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746,372 papers in this slice of arXiv.

All fieldsArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputation and LanguageComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionNeural and Evolutionary ComputingRoboticsInformation RetrievalHuman-Computer InteractionCryptography and SecurityData Structures and AlgorithmsSoftware EngineeringDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingProgramming LanguagesSystems and Control
2608.13472
2 days ago

AaLLM: An End-to-End Analog Circuit Design Framework from Topology Generation to Sizing Using Large Language Models

Mohammed Ayman Habib, Rylan Hart, Morteza Fayazi

Analog circuit design is a time-consuming, iterative process in a nonlinear and high-dimensional design space that relies heavily on expert intuition. Among recent developments, LLMs have introduced a promising approach by bringing natural language reasoning to circuit design tasks. The majority of conventional LLM-based approaches provide fragmented solutions that focus either only on sizing or topology generation. These methods require adding specific technical knowledge manually, which is inefficient and prone to hallucinations during circuit sizing. Moreover, the inherent trade-off in meeting different specs makes current approaches iterative and tedious. Another shortcoming is the inability to create innovative topologies, which may lead to sub-optimal designs due to reliance on conventional topologies. In this paper, we present AaLLM, an open-source end-to-end multi-agent LLM workflow that takes user specs as input and outputs the appropriate netlist, encompassing both topology generation and circuit sizing. AaLLM automates the creation of a relevant knowledge base from research papers and textbooks to combat tedious manual data collection. A RAG model is implemented to emulate circuit design expertise using this knowledge base. Moreover, AaLLM uses a novel tri-agent feedback system comprising a Designer that determines circuit component values, a Critic that scrutinizes these values, and an Evaluator that minimizes circuit sizing iterations by arbitrating between the other two agents. AaLLM-generated novel topologies achieve a figure of merit (FoM) comparable to that of known topologies, and up to 3x higher for certain circuits. Testing on several circuit topologies, our results show a 3x - 4.5x decrease in the number of SPICE calls at inference when compared to SOTA multi-agent LLM pipelines. The results also show a 40x decrease in wall-clock time compared to existing approaches.

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Systems and ControlArtificial Intelligence
2608.13467
2 days ago

Active-Trace Complexity Bounds for Moreau--Yosida Unadjusted Langevin Sampling

Yuchen Xin, Zhihua Zhang

We study the Moreau--Yosida unadjusted Langevin algorithm (MYULA) for the nonsmooth composite target π(dx)∝exp⁡{−f(x)−g(x)} dx,x∈Rd,π(dx)\propto \exp\{-f(x)-g(x)\}\,dx, \qquad x\in\mathbb R^d,π(dx)∝exp{−f(x)−g(x)}dx,x∈Rd, where fff is mmm-strongly convex with LfL_fLf​-Lipschitz gradient and ggg is convex and GGG-Lipschitz. Let gλg_λgλ​ be the Moreau envelope of ggg, πλπ_λπλ​ the corresponding smoothed target, and aλ=tr⁡Hλa_λ=\operatorname{tr}H_λaλ​=trHλ​, where HλH_λHλ​ is the a.e./weak Hessian of gλg_λgλ​. We show that the leading MYULA discretization error is controlled by the reference active trace BrefB_{\mathrm{ref}}Bref​, the average of aλa_λaλ​ along the heat substep of one MYULA update started from πλπ_λπλ​, rather than by the global curvature bound d/λd/λd/λ. If MλM_λMλ​ is an a.e. upper bound for aλa_λaλ​, then, up to logarithmic factors, N≲1m[Lf+τf+G2+Brefεalg2+Mλεalg],τf:=sup⁡xtr⁡∇2f(x),N \lesssim \frac{1}{m} \left[ L_f + \frac{ τ_f+G^2+B_{\mathrm{ref}} }{ \varepsilon_{\mathrm{alg}}^2 } + \frac{M_λ}{\varepsilon_{\mathrm{alg}}} \right], \qquad τ_f:= \sup_x\operatorname{tr}\nabla^2 f(x),N≲m1​[Lf​+εalg2​τf​+G2+Bref​​+εalg​Mλ​​],τf​:=xsup​tr∇2f(x), iterations suffice to ensure m W2(μN,πλ)≤εalg\sqrt m\,W_2(μ_N,π_λ)\leq\varepsilon_{\mathrm{alg}}m​W2​(μN​,πλ​)≤εalg​, where μNμ_NμN​ is the law of the NNN-th iterate and W2W_2W2​ is the quadratic Wasserstein distance. We also prove the Moreau-bias bound m W2(πλ,π)≤G2λ4.\sqrt m\,W_2(π_λ,π) \leq \frac{G^2λ}{4}.m​W2​(πλ​,π)≤4G2λ​. Thus, choosing λ≍ε/G2λ\asymp\varepsilon/G^2λ≍ε/G2 gives an end-to-end guarantee for πππ. The universal estimate Bref≤d/λB_{\mathrm{ref}}\leq d/λBref​≤d/λ yields O~(ε−3)\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})O(ε−3) accuracy dependence. For the structured piecewise-linear, lasso-type, group, and total-variation penalties considered here, curvature--tube estimates make BrefB_{\mathrm{ref}}Bref​ independent of λλλ, yielding O~(ε−2)\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-2})O(ε−2) for the same classical MYULA kernel.

