OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Taxonomy of the Retrieval System Framework: Pitfalls and Paradigms
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Designing an embedding retrieval system requires navigating a complex design space of conflicting trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness. This work structures these decisions as a vertical traversal of the system design stack. We begin with the Representation Layer by examining how loss functions and architectures, specifically Bi-encoders and Cross-encoders, define semantic relevance and geometric projection. Next, we analyze the Granularity Layer and evaluate how segmentation strategies like Atomic and Hierarchical chunking mitigate information bottlenecks in long-context documents. Moving to the Orchestration Layer, we discuss methods that transcend the single-vector paradigm, including hierarchical retrieval, agentic decomposition, and multi-stage reranking pipelines to resolve capacity limitations. Finally, we address the Robustness Layer by identifying architectural mitigations for domain generalization failures, lexical blind spots, and the silent degradation of retrieval quality due to temporal drift. By categorizing these limitations and design choices, we provide a comprehensive framework for practitioners to optimize the efficiency-effectiveness frontier in modern neural search systems.
Mind the Shift: Using Delta SSL Embeddings to Enhance Child ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have achieved impressive results across many speech tasks, yet child automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited data and pretraining domain mismatch. Fine-tuning SSL models on child speech induces shifts in the representation space. We hypothesize that delta SSL embeddings, defined as the differences between embeddings from a finetuned model and those from its pretrained counterpart, encode task-specific information that complements finetuned features from another SSL model. We evaluate multiple fusion strategies on the MyST childrens corpus using different models. Results show that delta embedding fusion with WavLM yields up to a 10 percent relative WER reduction for HuBERT and a 4.4 percent reduction for W2V2, compared to finetuned embedding fusion. Notably, fusing WavLM with delta W2V2 embeddings achieves a WER of 9.64, setting a new state of the art among SSL models on the MyST corpus. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of delta embeddings and highlight feature fusion as a promising direction for advancing child ASR.
Not All Tokens Matter: Data-Centric Optimization for Efficient Code Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Instruction-tuned Language Models ILMs have become essential components of modern AI systems, demonstrating exceptional versatility across a wide range of natural language and reasoning tasks. Among their most impactful applications is code generation, where ILMs--commonly referred to as Code Language Models CLMs--have demonstrated remarkable capability. This strength stems from their defining feature: the use of explicit task instructions during fine-tuning, which enables them to bridge natural language and code by translating human intent into executable code. While much of their progress has been driven by advances in scaling laws and training methodologies, one critical aspect remains underexplored--the impact of system prompts on the performance of both general-purpose ILMs and specialized CLMs when instantiated to assist users with code generation activities. In this study, we take a first step toward bridging this gap by systematically evaluating how system prompts of varying instructional detail, along with model scale, prompting strategy, and programming language, affect ILMs and CLMs in code generation tasks. Our evaluation framework, spanning 120 model configurations, reveals that (1) the influence of system prompts increases with model scale; (2) few-shot prompting reduces this effect compared to zero-shot; and (3) programming language matters, with Java showing greater sensitivity to system prompt variations than Python.
A Taylor Series Approach to Correct Localization Errors in Robotic Field Mapping using Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are powerful non-parametric Bayesian models for regression of scalar fields, formulated under the assumption that measurement locations are perfectly known and the corresponding field measurements have Gaussian noise. However, many real-world scalar field mapping applications rely on sensor-equipped mobile robots to collect field measurements, where imperfect localization introduces state uncertainty. Such discrepancies between the estimated and true measurement locations degrade GP mean and covariance estimates. To address this challenge, we propose a method for updating the GP models when improved estimates become available. Leveraging the differentiability of the kernel function, a second-order correction algorithm is developed using the precomputed Jacobians and Hessians of the GP mean and covariance functions for real-time refinement based on measurement location discrepancy data. Simulation results demonstrate improved prediction accuracy and computational efficiency compared to full model retraining.
Reference-Free Spectral Analysis of EM Side-Channels for Always-on Hardware Trojan Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Always-on hardware Trojans (HTs) pose a critical risk to trusted microelectronics, yet most side-channel detection methods rely on unavailable golden references. We present a reference-free approach that combines time-frequency EM analysis with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). By applying Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) at multiple window sizes, we show that HT-free circuits exhibit fluctuating statistical structure, while always-on HTs leave persistent footprints with fewer, more consistent mixture components. Results on AES-128 demonstrate feasibility without requiring reference models.
