
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Slot3R: Set-Associative Spatial Memory for Streaming 3D Reconstruction
2026-10-08 16:39:39Xiyuan Zhang, Yanming Yang, Kaiyuan Xu, Ruibo Li, Chi ZhangAbstract
Streaming 3D reconstruction must preserve evidence from each frame while processing an expanding scene online. Spatial memory is a natural fit because it organizes history by reconstructed 3D location. Yet Point3R uses spatial proximity both to associate a new observation with an existing memory entry and to decide whether to fuse it, conflating co-location with state identity. Because pointers summarize image patches, nearby pointers may encode distinct surfaces, viewpoints, or visibility conditions; averaging them can destroy complementary evidence before later frames disambiguate it. We argue that location should determine address, not whether observations must merge. Slot3R realizes this principle as a training-free, set-associative retrofit that lets multiple states coexist at a shared address while keeping the pretrained Point3R backbone frozen. A bounded sparse readout further decouples persistent storage from per-frame decoder access. At 300-500 sampled frames, Slot3R reduces Point3R's point-cloud accuracy error (Acc) by 57.1%-63.1% on 7Scenes and 64.0%-72.0% on NeuralRGBD, lowers Sim(3)-aligned absolute trajectory error (ATE) on all three pose benchmarks, and remains competitive on video-depth estimation. It completes all evaluated settings from 600 to 1000 sampled frames at about 19 FPS under the same protocol, whereas Point3R and InfiniteVGGT run out of memory at 800 frames and beyond.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12282
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La-Ribo: RNA Co-Design via Geometry-Latent Flow Matching
2026-10-08 16:19:07Runze Ma, Will Hua, Shuangjia ZhengAbstract
RNA function arises from the coupling of nucleotide sequence and three-dimensional structure, motivating their joint design. Coordinating global folding with nucleotide-level detail remains challenging under limited structural supervision. We introduce La-Ribo, a generative framework for RNA sequence-structure co-design via geometry-latent flow matching. La-Ribo retains a sparse phosphate-sugar--base scaffold and encodes nucleotide identity and local conformation in residue-wise latents. A shared flow network generates both jointly, and an RNA-specific decoder then reconstructs all heavy atoms. To expand supervision, we construct a quality-controlled corpus of 168,561 RNA structures, integrating experimental data with predictions from three folding models, including 10,631 MSA-supported structures generated in this work. La-Ribo improves designability and codesignability over the evaluated baselines across sampling budgets and two refolding models, and the same prior supports scaffold-conditioned inverse folding without additional training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12236
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Equal-Budget Monte Carlo Tree Search versus Randomized-Restart List Scheduling for DAG Workflows: A Controlled Equal-Budget Computational Study
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Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is often proposed for scheduling directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) workflows, yet most studies never run the comparison that could refute it - giving a much simpler method the same search effort. We run that comparison under a controlled protocol. All arms receive an identical budget - the same number of candidate schedules built and evaluated: an MCTS scheduling method, preregistered as the main arm; a randomized-restart list scheduler with no search tree as the control; and a textbook-UCT MCTS arm as a registered follow-up on the same domain. The analysis plan was locked before data collection; an independent checker confirmed all 768 confirmation-stage schedules valid with correct finish times. At the main budget of 2048 evaluated schedules, MCTS is 2.88% worse than the restarts (95% CI [-3.62%,-2.15%]; the 72 of 96 held-out instances with positive baseline-relative headroom). The deficit is not budget starvation: on the separate exploration pool restarts self-improve by 1.85% where MCTS gains 0.24%, and 700 of 720 of MCTS's first results are merely the warm start it was handed. The studied selection rule locks deterministically onto the first-expanded child, keeping its trials correlated while restarts draw gains from the tails; the causal link to makespan remains an inference. A structural map locates where the tree stops paying: restarts win on sparse irregular workflows, no difference is detectable on regular layered ones, and dense ones leave no room to improve. Swapping the rule for textbook UCT removes most of the deficit (-0.26%, 95% CI [-0.71%,+0.23%]) without reversing its sign. Results are confined to a controlled synthetic domain (N in {8,16,32} tasks, 2-8 processors, budgets up to 2048); we make no claim about larger budgets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12542
