OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VarSplat: Uncertainty-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust RGB-D SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables fast, differentiable rendering and high-fidelity reconstruction across diverse real-world scenes. However, existing 3DGS-SLAM approaches handle measurement reliability implicitly, making pose estimation and global alignment susceptible to drift in low-texture regions, transparent surfaces, or areas with complex reflectance properties. To this end, we introduce VarSplat, an uncertainty-aware 3DGS-SLAM system that explicitly learns per-splat appearance variance. By using the law of total variance with alpha compositing, we then render differentiable per-pixel uncertainty map via efficient, single-pass rasterization. This map guides tracking, submap registration, and loop detection toward focusing on reliable regions and contributes to more stable optimization. Experimental results on Replica (synthetic) and TUM-RGBD, ScanNet, and ScanNet++ (real-world) show that VarSplat improves robustness and achieves competitive or superior tracking, mapping, and novel view synthesis rendering compared to existing studies for dense RGB-D SLAM.
On Catastrophic Forgetting in Low-Rank Decomposition-Based Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) based on low-rank decomposition, such as LoRA, has become a standard for adapting large pretrained models. However, its behavior in sequential learning -- specifically regarding catastrophic forgetting -- remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present an empirical study showing that forgetting is strongly influenced by the geometry and parameterization of the update subspace. While methods that restrict updates to small, shared matrix subspaces often suffer from task interference, tensor-based decompositions (e.g., LoRETTA) mitigate forgetting by capturing richer structural information within ultra-compact budgets, and structurally aligned parameterizations (e.g., WeGeFT) preserve pretrained representations. Our findings highlight update subspace design as a key factor in continual learning and offer practical guidance for selecting efficient adaptation strategies in sequential settings.
AutoViVQA: A Large-Scale Automatically Constructed Dataset for Vietnamese Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a fundamental multimodal task that requires models to jointly understand visual and textual information. Early VQA systems relied heavily on language biases, motivating subsequent work to emphasize visual grounding and balanced datasets. With the success of large-scale pre-trained transformers for both text and vision domains -- such as PhoBERT for Vietnamese language understanding and Vision Transformers (ViT) for image representation learning -- multimodal fusion has achieved remarkable progress. For Vietnamese VQA, several datasets have been introduced to promote research in low-resource multimodal learning, including ViVQA, OpenViVQA, and the recently proposed ViTextVQA. These resources enable benchmarking of models that integrate linguistic and visual features in the Vietnamese context. Evaluation of VQA systems often employs automatic metrics originally designed for image captioning or machine translation, such as BLEU, METEOR, CIDEr, Recall, Precision, and F1-score. However, recent research suggests that large language models can further improve the alignment between automatic evaluation and human judgment in VQA tasks. In this work, we explore Vietnamese Visual Question Answering using transformer-based architectures, leveraging both textual and visual pre-training while systematically comparing automatic evaluation metrics under multilingual settings.
ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

With the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), numerous pioneering efforts have been made to address the effective compression issue of massive 3DGS data. 3DGS offers an efficient and scalable representation of 3D scenes by utilizing learnable 3D Gaussians, but the large size of the generated data has posed significant challenges for storage and transmission. Existing methods, however, have been limited by their inability to support progressive coding, a crucial feature in streaming applications with varying bandwidth. To tackle this limitation, this paper introduce a novel approach that organizes 3DGS data into an octree structure, enabling efficient progressive coding. The proposed ProGS is a streaming-friendly codec that facilitates progressive coding for 3D Gaussian splatting, and significantly improves both compression efficiency and visual fidelity. The proposed method incorporates mutual information enhancement mechanisms to mitigate structural redundancy, leveraging the relevance between nodes in the octree hierarchy. By adapting the octree structure and dynamically adjusting the anchor nodes, ProGS ensures scalable data compression without compromising the rendering quality. ProGS achieves a remarkable 45X reduction in file storage compared to the original 3DGS format, while simultaneously improving visual performance by over 10%. This demonstrates that ProGS can provide a robust solution for real-time applications with varying network conditions.
Simultaneous Embedding of Two Paths on the Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2026
Year: 2026

We study the problem of simultaneous geometric embedding of two paths without self-intersections on an integer grid. We show that minimizing the length of the longest edge of such an embedding is NP-hard. We also show that we can minimize in $O(n^{3/2})$ time the perimeter of an integer grid containing such an embedding if one path is $x$-monotone and the other is $y$-monotone.