Efficient Token Pruning for LLaDA-V
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Diffusion-based large multimodal models, such as LLaDA-V, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding and generation. However, their bidirectional attention mechanism and diffusion-style iterative denoising paradigm introduce significant computational overhead, as visual tokens are repeatedly processed across all layers and denoising steps. In this work, we conduct an in-depth attention analysis and reveal that, unlike autoregressive decoders, LLaDA-V aggregates cross-modal information predominantly in middle-to-late layers, leading to delayed semantic alignment. Motivated by this observation, we propose a structured token pruning strategy inspired by FastV, selectively removing a proportion of visual tokens at designated layers to reduce FLOPs while preserving critical semantic information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate structured token pruning in diffusion-based large multimodal models. Unlike FastV, which focuses on shallow-layer pruning, our method targets the middle-to-late layers of the first denoising step to align with LLaDA-V's delayed attention aggregation to maintain output quality, and the first-step pruning strategy reduces the computation across all subsequent steps. Our framework provides an empirical basis for efficient LLaDA-V inference and highlights the potential of vision-aware pruning in diffusion-based multimodal models. Across multiple benchmarks, our best configuration reduces computational cost by up to 65% while preserving an average of 95% task performance.
Causal-Driven Feature Evaluation for Cross-Domain Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains a fundamental challenge in real-world classification, where test distributions often differ substantially from training data. Most existing approaches pursue domain-invariant representations, implicitly assuming that invariance implies reliability. However, features that are invariant across domains are not necessarily causally effective for prediction. In this work, we revisit OOD classification from a causal perspective and propose to evaluate learned representations based on their necessity and sufficiency under distribution shift. We introduce an explicit segment-level framework that directly measures causal effectiveness across domains, providing a more faithful criterion than invariance alone. Experiments on multi-domain benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in OOD performance, particularly under challenging domain shifts, highlighting the value of causal evaluation for robust generalization.
Securing AI Agents in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Survey of Environmental Interactions, Deepfake Threats, and Defenses
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

The increasing integration of AI agents into cyber-physical systems (CPS) introduces new security risks that extend beyond traditional cyber or physical threat models. Recent advances in generative AI enable deepfake and semantic manipulation attacks that can compromise agent perception, reasoning, and interaction with the physical environment, while emerging protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) further expand the attack surface through dynamic tool use and cross-domain context sharing. This survey provides a comprehensive review of security threats targeting AI agents in CPS, with a particular focus on environmental interactions, deepfake-driven attacks, and MCP-mediated vulnerabilities. We organize the literature using the SENTINEL framework, a lifecycle-aware methodology that integrates threat characterization, feasibility analysis under CPS constraints, defense selection, and continuous validation. Through an end-to-end case study grounded in a real-world smart grid deployment, we quantitatively illustrate how timing, noise, and false-positive costs constrain deployable defenses, and why detection mechanisms alone are insufficient as decision authorities in safety-critical CPS. The survey highlights the role of provenance- and physics-grounded trust mechanisms and defense-in-depth architectures, and outlines open challenges toward trustworthy AI-enabled CPS.
TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Due to near-infinite degrees of freedom, complex dynamics, and heterogeneous patterns, existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-thought with dEformable-object Refinement framework, which establishes a cross-hierarchical mapping from hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent functional region refinement. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) is formulated to decompose high-level task intentions into hierarchical sub-task semantics, providing consistent guidance across various execution stages. To ensure spatial integrity, a Spatial-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism is introduced to suppress prediction spillover, guiding the perceptual response to converge toward authentic interaction manifolds. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergence Refinement Flow (ICRF) is developed to aggregate discrete pixels corrupted by appearance noise, significantly enhancing the spatial continuity and physical plausibility of the identified functional regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER significantly improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns inherent to deformable objects. More importantly, it enhances the success rate of long-horizon tasks, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.
