EEGaze: Multimodal Attention Prediction in Visual Search via EEG-Based Saliency Refinement

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual search is ubiquitous in daily life, from locating keys in a messy apartment to finding a tool in a cluttered workshop or an application icon on a desktop screen. While visual attention is to a large extent driven by image content, research in psychology indicates that user cognitive states have a significant influence on attention allocation. A promising way to access information about cognitive states is via Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Despite this potential, previous works in computational attention modeling have largely disregarded EEG, and related studies in psychology operate with abstract, simplistic stimuli, or even artificially guided search procedures. We bridge this gap with two contributions. First, we present EEGaze 140, the largest publicly available multimodal dataset of free visual search with realistic stimuli. The dataset contains synchronized EEG and eye tracking recordings from 36 participants across 140 naturalistic scenes, covering two scenarios: searching for desktop icons and finding tools in cluttered workshop scenes. Second, we introduce EEGazeNet, the first method for human attention prediction in visual search that integrates EEG signals. Our approach consists of a EEG guided refinement stage that adapts the output of a state of the art saliency prediction method to the user current cognitive state. In comprehensive evaluations on EEGaze 140, we show that EEGazeNet consistently outperforms all baselines and ablation conditions.
Mansi Sharma, Dinar Orazgaliyev, Antonio Kr\"uger, Philipp M\"uller

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Using Routed Ensembles and Trajectory Attribution

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning is a fundamental problem for modern AI, with applications spanning post-training, reasoning models, and robotic control. A central challenge is to learn policies that balance competing objectives, such as helpfulness versus honesty in safety and alignment, or speed versus energy in robotics. The optimal policy can vary sharply with objective-weighting combinations, and the extent of this variation depends crucially on the degree of conflict among objectives, making per-preference policy learning sample-inefficient. In this paper, we introduce objective-conflict coefficients and derive near-optimal regret bounds for online settings using this measure, thereby quantifying the impact of misalignment on learning efficiency. Then, we design routed ensemble policy learning, an algorithm that maintains a small set of basis policies and dynamically routes trajectories to the policy with the highest potential reward. Finally, we consider trajectory selection as another approach to mitigate objective conflict, and design a kernel surrogate trajectory attribution algorithm that estimates how feedback signals from a set of trajectories influence policy learning on other trajectories. The kernel can capture nonlinear interactions such as synergy and antagonism between trajectories. We evaluate our approach across diverse environments and benchmarks: routed ensembles improve average performance by 4.3% over baselines for online environments from Meta-World and MO-Gymnasium, and kernel surrogate attribution improves correlation with leave-one-out analysis over existing baselines by 50%. When applied to trajectory selection, kernel-based attribution yields a 27% improvement in reward over baseline attribution methods.
Zhenshuo Zhang, Ruoxuan Xiong, Hongyang R. Zhang

The Watchtower Imperative: Lifespan-Calibrated Evaluation for Frontier AI

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The gap between AI capability deployment and safety assurance is structural and cannot be closed through internal evaluations alone. Analyzing documented harms (2017-2026) across the human lifespan reveals that disparate incidents --- from voice assistants endangering children to AI companions implicated in adolescent suicide and automated care denials for the elderly --- reflect a single failure: evaluating systems against an implicit adult user model. We introduce five developmental moderators structured into a Lifespan Vulnerability Matrix across six life stages. The matrix reveals a nonmonotonic risk distribution: vulnerability peaks at both ends of the lifespan, governance coverage is asymmetrical, and authority to convert model errors into real-world impact is scrutinized least. We then propose a set of lifespan design principles generalizing existing child-protective instruments, and an institution-agnostic, three-tier external evaluation framework --- comprising automated simulation, expert red teaming, and post-deployment monitoring --- indexed directly to matrix risk cells.
Casey M. Williams, Jennifer Victoria Scurrell

Can JEV Support Clinical Trial Criteria Assessment?

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical trial prescreening requires distinguishing unmet conditions from insufficient evidence in patient records. Given patient records, criterion questions, and predefined answer options, we retrospectively compared JEV, a non-generative decision model returning native option probabilities, with schema-constrained Qwen Flash across 2,048 test patient-condition pairs from TrialGPT and question-answer datasets derived from MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, all evaluated under strict Zero Data Retention (ZDR) policies to ensure clinical data privacy. Both models assessed conditions individually or in batches sharing the same patient context, with performance measured against reference labels. In batch mode, JEV and Qwen achieved similar macro-F1 scores on TrialGPT (0.652 vs. 0.660) and MIMIC-IV (0.807 vs. 0.814), whereas JEV substantially outperformed Qwen on MIMIC-III (0.768 vs. 0.534; $\Delta$ = +0.234, 95% CI: 0.187-0.281). This advantage largely reflected higher recall for conditions labeled as having insufficient information (56.3% vs. 9.9%). Across all three datasets, JEV also had lower observed median job latency (1.18-1.40 vs. 2.80-8.90 s) and 53%-74% lower estimated cost per condition. These findings position JEV as an initial assessment component that provides criterion-level judgments and flags potential information gaps for review. JEV's observed errors in interpreting clinical evidence underscore the need to verify its outputs against patient records before they inform eligibility decisions.
Mengxian He, Ziyue Gao, Chun Li, Shunyi Zhang, Hao Wei, Minqing Zhang, Wu Yuan

Audit Where Hacks Pay: Budgeted Strong-Verifier Audits Against Reward Hacking in GRPO

