Traffic sign detection is a fundamental component of environmental perception in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. However, most existing detectors rely on static inference with globally shared parameters, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse and unstructured traffic scenarios. As a result, a single static model often struggles to simultaneously handle both clear near-range samples and challenging conditions such as distant small targets or adverse weather environments. To address this limitation, we propose CBDES MoE TSR, a hierarchically decoupled heterogeneous mixture-of-experts(MoE) framework for traffic sign recognition. The proposed framework departs from the conventional globally shared parameter paradigm by introducing a heterogeneous You Only Look Once (YOLO) expert pool together with a lightweight gating network, enabling an image-level dynamic routing mechanism. Based on the semantic characteristics of the input image, the gating module selectively activates the most suitable expert model from the expert pool, enabling a shift from fixed parameter fitting to on-demand dynamic representation. This design enhances feature extraction capability for specific scenarios while maintaining controlled inference overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a remarkable balance between detection accuracy and efficiency on the composite traffic sign dataset. Specifically, our method attains an mAP50-95 of 76.8%, yielding a 2.3% improvement over the baseline method (74.5%) while simultaneously reducing computational overhead by approximately 39.4%. These findings robustly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The CoVR-R challenge evaluates composed video retrieval, where a system must retrieve a target video from a large gallery given a reference video and a textual edit instruction. This setting is not a standard video-text retrieval problem: the query is defined by both the visual evidence in the source video and the transformation implied by the edit. A strong embedding model can provide scalable candidate recall, but it may under-express target-side consequences such as state changes, action replacement, object preservation, or temporal consistency. A pairwise multimodal reranker can verify such details more directly, but exhaustive reranking over the full gallery is computationally infeasible. We present $\mathbb{R}^3$, a zero-shot composed video retrieval pipeline built around Reasoning-guided Recalling and Reranking. The core idea is to turn the source-edit query into a reasoning-grounded retrieval program rather than treating the edit text as a short caption. First, the model generates a reasoning trace that describes the expected target video after applying the edit. Then the trace is encoded together with the source video as a reasoning-augmented query, and its retrieval score is fused with the base composed query through an agreement-gated residual rule. At last, a re-ranker verifies the recalled candidates with direct source-candidate comparison. Experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in addressing this challenge. Codes are available on https://github.com/Lee-zixu/R-3.

AI research often requires decisions before future evidence exists: which bottleneck to attack, which direction to pursue, or where a project should be positioned. We introduce ForeSci, a temporally controlled benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can make such forward-looking research judgements from historical evidence. ForeSci contains 500 tasks across four fast-moving AI domains and four decision families. Each task is paired with a cutoff-aligned offline knowledge base; post-cutoff papers are hidden during generation and used only for validation. To avoid random future-event prediction, tasks are derived from pre-cutoff taxonomy branches and evidence signals, and answer-generation backbones are selected to precede the task cutoffs. We evaluate native LLMs, Hybrid RAG, and three research-agent adaptations across four backbones. Results show that explicit evidence organization improves traceability and factual support, but gains depend strongly on the decision family. Diagnostics reveal a recurring evidence-decision decoupling: agents may cite relevant evidence while forecasting the wrong research object. ForeSci turns forward-looking AI research judgement into a controlled benchmark for evaluating research agents as decision-making systems.

In this work, we present our solution for the 8th UG2+ Challenge (CVPR 2026) Track 3: Dynamic Object Segmentation in Turbulence (DOST). Our method is built upon the strong baseline framework Segment Any Motion (SegAnyMo), which provides powerful mask generation and motion tracking capabilities. To further boost the segmentation performance under severe atmospheric distortions, we propose two key improvements. First, we employ a data-centric domain adaptation strategy. We significantly expand our training data by incorporating selected sequences from the DAVIS dataset alongside a subset of the DOST dataset, and apply simulated atmospheric fluctuation degradations to enhance the model's robustness against complex geometric distortions. Second, we introduce a spatio-temporal post-processing module. This refinement step effectively removes persistent boundary-connected false foregrounds and short-lived fragmented noise, while strictly preserving genuine small targets and maintaining original individual labels across frames. With these combined strategies, our proposed method ranks the 2st place in the challenge.