Beyond Fine-Tuning: Robust Food Entity Linking under Ontology Drift with FoodOntoRAG
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Standardizing food terms from product labels and menus into ontology concepts is a prerequisite for trustworthy dietary assessment and safety reporting. The dominant approach to Named Entity Linking (NEL) in the food and nutrition domains fine-tunes Large Language Models (LLMs) on task-specific corpora. Although effective, fine-tuning incurs substantial computational cost, ties models to a particular ontology snapshot (i.e., version), and degrades under ontology drift. This paper presents FoodOntoRAG, a model- and ontology-agnostic pipeline that performs few-shot NEL by retrieving candidate entities from domain ontologies and conditioning an LLM on structured evidence (food labels, synonyms, definitions, and relations). A hybrid lexical--semantic retriever enumerates candidates; a selector agent chooses a best match with rationale; a separate scorer agent calibrates confidence; and, when confidence falls below a threshold, a synonym generator agent proposes reformulations to re-enter the loop. The pipeline approaches state-of-the-art accuracy while revealing gaps and inconsistencies in existing annotations. The design avoids fine-tuning, improves robustness to ontology evolution, and yields interpretable decisions through grounded justifications.
World2Mind: Cognition Toolkit for Allocentric Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Achieving robust spatial reasoning remains a fundamental challenge for current Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs). Existing methods either overfit statistical shortcuts via 3D grounding data or remain confined to 2D visual perception, limiting both spatial reasoning accuracy and generalization in unseen scenarios. Inspired by the spatial cognitive mapping mechanisms of biological intelligence, we propose World2Mind, a training-free spatial intelligence toolkit. At its core, World2Mind leverages 3D reconstruction and instance segmentation models to construct structured spatial cognitive maps, empowering MFMs to proactively acquire targeted spatial knowledge regarding interested landmarks and routes of interest. To provide robust geometric-topological priors, World2Mind synthesizes an Allocentric-Spatial Tree (AST) that uses elliptical parameters to model the top-down layout of landmarks accurately. To mitigate the inherent inaccuracies of 3D reconstruction, we introduce a three-stage reasoning chain comprising tool invocation assessment, modality-decoupled cue collection, and geometry-semantics interwoven reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that World2Mind boosts the performance of frontier models, such as GPT-5.2, by 5%~18%. Astonishingly, relying solely on the AST-structured text, purely text-only foundation models can perform complex 3D spatial reasoning, achieving performance approaching that of advanced multimodal models.
TIMID: Time-Dependent Mistake Detection in Videos of Robot Executions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

As robotic systems execute increasingly difficult task sequences, so does the number of ways in which they can fail. Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) frameworks typically focus on singular, low-level kinematic or action failures, struggling to identify more complex temporal or spatial task violations, because they do not necessarily manifest as low-level execution errors. To address this problem, the main contribution of this paper is a new VAD-inspired architecture, TIMID, which is able to detect robot time-dependent mistakes when executing high-level tasks. Our architecture receives as inputs a video and prompts of the task and the potential mistake, and returns a frame-level prediction in the video of whether the mistake is present or not. By adopting a VAD formulation, the model can be trained with weak supervision, requiring only a single label per video. Additionally, to alleviate the problem of data scarcity of incorrect executions, we introduce a multi-robot simulation dataset with controlled temporal errors and real executions for zero-shot sim-to-real evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that out-of-the-box VLMs lack the explicit temporal reasoning required for this task, whereas our framework successfully detects different types of temporal errors. Project: https://ropertunizar.github.io/TIMID/
Test-time Ego-Exo-centric Adaptation for Action Anticipation via Multi-Label Prototype Growing and Dual-Clue Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Efficient adaptation between Egocentric (Ego) and Exocentric (Exo) views is crucial for applications such as human-robot cooperation. However, the success of most existing Ego-Exo adaptation methods relies heavily on target-view data for training, thereby increasing computational and data collection costs. In this paper, we make the first exploration of a Test-time Ego-Exo Adaptation for Action Anticipation (TE$^{2}$A$^{3}$) task, which aims to adjust the source-view-trained model online during test time to anticipate target-view actions. It is challenging for existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods to address this task due to the multi-action candidates and significant temporal-spatial inter-view gap. Hence, we propose a novel Dual-Clue enhanced Prototype Growing Network (DCPGN), which accumulates multi-label knowledge and integrates cross-modality clues for effective test-time Ego-Exo adaptation and action anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Label Prototype Growing Module (ML-PGM) to balance multiple positive classes via multi-label assignment and confidence-based reweighting for class-wise memory banks, which are updated by an entropy priority queue strategy. Then, the Dual-Clue Consistency Module (DCCM) introduces a lightweight narrator to generate textual clues indicating action progressions, which complement the visual clues containing various objects. Moreover, we constrain the inferred textual and visual logits to construct dual-clue consistency for temporally and spatially bridging Ego and Exo views. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed EgoMe-anti and the existing EgoExoLearn benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms related state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/DCPGN}{https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/DCPGN}.