Scaling Medical Reasoning Verification via Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models have achieved strong performance on medical reasoning benchmarks, yet their deployment in clinical settings demands rigorous verification to ensure factual accuracy. While reward models offer a scalable approach for reasoning trace verification, existing methods face two limitations: they produce only scalar reward values without explicit justification, and they rely on single-pass retrieval that precludes adaptive knowledge access as verification unfolds. We introduce $\method$, an agentic framework that addresses these limitations by training medical reasoning verifiers to iteratively query external medical corpora during evaluation. Our approach combines tool-augmented verification with an iterative reinforcement learning paradigm that requires only trace-level supervision, alongside an adaptive curriculum mechanism that dynamically adjusts training data distribution. Across four medical reasoning benchmarks, $\method$ achieves substantial gains over existing methods, improving MedQA accuracy by 23.5% and MedXpertQA by 32.0% relative to the base generator in particular. Crucially, $\method$ demonstrates an $\mathbf{8\times}$ reduction in sampling budget requirement compared to prior reward model baselines. These findings establish that grounding verification in dynamically retrieved evidence offers a principled path toward more reliable medical reasoning systems.
Certificate-Guided Pruning for Stochastic Lipschitz Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We study black-box optimization of Lipschitz functions under noisy evaluations. Existing adaptive discretization methods implicitly avoid suboptimal regions but do not provide explicit certificates of optimality or measurable progress guarantees. We introduce \textbf{Certificate-Guided Pruning (CGP)}, which maintains an explicit \emph{active set} $A_t$ of potentially optimal points via confidence-adjusted Lipschitz envelopes. Any point outside $A_t$ is certifiably suboptimal with high probability, and under a margin condition with near-optimality dimension $α$, we prove $\Vol(A_t)$ shrinks at a controlled rate yielding sample complexity $\tildeO(\varepsilon^{-(2+α)})$. We develop three extensions: CGP-Adaptive learns $L$ online with $O(\log T)$ overhead; CGP-TR scales to $d > 50$ via trust regions with local certificates; and CGP-Hybrid switches to GP refinement when local smoothness is detected. Experiments on 12 benchmarks ($d \in [2, 100]$) show CGP variants match or exceed strong baselines while providing principled stopping criteria via certificate volume.
MALLOC: Benchmarking the Memory-aware Long Sequence Compression for Large Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

The scaling law, which indicates that model performance improves with increasing dataset and model capacity, has fueled a growing trend in expanding recommendation models in both industry and academia. However, the advent of large-scale recommenders also brings significantly higher computational costs, particularly under the long-sequence dependencies inherent in the user intent of recommendation systems. Current approaches often rely on pre-storing the intermediate states of the past behavior for each user, thereby reducing the quadratic re-computation cost for the following requests. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often treat memory merely as a medium for acceleration, without adequately considering the space overhead it introduces. This presents a critical challenge in real-world recommendation systems with billions of users, each of whom might initiate thousands of interactions and require massive memory for state storage. Fortunately, there have been several memory management strategies examined for compression in LLM, while most have not been evaluated on the recommendation task. To mitigate this gap, we introduce MALLOC, a comprehensive benchmark for memory-aware long sequence compression. MALLOC presents a comprehensive investigation and systematic classification of memory management techniques applicable to large sequential recommendations. These techniques are integrated into state-of-the-art recommenders, enabling a reproducible and accessible evaluation platform. Through extensive experiments across accuracy, efficiency, and complexity, we demonstrate the holistic reliability of MALLOC in advancing large-scale recommendation. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MALLOC.
BLENDER: Blended Text Embeddings and Diffusion Residuals for Intra-Class Image Synthesis in Deep Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

The rise of Deep Generative Models (DGM) has enabled the generation of high-quality synthetic data. When used to augment authentic data in Deep Metric Learning (DML), these synthetic samples enhance intra-class diversity and improve the performance of downstream DML tasks. We introduce BLenDeR, a diffusion sampling method designed to increase intra-class diversity for DML in a controllable way by leveraging set-theory inspired union and intersection operations on denoising residuals. The union operation encourages any attribute present across multiple prompts, while the intersection extracts the common direction through a principal component surrogate. These operations enable controlled synthesis of diverse attribute combinations within each class, addressing key limitations of existing generative approaches. Experiments on standard DML benchmarks demonstrate that BLenDeR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple datasets and backbones. Specifically, BLenDeR achieves 3.7% increase in Recall@1 on CUB-200 and a 1.8% increase on Cars-196, compared to state-of-the-art baselines under standard experimental settings.