Reliable evaluation of agentic systems requires unbiased estimates with valid uncertainty, but standard practice navigates between costly human annotation and biased LLM-as-judge proxies. Prediction-powered inference (PPI) combines both into debiased estimates with valid confidence intervals, yet its various methods remain scattered across papers under partial implementations. We introduce GLIDE, an open-source Python library that unifies state-of-the-art PPI estimators (PPI++, Stratified PPI, Predict-Then-Debias and its stratified variants, Active Statistical Inference) and samplers (uniform, stratified, active, cost-optimal) under a scipy-style API specialized to mean estimation. GLIDE ships with a reproducible Monte Carlo validation suite, an empirically grounded decision tree for method selection, and an agentic evaluation case study showing substantial annotation savings at equivalent precision. The GLIDE package is available at this URL: https://github.com/EmertonData/glide

Most text-driven 3D indoor scene synthesis methods generate rooms from object-centric prompts, asking what furniture should be placed rather than how the space is used. Yet in real interior design, a layout is judged by how well it supports its occupants, e.g., their activities and physical needs. We introduce Function2Scene, a framework for generating 3D indoor layouts from functional specifications, i.e., natural-language design briefs describing who will use a room and what they need to do there. Given such a specification, our system parses occupant personas and activities, derives a customized set of functional design constraints from a taxonomy of 17 criteria spanning spatial, ergonomic, activity, and environmental considerations, and uses these constraints to guide layout generation. Rather than relying on an LLM to directly produce a final scene, Function2Scene performs iterative evaluation and refinement through a tool-augmented check-and-repair loop, combining geometric measurements, LLM-based contextual reasoning, and VLM-based visual assessment. Experiments on 30 professionally written interior-design cases show that Function2Scene produces layouts that better satisfy functional requirements than recent LLM-based scene synthesis baselines, with our results preferred in 94.3% of pairwise comparisons. Our work reframes text-driven indoor scene synthesis from placing plausible objects to designing spaces that support human use.

Logical rules constitute a cornerstone of knowledge graph (KG) reasoning, valued for their interpretability and ability to model relational patterns. However, existing rule mining methods predominantly focus on simple chain-like rules and therefore neglect the richer relational information encoded in graph-like structures, such as cycles and branches. This limitation is further exacerbated by computational bottlenecks caused by the combinatorial explosion of the search space, which is especially challenging for graph-like rules. Meanwhile, generative approaches such as diffusion models, despite their success in other domains, cannot be directly applied to rule mining because their training objectives are not aligned with the goal of learning high-quality rules, and non-differentiable KG rule quality metrics cannot directly guide model optimization. To address these limitations, we propose GRiD, a framework that reformulates graph-like rule discovery as a discrete generative process conditioned on the target relation. GRiD employs a two-phase training strategy. First, supervised pre-training enables GRiD to capture structural priors from subgraphs sampled from the KG meta-graph. Subsequently, reinforcement learning is applied to fine-tune GRiD through policy gradient optimization guided directly by non-differentiable rule-quality metrics. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that GRiD achieves competitive performance on KG completion tasks. Ablation studies confirm the efficiency and robustness of GRiD and further show that graph-like rules complement chain-like rules in KG completion. Our code and datasets are available in https://github.com/Haoxiang-Cheng/GRiD.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced text-driven 3D generation, yet Text-to-CAD remains far from supporting industrial product design. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on generating single-part CAD models and evaluate them using geometric similarity metrics that fail to capture functionality, manufacturability, and assemblability. To address this gap, we introduce MUSE, a Text-to-CAD benchmark focused on complex, editable boundary representation (B-Rep) assemblies. MUSE pairs practical design instances with structured Design Specifications and evaluates generated models through a three-stage protocol: code check, geometric check, and design-intent alignment. The final stage uses design-specific rubrics to assess functionality, manufacturability, and assemblability, moving beyond shape matching toward practical design quality. To enable scalable evaluation, we use a rubric-based visual language model (VLM) judge and validate its reliability through human annotation. Experiments on closed-source and open-source LLMs reveal a clear failure cascade from executable code to valid geometry and finally to engineering-ready design, with even the strongest models achieving limited success on fine-grained engineering criteria. Together, MUSE provides a realistic benchmark and evaluation framework for advancing Text-to-CAD from geometric generation toward true engineering design. Our project website, including the leaderboard, dataset, and code, is available at https://dong7313.github.io/muse-benchmark/.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across diverse financial tasks, yet portfolio management (PM), a critical financial decision-making task, remains poorly benchmarked. Existing benchmarks exhibit two main gaps: they ignore cross-asset correlation structures, thereby failing to distinguish genuinely diversified portfolios from concentrated ones, and fail to evaluate the complete PM decision pipeline in real-world scenarios. We introduce PortBench, a benchmark spanning six heterogeneous asset classes over ten years. PortBench consists of two complementary layers: a static QA dataset of 6,269 correlation-based questions across seven task templates, and a dynamic five-stage allocation pipeline that mirrors the full PM decision cycle. To evaluate these layers, we introduce two dedicated metrics: a dual-layer correlation score that measures whether proposed portfolios exploit inter-class hedging and avoid intra-class concentration, and CEPS, a metric that quantifies how reasoning errors compound across pipeline stages. We further assess strategy robustness and investor alignment under three historical stress regimes and risk profiles. Evaluating ten frontier LLMs, we find that despite strong performance on static financial QA, 90\% of model-profile combinations fail to outperform a basic equal-weight allocation, and models that satisfy every procedural constraint still suffer catastrophic drawdowns under stress. Our source code is available at \href{https://github.com/AgenticFinLab/portbench}{this https URL}.

