Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omnimodal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering. OmniReasoner first builds a low-cost global preview of the full stream and then, when needed, calls the zoom-in tool with a requested temporal interval for higher-fidelity visual and audio inspection before answering. Because the model observes different sampling granularities before and after this call -- a sparse global preview and a denser local clip -- we introduce TimeAnchor, which keeps the tool's temporal argument valid and round-trip-consistent across these granularities, rather than tied to frame indices from a particular sampling rate. To make this tool-use behavior trainable without expensive manual interval annotation, we build a Temporal Augmented Data Engine that synthesizes tool-use post-training trajectories by video editing and composition. Experiments across omnimodal and video benchmarks show that OmniReasoner improves both answer accuracy and temporal grounding while concentrating high-fidelity computation on informative regions. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19339
This paper addresses multi-objective kinodynamic planning in environments with stochastic hybrid adversaries that probabilistically transition to adversarial modes based on the ego state. The goal is to construct the Pareto-front of paths that trade off execution cost and the probability of safety constraint violation (risk). Existing chance-constrained planners evaluate risk over open-loop trajectories, yielding overly conservative solutions that fail to account for ego-agent reactivity. To address this limitation, we shift the planning space to sequences of closed-loop policies, and integrate sample-based risk evaluation directly into tree construction via Monte-Carlo particle rollouts. We first introduce Stochastic Multi-Objective RRT (SMO-RRT), for which we prove probabilistic completeness, followed by Stochastic Multi-Objective Stable Sparse RRT (SMO-SST), which leverages selective pruning to improve numerical performance at the cost of completeness. For both algorithms, we derive a finite-sample bound on the probability of chance constraint violation for systems with non-Gaussian, state-dependent uncertainty, enabling probabilistically safe planning in a broad class of environments applicable to multi-agent systems, social navigation, and autonomous driving.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19284
Accurate delineation of the pericardium in a cardiac CT scan is essential for quantifying epicardial adipose tissue, yet it remains one of the most challenging structures to segment due to its poor contrast boundaries. Instead of solely relying on image gradients, our framework leverages the anatomical context of surrounding anatomical structures to guide the segmentation. This work introduces a novel 3D iterative mesh refinement framework that balances anatomical and geometric forces derived from inherent anatomical rules to refine an initial, possibly ambiguous, segmentation into a high-precision, anatomically plausible result. Designed as a model-agnostic post-processing step, our method uses a 3D vector field to iteratively push the vertices to the correct anatomical locations. Evaluating the refinement on both a high-resolution in-house dataset and a coarse, sparsely annotated open-source dataset, our method consistently improves all volumetric, surface, and anatomical metrics. The framework demonstrates greater improvement when applied to weaker initial segmentations, highlighting its potential for improving segmentations for out-of-domain models and in limited-training-data scenarios. The method is formulated as a gradient-based, GPU-accelerated framework that can be easily extended to other anatomical use cases.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19210
Data-driven methods have revolutionized ocean modeling, yet current approaches rely heavily on complete reanalysis datasets, imposing computational constraints and limiting model performance to that of the training data. Here, we present a generative state-space model and an optimization framework that enable learning directly from sparse and noisy observations. The model is essentially a hidden Markov model with a continuous state space, where oceanic physical quantities are treated as hidden states and measurements as observations, enabling a unified representation of ocean fields and observational data. Both the initial-state and state-transition modules are implemented as neural networks to capture the complexity and temporal evolution of ocean states, while the emission module is formulated as a masked Gaussian distribution. To train the model from sparse observations, we derive an optimization framework based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The framework alternately reconstructs high-fidelity ocean fields via Langevin dynamics and optimizes deep neural networks to capture temporal evolution. Theoretical analysis shows that the framework maximizes the likelihood of observations under the generative model. For efficiency, we assume that ocean-state evolution follows a stationary, ergodic, and Markovian stochastic process and adopt only length-two state sequences during optimization. Experiments on CMIP6 simulation data and FY-3D satellite data demonstrate high-fidelity reconstruction and accurate prediction, showing that sparse observations can directly improve the model's representation of ocean-state dynamics. This work offers a scalable pathway for next-generation Earth system models to learn directly from sparse, incomplete real-world observations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19147