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MAP2: Model- and Acceleration-Based Pursuit with MPC and Gaussian Process Residual Learning for Autonomous Racing
2026-10-08 15:52:50Weizhan Huang, Cheng Hu, Edoardo Ghignone, Nicolas Baumann, Yiqin Wang, Hongye Su, Lei Xie, Michele MagnoAbstract
Autonomous racing requires accurate trajectory tracking near the handling limits of a vehicle while maintaining low computational latency. Geometric controllers are computationally efficient, but the Ackermann steering geometry becomes invalid under limit-handling conditions. Model- and Acceleration-based Pursuit (MAP) preserves the simplicity of geometric approaches while leveraging tire dynamics. Yet MAP remains fundamentally a geometric controller that relies on Ackermann steering geometry, and its tire model may not fully capture the vehicle's actual dynamic response. This paper presents MAP2, a model-based pursuit controller that combines a curvature-based kinematic MPC and a Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) residual correction. The proposed algorithm uses MPC to optimize kinematic control inputs over a prediction horizon and maps them to steering commands through a tire dynamics model augmented with SGP residual correction. Real-world vehicle experiments demonstrate substantial reductions in lateral tracking error and lap time. Compared with MAP and Pure Pursuit (PP), MAP2 reduces the average lateral tracking error by 37.99% and 44.65%, respectively, while reducing average lap time by at least 1.5%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12196
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DVLA-RL++: Dual-Level Vision-Language Alignment with Reinforcement Learning Gating for Few-Shot Learning
2026-10-08 15:01:47Wenhao Li, Xianjing Meng, Qiangchang Wang, Zhongyi Han, Yilong Yin, Liqiang NieAbstract
Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel categories from limited labeled examples. Recent studies incorporate textual semantics to compensate for limited visual observations and improve class representations. However, high image-text agreement may reflect both intrinsic object properties and incidental context, making support prototypes susceptible to contextual contamination. To address this problem, we propose DVLA-RL++, which extends DVLA-RL with complementary semantic purification (CSP) and counterfactual reinforcement-learning gating (CRG). Specifically, CSP generates intrinsic and nuisance descriptions from labeled supports and compares their agreement with each support token. An ambiguity-dependent rejection margin guides sparse evidence allocation, while an intrinsic semantic anchor fills the unassigned mass to provide a fallback when visual evidence is unreliable. CRG learns layer-wise semantic fusion strengths using a reward that balances recognition performance and nuisance exposure. An independently executed reference trajectory on the same episode provides a paired learning signal. Theoretical analysis relates retained evidence and anchor quality to prototype stability and establishes conditions for unbiased on-policy gradient estimation. Experiments on standard, fine-grained, and cross-domain benchmarks show state-of-the-art accuracy, with an average gain of 1.4% over DVLA-RL. The project page is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12095
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FearCaut-Qwen: Affective Steering in a Vision-Language Model Shifts the Decision Criterion for Hazard Assessment
2026-10-08 13:57:46Xiaoshan ZhouAbstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) show great potential for damage assessment after a disaster, but a recurring deficiency is that they are reluctant to declare a hazard; that is, recall is low even when overall accuracy appears adequate. This study examines that deficiency by using signal detection theory to decompose the decision behavior into perceptual capability and decision-criterion placement. We then propose a novel method for correcting the over-conservative decision policy, inspired by the finding that fear makes humans risk-averse, and ask whether an affective representation associated with fear can be causally manipulated to similarly alter a VLM's decision tendency. Using mechanistic interpretability, we localize a causally implicated affective circuit in the model and use activation steering to manipulate it while observing the effect on downstream prediction. The method is tested on a two-stage SeisMLLM pipeline built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, which flags only 27.0% of genuinely unsafe buildings on the SeisMLLM-1K test split and never issues a false Red, an SDT criterion of c = +1.354, despite adequate evidence quality (d' = 1.521). An affective direction is localized on emotion-rich natural scenes, causally validated by sparse-neuron knockout and distributed steering on held-out emotion data, and then injected into the building task. Fear-direction injection raises Red recall to 75.7% (p<0.001), and subtracting the same direction suppresses Red predictions entirely, whereas norm-matched random and matched happiness directions show no significant effect. The mechanism is a shift in criterion (c=-1.515) while discrimination is not improved (d'=-0.493). These results show that VLM decisions can be adjusted at inference time without retraining and demonstrate how mechanistic interpretability can be used to diagnose and control VLM decision behaviors in engineering applications.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11986