RA-SSU: Towards Fine-Grained Audio-Visual Learning with Region-Aware Sound Source Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Audio-Visual Learning (AVL) is one fundamental task of multi-modality learning and embodied intelligence, displaying the vital role in scene understanding and interaction. However, previous researchers mostly focus on exploring downstream tasks from a coarse-grained perspective (e.g., audio-visual correspondence, sound source localization, and audio-visual event localization). Considering providing more specific scene perception details, we newly define a fine-grained Audio-Visual Learning task, termed Region-Aware Sound Source Understanding (RA-SSU), which aims to achieve region-aware, frame-level, and high-quality sound source understanding. To support this goal, we innovatively construct two corresponding datasets, i.e. fine-grained Music (f-Music) and fine-grained Lifescene (f-Lifescene), each containing annotated sound source masks and frame-by-frame textual descriptions. The f-Music dataset includes 3,976 samples across 22 scene types related to specific application scenarios, focusing on music scenes with complex instrument mixing. The f-Lifescene dataset contains 6,156 samples across 61 types representing diverse sounding objects in life scenarios. Moreover, we propose SSUFormer, a Sound-Source Understanding TransFormer benchmark that facilitates both the sound source segmentation and sound region description with a multi-modal input and multi-modal output architecture. Specifically, we design two modules for this framework, Mask Collaboration Module (MCM) and Mixture of Hierarchical-prompted Experts (MoHE), to respectively enhance the accuracy and enrich the elaboration of the sound source description. Extensive experiments are conducted on our two datasets to verify the feasibility of the task, evaluate the availability of the datasets, and demonstrate the superiority of the SSUFormer, which achieves SOTA performance on the Sound Source Understanding benchmark.
BrainSTR: Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Learning for Interpretable Dynamic Brain Network Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Dynamic functional connectivity captures time-varying brain states for better neuropsychiatric diagnosis and spatio-temporal interpretability, i.e., identifying when discriminative disease signatures emerge and where they reside in the connectivity topology. Reliable interpretability faces major challenges: diagnostic signals are often subtle and sparsely distributed across both time and topology, while nuisance fluctuations and non-diagnostic connectivities are pervasive. To address these issues, we propose BrainSTR, a spatio-temporal contrastive learning framework for interpretable dynamic brain network modeling. BrainSTR learns state-consistent phase boundaries via a data-driven Adaptive Phase Partition module, identifies diagnostically critical phases with attention, and extracts disease-related connectivity within each phase using an Incremental Graph Structure Generator regularized by binarization, temporal smoothness, and sparsity. Then, we introduce a spatio-temporal supervised contrastive learning approach that leverages diagnosis-relevant spatio-temporal patterns to refine the similarity metric between samples and capture more discriminative spatio-temporal features, thereby constructing a well-structured semantic space for coherent and interpretable representations. Experiments on ASD, BD, and MDD validate the effectiveness of BrainSTR, and the discovered critical phases and subnetworks provide interpretable evidence consistent with prior neuroimaging findings. Our code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BrainSTR1.
Gap-ETH-Tight Algorithms for Hyperbolic TSP and Steiner Tree
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2026
Year: 2026

We give an approximation scheme for the TSP in $d$-dimensional hyperbolic space that has optimal dependence on $\varepsilon$ under Gap-ETH. For any fixed dimension $d\geq 2$ and for any $\varepsilon>0$ our randomized algorithm gives a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in time $2^{O(1/\varepsilon^{d-1})}n^{1+o(1)}$. We also provide an algorithm for the hyperbolic Steiner tree problem with the same running time. Our algorithm is an Arora-style dynamic program based on a randomly shifted hierarchical decomposition. However, we introduce a new hierarchical decomposition called the hybrid hyperbolic quadtree to achieve the desired large-scale structure, which deviates significantly from the recently proposed hyperbolic quadtree of Kisfaludi-Bak and Van Wordragen (JoCG'25). Moreover, we have a new non-uniform portal placement, and our structure theorem employs a new weighted crossing analysis. We believe that these techniques could form the basis for further developments in geometric optimization in curved spaces.