Evaluating AI tutor responses requires more than factual correctness: tutors must identify mistakes, locate errors, provide guidance, and offer actionable next steps. We present GRADE, a systematic study of open-source models for pedagogical ability assessment in student-tutor dialogues. Building on the BEA 2025 TutorMind setting, we evaluate 120 configurations across five language models, zero-shot inference, LoRA fine-tuning, synthetic augmentation, CoT+Reasoning, and single-task versus multitask formulations. Gemma3-12B performs best for single-task evaluation, while Gemma3-27B in 8-bit precision is more reliable for multitask prediction. We find that augmentation helps models that struggle with the original data, verification adds limited gains despite higher cost, and CoT+Reasoning is more useful for synthetic data generation than direct classification. We further show that LoRA fine-tuning on structured classification objectives interferes with instruction-following behavior under thinking mode, redirecting generation away from the required evaluation format. Carbon analysis shows that model choice and reasoning mode substantially affect emissions. Overall, GRADE shows that carefully selected open-source LoRA pipelines can match or surpass proprietary and ensemble-based systems on key pedagogical dimensions, with code and data available at https://github.com/pvbgeek/GRADE.

The 1st Cross-Domain EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis, CVPR 2026 evaluates whether multimodal large language models can reason over egocentric videos across surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective. We achieved second place in both the Source-Limited and Open-Source tracks. In this report, we formulate EgoCross as a robust cross-domain embodied video reasoning problem rather than a simple multiple-choice visual question answering task. We identify three key challenges: (C1) temporal boundary ambiguity, where critical state transitions are sparsely sampled and often occur between frames; (C2) cross-domain semantic granularity mismatch, where the same capability requires different domain-specific visual grammar; and (C3) decision instability under close options, where long multimodal reasoning can select unsupported distractors or produce malformed outputs. To address them, we propose OmniEgo-R$^2$ (Omnidomain Egocentric Routed Reasoning), a unified routed reasoning pipeline consisting of temporal-evidence normalization, domain-agnostic capability routing, structured perception--dynamics--decision reasoning, boundary-aware option verification, and defensive answer calibration. OmniEgo-R$^2$ uses the Qwen3-VL-4B-SFT checkpoints on each EgoCross domain as the visual-language backbone, and wraps them with lightweight test-time reasoning and parsing programs. Our final submissions obtain 66.35% overall accuracy in the Source-Limited track and 66.77% in the Open-Source track, ranking second in both leaderboards. The codes are available on https://github.com/Lee-zixu/OmniEgo-R2

Privacy auditing aims to empirically assess privacy leakage in machine learning models using membership inference attacks (MIAs), and to derive lower bounds on differential privacy (DP) parameters. Recent one-run auditing methods address the high cost of standard approaches by relying on a single training run with multiple "canary" points whose inclusion or exclusion must be detected by the auditor. In this work, we study the problem of efficiently crafting canaries for one-run privacy auditing. Motivated by recent theoretical insights suggesting that interference between canaries contributes to weaker leakage estimates compared to multi-run methods, we propose to optimize canaries to be both highly detectable and minimally interfering. Our approach combines a greedy initialization based on influence functions with a bilevel optimization procedure that maximizes distinguishability while promoting diversity in embedding space, enabling the use of computationally efficient bilevel algorithms. Experiments show that our method achieves stronger privacy leakage estimates at a lower computational cost than existing canary crafting approaches.