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STAG: A Sparse Traversability-Aware Graph Representation from Grid-Based Costmaps for Robotic Navigation
2026-10-08 13:33:38Gabriel Manuel Garcia, St\'ephanie Aravecchia, Miguel Angel Olivares-MendezAbstract
Autonomous rovers navigating large unstructured environments need efficient global planning that accounts for terrain traversability. However, searching dense grid-based costmaps becomes computationally expensive as the mapped area grows. We introduce STAG, a Sparse Traversability-Aware Graph that converts costmaps into compact graphs. STAG combines a medial-axis topological backbone, representative nodes for homogeneous traversability regions, and transition nodes near strong traversability gradients. Edges encode geometry and traversability to account for path length and terrain difficulty. We compare A* on STAG and dense grids using synthetic cave maps, mine maps and the DARPA CERBERUS dataset. Across five benchmark categories comprising 203 map instances and 101,200 queries, STAG reduces median planning time by 3.4x to 9.9x and peak query memory by 2.1x to 15.4x, with median relative path-length differences of -2.9% and +7.6%. STAG offers a compact representation for global planning, trading dense-grid traversability optimality for faster, less memory-intensive search.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11943
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From Surface to Depth: Towards Cognitive Appraisal Reasoning in Multimodal Emotion Understanding
2026-10-08 13:14:39Jia Li, Yichao He, Yangchen Yu, Qiankun Li, Xinyi Li, Baiyi Ye, Zhenzhen Hu, Richang Hong, Erik CambriaAbstract
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly incorporate explainable reasoning for emotion understanding. However, reasoning based mainly on observable affective cues can reduce emotion understanding to superficial cue-label associations, giving rise to the Clever Hans effect. Such shortcuts become unreliable when affective cues are implicit, conflicting across modalities, linguistically misleading, or obscured by redundant details. In contrast, human emotions are shaped by how individuals interpret and evaluate surrounding events beyond observable cues. Inspired by appraisal theories of emotion, we formulate multimodal emotion understanding as a progression from perception to cognitive appraisal, and introduce a dataset, a model, and a benchmark to support this novel paradigm. CogEmo-40K is a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset constructed through a perception-to-appraisal pipeline to elicit evidence-grounded reasoning across six cognitive appraisal dimensions underlying emotion. CogEmo-MoE is a compact sparse MLLM that introduces interleaved MoE blocks for appraisal-specific adaptation, enabling effective appraisal reasoning at a substantially smaller scale than typical emotion MLLMs. CogEmo-Bench introduces an Appraisal Evidence Quality Score (AEQS) to assess cognitive-affective understanding across six complementary appraisal dimensions, addressing the limitation of conventional emotion metrics that evaluate what emotion is predicted but not why it arises. Extensive experiments show that our paradigm not only leads CogEmo-Bench, but also exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Our findings suggest that perception-to-appraisal reasoning can move beyond surface-level cue-label associations toward more reliable multimodal emotion understanding and closer cognitive alignment between MLLMs and humans.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11918
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STEMMA: Song-to-Stem Multi-Audio Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models
2026-10-08 12:54:12Hoyeol Sohn, Wonil Kim, Keunhyoung Kim, Sangeun Kum, Taehyoung Kim, Dongjoo Moon, Theerasak Charoenchob, Teeratep Weerapang, Jongpil Lee, Juhan NamAbstract