Machine Learning
2608.13465
2 days ago

Concept Drift Detection and Adaptive Retraining of Malware Classification Models

Christofer Washington Berruz Chungata, Martin Jurecek, Katerina Potika +2

Concept drift refers to changes over time in the statistical properties of data, as compared to the data that was used to train a learning model. Machine learning models for malware detection or classification are particularly susceptible to performance degradation caused by concept drift, as attackers constantly modify existing malware. In this chapter, we analyze two machine learning-based approaches to automated concept drift detection-a novel approach based on One-Class Support Vector Machines (OCSVM) and a previously-studied technique based on Minibatch K-Means (MK-Means). For comparison we also consider Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), a statistical technique for detecting changes in multidimensional data. We conduct an extensive series of experiments comparing the effectiveness of four learning models, namely, Multilayer Perceptron, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting. For each of these models, we consider three distinct scenarios: A static scenario where no model retraining occurs, a periodic scenario where models are constantly retrained irrespective of concept drift, and a drift-aware scenario where models are only retrained when concept drift is detected. Under the drift-aware scenario, we analyze the tradeoff between accuracy and training efficiency using Pareto Front analysis. We find that all three concept drift detection techniques achieve classification accuracy comparable to periodic retraining, while offering substantially greater efficiency in terms of the number of models that must be retrained. In addition, drift-aware retraining based on our OCSVM technique generally outperforms the MK-Means and MMD approaches. Overall, these results provide strong evidence that we can accurately detect concept drift in malware classification models.

Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceCryptography and Security
2608.13463
2 days ago

MLLM-Routed Heterogeneous Ensembles for Robust Cross-Dataset Image Classification

Daniel Perkins, John Squires, Janou Milligan +2

Modern image classification models excel when trained on single task-specific datasets but often struggle to generalize across domains and difficulty levels. We propose ARMDIL, an Adaptive Router for Multi-Domain Image classification with LLMs. ARMDIL is an ensemble that uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent to dynamically route each image to the most suitable vision backbone. Our diverse ensemble employs convolutional neural networks (ResNets), self-supervised representation learners (SSL), and vision-language models (VLMs), each trained on a unified label space constructed from multiple image datasets with differing distributions and characteristics. Empirical evaluations illuminate the distinct capabilities and vulnerabilities of each architecture across disparate visual domains. Crucially, we show that ARMDIL effectively navigates these trade-offs, performing competitively with specialized training-based routers. Furthermore, it drastically improves adaptability by allowing new information to be integrated via simple prompt modifications, while enhancing interpretability through natural language reasoning traces. These advances in cross-dataset image classification pave the way for more reliable general-purpose vision systems such as AI assistants and autonomous robots.

