Survey
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IP Protection in the Era of Visual Generative AI: A Survey
2026-08-13 00:26:41Zhuan Shi, Shunchang Liu, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Qian Yang, Han Yu, Cao Yang, Chaochao Chen, Yuping Yan, Yaochu Jin, Golnoosh Farnadi, Lingjuan LyuAbstract
The rapid evolution of visual generative AI has introduced a wide range of intellectual property risks, spanning the unauthorized learning, reproduction, extraction, misuse, and redistribution of protected data and model assets. To address these risks, a growing body of technical defenses has been proposed. However, existing surveys typically organize this literature by lifecycle stage or technical mechanism, which can obscure the protective intent of different methods. This survey presents a two-dimensional taxonomy for IP protection in visual generative models. The primary axis is a Control Logic View, which classifies methods into Information Exposure Control, Generative Behavior Constraint, and Attribution & Accountability according to the risk variable they regulate. The secondary axis distinguishes Data IP from Model IP as cross-cutting asset dimensions. Under this framework, we systematically review protection methods, align evaluation protocols with protection objectives, and discuss open challenges including proactive model-level safeguards, standardized evaluation, robustness against adaptive attacks, and explainable evidence. This survey aims to offer a principled, systematic, and easy-to-follow overview for both new and experienced researchers in visual generative AI IP protection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14730
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Co-constructing sociotechnical AI governance: participatory system mapping using algorithm registers
2026-08-12 15:27:45\'I\~nigo de Troya, Maurus Enbergs, Neelke Doorn, Roel DobbeAbstract
Algorithm registers have been championed as a means of providing transparency on the use of algorithms in public services. Yet potential publics differ in their expectations of what should be made transparent and how, as well as in their interest in and ability to parse the information currently published in the registers. Moreover, it remains unclear how these instruments can represent the sociotechnical systems in which these algorithms are embedded, and how system-level transparency can facilitate accountability. In this paper, we ask, what do algorithm registers reveal (and occlude) about the sociotechnical systems governing algorithmic systems, and how can diverse stakeholder perspectives inform a more pluralistic system-theoretic safety analysis? To do this, we probe the municipal algorithm register of a Dutch city through a case study of a decision-support tool for caseworkers' assessment of citizens' welfare benefits eligibility based on legal automation through a business rule engine. Through interviews, surveys, and participatory system mapping workshops (with municipal staff, civil society organisations, and ombudsmen, N=8), we seek to understand to what extent the register allows stakeholders to map the algorithmic system in question. These maps inform a System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) that situates the register within a wider sociotechnical governance structure. Participants' contributions allow us to identify potential safety hazards which would not have been possible to see using the algorithm register alone, including benefits eligibility denial, system performance deterioration, and inability to contest wrongful decisions. By engaging both direct and indirect stakeholders, we reflect on the normative dimensions of algorithm governance efforts and how politics shape the practice of system safety analysis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12166
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Benchmark-Based Comparative Assessment of Publicly Benchmarked Indian Foundation Models: A Capability and Evaluation-Maturity Framework
2026-08-12 10:19:14Avinash Agarwal, Vridhi JainAbstract
Governments increasingly fund indigenous foundation models to strengthen national AI capability, digital sovereignty, and multilingual computing. Assessing the progress of such national ecosystems is complicated by inconsistent benchmark reporting, proprietary evaluation methodologies, and rapidly evolving model releases. This paper presents a structured, benchmark-based comparative assessment of publicly benchmarked Indian foundation models against global frontier and comparable-scale models, across eight capability domains: general-purpose reasoning, coding and software engineering, agentic AI and computer use, cybersecurity, vision and image understanding, video and multimodal understanding, scientific research, and Indic language capability. Using only publicly reported benchmark results, we find that Indian models achieve strong scores on established benchmarks such as MMLU and MATH-500. However, these benchmarks are now widely regarded as saturated, and frontier developers no longer report them. Indian models participate far less frequently in newer, agentic, and domain-specialized evaluations. Benchmark participation is also highly uneven across Indian organizations. Among the models surveyed, Sarvam AI reports the broadest benchmark coverage by a substantial margin. We propose an exploratory four-dimension Benchmark Maturity Index (BMI), scoring each capability domain on standardization, participation, independent verification, and national coverage. We show that the BMI refines, and in some cases revises, the maturity judgments that a purely descriptive review would produce. We argue that many apparent capability gaps in the public record cannot be distinguished, on available evidence, from evaluation-ecosystem gaps. This has direct implications for how national AI programs should design monitoring and funding criteria.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11891