Multimodal instruction tuning is the de facto recipe for adapting vision language models (VLMs), yet instruction data are highly redundant, making data selection critical for training efficiency. Existing methods derive selection signals from a specific model or dataset, so whenever the target model or candidate pool changes, the criteria must be recomputed from scratch at substantial cost. To address this, we propose OFA, a data selection framework that trains a reusable selector once and applies it to any dataset or model without recomputation. OFA clusters multimodal instructions in a frozen CLIP space, derives pseudo labels from the cluster structure, and trains a lightweight selector for only a few epochs; samples on which this selector is least confident are selected as the most informative. Once trained, the frozen selector transfers directly across datasets and model scales. The selector is trained once on LLaVA-665K and applied both to LLaVA-665K itself and, without any retraining, to the unseen Vision-Flan-186K. Selecting only 15% of the data, OFA achieves 98.3% of full data performance across 10 downstream benchmarks; on the smaller Vision-Flan-186K, the transferred selector surpasses full data training by 10.6%, confirming that the learned signal generalizes to datasets never seen during selector training. The same selected subsets benefit VLMs at both Qwen2.5-VL-3B and LLaVA-v1.5-7B without per model recomputation, decoupling selection from the target model. These results demonstrate that a single, transferable selector provides an effective and reusable solution for efficient multimodal instruction tuning.

Co-speech gesture generation requires both semantic expressivity and biomechanically plausible rhythmic motion. Existing holistic gesture models mix lexically grounded semantic gestures with frequent prosody-aligned beat gestures. This limits semantic grounding, speech-motion alignment, and kinematic smoothness. We propose \emph{DuoGesture}, a neuro-inspired and biomechanically informed dual-stream approach that decomposes co-speech gesture synthesis into coupled semantic and beat streams. The two streams are coordinated by a \emph{Semantic Variational Information Bottleneck}, a stochastic frame-level gate that learns when semantic gestures should override rhythmic beat motion. The semantic stream is controlled by \emph{Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning}, which replaces purely linguistic word embeddings with motion-language representations to provide motion-aligned semantic priors for long-tailed lexical triggers of gestures. The beat stream is further regularised by an \emph{Inertial Beat Prior}, an anthropometry-weighted arm-chain module that reduces jitter and improves rhythmic consistency without constraining semantic frames. Objective evaluations and subjective experiments show that DuoGesture outperforms strong holistic baselines, while component ablations confirm the complementary roles of semantic grounding, stochastic stream selection, and biomechanical regularisation.

Customizing an LLM judge to a specific problem or domain often involves optimizing its prompt across multiple evaluation criteria simultaneously. Textual gradient methods automate this for a single judge criterion, however they produce natural-language critiques, not numerical vectors. Thus, the conflict-resolution toolkit of multi-task learning (PCGrad, MGDA) does not apply to this multi-objective textual gradient setting. We extend TextGrad to the multi-objective setting and test four decomposition modes of textual gradient optimizers by varying how much cross-objective information the loss, gradient and optimizer LLMs share. We find the gradient's task-focus drops by 59% (9.0 to 3.7 out of 10) when the gradient LLM must provide feedback on multiple criteria jointly. Separately, we observe that naively combining single-objective optimized instructions into a single prompt degrades Spearman rho from 0.305 to 0.220 (-0.085). These results identify two separable failure modes: optimization-time gradient dilution and inference-time instruction interference, which together constrain the design space for multi-objective judge optimization using textual feedback.

