OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Taxonomy for Evaluating Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Machine learning for robot manipulation promises to unlock generalization to novel tasks and environments. But how should we measure the progress of these policies towards generalization? Evaluating and quantifying generalization is the Wild West of modern robotics, with each work proposing and measuring different types of generalization in their own, often difficult to reproduce settings. In this work, our goal is (1) to outline the forms of generalization we believe are important for robot manipulation in a comprehensive and fine-grained manner, and (2) to provide reproducible guidelines for measuring these notions of generalization. We first propose STAR-Gen, a taxonomy of generalization for robot manipulation structured around visual, semantic, and behavioral generalization. Next, we instantiate STAR-Gen with two case studies on real-world benchmarking: one based on open-source models and the Bridge V2 dataset, and another based on the bimanual ALOHA 2 platform that covers more dexterous and longer horizon tasks. Our case studies reveal many interesting insights: for example, we observe that open-source vision-language-action models often struggle with semantic generalization, despite pre-training on internet-scale language datasets. We provide videos and other supplementary material at stargen-taxonomy.github.io.
DISCOVER: Identifying Patterns of Daily Living in Human Activities from Smart Home Data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Smart homes equipped with ambient sensors offer a transformative approach to continuous health monitoring and assisted living. Traditional research in this domain primarily focuses on Human Activity Recognition (HAR), which relies on mapping sensor data to a closed set of predefined activity labels. However, the fixed granularity of these labels often constrains their practical utility, failing to capture the subtle, household-specific nuances essential, for example, for tracking individual health over time. To address this, we propose DISCOVER, a framework for discovering and annotating Patterns of Daily Living (PDL) - fine-grained, recurring sequences of sensor events that emerge directly from a resident's unique routines. DISCOVER utilizes a self-supervised feature extraction and representation-aware clustering pipeline, supported by a custom visualization interface that enables experts to interpret and label discovered patterns with minimal effort. Our evaluation across multiple smart-home environments demonstrates that DISCOVER identifies cohesive behavioral clusters with high inter-rater agreement while achieving classification performance comparable to fully-supervised baselines using only 0.01% of the labels. Beyond reducing annotation overhead, DISCOVER establishes a foundation for longitudinal analysis. By grounding behavior in a resident's specific environment rather than rigid semantic categories, our framework facilitates the observation of within-person habitual drift. This capability positions the system as a potential tool for identifying subtle behavioral indicators associated with early-stage cognitive decline in future longitudinal studies.
Jailbreaking Safeguarded Text-to-Image Models via Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Text-to-Image models may generate harmful content, such as pornographic images, particularly when unsafe prompts are submitted. To address this issue, safety filters are often added on top of text-to-image models, or the models themselves are aligned to reduce harmful outputs. However, these defenses remain vulnerable when an attacker strategically designs adversarial prompts to bypass these safety guardrails. In this work, we propose \alg, a method to jailbreak text-to-image models with safety guardrails using a fine-tuned large language model. Unlike other query-based jailbreak attacks that require repeated queries to the target model, our attack generates adversarial prompts efficiently after fine-tuning our AttackLLM. We evaluate our method on three datasets of unsafe prompts and against five safety guardrails. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively bypasses safety guardrails, outperforms existing no-box attacks, and also facilitates other query-based attacks.
Contextual Quantum Neural Networks for Stock Price Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In this paper, we apply quantum machine learning (QML) to predict the stock prices of multiple assets using a contextual quantum neural network. Our approach captures recent trends to predict future stock price distributions, moving beyond traditional models that focus on entire historical data, enhancing adaptability and precision. Utilizing the principles of quantum superposition, we introduce a new training technique called the quantum batch gradient update (QBGU), which accelerates the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in quantum applications and improves convergence. Consequently, we propose a quantum multi-task learning (QMTL) architecture, specifically, the share-and-specify ansatz, that integrates task-specific operators controlled by quantum labels, enabling the simultaneous and efficient training of multiple assets on the same quantum circuit as well as enabling efficient portfolio representation with logarithmic overhead in the number of qubits. This architecture represents the first of its kind in quantum finance, offering superior predictive power and computational efficiency for multi-asset stock price forecasting. Through extensive experimentation on S\&P 500 data for Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon stocks, we demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms quantum single-task learning (QSTL) models but also effectively captures inter-asset correlations, leading to enhanced prediction accuracy. Our findings highlight the transformative potential of QML in financial applications, paving the way for more advanced, resource-efficient quantum algorithms in stock price prediction and other complex financial modeling tasks.