Geometric foundation models, such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), provide strong 3D priors from unposed images. However, such models operate purely in a feed-forward, deterministic regime, \ie~they cannot generate plausible geometry beyond what the input views directly support. Generative models for 3D scenes, on the other hand, must rely on strong geometric priors to produce coherent outputs from sparse inputs. We bridge these two paradigms by performing flow matching directly in VGGT's latent space, leveraging its learned 3D priors without committing to any explicit downstream representation such as Gaussians, meshes, or video-VAE latents. This requires respecting the latent geometry: VGGT tokens occupy a product of high-dimensional hyperspheres on which standard Euclidean flow matching fails. We address this with a Riemannian Flow Matching framework defined on a product manifold of four hyperspheres, aligned with VGGT's multi-scale encoder, which keeps generated tokens on the valid data manifold required by the frozen decoding heads. On RealEstate10K, ScanNet++ and ETH3D, our method achieves strong performance against recent scene generation baselines in both per-view appearance and aggregated 3D geometry, establishing latent-space flow matching on geometric foundation models as a viable paradigm for 3D generation. The project page can be found $\href{this https URL}{\text{here}}$.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19120
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, most RLVR methods assign a scalar outcome reward to an entire trajectory, resulting in sparse supervision and limited token-level credit assignment. On-policy distillation (OPD) provides denser supervision by distilling token-level distributions from a stronger teacher model, but requires an additional teacher and typically assumes a shared vocabulary. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) removes this dependency by conditioning the same model on privileged information to construct a teacher policy. However, directly matching the teacher distribution may cause information leakage and unstable optimization. RLSD avoids direct matching by using the teacher signal only to modulate update magnitudes, but it cannot provide an explicit correction direction when the sampled reasoning fails. To address this tradeoff, we introduce $\mathrm{H}^{2}\mathrm{SD}$, a hybrid hindsight self distillation framework that uses the teacher differently according to trajectory correctness. For successful trajectories, the teacher receives the student response confirmed as correct together with a rephrasing instruction, and its probabilities on the original response tokens are used to modulate update magnitudes without changing the direction determined by the reward. For failed trajectories, we condition the teacher on a reference hint containing key reasoning steps and a verified answer, and minimize the reverse KL divergence from the student to the teacher. Experiments on multiple challenging reasoning benchmarks show that H$^2$SD consistently outperforms representative RLVR, OPSD, and RLSD baselines while maintaining stable optimization and favorable generation efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18955
Circuit extraction identifies a small set of model components whose presence preserves a target behavior under ablation, and the resulting circuit is often read as the mechanism behind that behavior. We argue that this reading is under-determined: preserving behavior does not single out one circuit, because the claim it supports depends on which circuit is reported and how two circuits are compared. We make this concrete in a synthetic Lean tactic-prediction benchmark -- predicting the next step of a proof -- where fixed proof rules with randomized surface form let differences between extracted circuits be attributed to these choices rather than to the task. Across dense and weight-sparse checkpoints (most weights constrained to zero) of the same transformer, evaluated on atomic (single-rule) and compositional (multi-rule) proofs, we vary which extracted object is reported (a compact prediction-preserving circuit, a broader graph that also keeps surrounding read, write, and routing structure, or the smallest subgraph meeting a post-ablation loss threshold), and whether each attention head's query and key are represented jointly or separately. Exact component-to-component edge overlap is low and sensitive to these choices, at times dropping to a random baseline, while two coarser summaries stay stable: the set of selected attention heads, and the circuit-size ranking of conditions that differ in which supervised checkpoint initializes reinforcement learning (RL). The largest accuracy gains from RL on compositional proofs come with the most structure beyond the atomic circuits. A circuit-level claim is therefore well defined only once one states which circuit is reported, the pruning threshold used to extract it, and the level at which circuits are compared. We distill these requirements into a reporting practice for circuit-extraction studies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18921