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
2608.13461
2 days ago

Doubly Robust Estimation of Causal Effect on CVR with Targeted Regularization

Jiayi Dan, Bo Li, Lu Deng +1

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a key metric in various scenarios including e-commerce and advertising, reflecting the efficiency and user experience in the second stage of the conversion process. Estimating the causal effect on CVR is therefore of great practical importance. However, directly applying existing causal inference methods to clicked samples introduces sample selection bias and increased variance due to the exclusion of non-click data. Recent studies on CVR prediction introduce "ideal loss", which optimizes model parameters using an unbiased estimate of the loss over the full sample. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that unbiasedness of the loss implies unbiasedness of the final estimator. We revisit this challenge from the perspective of semiparametric theory. Specifically, we develop a new doubly robust causal effect estimator for chain-structured outcomes such as CVR, and derive its theoretical properties in detail. It achieves a faster convergence rate compared to nuisance parameters estimation and is therefore more robust when using flexible nonparametric estimators, including neural networks. Based on these theoretical findings, we further design a framework based on targeted regularization to improve numerical stability and practical applicability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. In addition, we find that naively combining loss debiasing with standard causal estimators underperforms our method, highlighting the necessity of developing the new estimator tailored to this CVR-style objective with solid theoretical guarantees.

Machine Learning
2608.13460
2 days ago

SNM-VFI: Symmetric Nonlinear Motion-Guided Generative Video Frame Interpolation

Jisoo Jeong, Hong Cai, Jamie Menjay Lin +5

We propose Symmetric Nonlinear Motion-guided Generative Video Frame Interpolation (SNM-VFI), a training-free framework for motion-controllable generative video frame interpolation with pre-trained optical flow and video diffusion models. Unlike conventional diffusion-based VFI methods that synthesize intermediate frames from random noise, SNM-VFI guides the generative process with correspondence-aware frames produced by a symmetric nonlinear motion model. Specifically, we first utilize a pre-trained optical flow model to construct multi-frame nonlinear flow-based intermediate frames and confidence maps. These flow-guided frames are then encoded as latent priors to initialize and iteratively guide a pre-trained Video Diffusion model, enabling the diffusion model to preserve dense motion correspondence while improving perceptual realism. To further enhance output quality, we employ confidence maps to fuse structurally reliable flow-based predictions with diffusion-generated details in uncertain regions such as occlusions and object boundaries. Extensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including DAVIS, Sintel, and KITTI, demonstrate that SNM-VFI achieves strong perceptual quality, competitive reconstruction accuracy, and robust temporal coherence across diverse motion scenarios.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13459
2 days ago

CAPRI: Contract-Aware Proof Repair for Isabelle

Jim Woodcock, Gabriel Leite, Augusto Sampaio +1

We address the use of large language models (LLMs) to help discover Isabelle proofs. An Isabelle build establishes that the submitted theory is accepted, but not that an LLM changed only what the developer authorised. We present CAPRI, a contract-aware repair workflow in which Isabelle checks the proof and an independent checker enforces a machine-readable edit contract. Prompts, proposals, candidate repositories, diagnostics, verdicts, and hashes are retained for audit. We evaluate five workflows on twelve failed proofs from four developments, with three replicates per task and condition, giving 180 runs and 138 valid repairs. Of 144 terminal candidates accepted by Isabelle, six had modified protected text; all arose in iterative workflows that could edit a complete theory. A proof-body-only interface produced 29/36 valid repairs and no contract violations, compared with 31/36 for the corresponding full-theory workflow. One-shot repair produced 22/36, while a later prospectively frozen iterative workflow produced 32/36; these figures compare complete workflows rather than individual mechanisms. A separate post hoc OpenRouter campaign found no improvement in the designated Luna comparisons. A Sol configuration with matched demonstrations produced 33/36 repairs, compared with 29/36 in the frozen OpenAI Responses condition, but the difference was not statistically significant in a one-sided exact McNemar test (p=0.0625p=0.0625p=0.0625).