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Inverse Theory of Mind Modeling for Content Recommendation: From Web Browsing to Dynamic Intelligent Interfaces
2026-08-11 18:58:28Mengyu Chen, Feiyu Lu, Chun-Fu Chen, Lucas Vinh Tran, Jay KatukuriAbstract
Modern recommender systems treat observed actions as reliable proxies for user preferences, yet interactions often reflect exploration or comparison rather than stable preference expression. As interfaces evolve from static layouts toward generative UIs and immersive extended reality (XR), the need for deeper, modality-agnostic user understanding grows: these adaptive environments must decide not only what to present but where, when, how prominently, and most importantly why a user acts. We propose an Inverse Theory of Mind (IToM) pipeline that reasons backward from observed interactions to infer the beliefs, preferences, and decision-making traits that explain behavior. The pipeline reconstructs each user's decision context, including what was chosen and what alternatives were available, applies LLM-driven counterfactual reasoning to produce evidence-grounded natural-language belief statements, and synthesizes these beliefs through multi-hypothesis abductive inference into a structured user persona. We evaluate on the OPeRA dataset against ground-truth personality assessments, attitudinal surveys, and interview-based personas across four tasks: next action prediction, shopping attitude alignment, Big Five personality inference, and held-out category prediction. Results show that inferred personas match or exceed ground-truth personas and that multi-hypothesis reasoning is essential for accurate personality prediction. We further demonstrate cross-modal transferability with a persona-driven spatial banking application on VisionOS.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11354
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Apodex Discovery: Reality Benchmarks and Environments for Evaluating and Building Discoverative Artificial Intelligence
2026-08-11 18:48:40Brian Wang, Bin Feng, Xiaoman Pan, Chenyang An, Felix Liu, Tangqi Fang, Gongbo Sun, Lingfeng Shen, Ning Wang, Handuo Zhang, Feng Chen, Fuchao Yang, Xiang Wang, Jiacheng Lin, Siting Li, Zixuan Liu, Chi Han, Zhenhailong Wang, Kunlun Zhu, Lawrence Zhao, Yueqi Guo, Kailong Wen, Feng Xing, Yiling Guo, Lidong Bing, David Tan, Bo An, Heng Ji, Sheng WangAbstract
Apollo did not reach the Moon merely because its engineers could solve difficult equations. It succeeded by turning a distant ambition into a mission architecture of explicit objectives, simulation, verification, and repeated correction. AI now faces a similar transition: frontier models can solve difficult tasks once the problem, tools, and success criteria are specified, yet consequential real-world challenges rarely arrive in an executable or verifiable form. We introduce Apodex Discovery, a framework for building and evaluating discoverative AI through the heavy-duty solver, a system comprising a foundation model, harness, tools, and control policies that pursues extended, stateful, verifiable investigations. It has three core components. First, a problem-scouting process surveyed 561 industries across 16 sectors, assembled 423 high-value real-world problems, and selected 20 for the initial release. Second, a common environment-task-episode abstraction provides data, tools, constraints, feedback, trajectory recording, and verification of intermediate artifacts and final submissions. Third, HDS6 evaluates Tools, Repair, Alternatives, Coherence, Evidence, and Scope independently of final-task success. In AAV capsid design, Apodex surpassed the published state of the art by 7% across viability, tropism, structure prediction, and generative design. In drug repurposing and reformulation, a task-specific biomedical environment improved the mean normalized prediction score of GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6-sol by 2.5 and 7.6 points over the same closed-book backbone. Controlled ablations show that the fixed TRACES episode interface enables attribution of performance differences to specific solver components. Apodex Discovery moves AI evaluation beyond predefined benchmarks toward verifiable investigations aimed at genuine discovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11341
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Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives
2026-08-11 16:00:40Songlin Du, Xiaoyong Lu, Zeyu Wu, Xiaobo Lu, Guobao Xiao, Bin Fan, Jiayi Ma, Takeshi IkenagaAbstract