HiGP: A high-performance Python package for Gaussian Process
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are flexible, nonparametric Bayesian models widely used for regression and classification because of their ability to capture complex data patterns and quantify predictive uncertainty. However, the O(n^3) computational cost of kernel matrix operations poses a major obstacle to applying GPs at scale. HiGP is a high-performance Python package designed to overcome these scalability limitations through advanced numerical linear algebra and hierarchical kernel representations. It integrates H^2 matrices to achieve near-linear complexity in both storage and computation for spatial datasets, supports on-the-fly kernel evaluation to avoid explicit storage in large-scale problems, and incorporates a robust Adaptive Factorized Nyström (AFN) preconditioner that accelerates convergence of iterative solvers across a broad range of kernel spectra. These computational kernels are implemented in C++ for maximum performance and exposed through Python interfaces, enabling seamless integration with modern machine learning workflows. HiGP also includes analytically derived gradient computations for efficient hyperparameter optimization, avoiding the inefficiencies of automatic differentiation in iterative solvers. By serving as a reusable numerical engine, HiGP complements existing GP frameworks such as GPJax, KeOps, and GaussianProcesses.jl, providing a reliable and scalable computational backbone for large-scale Gaussian Process regression and classification.
Succinct Ambiguous Contracts
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by Dütting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions often require deploying an impractically large menu of contracts. This paper investigates \emph{succinct} ambiguous contracts, which are restricted to consist of at most $k$ classic contracts. By letting $k$ range from $1$ to $n-1$, this yields an interpolation between classic contracts ($k=1$) and unrestricted ambiguous contracts ($k=n-1$). This perspective enables important structural and algorithmic results. First, we establish a fundamental separability property: for any number of actions $n$ and any succinctness level $k$, computing an optimal $k$-ambiguous contract reduces to finding optimal classic contracts over a suitable partition of the actions, up to an additive balancing shift acting as a base payment. Second, we show bounds on the principal's loss from using a $k$-ambiguous rather than an unrestricted ambiguous contract, which uncover a striking discontinuity in the principal's utility regarding contract size: lacking even a single contract option may cause the principal's utility to drop sharply by a multiplicative factor of $2$, a bound we prove to be tight. Finally, we characterize the tractability frontier of the optimal $k$-ambiguous contract problem. Our separability result yields a poly-time algorithm whenever the number of partitions of $n-1$ actions into $k$ sets is polynomial, recovering and extending known results for classic and unrestricted ambiguous contracts. We complement this with a tight hardness result, showing that the problem is \textsf{NP}-hard whenever the number of partitions is super-polynomial. Moreover, when $k \approx n/3$, the problem is even hard to approximate.
Active operator learning with predictive uncertainty quantification for partial differential equations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

With the increased prevalence of neural operators being used to provide rapid solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs), understanding the accuracy of model predictions and the associated error levels is necessary for deploying reliable surrogate models in scientific applications. Existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) frameworks employ ensembles or Bayesian methods, which can incur substantial computational costs during both training and inference. We propose a lightweight predictive UQ method tailored for Deep operator networks (DeepONets) that also generalizes to other operator networks. Numerical experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that the framework's uncertainty estimates are unbiased and provide accurate out-of-distribution uncertainty predictions with a sufficiently large training dataset. Our framework provides fast inference and uncertainty estimates that can efficiently drive outer-loop analyses that would be prohibitively expensive with conventional solvers. We demonstrate how predictive uncertainties can be used in the context of Bayesian optimization and active learning problems to yield improvements in accuracy and data-efficiency for outer-loop optimization procedures. In the active learning setup, we extend the framework to Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) and describe a generalized method for other operator networks. To enable real-time deployment, we introduce an inference strategy based on precomputed trunk outputs and a sparse placement matrix, reducing evaluation time by more than a factor of five. Our method provides a practical route to uncertainty-aware operator learning in time-sensitive settings.