Software EngineeringArtificial IntelligenceLogic in Computer Science
2608.13458
2 days ago

Fine-Grained Action Recognition with Cross-Attentive Latent Sparse Experts

Imtiaz Ul Hassan, Tasweer Ahmad, Nik Bessis +1

Fine-grained human action recognition (FHAR) must distinguish visually similar actions that differ mainly in body configuration, timing, or local appearance. RGB representations retain visual context but often suppress joint-level geometry, whereas skeleton representations encode kinematics but discard dense spatial detail. We introduce FineX, which factorizes fine-grained cues into RGB appearance, pose heatmap geometry, and skeletal-graph topology. Pairwise cross-attention enables symmetric, stream-preserving information exchange, followed by a streamwise latent sparse Mixture-of-Experts that routes each representation to a content-dependent subset of shared experts, regularized by a load-balancing objective. FineX achieves state-of-the-art results on Gym99, Gym288, and Diving48. On the long-tailed Gym288, it raises mean class accuracy from 68.6% to 76.2% (+7.6 points) without textual supervision or large-scale vision-language pre-training, demonstrating the benefit of structured visual-pose-graph fusion and conditional expert refinement for FHAR.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13457
2 days ago

Symmetry-Breaking De Novo Crystal Generation via Markovian Jump Diffusion

Van Khoa Nguyen, Alexandros Kalousis

Generating crystals has recently attracted significant interest due to their broad applications in materials science. However, existing generative models struggle to produce complete crystallographic specifications, limiting their ability to capture global symmetry and structural dependencies. In particular, current state-of-the-art approaches generate crystals only up to site symmetries and rely on sampling space groups from empirical distributions during generation. Inspired by spontaneous symmetry breaking in physics, where crystals break symmetries under external conditions, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework that generates full structure specifications by reversing from the lowest-symmetry priors. Our method leverages a Markovian jump-diffusion process to model these symmetry-breaking dynamics, enabling it to traverse different space groups in a physically motivated manner. Our model, dubbed Symmetry-breaking Crystal Diffusion (SbCD), introduces a principled approach to explicitly incorporate inter-space-group transitions into the generative process. In de novo generation experiments on MP20 and MPTS-52, SbCD outperforms its symmetry-preserving counterpart by a substantial margin, offering a promising perspective for generative modeling of crystalline materials.

Machine Learning
2608.13456
2 days ago

A Unifying Perspective on Causal World Models: From Observations to Representations to Structure

Avinash Kori, Fabrizio Russo

World Models (WM) are increasingly seen as a foundation for intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act beyond their training distribution. In this paper, we study WMs from a causal perspective across multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from perceptual observations to building a conceptual representation of the structure governing the environment dynamics. We argue that useful WMs must go beyond generative capabilities alone: they should also capture entity properties, entity-to-entity interactions, and entity-to-environment interactions that determine and explain the dynamics of a system. We provide a formal definition of Causal WMs (CWMs) grounded in the tasks they are intended to support, connecting world modelling with existing work in causal representation learning, object-centric learning, causal discovery, structural causal models, and model-based decision-making. Finally, we relate CWMs to the literature on identifiability, clarifying when the components of a WM can be recovered from data and up to which equivalence. With this, we ground WMs in representations and structures that support causal reasoning and informed decision-making.

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13455
2 days ago

Evaluation of Clinically Steerable Retinal Image Generation from Foundation Model Latent Spaces

Zuzanna A. Wakefield-Skórniewska, Bartłomiej W. Papież

Medical foundation models learn latent representations of clinically meaningful phenotypes, yet their ability to support controllable image generation remains largely unexplored. We evaluate four retinal foundation models within the representation tokenizer framework and examine whether demographic and clinical information encoded in latent representations from foundation models is preserved during synthetic image generation. We show that generated representations and images faithfully inherit phenotype information when evaluated within their originating foundation models, consistently outperforming conventional latent diffusion on multiple downstream prediction tasks. However, these gains largely disappear when evaluated using classifiers trained on real images, revealing a previously uncharacterised synthetic-to-real representation gap. These findings demonstrate that foundation-model latent spaces provide a powerful substrate for controllable retinal synthesis while highlighting the need to better align synthetic representations with real-image distributions.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13454
2 days ago