Cross-view feature matching aims to establish reliable correspondences across images with large viewpoint variations. Over the past decade, the field has evolved from task-specific models toward increasingly unified and generalizable correspondence models, with recent progress further driven by the emergence of vision foundation models (VFMs). Despite these advances, existing studies remain highly diverse in their problem formulations, model architectures, training paradigms, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to obtain a unified understanding of the field. In this survey, we present a unified review of cross-view feature matching. We first introduce a structured taxonomy covering feature extraction, single-type feature matcher, multi-type feature matcher, VFMs based methods, training strategy and robust estimation, providing a coherent framework for analysis and comparison. We further examine recent advances, distilling key design principles and highlighting the shift toward unified and generalizable correspondence models. We also provide a unified experimental benchmarking of representative state-of-the-art methods under consistent protocols, enabling fair and comprehensive performance comparisons. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including efficiency, robustness under extreme conditions, and cross-domain generalization. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and structured reference for understanding the evolution, current landscape, and future development of cross-view feature matching in the era of vision foundation models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11093
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Templated or fully Synthetic? Prompt construction as a confound in measuring LLM political stance beyond writing assistance
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Political stance detection in LLMs has long been dominated by closed-ended, multiple-choice political survey questions---originally designed for humans, and thus lacks the realism and nuance of human-AI interactions in the wild, while also being susceptible to sandbagging. The recent IssueBench framework substantially mitigates these limitations with templated prompts anchored in real-world chat logs. Given the rise in non-work-related use of GenAI assistants, we extend IssueBench beyond writing assistance to include two additional tasks, information seeking and opinion sharing. We argue that templated prompts still lack the nuance of real ones, especially for open-ended tasks, and remain recognisable as evaluation artefacts. We propose the use of fully synthetic (LLM-generated) prompts, produced under detailed instructions with real prompts as seeds. We assess the ecological validity of real, templated, and LLM-generated prompts in a small-scale study covering 3 highly contested policy issues and 3 recent geopolitical conflicts. Human and LLM annotators rank LLM-generated prompts as no less realistic than real ones and clearly more realistic than templated ones, and find that they carry their intended intent and stance more clearly; the LLMs separate templated prompts from the other two far more sharply than the humans do. In a case study, templated and LLM-generated prompts yield systematically different stance estimates for the same model, most visibly under neutral framings, where templated prompts overstate the model's leaning in the direction encoded by the topic-and-stance text (filler) slotted into their templates.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11008
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Agent Safety Should Be a Runtime Contract
2026-08-11 08:01:05Albus W. Ng, Yi Han, Jusheng Zhang, Wenhao WangAbstract
The dominant paradigm treats AI safety as a property to be instilled during model training via RLHF, DPO, or Constitutional AI. We argue this is structurally insufficient for autonomous agents that execute code, mutate files, send messages, and modify databases. Agent safety should be a runtime contract enforced by the harness, and the contract has two complementary faces. The preventive face blocks dangerous actions before they happen via sandboxes, permission gates, output filters, and trajectory monitors. The evidential face requires verifiable proof that good actions actually happened, gating task submission on hard evidence such as test runs, log captures, file diffs, and citation grounding. We ground the position in four lines of public evidence, with row-level protocols and data released in the supplementary JSON files: a survey of 52 documented AI-agent and LLM safety incidents, a false-completion audit with 31 non-contested core cases plus one disputed illustrative case, a trajectory-schema audit of 12 public agent systems and harnesses, and a title-level audit of all 28,560 papers accepted at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR 2023-2025 showing a pooled 8-12x imbalance between training-time and deployment-time publication. Two prior communities that needed to enforce safety, computer security and the experimental sciences, converged on runtime contracts with both preventive and evidential elements; agentic AI is now under the same pressure. We formalize an Agent Trajectory Schema and Evidence Chain, state a compositional gating proposition based on standard monitor composition, and outline a research agenda. The right unit of safety in agentic AI is the trajectory-with-checkable-evidence, not the model.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11274
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What We Know about Responsible AI Practices in Industry: A Half Decade of Empirical Research
2026-08-11 03:29:48Wesley Hanwen Deng, Agathe Balayn, Andrew Selbst, Jason I. Hong, Motahhare Eslami, Kenneth Holstein, Hanna Wallach, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Solon BarocasAbstract