Automated Benchmark Generation from Domain Guidelines Informed by Bloom's Taxonomy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Open-ended question answering (QA) evaluates a model's ability to perform contextualized reasoning beyond factual recall. This challenge is especially acute in practice-based domains, where knowledge is procedural and grounded in professional judgment, while most existing LLM benchmarks depend on pre-existing human exam datasets that are often unavailable in such settings. We introduce a framework for automated benchmark generation from expert-authored guidelines informed by Bloom's Taxonomy. It converts expert practices into implicit violation-based scenarios and expands them into auto-graded multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and multi-turn dialogues across four cognitive levels, enabling deterministic, reproducible, and scalable evaluation. Applied to three applied domains: teaching, dietetics, and caregiving, we find differences between model and human-like reasoning: LLMs sometimes perform relatively better on higher-order reasoning (Analyze) but fail more frequently on lower-level items (Remember). We produce large-scale, psychometrically informed benchmarks that surface these non-intuitive model behaviors and enable evaluation of contextualized reasoning in real-world settings.
C2:Cross learning module enhanced decision transformer with Constraint-aware loss for auto-bidding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Decision Transformer (DT) shows promise for generative auto-bidding by capturing temporal dependencies, but suffers from two critical limitations: insufficient cross-correlation modeling among state, action, and return-to-go (RTG) sequences, and indiscriminate learning of optimal/suboptimal behaviors. To address these, we propose C2, a novel framework enhancing DT with two core innovations: (1) a Cross Learning Block (CLB) via cross-attention to strengthen inter-sequence correlation modeling; (2) a Constraint-aware Loss (CL) incorporating budget and Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) constraints for selective learning of optimal trajectories. Extensive offline evaluations on the AuctionNet dataset demonstrate consistent performance gains (up to 3.2% over state-of-the-art method) across diverse budget settings; ablation studies verify the complementary synergy of CLB and CL, confirming C2's superiority in auto-bidding. The code for reproducing our results is available at: https://github.com/Dingjinren/C2.
StreamFusion: Scalable Sequence Parallelism for Distributed Inference of Diffusion Transformers on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have gained increasing adoption in high-quality image and video generation. As demand for higher-resolution images and longer videos increases, single-GPU inference becomes inefficient due to increased latency and large activation sizes. Current frameworks employ sequence parallelism (SP) techniques such as Ulysses Attention and Ring Attention to scale inference. However, these implementations have three primary limitations: (1) suboptimal communication patterns for network topologies on modern GPU machines, (2) latency bottlenecks from all-to-all operations in inter-machine communication, and (3) GPU sender-receiver synchronization and computation overheads from using two-sided communication libraries. To address these issues, we present StreamFusion, a topology-aware efficient DiT serving engine. StreamFusion incorporates three key innovations: (1) a topology-aware sequence parallelism technique that accounts for inter- and intra-machine bandwidth differences, (2) Torus Attention, a novel SP technique enabling overlapping of inter-machine all-to-all operations with computation, and (3) a one-sided communication implementation that minimizes GPU sender-receiver synchronization and computation overheads. Our experiments demonstrate that StreamFusion outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by an average of $1.35\times$ (up to $1.77\times$).
Beyond the Needle's Illusion: Decoupled Evaluation of Evidence Access and Use under Semantic Interference at 326M-Token Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Long-context LLM agents must access the right evidence from large environments and use it faithfully. However, the popular Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) evaluation mostly measures benign span localization. The needle is near-unique, and the haystack is largely irrelevant. We introduce EverMemBench-S (EMB-S), an adversarial NIAH-style benchmark built on a 326M-token MemoryBank. While the full MemoryBank spans 326M tokens for retrieval-based (RAG) evaluation, we evaluate native long-context models only at scales that fit within each model's context window (up to 1M tokens in this work) to ensure a fair comparison. EMB-S pairs queries with collision-tested near-miss hard negatives and gold evidence sets spanning one or more documents, validated via human screening and LLM verification. We also propose a decoupled diagnostic protocol that reports evidence access (document-ID localization) separately from end-to-end QA quality under full-context prompting. This enables consistent diagnosis for both native long-context prompting and retrieval pipelines. Across a reference-corpus ladder from domain-isolated 64K contexts to a globally shared 326M-token environment, we observe a clear reality gap. Systems that saturate benign NIAH degrade sharply in evidence access under semantic interference. These results indicate that semantic discrimination, not context length alone, is the dominant bottleneck for long-context memory at scale.