Before You Say It: Anticipating Verbal Behavior from Longitudinal Everyday Conversations with LLMs

Yasith Samaradivakara, Valdemar Danry, Paul Liang +1

Knowing someone deeply means not just understanding what they say or do but also how they will likely think, react, and engage across situations. Such predictions could eventually inform systems to anticipate when the individual is about to deviate from their goal, catch regrettable behaviors before they are made, and surface blind spots before they take hold. While many interactive systems model users to enable more personalized interactions, most cannot make such behavioral predictions, as this often requires longitudinal observation and inference of how the individual's behaviors unfold across various everyday situations. In this work, we introduce a novel LLM-based predictive behavioral modeling approach that anticipates a user's likely behavior across everyday conversational situations. We (1) collect a longitudinal dataset of over 1000 hours of naturalistic conversations from 14 participants using a wearable smartwatch; (2) evaluate LLM-based predictions against ground truth behaviors; and (3) use semi-structured interviews to explore participants perceptions of behavioral predictions and their views on possible forms of future behavioral support. Altogether, our findings provide evidence that person-specific verbal behavior can be predicted from longitudinal conversational data. This opens up new possibilities for potential future context-aware, anticipatory, proactive and personalized AI systems.

Human-Computer Interaction
2608.13453
2 days ago

UniTexture: Cross-Task Universal Adversarial Textures for Vision-Language-Action Models

Yukun Dai, Mingzhe Dai, Tianshi Wang +3

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic policies capable of following diverse language instructions and performing a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, their direct control over embodied agents also exposes them to adversarial interference that may cause unsafe physical behaviors. Existing attacks on robotic policies are typically optimized for a single task or instruction, leaving the cross-task vulnerabilities of multitask VLAs largely unexplored. We introduce UniTexture, a cross-task universal adversarial texture attack that uses a single textured 3D object to induce targeted deviations in VLA action predictions across multiple tasks. UniTexture backpropagates gradients from the policy's action outputs to surface texture parameters through a differentiable renderer. It jointly optimizes the shared texture over a distribution of tasks, instructions, states, and viewpoints using a targeted action-space objective, steering predicted actions toward attacker-defined targets without optimizing a separate texture for each task. We evaluate UniTexture on OpenVLA and π0.5π_{0.5}π0.5​ across diverse manipulation tasks and multiple evaluation settings. UniTexture reduces the mean task success rate from 90.0% under benign conditions to 48.4% under attack, induces target-aligned action shifts, and further exhibits cross-suite and cross-model transfer without re-optimization. Together, these findings reveal shared cross-task vulnerabilities in multitask VLAs that can be systematically exploited through a single adversarial surface texture.

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
2608.13450
2 days ago

LLM-Assisted Dynamic Threat Analysis for Attacker-Reachable Software Weaknesses in Autonomous Vehicles

Md Wasiul Haque, Sagar Dasgupta, Mizanur Rahman +1

Autonomous vehicles depend on large safety-critical software stacks, where weaknesses reachable from adversarial inputs may affect steering, braking, or other control decisions. Static analysis can identify candidate sites, but dynamically confirming exploitability requires executable test artifacts that are difficult to construct manually. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can automate this process for Autoware, an open-source autonomous-driving stack. We perform compiler-precise static analysis across 185 packages, identifying 1,375 decision rules, 2,274 validation checks, and 482 input-to-safety-output flows, from which we derive a weakness taxonomy and sample 740 reachable sites. Two local open-weight LLMs, a no-static-context ablation, and a naive-template baseline generate 3,700 artifact sets, which are compiled against the real build under sanitizers, repaired through compiler-in-the-loop feedback, and fuzzed when executable. The main result is a build-integration failure taxonomy showing that 80% of first-shot compilation failures arise from dependency wiring rather than program logic. The reasoning model compiled 64% of harnesses on the first attempt, compared with 6% for the code-specialized model. Repair achieved full object-compileability for the reasoning model only through extensive stubbing; fewer than half of its harnesses reached the fuzzer, and all 37 observed crashes originated in stubbed code rather than Autoware. No candidate weakness was dynamically confirmed within budget. These results show that build integration, not candidate generation or fuzzing, is the primary barrier to reliable LLM-assisted dynamic analysis of full autonomous-vehicle software stacks.