Responsible AI (RAI) has become a central concern for technology companies, regulators, and the public. How industry practitioners interpret, implement, and sustain RAI work directly shapes the design and deployment of AI systems. As empirical scholarship examining RAI practices in industry has rapidly expanded, findings are dispersed across studies that focus on different roles, organizational contexts, and interventions. This work synthesizes current knowledge through a literature review of 161 empirical studies spanning six years, each engaging industry practitioners via interviews, surveys, workshops, ethnographies, and other methods. Our synthesis reveals both meaningful progress and persistent challenges in industry RAI practice. Practitioner awareness has increased, RAI activities have become more professionalized, and interventions such as toolkits and guidelines are more widely adopted. At the same time, practitioners continue to face substantial barriers, including limited training, uneven organizational support, and a lack of interventions tailored to day-to-day work practices. By consolidating and organizing these findings, we provide a more complete account of industry RAI than any single study to date. We conclude by discussing implications for RAI researchers, practitioners seeking to adopt effective practices, and policymakers aiming to ground governance efforts in the realities of industry contexts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10431
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Co-Evolution in Agentic Systems: Toward Self-Directed Evolution Beyond Human Design
2026-08-10 23:10:40Qing Zong, Jiayu Liu, Junhao Shen, Zecong Tang, Linsi Wu, Yuxuan Liu, Rui Wang, Zhaowei Wang, Weiqi Wang, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Yangqiu SongAbstract
Agentic systems are increasingly expected to improve after deployment, yet single-entity self-evolution is often bounded by a static learning context, such as fixed tasks and feedback. This survey focuses on co-evolution in agentic systems, a multi-component form of self-evolution in which multiple agents and their environment impose adaptive pressure on one another. To organize existing papers, we propose a progressive three-stage taxonomy that traces how the system gradually sheds human-engineered constraints. Agent--Agent Co-Evolution studies how agents adapt through dynamic peers, including adversarial, collaborative, and organizational adaptation. Agent--Environment Co-Evolution extends this loop to adaptive tasks, feedback, and interaction spaces that change with the agents. Meta Co-Evolution further explores the possibility of making the evolution mechanism itself evolvable. We also discuss open challenges in evaluating such systems, scaling them across multiple components, and keeping increasingly autonomous evolutionary processes safe and controllable. This survey provides a unified foundation for building robust and open-ended agentic systems that can improve beyond fixed human-designed paths.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10299
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From Values to Benchmarks: Evaluating Large Language Models for Governmental Use in Dutch
2026-08-10 17:59:05Laurens Samson, Iva Gornishka, Gossa L\^o, Yuki M. Asano, Sennay GhebreabAbstract
Large language models are increasingly being deployed in governmental settings, yet few existing evaluation frameworks jointly reflect the values of public administration and the linguistic requirements of non-English contexts. We present the "Grip on LLMs" framework, a systematic evaluation suite for Dutch governmental use developed in collaboration with domain experts from a major Dutch municipal organisation. Through an advisory board process, user research, and a survey of the users of a civil-servant chatbot, we identify six evaluation dimensions (factuality, honesty, social bias, energy consumption, cost, and training data transparency) and operationalise them into a benchmark suite covering more than 30 multilingual and Dutch-specific models. Our results reveal that no single model excels across all dimensions, and that trade-offs are unavoidable: higher quality consistently comes at greater environmental impact and financial cost, while bias remains largely independent of both. We further find that factuality (whether a model answers correctly) and honesty (whether a model acknowledges what it does not know) are governed by distinct properties, with high factuality not implying high honesty. To make these findings actionable for non-technical audiences, we release a publicly accessible, user-friendly model overview designed for the full range of stakeholders involved in governmental LLM selection, from engineers to policymakers.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09925
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Periocular Soft Biometrics: A Survey and Applications to Multimedia Forensics and Disinformation Detection
2026-08-10 15:29:46Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Kevin Hernandez-Diaz, Josef BigunAbstract