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-friendly human sensing, but its sparse point clouds are physical measurements of view-dependent electromagnetic reflections and only indirectly characterize body articulation. Recovering a complete 3D pose from such partial, geometry-dependent observations is therefore under-constrained. Existing methods directly regress joint coordinates from paired radar-pose data, relying on the same limited paired supervision to learn radar perception, human-body structure, and their alignment. This coupling can encourage dataset-specific shortcuts under ambiguous radar observations. We propose Wave2Body, a radar-to-body token translation framework that decouples these learning targets using a self-supervised mmWave tokenizer, a pretrained compositional body tokenizer that defines the output space, and a lightweight translator between them. Experiments on M4Human and mmBody show that Wave2Body achieves stronger cross-domain generalization than previous methods while incurring much lower computational costs for training and inference. All the code and experiment results are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18875
Continuous Thought Machines introduce an internal temporal dimension in which neuron-level histories and synchronization-derived representations evolve over a sequence of thought ticks. Extending this mechanism to dense visual prediction is non-trivial, because tasks such as image super-resolution require spatial evidence to remain available at every output location rather than being compressed into a single global representation. In the proposed window-level use of CTM, the thought dynamics produce a compact summary representation for each local window. DQ-CTM transforms this compact thought representation into window-aligned dense queries through a structured low-rank, parameter-efficient compact-to-dense query mechanism. Each position within a window receives its own query, while shared thought dynamics progressively refine the dense representation across ticks. In its super-resolution instantiation, termed ThinkSR, encoded feature maps are partitioned into local visual windows without token pooling, restored to the original feature field after shared refinement, and decoded into a high-resolution image. Preliminary experiments under a fixed four-tick training horizon reveal a progressive reconstruction trajectory. PSNR-Y increases from 28.1045 dB at $T=0$ to 30.2817 dB at $T=4$, while PSNR-RGB increases from 26.6271 dB to 28.7781 dB and the mean $\ell_1$ error decreases from 0.034602 to 0.023545. All 100 evaluated images improve from $T=1$ to $T=4$. These initial results establish the feasibility of sparse latent thought for dense spatial reconstruction and motivate broader continuous-thought architectures for dense vision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18856
LLM-agent defenses are typically evaluated one session at a time. In deployment, however, attacks can be distributed across independent agents, teams, and runtimes, leaving each local guardrail with only a sparse fragment. We formalize cross-agent asynchronous campaign attribution: linking sessions from the same latent adversarial campaign without shared runtime state, test-time campaign labels, or attacker identity oracles. We introduce Asynchronous Attribution Fingerprint Vectors ($A^2FV$), a lightweight proxy-side reference protocol for scoring pairwise campaign similarity from proxy-observable tool-use, timing, and prompt residue. We also construct SCD-v1, a controlled persona-matched benchmark with benign traffic, isolated attacks, multi-session campaigns, matched non-oracle evasion, and leakage audits. On SCD-v1, $A^2FV$ achieves 0.82 pairwise AUC for campaign linking, while score-only adaptations of per-session detectors and chunked LLM judges remain near chance under the same task. The strongest fixed signal is carried by structural and stylometric residue, while timing is retained as a diagnostic channel for richer proxy traces. Crossed-style controls show that the signal is partly style-sensitive but not reducible to style alone. Static and dimension-aware non-oracle stress tests further show that pairwise separability persists under controlled evasion. These results establish cross-agent campaign attribution as a distinct evaluation layer for securing LLM agents in the wild.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18826