Music understanding often requires comparing excerpts and reasoning about relationships among songs, sections, and stems. However, existing large audio-language models (LALMs) and music question-answering datasets typically operate on single recordings or compare independently sampled tracks with no known production relationship. We introduce STEMMA, a multi-audio music question-answering framework built around production provenance: whether excerpts originate from the same track or section, and which stems belong to which mixtures. Because such relations are sparse under conventional audio-first sampling, STEMMA adopts a relation-first construction strategy: it first specifies a target relation and then queries the catalog for excerpts that satisfy it and hard negatives that do not. Labels are determined directly from catalog provenance rather than generated by a language model from metadata. We build STEMMA-Bench for evaluation and a track-disjoint training set, STEMMA-Instruct. Fine-tuning two LALMs on STEMMA-Instruct improves multi-audio reasoning, with the largest gains on structural relations directly determined by the catalog, while preserving single-audio music understanding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11884
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Seek-and-View Reasoning for Multi-View Spatial Understanding
2026-10-08 12:18:01Qixiang Chen, Cheng Zhang, Fucai Ke, Chi-Wing Fu, Jianfei Cai, Jingwen YeAbstract
Existing approaches to multi-view spatial reasoning operate largely on sparse input views. Vision-language models (VLMs) are thus restricted to understand a scene and infer spatial relations within these fixed views, leading to fragile cross-view alignment and geometry-to-language bottleneck. To address these issues, we formulate a novel Seek-and-View reasoning approach to find implicit cross-view spatial evidence by locating a question-relevant view to support the spatial reasoning. To realize this approach, we propose Vantage, a training-free model-agnostic reasoning framework that pairs a VLM with a 3D foundation model: a viewpoint-grounded reasoning stage for question analysis and view planning, followed by a geometry-grounded evidence augmentation stage to effectively synthesize and incorporate visual evidence into the final reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on six VLMs demonstrate consistent improvements on five benchmarks without fine-tuning. Overall, by revealing spatial evidence through view-grounded reasoning, Vantage can largely reduce reliance on language-based cross-view alignment and improve multi-view spatial understanding. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11810
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From Sparse Representations to Behavioral Insights for Multimodal Depression Assessment
2026-10-08 12:03:06Guimin Hu, Zihao Song, Jiachen Luo, Jiayuan Xie, Ruichu CaiAbstract
Multimodal depression assessment offers a promising approach to analyzing behavioral patterns associated with depression. However, existing methods often rely on dense and opaque multimodal representations, making it difficult to interpret the behavioral patterns underlying their predictions. In this work, we introduce BehavDep, a sparse factor-based framework that decomposes multimodal behavioral representations into sparse latent factors and associates them with behaviorally meaningful concepts through a semantic bridge. To address the mismatch between user-level annotations and heterogeneous video-level behaviors, BehavDep further learns video-level depression tendency scores under weak supervision and aggregates information across multiple observations for user-level assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BehavDep achieves the best overall assessment performance while revealing complementary modality contributions, heterogeneous behavioral patterns across observations, and prediction responses to concept-level editing. These results show that BehavDep provides a structured and interpretable approach to analyzing multimodal behavioral representations for depression assessment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11787
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RouterInterp: Understanding Superposed Specialisation in Mixture of Experts Routing
2026-10-08 11:55:25Ilya Lasy, Nora Yinuo Cai, Kola AyonrindeAbstract
Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models scale more efficiently than dense models by routing tokens to modular expert networks that are only active for processing a fraction of tokens. A leading hypothesis for the performance of MoE models is that each expert specialises in a single, coherent domain. However, interpretability efforts that assume this hypothesis have generally been unsuccessful. We propose and present evidence for an alternative account that we call the Superposed Specialisation Hypothesis (SSH): experts specialise in a disjoint union of fine-grained features rather than one broad domain. Leveraging the SSH, we introduce RouterInterp, a method for interpreting expert routing that identifies Sparse Autoencoder features most predictive of routing decisions and produces unified natural language explanations. On gpt-oss-20b, RouterInterp explains expert routing with ${\sim}65\%$ higher detection accuracy than prior token statistics based methods. This work provides a scalable method for generating more accurate explanations of expert routing and increases our understanding of a previously uninterpretable component of foundation models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11775