Soft-biometric attributes such as gender, age, and ethnicity provide valuable ancillary evidence when full identity recognition is not feasible, supporting applications in forensic investigation, identity verification, surveillance, or detection of synthetic and manipulated media. Among biometric modalities, the periocular region is a robust source of soft-biometric cues, as it often remains visible when other parts of the face are occluded, a frequent condition in forensic evidence and surveillance footage, and can be captured across a wide range of acquisition conditions. In this paper, we provide a survey of demographic attribute estimation from periocular images, covering publicly available datasets, methodological trends from handcrafted descriptors to deep learning architectures, and the state of the art in gender, age, and ethnicity prediction. We discuss use cases relevant to multimedia forensics and disinformation-detection applications, including demographic filtering in surveillance footage, age verification, and the detection of demographic inconsistencies in synthetic data. We also highlight open challenges, including dataset bias, cross-domain generalisation, fairness, ethical aspects, and the lack of forensic-oriented benchmarks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14701
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TriView-YOLO: Early Multi-View Fusion for Ground Penetrating Radar Cavity Detection in Soft, High-Water-Content Soils
2026-08-10 12:21:52Suphawut Thawinutchokaudom, Sompote Youwai, Warat Kongkitkul, Mitsumasa Yamashina, Jose M. D. S. Rodrigues Neto, Jun ShinoharaAbstract
Automated detection of subsurface cavities from Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is most difficult in soft, high-water-content ground, where conductive, water-saturated soil attenuates the signal and degrades cavity reflections, yet this is also the condition under which cavities most readily form. This paper proposes TriView-YOLO, a multi-view YOLOv12 detector for road cavity screening in such ground. Three co-registered views (longitudinal B-scan, horizontal C-scan, and cross-section B-scan) form a 9-channel input fused by a TripleInputConv layer that replaces the YOLOv12 stem; the rest of the network is unchanged, and bounding boxes are required on the longitudinal view only. Training used 1,600 expert-verified field samples, principally metropolitan road surveys of Bangkok, Thailand, acquired with a vehicle-mounted multichannel three-dimensional GPR mobile mapping system, with surveys over the firmer subgrades of Japan added to training and validation only. The test set comes exclusively from the Bangkok surveys, over soft marine clay with 80-140% water content and a water table at 1-2 m depth, a ground condition for which no dedicated deep learning cavity-detection evaluation has been reported. On this unaugmented, field-only test set, split randomly within surveys, the proposed model attains mAP50 of 0.558 +/- 0.028 over three seeds at 23.6 GFLOPs and 3.1 ms per image. Ablations show that removing the auxiliary views lowers mAP50 and recall, whereas public and synthetic training images, DINOv3 features, larger model scale, and COCO pretraining bring no gain.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09522
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GeoAI-based post-segmentation quality validation of building footprints via spatial feature engineering
2026-08-10 02:55:07Shah Imran Ahsan Chowdhury, Kazi Jihadur Rashid, Rajsree Das Tuli, Rahul Saha, Bulbul AhammadAbstract
Deep learning-based building footprint extraction from high-resolution imagery often produces topologically inconsistent vectors unfit for direct GIS database ingestion. To address this, we present a multidomain GeoAI quality control framework that automates error detection to systematically purify vector footprint databases. Candidate footprints were generated across five UAV survey sites in Bangladesh using U-Net (ResNet-34) and SAM-LoRA (ViT-B). The extracted raster masks were vectorized, geometrically regularized, and consolidated under a spatial-exclusivity constraint to eliminate duplicate representations. We used twenty-four predictors capturing geometric, spatial-contextual, and raster-derived spectral and texture properties. Machine Learning (ML) classifiers were trained on a development partition (Sites B-D) and rigorously validated on a spatially independent test set (Site E) excluded from hyperparameter tuning and class balancing. The experimental results demonstrate that geometric and spatial-contextual predictors using Decision Tree (DT) provide the most effective discriminatory evidence for identifying object-level boundary deformations. DT achieved an accuracy of 95.31%, an F1-score of 91.06%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.880 on the unseen testing site. At the database level, this framework successfully identified 87.34% of erroneous footprints while maintaining 98.31% of acceptable structures, reducing the residual error proportion from 27.32% to 4.62% and improving final database purity to 95.38%. This translates into a relative error reduction of 83.09%. The findings indicate that post-segmentation object-level ML provides a highly transferable, robust mechanism for automated quality assurance in production-ready geographic information system (GIS) workflows.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09048
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From Manuals to Maintenance: Fine-Tuning MedGemma for Multi-Modal Imaging System Support in Low-Resource Settings