Public institutions hold large volumes of sensitive documents and support tickets that cannot leave the premises, ruling out cloud-hosted language models entirely. We report on RAGAL, a retrieval-augmented assistant for the technical-support team of AFIR, the Romanian Agency for Financing Rural Investments, built and operated under three hard constraints: zero data egress (no external API calls, even for synthetic data), a read-only mandate (the assistant drafts, humans execute), and a single 8 GB consumer laptop as the only development and training machine. Over a Romanian-language corpus of ~25,000 chunks -- 15,073 resolved support tickets and internal normative documents -- we show that the highest-leverage investments were retrieval engineering and retriever fine-tuning rather than a larger generator: hybrid dense-sparse retrieval with intent routing raised our internal evaluation from 62% to 81%, and fine-tuning the bge-m3 embedder on real ticket data improved recall@10 from 0.663 to 0.850 (MRR 0.489 to 0.684) after 72 minutes of training. We document a general pitfall: single-domain fine-tuning silently degraded retrieval on the untouched document domain below the stock baseline, detected only after building a per-domain evaluation set and repaired with locally generated queries (GenQ). We report two counter-intuitive findings -- PII masking improved generation quality, and a structural "anchor distillation" scheme made SQL hallucination impossible by construction -- along with a reproducible recipe for full embedder fine-tuning in 8 GB of VRAM. Finally, since zero egress also rules out a cloud judge, we describe a substitute: a 744B-parameter model run on CPU, too slow to serve interactively but affordable in overnight batch, used as a second opinion whose limits we quantify. We release the sanitized pipeline scripts for institutions facing similar data-locality constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18756
Recent work extends Transformer residual pathways along two complementary axes: historical retrieval selects information from earlier depths, whereas multi-stream methods maintain multiple residual trajectories. These capabilities have largely been studied in isolation, and assigning an independent retriever to each stream still prevents one trajectory from influencing depth selection in another. We propose Dual Attention Residuals (DAR), which brings multi-stream interaction into historical retrieval through reciprocal cross-stream addressing. For each target stream, DAR computes depth weights from normalized states in the opposite stream and applies them to values from the target stream's own history. The retrieved states are combined for an unchanged Transformer branch and updated through constrained gated writes; a block-form variant operates on block-level histories to control overhead. Across dense models from 0.1B to 1B parameters and a 7B sparse-MoE model, DAR consistently improves validation loss over standard residual Transformers and Attention Residuals. Routing ablations show that the gain cannot be explained by an additional stream or value projection alone. Representation and intervention analyses further show that reciprocal cross-stream selection preserves depth-wise diversity and avoids the redundancy or functional imbalance observed in alternative two-stream designs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18730
Vision-based heading prediction is useful for UAV--UGV cooperation, but accurate prediction alone does not guarantee that every predicted heading should be issued directly as a control command. This paper investigates the decision problem of when and how a fixed vision-based heading predictor should be trusted for command issuance. A lightweight confidence-gated framework is proposed in which execution decisions are made using two interpretable reliability proxies derived from the perception stream: bounding-box area as a visibility-related proxy and short-window variation in predicted heading as a stability-related proxy. During low-confidence intervals, the framework compares the baseline freeze-HOLD policy with a bounded-blend fallback that updates the issued command conservatively. The method is evaluated on a real UAV--UGV dataset under clean and perturbed conditions. The results show that confidence gating creates a clear trade-off among execution rate, executed-frame accuracy, issued-command accuracy, and smoothness. The results further show that sparse execution can cause severe stale-command error under the baseline freeze-HOLD policy, whereas the bounded-blend fallback substantially improves command-level behavior under the same gate decisions. These findings highlight that reliable perception-driven autonomy depends not only on prediction accuracy, but also on decision-aware command issuance during low-confidence
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18713