Safe physical interaction is critical for deploying robotic manipulators in human-robot interaction and contact-rich tasks, where uncertainty, external forces, and actuator limitations can compromise both performance and safety. We propose an online adaptive impedance control framework that enforces joint-state safety while achieving compliant interaction under uncertain dynamics. The approach combines a quadratic-program-based safety filter with a novel composed position-velocity non-smooth control barrier function (NCBF), enabling joint position and velocity constraints to be enforced through a unified relative-degree-one barrier. Unknown dynamics are compensated online using an interval type-2 fuzzy logic system, while actuator torque limits are handled through soft constraints with exact penalty recovery of feasible solutions. A disturbance-observer-enhanced safety mechanism improves robustness against modelling errors and external interaction forces. Using composite Lyapunov analysis, we prove forward invariance of the safe set and the uniform ultimately boundedness of the impedance-tracking error. Simulations on a 7-DOF manipulator with severe parametric uncertainty and external interaction wrenches demonstrate safe constraint satisfaction and robust impedance tracking.

Point clouds provide a compact and expressive representation of 3D objects, and have recently been integrated into multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing methods primarily focus on static objects, while understanding dynamic point cloud sequences remains largely unexplored. This limitation is mainly caused by the lack of large-scale cross-modal datasets and the difficulty of modeling motions in spatio-temporal contexts. To bridge this gap, we present 4DPC$^2$hat, the first MLLM tailored for dynamic point cloud understanding. To this end, we construct a large-scale cross-modal dataset 4DPC$^2$hat-200K via a meticulous two-stage pipeline consisting of topology-consistent 4D point construction and two-level captioning. The dataset contains over 44K dynamic object sequences, 700K point cloud frames, and 200K curated question-answer (QA) pairs, supporting inquiries about counting, temporal relationship, action, spatial relationship, and appearance. At the core of the framework, we introduce a Mamba-enhanced temporal reasoning MLLM to capture long-range dependencies and dynamic patterns among a point cloud sequence. Furthermore, we propose a failure-aware bootstrapping learning strategy that iteratively identifies model deficiencies and generates targeted QA supervision to continuously strengthen corresponding reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 4DPC$^2$hat significantly improves action understanding and temporal reasoning compared with existing models, establishing a strong foundation for 4D dynamic point cloud understanding.

Interaction between humanoids involves bidirectional and nonverbal reactivity, coordination and synchrony. Toward socially aware robots and interactive virtual agents, we present SalsaAgent, a language model that generates expressive, full-body salsa dance motions in reaction to a human leader and against a contextual music backdrop. We formulate interaction as nonverbal motion token passing, extending the vocabulary of a large language model (LLM) to process discrete motion tokens, pairwise relation tokens, and audio. Our contributions include new tokens for full-body and motion relations, LLM fine-tuning using automatically derived text descriptions of skeleton dynamics for token grounding, and a two-stage token-to-diffusion pipeline. Subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of motion quality, music and partner coordination, and consistent two-person spatial behavior, with significant improvements over baselines.

While post-training has successfully improved large language models (LLMs) across a variety of domains, these gains heavily rely on human-labeled data or external verifiers. Existing data has already been exploited, and new data is expensive to collect. Moreover, true intelligence goes far beyond verifiable tasks. Therefore, we need self-improvement frameworks that are less dependent on external signals and more broadly applicable to both verifiable and non-verifiable domains. We propose **Mutual Information Preference Optimization (MIPO)**, a contrastive data augmentation method that constructs preference pairs by generating a positive response conditioning on the correct prompt, and a negative response by conditioning on a random, unrelated prompt. We show that using Direct Preference Optimization to learn from this paired data maximizes pointwise mutual information *under the base LLM* between prompts and model responses. Experiments with with 1-7B parameter Llama and Qwen instruct models show that MIPO achieves 3-16% gains (and 51% increase for Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct) on personalization compared to prompting baselines. Surprisingly, MIPO can also be useful in verifiable domains, such as math and multiple-choice question answering, yielding 1-20% gains *without any additional data or external supervision*. These results suggest a promising direction for self-improvement using intrinsic signals derived from contrastive data pairs.