Software EngineeringCryptography and SecurityMachine Learning
2608.13448
2 days ago

Mind the Context: Continual Learning of Socially Appropriate Robot Actions via Environmental-Social Disentanglement

Rafal Robert Karpinski, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Nikhil Churamani +4

Social robots are expected to operate across diverse environments, where similar arrangements can imply different socially appropriate actions, e.g., starting a conversation may be acceptable in a crowded home but disruptive in an office meeting. Because such norms and environments cannot all be anticipated in advance, robots require continual learning (CL) to adapt from sequential experience while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Prior work has studied CL for generating socially appropriate robot actions, but it has not addressed domain-incremental settings in which the robot incrementally encounters diverse contexts (e.g., living room, meeting room, office, hallway), where both environmental (e.g., whether the space is open or cluttered with furniture) and social cues (e.g., how people or other agents are positioned around the robot) jointly shape the appropriateness of robot actions. We address this gap with the Explicit Disentanglement Dual-Branch (EDD) framework. EDD explicitly separates environmental and social-agent related knowledge and uses replay-based rehearsal to mitigate forgetting while learning the appropriateness of robot actions (e.g., cleaning, serving, starting a conversation) across several indoor domains. Experiments show that EDD outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies further evaluate different disentanglement strategies and the sensitivity to domain ordering. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cambridge-AFAR/Mind-the-Context.git.

Robotics
2608.13447
2 days ago

Academic League of Artificial Intelligence - An Integrative Perspective of Teaching, Research, and Extension

Alison R. Panisson, Maria Eduarda W. M. Vianna, Italo Firmino da Silva +9

Academic leagues have become important mechanisms for promoting extracurricular education and strengthening the integration between universities and society. This paper presents the organizational framework adopted by the Academic League of Artificial Intelligence (LIA) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), designed to integrate teaching, research, and university extension through a student-centered, project-based approach. The framework combines democratic governance, collaborative learning, and dynamic project organization to foster both technical and transversal competencies. The framework is illustrated through representative initiatives, including competition teams, study groups, open lectures, knowledge repositories, and AI-powered applications with social impact. These projects demonstrate how diverse educational, scientific, and extension activities can be developed within a common organizational structure while promoting leadership, scientific production, community engagement, and knowledge preservation. The reported experience indicates that the proposed framework provides a flexible and replicable model for integrating the three university pillars into engineering and computing education, offering practical guidance for academic leagues and similar student organizations.

Artificial Intelligence
2608.13441
2 days ago

Edit2TikZ: A Comprehensive and Challenging Benchmark for Scientific Figure Editing with TikZ

Zongyun Zhang, Jiacheng Ruan, Xian Gao +5

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown substantial potential in visual understanding and graphic code generation, editing scientific figures through code presents a greater challenge: a model must jointly recover visual structure, ground the requested change, generate compilable code, and preserve all unrelated content. While existing TikZ benchmarks mainly focus on figure reconstruction and generation, few systematically evaluate instruction-guided scientific figure editing with compilable code. We introduce Edit2TikZ, a comprehensive benchmark for scientific figure editing tasks, featuring 1,548 diverse and high-quality samples. Edit2TikZ combines real-world and controlled synthetic edit cases, supports both textual and visual localization request, and contains multi-step editing, each with step-level annotations. We further construct a human-aligned evaluation framework to measure whether a requested edit is completed while irrelevant content is preserved. Utilizing Edit2TikZ, we evaluate 14 mainstream MLLMs and find that current systems remain unreliable: on average, proprietary models achieve a compilation success rate of merely 75% and remain limited in both figure restoration and edit correctness, while compact models below 9B struggle further with instruction following and complete figure generation. Therefore, we build a mixed training set TikZEditMix and adopt reconstruction-then-editing curriculum learning for compact models. On Qwen3.5-4B, this training improves the compilation success rate from 45.35% to 83.40% and yields an average improvement of 18.7 points across our proposed evaluation metrics. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/Solunny/Edit2TikZ.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13438
2 days ago