The FathomNetCLEF 2026 competition combines underwater object detection and fine-grained marine species classification under a positive-unlabeled evaluation setting. The provided training labels are sparse, while the hidden test set is out-of-distribution relative to the training imagery, creating both annotation incompleteness and source-shift challenges. We describe DS@GT ARC's multi-stage system developed for this setting while keeping model training restricted to the data provided by the competition. The final private-leaderboard model uses a frozen Megalodon YOLOv8x detector as a class-agnostic proposal generator, combines global and tiled inference with tile-edge filtering, classifies expanded proposal crops with a LoRA-finetuned DINOv3 ViT-H classifier, and ranks predictions using weighted geometric fusion of detector and classifier confidence. This system placed 12th out of 102 teams. A closely related variant added a locally trained TTN-inspired validity head as a light reranking signal, improving public-leaderboard and proxy-evaluation performance but slightly reducing private-leaderboard performance. Across experiments, the strongest lesson was that train-derived validation and detector-only metrics were not reliable enough for model selection. Instead, we used proxy datasets only for validation and comparison, and combined those signals with leaderboard feedback and targeted ablations. These experiments showed that reserving proposal recall, avoiding over-aggressive filtering, and improving downstream ranking were more effective than fine-tuning the detector or directly training on noisy pseudo-labels. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18700
Vision Mamba models replace quadratic self-attention with linear complexity selective state space models (SSMs), emerging as efficient visual backbones. However, MambaOut demonstrates that a Gated CNN block can match or exceed VMamba on image classification, questioning the necessity of SSMs for vision. This raises a fundamental question: do VMamba and MambaOut encode visual information differently at the representation level? To investigate, we apply cross model centered kernel alignment (CKA) analysis and find that VMamba's final stage blocks form representations distinctly different from both MambaOut and its own preceding blocks. We therefore focus on the final block features, decomposing each spatial token into magnitude and direction. MambaOut concentrates class-discriminative information in high-norm foreground tokens that align with Grad-CAM attribution. VMamba, by contrast, produces high-norm tokens predominantly in background regions, misaligned with Grad-CAM, yet preserves discriminative signals primarily in token directions. These observations reveal that the two models rely on different encoding strategies. We connect this difference to high-resolution classification and semantic segmentation. VMamba distributes logit support broadly across object regions, whereas MambaOut relies on sparse dominant tokens, a strategy that becomes less stable as token counts grow. Under full fine-tuning for segmentation, VMamba consistently outperforms MambaOut. These results suggest that VMamba's advantage in dense prediction stems not merely from the SSM mechanism or sequence length, but from how semantic evidence is organized across token magnitude, direction. Ultimately, we conclude that token magnitude and directional structure serve as critical axes for improving visual backbones, particularly under dense supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18625
In this study, we explore how pianists can customize Music Minus One (MMO) concerto accompaniments to match their playing style. Bypassing the need for a symbolic score, often not available digitally, we use three types of audio data: solo piano recordings, MMO orchestra-only recordings, and mixed recordings of both piano and orchestra (e.g., from YouTube). The mixed recording serves as an intermediary reference to align the solo and orchestra parts, with only the orchestral part being adjusted through time-scale modification to synchronize with the user's playing. The main challenge with estimating these alignments is the spectral mismatch between recordings containing different musical parts. Motivated by this application scenario, we introduce Dense-Sparse DTW, a variant of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) that is designed to improve robustness of alignments to spectral mismatch by focusing on aligning a selected subset of audio frames containing prominent timing cues. We collect and annotate data from four piano concerto movements and establish a framework for generating and evaluating customized accompaniment recordings. On this benchmark, we show that Dense-Sparse DTW has better or comparable performance than more complex approaches based on source separation and spectral subtraction techniques.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18189
Multimodal video misinformation detection is commonly formulated as a holistic video-understanding task, where the entire video and its associated content are processed and judged in a single pass. However, real-world misinformation often exhibits a sparse and compositional evidence structure: a reliable decision may depend on only a few coupled clues, while most video content contributes limited additional information. Exhaustive multimodal reasoning may therefore introduce substantial redundancy and obscure decisive evidence. This motivates decoupling evidence acquisition from verification: first identifying sparse, decision-relevant clues and then judging veracity based on the acquired evidence. Accordingly, we propose SIEVE, a framework for Sparse Interactive Evidence Verification via Extraction in multimodal video misinformation detection. An evidence-seeking agent actively explores the available multimodal evidence and constructs a compact evidence package, which is then used by a verifier to determine veracity. The agent is trained with supervised evidence-seeking trajectories and an evidence-aware reinforcement learning objective that promotes informative evidence acquisition while discouraging unnecessary or invalid interactions. Experiments on multiple video misinformation benchmarks show that SIEVE consistently outperforms the evaluated baselines and supports reliable verification using compact evidence packages. Moreover, the resulting acquisition process provides an explicit and inspectable evidence trail, improving the transparency and groundedness of multimodal misinformation detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18080