Clinical pathways are disseminated as visual flowcharts where spatial topology, arrow direction, colour coding, and font weight encode critical triage logic that remains inaccessible to computational systems. We present PathWISE, a five-phase pipeline combining four LLM-based agents with a deterministic depth-first search auditor and a Java compiler critic, transforming these non-computable artefacts into validated, executable HL7 Clinical Quality Language (CQL) libraries deployable as FHIR CDS Hooks services. Purpose-built agents extract flowchart structure into a typed directed graph, perform deterministic path enumeration, conduct a structured semantic audit of every node's computability, generate terminology-constrained CQL definitions verified by the official Java CQL-to-ELM compiler, and produce routing logic covering 100% of enumerated patient journeys. Demonstrated across five UK NHS cancer pathways (colorectal, lung, skin, upper GI, and breast), PathWISE audits up to 183 nodes (182 under the Hybrid configuration), identifies 544 structured governance findings across four issue categories, achieves 100% syntactic compilation success, with UNCOMPUTABLE nodes receiving false placeholders that preserve compilability while surfacing governance gaps for clinical review, and produces zero hallucinated terminology codes for dictionary-covered concepts. Critically, PathWISE confines non-deterministic LLM inference to knowledge extraction while deterministic graph mathematics and a standard compiler underpin every verification step.

Urgent suspected colorectal cancer (CRC) referrals create operational bottlenecks because semi-structured clinical documents often require manual review and transcription. The original RAPTOR system used Large Language Models for structured extraction but relied on a separate OCR stage, making it vulnerable to handwriting, layout variation, and loss of visual evidence linkage. We present RAPTOR+, a multimodal extension that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for end-to-end referral understanding. We evaluate fine-tuned VLMs, commercial and open-source zero-shot VLMs, and the original OCR-based pipeline on 223 clinically curated CRC urgent referral forms. We also introduce a grounding-aware evaluation framework that measures both extraction accuracy and evidence localisation. Results show a clear grounding gap in zero-shot models. Gemini 2.5 Flash achieved 92.6% Reading Accuracy but only 1.2% Strict Safety. In contrast, fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B achieved 96.1% Reading Accuracy and 60.6% Strict Safety, substantially improving verifiable evidence grounding. These findings show that task-specific fine-tuning is essential for reliable, auditable clinical document understanding. RAPTOR+ enables extracted referral decisions to be linked to visual evidence, supporting safer and more efficient cancer referral triage.

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized. To investigate this, we perform extensive off-policy updates on fixed data. Our experiments reveal that aggressive multi-step optimization brings rapid initial gains, but excessive updates cause trajectory probabilities to deviate and entropy to collapse, with performance plateauing early. Tightening KL constraints merely lowers the ceiling without resolving the degradation. This motivates Extreme Region Policy Distillation (ERPD), a two-stage framework that decouples sample efficiency from KL efficiency. The first stage performs weakly constrained off-policy optimization on fixed data to maximally extract training signals. The resulting policy provides token-level supervision. In the second stage, we distill these signals into the base policy under trust-region constraints, filtering harmful drift while preserving useful signals. The distilled policy achieves comparable or better performance with substantially smaller KL divergence, indicating that much of the first-stage divergence was spent on unnecessary drift rather than genuine improvement. Crucially, ERPD accommodates both strong and weak teachers: when aggressive optimization yields no stronger policy, even degenerate teachers provide effective supervision via alternative signal construction strategies. We validate ERPD on mathematical reasoning, showing gains for strong base models where on-policy training plateaus, and reliable improvements with weak teachers.

Steerable pluralism requires a model to faithfully represent one specified perspective. Organizations are a natural setting for this demand, since they deploy LLMs to make decisions that must reflect their own policy. Yet, most existing work fixes that perspective at the level of individuals or demographic groups. We rely on a decision-policy capturing method to measure process alignment in organizational settings, assessing whether an LLM faithfully reproduces the organization's decision policy rather than merely reaching the same conclusions. We find heterogeneity along two axes. Across models, baseline alignment varies strongly and tracks neither pricing nor general benchmark performance. Across organizations, the structure of alignment changes. In ECHR Article 6 decisions, process alignment predicts output accuracy ($r = 0.85$, $p < .001$), and making the organization's past decision policy explicit improves poorly aligned models. In consumer credit decisions, process alignment is low overall but varies more than output accuracy, and the models resist adopting the organization's weighting of protected attributes. Because historical credit decisions encode potentially discriminatory patterns, higher alignment there is not always desirable. Process-level measurement is therefore necessary, and depending on whether the target policy is normatively desirable, the same procedure can calibrate or audit a model. Deciding which policy to align to, and whether higher alignment is feasible or desirable, makes organizational alignment a pluralistic problem in its own right.