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Uncovering and Fixing Collider Bias in Bayesian PINNs
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Bayesian physics-informed neural networks (B-PINNs) are a popular framework for parameter and state inference from sparse or noisy observations. They are commonly formulated via a collider structure, in which physical and trajectory parameters are assumed to be a priori independent and become coupled through virtual likelihoods on differential-equation residuals that enforce physical consistency. We show that this modeling choice can induce severe systematic bias in the posterior over physical parameters: even when the prior is favorably centered on the ground-truth parameters, the resulting posterior can drift away and concentrate far from them. As a remedy, we advocate a hierarchical chain model in which physics generates trajectories, which in turn generate observations. The chain model does not suffer from this posterior bias, but it poses a harder, so-called doubly intractable, inference problem due to a physics-dependent normalization constant. This challenge can be resolved by discretizing the underlying stochastic dynamics, after which the chain posterior can be sampled exactly with particle MCMC. We identify two distinct mechanisms characterizing the collider bias, derive analytical approximations of their magnitudes, and establish diagnostic criteria for predicting when standard B-PINNs remain reliable. Experiments confirm the predicted bias and show that the chain formulation successfully avoids it.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11737
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SDPAD: A Fully Spike-Driven Pipeline for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
2026-10-08 09:33:19Chengjun Zhang, Yuhao Zhang, Jie Yang, Mohamad SawanAbstract
End-to-end autonomous driving demands trajectory planners that are both highly accurate and cheap enough for edge deployment. State-of-the-art artificial neural network (ANN) planners meet the accuracy requirement at the cost of heavy dense computation, while spiking neural networks (SNNs)---though promising orders-of-magnitude energy savings through sparse, event-driven arithmetic---still lag far behind in planning accuracy. We present \textbf{SDPAD}, a fully spike-driven end-to-end planning pipeline that closes this gap. SDPAD converts a pre-trained ANN perception stack into integer-spike form via quantized ANN2SNN conversion, lifts multi-view images into the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space with a spike-driven-max (SDM) depth distribution (Spike-3D-Lift), and plans through the Spike-QFormer, a spiking query transformer in which ego, agent, and map queries distilled from the BEV scene are fused by learnable waypoint queries via cross-attention, followed by deformable spike-cross-attention refinement. Every operation is gated by integer spikes and inference is a single feed-forward pass without temporal simulation loops. On the nuScenes open-loop benchmark, SDPAD achieves an average $L_2$ error of 0.40\,m and a collision rate of 0.12\%, on par with strong ANN planners while consuming 69.9\,mJ---less than 2\% of recent ANN baselines. In closed-loop evaluation on the NAVSIM navtest split, SDPAD reaches 86.3 PDMS, surpassing the previous SNN planner SAD by 4.3 points and matching mainstream ANN planners at a fraction of their energy. To our knowledge, SDPAD is the first fully spike-driven planner evaluated in end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating that SNNs can rival dense ANNs in complex driving tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11583
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SV-TAD: Native Sparse Convs for Efficient Temporal Action Detection
2026-10-08 09:31:38Ricardo Pizarro, Roberto Valle, Jos\'e M. Buenaposada, Luis M. Bergasa, Luis BaumelaAbstract
To adapt billion-parameter Vision Transformers for long-video understanding, recent methods freeze the backbone and train lightweight convolutional modules. While effective for parameter-efficient training, existing adapters do not reduce inference-time computation, leaving scalability with respect to video length largely unaddressed. Token selection can reduce attention cost by pruning redundant tokens, but it breaks the spatial grid structure required by convolutional adapters. This forces an expensive dense reconstruction, nullifying much of the potential speedup. We address this by introducing native sparse 2D convolutions, a primitive that allows these adapters, for the first time, to operate directly and efficiently on dynamically pruned token sets. We integrate this primitive into SV-TAD, an adapter framework for temporal action detection, reducing VideoMAEv2-L computation by up to 64% and achieving 2.2x faster inference, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. When scaled to InternVideoNext-L, our approach surpasses the previous state of the art at roughly half its computational cost. Moreover, the sparse formulation naturally supports auxiliary task tokens, which improves fine-grained assembly detection on ATTACH.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11579