Vision-only occupancy prediction requires recovering a semantic 3D occupancy field from calibrated surround-view images, where each view provides observations with ambiguous depth along camera rays. Existing methods have progressed from dense structured representations to sparse Gaussian primitives, improving the efficiency of 3D scene representation. However, Gaussian learning still relies primarily on image domain features, which provide limited explicit geometric information for volumetric reasoning. Our key observation is that effective Gaussian occupancy modeling requires not only sparse primitives, but also richer geometric and semantic learning cues. In this paper, we propose VGOcc, which learns visual and geometric cues from foundation models for Gaussian modeling. VGOcc incorporates these cues into primitive initialization and refinement, yielding a representation termed Visual-Geometric Gaussians tailored to semantic occupancy prediction. Specifically, we propose Visual-Geometric Gaussian Birth to form spatially balanced Gaussian centers from ray depth hypotheses, while visual semantic features initialize primitive attributes. Next, we design Pose-Aware Feature Learning to combine foundation tokens with camera embeddings and calibrated ray information. Features from neighboring views are then aggregated at projected 3D locations for each Gaussian refinement stage. Finally, Gaussian decoder refines birth Gaussians with pose-aware features and renders them into semantic occupancy. Experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that VGOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance in vision-only 3D occupancy prediction. Codes will be available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18078
Monocular geometry estimation has recently achieved impressive performance across diverse scenes. However, state-of-the-art models still face notable distortion in local 3D structure, especially in fine details, like thin structures and small objects. We attribute this limitation to an architectural mismatch: most current models decode 3D geometry within a 2D parameterization, where feature interactions are governed by image-plane proximity rather than true 3D spatial relationships. This inadvertently mixes features from geometrically distant surfaces, resulting in over-smoothed geometry particularly around thin or elongated structure. In this paper, we propose a fine-detail monocular geometry estimation with Self-Guided Sparse 3D Refinement (SSR) that lifts monocular geometry modeling from 2D image space to 3D space for high-fidelity metric-scale point maps. Our model lifts the coarse point map from a foundation base model onto a sparse voxel shell and refines it via SSR. The SSR employs sparse convolutions that aggregate features based on 3D spatial locality, avoiding feature mixing across depth discontinuities. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in recovering fine detailed 3D geometry across both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17967
Deep neural networks have become a promising approach for IMU-based sensing, but their scalability is fundamentally limited by costly labeled data and poor robustness to heterogeneous devices, placements, and users. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised methods reduce but do not remove this dependence, still requiring labeled data for domain adaptation and largely ignoring known physical structure. We propose physical self-supervised learning, an autoencoder-style paradigm for label-free IMU sensing. We replace the conventional neural decoder with an auto-adaptive physics decoder, a learnable family of kinematic equations that enforces explicit physical structure while adapting across environments, and adopt a hybrid two-stage IMU encoder with reconstruction in a structured latent space to mitigate sensor noise. Our framework further introduces probabilistic frequency-spatial constraints to disentangle sensor and object motion, a multi-view kinematic tree to exploit sparse physical self-supervised signals, and an uncertainty-aware formulation to handle the inherent ambiguity of IMU inference. Evaluated on inertial tracking and full-body motion capture over public datasets and realistic deployments, physical self-supervised learning reduces errors by up to 5x for tracking and 4x for motion capture in challenging generalization scenarios, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines without any labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18361