CarbonBench: A Global Benchmark for Upscaling of Carbon Fluxes Using Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Accurately quantifying terrestrial carbon exchange is essential for climate policy and carbon accounting, yet models must generalize to ecosystems underrepresented in sparse eddy covariance observations. Despite this challenge being a natural instance of zero-shot spatial transfer learning for time series regression, no standardized benchmark exists to rigorously evaluate model performance across geographically distinct locations with different climate regimes and vegetation types. We introduce CarbonBench, the first benchmark for zero-shot spatial transfer in carbon flux upscaling. CarbonBench comprises over 1.3 million daily observations from 567 flux tower sites globally (2000-2024). It provides: (1) stratified evaluation protocols that explicitly test generalization across unseen vegetation types and climate regimes, separating spatial transfer from temporal autocorrelation; (2) a harmonized set of remote sensing and meteorological features to enable flexible architecture design; and (3) baselines ranging from tree-based methods to domain-generalization architectures. By bridging machine learning methodologies and Earth system science, CarbonBench aims to enable systematic comparison of transfer learning methods, serves as a testbed for regression under distribution shift, and contributes to the next-generation climate modeling efforts.
Overview of the TREC 2025 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Track
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

The second edition of the TREC Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Track advances research on systems that integrate retrieval and generation to address complex, real-world information needs. Building on the foundation of the inaugural 2024 track, this year's challenge introduces long, multi-sentence narrative queries to better reflect the deep search task with the growing demand for reasoning-driven responses. Participants are tasked with designing pipelines that combine retrieval and generation while ensuring transparency and factual grounding. The track leverages the MS MARCO V2.1 corpus and employs a multi-layered evaluation framework encompassing relevance assessment, response completeness, attribution verification, and agreement analysis. By emphasizing multi-faceted narratives and attribution-rich answers from over 150 submissions this year, the TREC 2025 RAG Track aims to foster innovation in creating trustworthy, context-aware systems for retrieval augmented generation.
MSSR: Memory-Aware Adaptive Replay for Continual LLM Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Continual fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly crucial as these models are deployed in dynamic environments where tasks and data distributions evolve over time. While strong adaptability enables rapid acquisition of new knowledge, it also exposes LLMs to catastrophic forgetting, where previously learned skills degrade during sequential training. Existing replay-based strategies, such as fixed interleaved replay, accuracy-supervised, and loss-driven scheduling, remain limited: some depend on heuristic rules and provide only partial mitigation of forgetting, while others improve performance but incur substantial computational overhead. Motivated by retention dynamics under sequential fine-tuning, we propose Memory-Inspired Sampler and Scheduler Replay (MSSR), an experience replay framework that estimates sample-level memory strength and schedules rehearsal at adaptive intervals to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while maintaining fast adaptation. Extensive experiments across three backbone models and 11 sequential tasks show that MSSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art replay baselines, with particularly strong gains on reasoning-intensive and multiple-choice benchmarks.
The 802.11 MAC protocol leads to inefficient equilibria
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on the family of 802.11 technologies are becoming ubiquitous. These technologies support multiple data transmission rates. Transmitting at a lower data rate (by using a more resilient modulation scheme) increases the frame transmission time but reduces the bit error rate. In non-cooperative environments such as public hot-spots or WLANs operated by different enterprises that are physically close to each other, individual nodes attempt to maximize their achieved throughput by adjusting the data rate or frame size used, irrespective of the impact of this on overall system performance. In this paper, we show both analytically using a game theoretic model and through simulation that the existing 802.11 distributed MAC protocol, DCF (for Distributed Coordination Function), as well as its enhanced version, which is being standardized as part of 802.11e, can lead non-cooperative nodes to undesirable Nash equilibriums in which the wireless channel is inefficiently used. We show that by establishing independence between the allocation of the shared channel resource and the transmission strategies used by individual nodes, an ideal MAC protocol can lead rational nodes to arrive at equilibriums in which all competing nodes achieve higher throughputs than with DCF.
Thinking to Recall: How Reasoning Unlocks Parametric Knowledge in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

While reasoning in LLMs plays a natural role in math, code generation, and multi-hop factual questions, its effect on simple, single-hop factual questions remains unclear. Such questions do not require step-by-step logical decomposition, making the utility of reasoning highly counterintuitive. Nevertheless, we find that enabling reasoning substantially expands the capability boundary of the model's parametric knowledge recall, unlocking correct answers that are otherwise effectively unreachable. Why does reasoning aid parametric knowledge recall when there are no complex reasoning steps to be done? To answer this, we design a series of hypothesis-driven controlled experiments, and identify two key driving mechanisms: (1) a computational buffer effect, where the model uses the generated reasoning tokens to perform latent computation independent of their semantic content; and (2) factual priming, where generating topically related facts acts as a semantic bridge that facilitates correct answer retrieval. Importantly, this latter generative self-retrieval mechanism carries inherent risks: we demonstrate that hallucinating intermediate facts during reasoning increases the likelihood of hallucinations in the final answer. Finally, we show that our insights can be harnessed to directly improve model accuracy by prioritizing reasoning trajectories that contain hallucination-free factual statements.