Large Language Models in Bioinformatics: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing bioinformatics, enabling advanced analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, and single-cell data. This survey provides a systematic review of recent advancements, focusing on genomic sequence modeling, RNA structure prediction, protein function inference, and single-cell transcriptomics. Meanwhile, we also discuss several key challenges, including data scarcity, computational complexity, and cross-omics integration, and explore future directions such as multimodal learning, hybrid AI models, and clinical applications. By offering a comprehensive perspective, this paper underscores the transformative potential of LLMs in driving innovations in bioinformatics and precision medicine.
Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

We demonstrate the surprising real-world effectiveness of a very simple approach to whole-body model-predictive control (MPC) of quadruped and humanoid robots: the iterative LQR (iLQR) algorithm with MuJoCo dynamics and finite-difference approximated derivatives. Building upon the previous success of model-based behavior synthesis and control of locomotion and manipulation tasks with MuJoCo in simulation, we show that these policies can easily generalize to the real world with few sim-to-real considerations. Our baseline method achieves real-time whole-body MPC on a variety of hardware experiments, including dynamic quadruped locomotion, quadruped walking on two legs, and full-sized humanoid bipedal locomotion. We hope this easy-to-reproduce hardware baseline lowers the barrier to entry for real-world whole-body MPC research and contributes to accelerating research velocity in the community. Our code and experiment videos will be available online at:https://johnzhang3.github.io/mujoco_ilqr
A Framework for Responsible AI Systems: Building Societal Trust through Domain Definition, Trustworthy AI Design, Auditability, Accountability, and Governance
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) addresses the ethical and regulatory challenges of deploying AI systems in high-risk scenarios. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for the design of an RAI system (RAIS) that integrates five key dimensions: domain definition, trustworthy AI design, auditability, accountability, and governance. Unlike prior work that treats these components in isolation, our proposal emphasizes their inter-dependencies and iterative feedback loops, enabling proactive and reactive accountability throughout the AI lifecycle. Beyond presenting the framework, we synthesize recent developments in global AI governance and analyze limitations in existing principles-based approaches, highlighting fragmentation, implementation gaps, and the need for participatory governance. The paper also identifies critical challenges and research directions for the RAIS framework, including sector-specific adaptation and operationalization, to support certification, post-deployment monitoring, and risk-based auditing. By bridging technical design and institutional responsibility, this work offers a practical blueprint for embedding responsibility throughout the AI lifecycle, enabling transparent, ethically aligned, and legally compliant AI-based systems.
Capacity-Aware Inference: Mitigating the Straggler Effect in Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is an effective architecture for scaling large language models by leveraging sparse expert activation to balance performance and efficiency. However, under expert parallelism, MoE suffers from inference inefficiencies due to imbalanced token-to-expert assignment, where underloaded experts complete computations early but must wait for overloaded experts, leading to global delays. We define this phenomenon as the \textbf{\textit{Straggler Effect}}, as the most burdened experts dictate the overall inference latency. To address this, we first propose \textit{\textbf{Capacity-Aware Token Drop}}, which enforces expert capacity limits by discarding excess tokens from overloaded experts, effectively reducing load imbalance with minimal performance impact (e.g., $30\%$ speedup with only $0.9\%$ degradation on OLMoE). Next, given the presence of low-load experts remaining well below the capacity threshold, we introduce \textit{\textbf{Capacity-Aware Expanded Drop}}, which allows tokens to include additional local experts in their candidate set before enforcing strict local capacity constraints, thereby improving load balance and enhancing the utilization of underused experts. Extensive experiments on both language and multimodal MoE models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, yielding substantial gains in expert utilization, model performance, and inference efficiency, e.g., applying Expanded Drop to Mixtral-8$\times$7B-Instruct yields a {0.2\%} average performance improvement and a {1.85$\times$} inference speedup. The code is released at: https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/Capacity-Aware-MoE.