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Smoothing the Top-k Exposure Boundary for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
2026-10-08 09:31:19Yunkai Chai, Tong Zhu, Xiaoye Qu, Xuyang Hu, Guanjie Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yu ChengAbstract
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models scale parameter capacity efficiently while maintaining a fixed compute budget per token. However, traditional training paradigms enforce a static choice of top-$k$ experts, which converts a continuous routing distribution into a rigid step function. This constraint introduces a brittle boundary where highly competitive experts are arbitrarily separated into full-supervision and zero-feedback zones based on minor score fluctuations. To address this issue, we propose Elastic Expert Routing, which stochastically samples the active expert budget from a localized discrete distribution centered at $k$. Over multiple training iterations, this mechanism softens the sharp threshold into a gradual probability distribution. Because the sampling neighborhood remains symmetric, this approach matches the expected computational cost of deterministic training, while preserving the inference budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method on both supervised fine-tuning and from-scratch pretraining settings. During supervised fine-tuning, elastic routing improves downstream macro-averages on OLMoE-1B-7B and Qwen3-30B-A3B by $+0.84$ and $+2.02$ points, respectively. In addition, in from-scratch pretraining, it outperforms the static top-$k$ baseline by $1.6$ points on average across downstream tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11575
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OX-NeRF: 3D X-ray Tomography Reconstruction from Sparse Views Using Implicit Neural Representation
2026-10-08 09:12:37Thomas Welsch, Min-Hsin Tu, David J. Chapman, Daniel E. EakinsAbstract
NeRF and Gaussian splatting methods have been successfully applied on X-ray scenes where the views are too sparse for 3D reconstruction via classical methods. Ultra-sparse scenes with 10 or fewer views such as those with high-rate or low-dose acquisition still, however, present a significant challenge. To address this problem we present a new framework, Optimised X-ray Neural Radiance Fields (OX-NeRF), that combines cross-scene feature learning with scene-specific optimisation to reconstruct sets of related scenes. OX-NeRF employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify cross-scene features while maintaining scene-specific multi-resolution hash grids of spatial features. The paired representations are fused and passed to a multilayer perceptron (MLP); the CNN, hash grids and MLP are then jointly optimised end-to-end. Benchmarking on parallel-beam and cone-beam X-ray datasets shows OX-NeRF provides significantly higher reconstruction accuracy on ultra-sparse scenes compared to existing radiance field methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11547
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AtomWorld-Mirror: Macro-Step World Modeling of Critical Evolution Backbones for Materials Dynamics
2026-10-08 08:56:53Ziming Pan, Ruge Zhang, Haozhi Han, Junkai Zhou, Xingyuan Chen, Yifeng Chen, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao, Yunxin Liu, Kun LiAbstract
Atomistic simulation is a fundamental tool for studying long-term materials evolution, from diffusion and defect dynamics to interfacial reactions and fracture. Yet conventional simulators typically advance at microscopic resolution, spending substantial computation on low-impact local updates before reaching structurally consequential states, an evolutionary-resolution bottleneck that limits long-horizon simulation. We propose AtomWorld-Mirror, a time-aware macro-step world model for the critical evolution backbone of atomic systems. For Step-Wise atomistic simulation, AtomWorld-Mirror distills short micro-event segments into physically reachable transitions between key states, jointly predicting sparse structural edits and accumulated physical time through latent macro-step dynamics. Local reachability, inventory conservation, and continuous-time consistency constrain each transition. By amortizing local atomic physics into a reusable latent macro model and replacing explicit micro-event replay with macro-step inference, this formulation provides a path toward substantially faster prediction of long-term materials evolution while preserving structural validity and time semantics. Across five atomic systems, spanning Cu-rich RPV steel irradiation aging, Cu-Zr metallic glass, and Li$_3$N-based anti-perovskite solid electrolyte, macro-step inference delivers a speed up of $10^3$ to $10^4$ times over event-by-event simulation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11527
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