Two methodologies dominate current practices of benchmarking: rubric-based scoring evaluates items against predefined criteria, whereas comparative judgment elicits pairwise preferences between outputs. Although both methodologies are widely used, the choice between them is rarely justified. We release JudgmentBench, a benchmark of 30 real-world legal tasks, paired with 1,539 rubric scores and 1,530 pairwise preference judgments collected from practicing attorneys--including at major U.S. law firms--with substantial experience. The annotations constitute the first publicly available dataset in a high-expertise domain in which both supervision signals are elicited from the same experts on the same items. Using LLM-generated outputs at three constructed quality levels, we provide an initial empirical comparison: comparative judgments recover the intended quality ordering substantially better than rubrics under both a per-task rank-correlation metric (mean Spearman's rank correlation of 0.908 vs. 0.150, estimated difference = 0.758 [0.494, 1.021]) and a per-judgment pairwise win-rate metric (0.669 vs. 0.542, estimated difference = 0.127 [0.067, 0.186]), while requiring less than half the annotation time. The patterns hold for human annotators and LLM autograders. Beyond this initial comparison, the paired structure of the dataset supports a broader research agenda on how expert judgment should be elicited, aggregated, and used as supervision in domains without verifiable ground truth.

This technical report presents our solution, EgoAdapt (Egocentric Adaptation via Category, Calibration, and Consistency), to the CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA challenge. HD-EPIC evaluates whether a vision-language model can reason over realistic first-person kitchen videos, where the evidence for an answer may be a short hand-object interaction, a long recipe trajectory, a spatial relation to a fixture, or a subtle gaze cue. The benchmark contains 26K multiple-choice questions across seven macro-categories: recipe, ingredient, nutrition, fine-grained action, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze. We observe that the main difficulty is not only model capacity, but also the mismatch between a single generic inference recipe and the heterogeneous temporal, spatial, and semantic structure of the benchmark. Our method, EgoAdapt, introduces three inference-time components: (1) category-conditioned routing with per-category prompts, frame budgets, and sampling rates; (2) calibrated option scoring that evaluates all candidate answers with letter-token likelihoods and generation agreement instead of relying only on direct generation; and (3) test-time consistency adaptation that aggregates predictions across option permutations and verification-style prompts for ambiguous cases. This design substantially improves over the available HD-EPIC baselines.

The EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Action Detection challenge evaluates whether a model can localize the start and end of each action in long untrimmed egocentric videos and assign the corresponding verb--noun action label. In this report, we formulate our submission as EgoAction (Egocentric Action Composition with Reliability-Aware Temporal Fusion), a unified decoupled detection and fusion pipeline. The pipeline uses EPIC-finetuned VideoMAE-L features, trains separate noun and verb temporal detectors with causal temporal modeling, composes action hypotheses from top noun--verb pairs, and introduces a confidence-adaptive boundary fusion rule at post-processing time. The key observation is that verb and noun streams often fail differently: verb scores are sensitive to motion transitions, whereas noun scores are sensitive to hand-object visibility and object clutter. A fixed arithmetic mean of their predicted boundaries can therefore amplify localization errors when one stream degenerates. We replace this hard-coded mean with Dynamic Weighted Fusion (DWF), which normalizes the maximum noun and verb classification confidences into proposal-wise boundary weights and linearly combines the two intervals. This lightweight tensor-only operator shifts boundary authority toward the more reliable stream while preserving the decoupled action scoring mechanism. Together with sliding-window inference, top-K noun--verb action composition, and class-wise Soft-NMS, EgoAction provides a compact and reproducible system for egocentric temporal action detection.