PromptPex: Automatic Test Generation for Language Model Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) are being used in many applications and prompts for these models are integrated into software applications as code-like artifacts. These prompts behave much like traditional software in that they take inputs, generate outputs, and perform some specific function. However, prompts differ from traditional code in many ways and require new approaches to ensure that they are robust. For example, unlike traditional software the output of a prompt depends on the AI model that interprets it. Also, while natural language prompts are easy to modify, the impact of updates is harder to predict. New approaches to testing, debugging, and modifying prompts with respect to the model running them are required. To address some of these issues, we developed PromptPex, an LLM-based tool to automatically generate and evaluate unit tests for a given prompt. PromptPex extracts input and output specifications from a prompt and uses them to generate diverse, targeted, and valid unit tests. These tests are instrumental in identifying regressions when a prompt is changed and also serve as a tool to understand how prompts are interpreted by different models. We use PromptPex to generate tests for eight benchmark prompts and evaluate the quality of the generated tests by seeing if they can cause each of four diverse models to produce invalid output. PromptPex consistently creates tests that result in more invalid model outputs than a carefully constructed baseline LLM-based test generator. Furthermore, by extracting concrete specifications from the input prompt, PromptPex allows prompt writers to clearly understand and test specific aspects of their prompts. The source code of PromptPex is available at https://github.com/microsoft/promptpex.
Global graph features unveiled by unsupervised geometric deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Graphs provide a powerful framework for modeling complex systems, but their structural variability poses significant challenges for analysis and classification. To address these challenges, we introduce GAUDI (Graph Autoencoder Uncovering Descriptive Information), a novel unsupervised geometric deep learning framework designed to capture both local details and global structure. GAUDI employs an innovative hourglass architecture with hierarchical pooling and upsampling layers linked through skip connections, which preserve essential connectivity information throughout the encoding-decoding process. Even though identical or highly similar underlying parameters describing a system's state can lead to significant variability in graph realizations, GAUDI consistently maps them into nearby regions of a structured and continuous latent space, effectively disentangling invariant process-level features from stochastic noise. We demonstrate GAUDI's versatility across multiple applications, including small-world networks modeling, characterization of protein assemblies from super-resolution microscopy, analysis of collective motion in the Vicsek model, and identification of age-related changes in brain connectivity. Comparison with related approaches highlights GAUDI's superior performance in analyzing complex graphs, providing new insights into emergent phenomena across diverse scientific domains.
Decoding Safety Feedback from Diverse Raters: A Data-driven Lens on Responsiveness to Severity
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Ensuring the safety of Generative AI requires a nuanced understanding of pluralistic viewpoints. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-driven approach for analyzing ordinal safety ratings in pluralistic settings. Specifically, we address the challenge of interpreting nuanced differences in safety feedback from a diverse population expressed via ordinal scales (e.g., a Likert scale). We define non-parametric responsiveness metrics that quantify how raters convey broader distinctions and granular variations in the severity of safety violations. Leveraging publicly available datasets of pluralistic safety feedback as our case studies, we investigate how raters from different demographic groups use an ordinal scale to express their perceptions of the severity of violations. We apply our metrics across violation types, demonstrating their utility in extracting nuanced insights that are crucial for aligning AI systems reliably in multi-cultural contexts. We show that our approach can inform rater selection and feedback interpretation by capturing nuanced viewpoints across different demographic groups, hence improving the quality of pluralistic data collection and in turn contributing to more robust AI alignment.
Evaluating Prediction-based Interventions with Human Decision Makers In Mind
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Automated decision systems (ADS) are broadly deployed to inform and support human decision-making across a wide range of consequential settings. However, various context-specific details complicate the goal of establishing meaningful experimental evaluations for prediction-based interventions. Notably, current experiment designs rely on simplifying assumptions about human decision making in order to derive causal estimates. In reality, specific experimental design decisions may induce cognitive biases in human decision makers, which could then significantly alter the observed effect sizes of the prediction intervention. In this paper, we formalize and investigate various models of human decision-making in the presence of a predictive model aid. We show that each of these behavioural models produces dependencies across decision subjects and results in the violation of existing assumptions, with consequences for treatment effect estimation. This work aims to further advance the scientific validity of intervention-based evaluation schemes for the assessment of ADS deployments.
FedMentalCare: Towards Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuned LLMs to Analyze Mental Health Status Using Federated Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

With the increasing prevalence of mental health conditions worldwide, AI-powered chatbots and conversational agents have emerged as accessible tools to support mental health. However, deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental healthcare applications raises significant privacy concerns, especially regarding regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. In this work, we propose FedMentalCare, a privacy-preserving framework that leverages Federated Learning (FL) combined with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune LLMs for mental health analysis. We investigate the performance impact of varying client data volumes and model architectures (e.g., MobileBERT and MiniLM) in FL environments. Our framework demonstrates a scalable, privacy-aware approach for deploying LLMs in real-world mental healthcare scenarios, addressing data security and computational efficiency challenges.