ContactGuard: Pre-Contact Execution Monitoring with Action-Conditioned Latent World Models

Gehan Zheng, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Weiming Zhi

Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact. This is especially limiting in wrist-camera setups: close gripper--object views help observe contact, but a poor approach may already push, miss, slip, or disturb the object before conventional detectors react. We introduce ContactGuard, a pre-contact execution monitor for chunked visuomotor policies. Given the policy's planned action chunk, ContactGuard predicts its short-horizon consequence in latent visual space and aborts if the predicted future latent indicates likely failure. Its latent world model is trained from unlabelled robot trajectories to predict compact multi-view visual embeddings under planned actions, avoiding pixel-level video prediction. A lightweight failure probe is then trained from a small labelled set of pre-contact clips. At deployment, ContactGuard anchors prediction before an imminent contact event, rolls the model forward under the policy's own actions, and verifies the predicted post-contact latent. Across real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ContactGuard predicts failure more accurately than direct and corrupted-action ablations, and transfers to live robot as a pre-contact abort signal without modifying the underlying policy.

RoboticsArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2608.13434
2 days ago

Fast Tendermint: Speeding Up a Foundational Consensus Protocol

Preston Vander Vos, Daniel Cason

Tendermint is among the most widely studied and deployed Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, owing in part to its native leader-rotation mechanism that subsumes complex view changes. Like most partially-synchronous BFT protocols, Tendermint tolerates f<n/3f < n/3f<n/3 Byzantine processes and decides in three communication steps. Motivated by the push for lower-latency blockchains, a recent line of work shows that consensus can be solved in two communication steps when f<n/5f < n/5f<n/5. We present Fast Tendermint, an adaptation of Tendermint to the n>5fn > 5fn>5f setting that decides in two communication steps in the good case, while preserving Tendermint's leader-rotation structure. Fast Tendermint collapses Tendermint's prevote and precommit steps into a single voting step and merges the lockedlockedlocked and validvalidvalid state. We give proofs of agreement, validity, and termination, and a formal specification in Quint, a modern surface syntax for TLA+, used to model-check the protocol.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
2608.13433
2 days ago

Algebraic Decomposition Theory for Transformer Length Generalization

Andy Yang, Blerta Veseli, Corentin Barloy +5

Transformer-based language models are known to sometimes generalize to sequences longer than seen during training, but we lack a precise characterization of which tasks admit length generalization. It is not even known which regular languages transformers length-generalize on -- and this is a foundational class of languages. Our contributions are to establish the first complete characterization of which regular languages transformers length-generalize on and provide a decision algorithm running in polynomial time in the size of the language's syntactic monoid. These results rely on an effective characterization of the regular languages in C-RASP, a recently-established formalism that expresses which languages transformers length-generalize on. This characterization is challenging because classical tools like Krohn-Rhodes decomposition theory for finite semigroups are insufficient for C-RASP. Firstly, the basic building blocks of Krohn-Rhodes theory -- flip-flop and simple groups -- are not expressible in C-RASP. Secondly, the basic building block of C-RASP (unbounded counting) is not expressible by the finite semigroups of Krohn-Rhodes theory. Thus, length generalization on regular languages is controlled by an algebraic property that is invisible to classical finite decomposition theory. We generalize classical decomposition theory from finite semigroups to the infinite additive group on the integers, allowing us to characterize C-RASP in terms of iterated wreath products of the integers and derive a provable polynomial-time decision algorithm for regular language membership. Experiments across a broad test suite of regular languages confirm that our theory captures transformers' length-generalization behavior more accurately than existing classifications.

Formal Languages and Automata TheoryArtificial Intelligence