Video-text retrieval has witnessed remarkable progress driven by large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet most existing approaches inherit an implicit assumption from image-text retrieval: that visual semantics can be captured frame-by-frame. This assumption overlooks the temporal dynamics of egocentric videos. The EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval (MIR) challenge further raises the bar by providing soft-label relevance matrices rather than binary labels, demanding models that can resolve graded semantic correspondences across modalities. In this report, we present our solution, termed TempRet, to the CVPR 2026 EPIC-KITCHENS-100 MIR challenge. Our approach builds upon a CLIP-based dual-encoder backbone and introduces two key components to address the temporal and cross-modal challenges. First, a temporal transformer operates exclusively on the video side, modeling inter-frame dependencies through learnable positional encodings and multi-head self-attention over frame-level CLIP features. Second, a two-stage reranking pipeline first retrieves Top-K candidates via the dual-encoder, then refines their scores using a cross-encoder equipped with an Image-Text Matching (ITM) head. The entire system is trained with Symmetric Multi-Similarity Loss to exploit the soft-label relevance matrices provided by the challenge. Our method achieves 67.97% average mAP and 82.92% average nDCG on the EK-100 MIR benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of temporal modeling and cross-modal refinement for egocentric video retrieval.

We present a three-step recipe for identifying attention-head circuits in pretrained transformers. A per-head spectral signal -- the time-integrated participation ratio of each head's attention output -- ranks heads doing sustained content-dependent computation without labels or attribution gradients. A task-pattern screen filters this general indicator into a task-specific candidate circuit, and group ablation against a matched-random control completes the causal claim. We validate across an 8x parameter range (51M to 1B-active / 7B-total), two architecture families (dense, mixture-of-experts), and four pretraining pipelines. The recipe ports: a 2-6 head induction circuit is causally necessary in every model tested, with a 94-100% drop in synthetic-induction top-1 after ablation. The spectral signal is predictive without supervision: on six independent seeds of a 51M-parameter probe model, the same computation identifies the seed-specific circuit on each seed. The fraction of heads doing identifiable specialized computation is conserved at 17-19% across the Pythia family (124M to 410M), while specific induction circuits stay 3-11 heads -- sublinear in total head count. This paper is the methodology anchor of a three-paper program; companion papers extend the recipe to developmental trajectories during pretraining and to composed-task circuits where pattern selectivity decouples from task-causal structure.

We conducted a reproducibility-oriented re-evaluation of prior migraine classification studies, correcting for data leakage and metric bias. We then introduced (i) a clinically motivated aggregation of two hemiplegic subtypes following ICHD-3 §1.2.3, (ii) a class-dependent hybrid augmentation strategy that assigns generation methods based on per-class sample size, and (iii) the concept of fidelity asymmetry, motivating proportionally constrained growth as an alternative to full class balance. Experiments were performed on a dataset of 400 patients across seven migraine subtypes under a two-stage protocol, including the six-class configuration described above. Models were evaluated using stratified 5-fold cross-validation with macro-averaged F1 as the primary metric. Correcting methodological flaws reduces previously inflated performance estimates, with the corrected macro-F1 baseline standing at 0.71. The proposed framework consistently outperformed individual augmenters in macro-F1 averaged across the eight evaluated classifiers (0.862 vs. 0.836 for Gaussian Copula, 0.815 for CTGAN, and 0.801 for the no-augmentation baseline), and achieved its peak result of 0.914 with FT-Transformer under proportional augmentation. The no-augmentation FT-Transformer baseline (0.896) shows that, at the per-classifier ceiling, clinically motivated class aggregation accounts for most of the absolute improvement; the framework's principal measurable contribution is the gain in average robustness across classifiers, highlighting the dominant role of problem formulation.

Block attention, which processes the input as separate blocks that cannot attend to one another, offers significant potential to improve KV cache reuse in long-context scenarios such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, its broader application is hindered by two key challenges: the difficulty of segmenting input text into meaningful, self-contained blocks, and the inefficiency of existing block fine-tuning methods that risk degrading performance. To address these, we first construct SemanticSeg, a large and diverse semantic segmentation dataset containing over 30k instances across 16 categories-including books, code, web text, and conversations with text lengths ranging from 2k to 32k. Using this dataset, we train a lightweight segmenter to automatically partition text into human-instinct-aligned blocks with controllable granularity. Second, we propose block distillation, a training framework that is more efficient than block fine-tuning, which uses a frozen full-attention teacher model to guide the block-attention student. This framework integrates three novel components: block sink tokens to mitigate information loss at block boundaries, block dropout to leverage training signals from all blocks, and token-level loss weighting to focus learning on block-attention-sensitive tokens. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that our segmenter outperforms heuristic and statistical baselines, and block distillation achieves near-full-attention performance under block attention, establishing a practical and scalable pathway for deploying block attention.