2026-08-09 20:16:51Bernes Lorier Atabonfack, Zion Kongbi Nfo, Ahmed Tahiru Issah, Tolulope Olusuyi, Clemence Ingabire, Mohammed Hardi Abdul Baaki, Mawuli Deku, Abdulrazaq Zubair, Alyasaa Anas, Raymond Confidence, Maruf Adewole, Udunna C. AnazodoAbstract
Imaging device downtime is a major barrier to healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), often driven by limited access to specialized biomedical engineering support. We present a multi-modality medical equipment maintenance question-answering (QA) framework and demonstrate the fine-tuning of a medical foundation model for specialized technical troubleshooting tasks. Guided by a multi-country survey across nine LMICs, we curated technical manuals from MRI and ultrasound systems to generate the INGENZI_DatasetV1, containing 10,294 high-quality, filtered QA-context pairs. Using QLoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we adapted the MedGemma-4b-it model to interpret system error logs and generate step-by-step equipment repair instructions. Compared to the baseline model, the fine-tuned system achieved substantial improvements across metrics, including F1 score (0.22 to 0.38), ROUGE-2 (0.18 to 0.41), and BERTScore F1 (0.86 to 0.91). These metric gains demonstrate that the model generates significantly more precise and procedurally accurate technical responses to new troubleshooting queries. This work establishes a reliable foundation for AI-assisted diagnostic and maintenance tools in resource-constrained settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08896
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A Comprehensive Survey of Wireless Foundation Models for AI-Native 6G Networks
2026-08-09 19:24:26Naveed Khan, Besan Al Sbeihi, Maryam Alshehhi, Nasir SaeedAbstract
Foundation models are emerging as a transformative paradigm for AI-native sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks by enabling scalable, transferable, and data-efficient intelligence across diverse communication tasks. Unlike conventional deep learning models that are trained for individual applications, wireless foundation models (WFMs) learn generalized representations from large-scale heterogeneous wireless data and can be efficiently adapted to communication, sensing, localization, and network optimization tasks with minimal task-specific supervision. Despite rapid progress, current research remains fragmented across architectures, training paradigms, and application domains, with no unified survey dedicated to the design, learning, and deployment of WFMs. This survey presents a comprehensive and unified review of wireless foundation models. We first establish the fundamental concepts of WFMs and introduce a taxonomy that organizes the field according to model architectures, pre-training paradigms, and applications. We then review representative architectures, self-supervised pre-training strategies, parameter-efficient adaptation methods, datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation methodologies, highlighting their roles in enabling transferable wireless intelligence. Furthermore, we examine emerging applications spanning physical-layer signal processing, network intelligence, and cross-layer optimization, and discuss the key challenges of data availability, generalization, interpretability, efficient edge deployment, and standardization. Finally, we outline future research directions toward scalable, trustworthy, and general-purpose wireless intelligence for AI-native 6G networks. This survey provides a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners developing next-generation intelligent wireless systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14694
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Conversation as Measurement in Clinical Encounters: Observable Phase Structure, Partially Observable Patient State
2026-08-09 19:16:10Lily Chen, Ted Mau, Michael Gensheimer, Brian Anthony Nuyen, Nancy Jiang, James ZouAbstract
Many modern AI systems analyze conversational traces to infer aspects of human interaction and state, implicitly assuming that such information is recoverable from conversation. We study observability: whether a target is recoverable from conversational transcripts alone. Observability is difficult to assess because transcripts may provide only a partial view of many targets, and large-scale analysis requires model-based annotation, making true limits of the conversational signal hard to distinguish from annotator error. We therefore study clinical encounters, where patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide an external anchor for patient state, and visits follow broadly structured patterns. We study observability of patient state and conversational phase structure using 439 real-world clinical encounter transcripts spanning 134 hours, including 245 ENT transcripts paired with 273 PROM surveys. We operationalize patient state using PROM scores for voice, cough, and swallowing; phase structure using conversational phase segmentation. To make these analyses credible at scale, we use a PHI-compliant GPT-5 deployment for transcript annotation and conduct 40 hours of manual validation, reducing the risk that apparent limits of observability simply reflect annotator error. Our core finding is an observability asymmetry: phase structure is observable and useful for characterizing clinical encounter organization, while patient state is only partially observable, even in a setting designed to elicit patient symptoms and experiences, cautioning against transcript-only inference of human state.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08868
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The Evolution of Mixture-of-Experts Architectures in Large Language Models: Routing, Topology, Load Balancing, and Expert Parallelism
Abstract
Mixture-of-Experts models increase parameter capacity while keeping the computation activated by each token bounded, but their architectural evolution cannot be explained by a chronological list of model releases alone. This technical survey synthesizes primary papers, official technical reports, and prior surveys to organize modern Mixture-of-Experts systems along five coupled dimensions: expert granularity, expert topology, routing freedom, the scope of load balancing, and execution structure. We describe eight architectural milestones as a dependency graph with six mainline developments and two orthogonal branches, rather than as eight successive generations. We then analyze individual systems through four control planes: Expert Topology, Routing, Balance, and Expert Parallelism. These planes specify which experts exist, which experts process each token, how aggregate load is controlled, and how selected computation is mapped onto physical devices. The framework connects algorithmic choices such as Top-k routing, shared experts, fine-grained experts, and dynamic expert composition with systems concerns including token dispatch, device placement, all-to-all communication, and communication-computation overlap. We conclude with equal-budget pretraining experiments, quality and systems metrics, and open research questions. The main trend is a shift from merely activating more sparse parameters toward decoupling semantic routing, computational budgets, and physical execution.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08650
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Position Encoding in Transformers: From Absolute and Relative Methods to Rotary Position Embeddings and Long-Context Scaling
2026-08-09 10:15:49Jiguo LiAbstract
Self-attention models content-dependent interactions between tokens but does not by itself encode token order. Position encoding addresses this limitation by introducing absolute coordinates, relative distances, or position-dependent rotations into Transformer representations and attention scores. This technical survey develops a unified account of sinusoidal and learned absolute position embeddings, Shaw-style relative position representations, Transformer-XL, T5 relative position bias, ALiBi, and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE). We derive how RoPE converts absolute position indices into relative phase differences in Query-Key inner products and compare these methods in terms of where position is injected, computational cost, compatibility with KV caching, and length extrapolation. We then examine long-context extensions, including Position Interpolation, RoPE scaling laws, NTK-aware scaling, Dynamic NTK, NTK-by-parts, YaRN, LongRoPE, and LongRoPE2, with emphasis on frequency allocation, attention rescaling, training length, and target context length. We also summarize implementation considerations, evaluation protocols, and position-encoding choices in representative large language models. A central conclusion is that the ability to compute positional features beyond the training length does not imply reliable long-context generalization; context extension must be evaluated through short-context retention, position-wise perplexity, retrieval, reasoning, and long-context code tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10021
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SCTD 3.0: Sonar Common Target Detection in the Wild - A Large-Scale, Multi-Scene Dataset from Real Marine Surveys
2026-08-08 12:39:22Peng ZhangAbstract
Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) is core for wide-area detection of small underwater targets. However, large-scale, high-quality SAS datasets are scarce, hindering data-driven recognition. Existing benchmarks are small and limited to single scenarios, failing to reproduce complex acoustic scattering, diverse seabeds, and multi-pose imaging in real detection. To fill this gap, we introduce SCTD 3.0 - a large-scale real-measured dataset for Sonar Common Target Detection in the Wild in natural waters. It contains over 10,000 high-quality real SAS image snippets from multi-frequency systems (240 kHz, 450 kHz, and others), covering ten typical target categories across varied seabed geomorphologies, with multiple observation angles, detection ranges, and frequency bands. We establish a rigorous hierarchical annotation protocol that decouples labeling of intrinsic physical properties, deployment characteristics, and scattering phenomena - covering material, geometry, internal structure, burial state, shadow integrity, specular highlights, edge diffraction, and resonance effects. This enables fine-grained target characterization. We also construct a multi-task benchmark for object detection, fine-grained classification, and attribute prediction, evaluating mainstream deep learning models under cross-domain, cross-scene, cross-frequency, and cross-view generalization. SCTD 3.0 is expected to provide a critical data cornerstone for robust underwater target perception in open-water environments. SCTD 3.0 is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08106
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