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards trains on cheap checks, such as unit tests, that a policy can learn to game, while a stronger check is too expensive to run on every rollout. We study how to spend a limited strong-verifier budget in GRPO, separating which weakly passing rollouts to audit from what reward a caught hack receives. At a fixed policy state with centered advantages, the expected update depends on a design only through each rollout's marginal audit probability and correction; reflecting a caught hack's reward about the failure reward negates the advantages of an all-hack group; and auditing whole groups with the fewest weak passes first (low-pass budgeted audits, LB) minimizes the advantage mass left on hacks among pass-count designs with a fixed correction when a label's value falls with the pass count. We tested this analysis in actual LLM training: from each run's starting state, the sign of this mass on a frozen panel predicted whether hacking would be suppressed in 33 of 39 runs, including 13 of 16 preregistered ones. In LeetCode (Wong et al., 2026) and Countdown-Code (Khalifa et al., 2026), LB drives hacking to near zero, while random audits with the same penalty and budget do not and use more labels. We also find that the randomness of the update affects training: in Countdown-Code, two unbiased corrections, per-item reward-level IPW and a group-level advantage correction, bring hacking down too but end 6.1-11.8 and 8.0-11.5 points lower in held-out accuracy than LB at the same budget. A full audit, which the group-level correction reproduces in expectation, stays within about two points of LB in three seeds, while LB uses 28% of its labels, and allocating the same correction by pass count recovers most of the loss (one seed). Training outcomes thus depend not only on the expected update but also on the randomness of its estimate.
Shurun Li, Michael Hua Wang, Haibo Zeng, Long Wang

Quantitative Generalization Bounds for Multi-Layer Transformers: A Few Long Strings can Beat Many Short Ones

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based language models exhibit an astonishing capacity to generalize to longer and more difficult problem instances than those seen in training. However, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon still lags behind. Unlike most machine learning models, the generalisation abilities of transformers inherently require considering two axes. On one hand, one must examine in-distribution statistical generalisation, which concerns the ability of a model to broaden a function from training samples to novel samples of the same distribution. On the other hand, given the sequential nature of language data, one must also consider length generalisation, which reflects whether a model trained on inputs of a given length can extrapolate to longer ones.These two notions have mostly been studied separately, leaving open how they interact. In this work, we give a joint treatment of both axes for fixed-precision transformers. We give generalisation guarantees in terms of the parameter sizes of the involved models, as well as the quantization space and the alphabet size that supply the sequences. Finally, we illustrate how the requirements in the sample count and training length trade off. In particular, we find that increasing training length can be exponentially more efficient than increasing the sample size. Experiments support predictions of the theory.
Marius Henry, Michael Rizvi-Martel, Michael Hahn

MiRL: Error-Targeted Reinforcement Learning for Correcting Terminal Agent Misbehaviors

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Error-targeted learning gives a legible way to improve a model: identify specific weaknesses of the model, train the model to fix these weaknesses, and check whether the weaknesses are fixed. We study how to apply error-targeted learning to terminal agents, which solve long-horizon tasks specified in natural language by interacting with a command shell. Existing error-targeted methods are designed for single-turn tasks, and existing analyses of agent failures are used to evaluate and debug agents rather than to train them. We propose Misbehavior-driven RL (MiRL), which first profiles the errors of a policy to find generalizable misbehaviors: kinds of wrong steps that recur across many environments. MiRL then trains the policy with RL, starting rollouts at the steps where these misbehaviors occur and rewarding a rollout only if it passes the tests and avoids the misbehavior. On Qwen3.5-4B, eight misbehaviors account for 52.1% of wrong steps. After training with MiRL, the policy repeats the measured misbehaviors 43% to 57% less often on average on unseen prefixes. MiRL outperforms TMax-4B on Terminal-Bench Lite (51.8% vs. 47.4%) and matches it on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (21.3% vs. 20.6%), while using 35% of its rollouts. These results show that error-targeted learning can be applied to realistic, long-horizon terminal tasks.
Runchu Tian, Zaid Khan, Zun Wang, Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Mohit Bansal

Towards a Unified Framework of Optimal Input-Side Dimensional Configuration for Deep CTR Prediction

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep click-through rate (CTR) prediction has achieved substantial success through increasingly expressive feature interaction architectures. However, predictive performance also depends on how input-side information is configured before interaction modeling. Existing studies have shown that selecting informative samples, features, or embedding units can improve prediction accuracy. Nevertheless, they primarily optimize these selection mechanisms independently along a single input-side dimension, overlooking their shared basic form and the inherent dependencies across input levels, thereby limiting the effectiveness of input-side dimensional configuration. To address this issue, we propose OptIDC, a unified framework for Optimal Input-side Dimensional Configuration in deep CTR prediction. OptIDC jointly learns sample, feature, and embedding-unit level configurations within a unified framework by integrating their corresponding selection mechanisms. To explicitly coordinate selection decisions across different levels, OptIDC further introduces a selection-weighted Optimal Transport mechanism that aligns coarse- and fine-grained selections via transport over finite measures, thereby alleviating cross-level selection conflicts while preserving the semantics of each input level. Moreover, OptIDC is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTR models. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that OptIDC consistently achieves higher AUC than existing input-side selection methods, validating the effectiveness of unified input-side dimensional configuration.
Chaohua Yang, Fuyuan Lyu, Xing Tang, Dugang Liu, Xiuqiang He, Zhong Ming

TrySee: Modular Perception-Enhanced VLM Grounding for Closed-Loop Robot Task Planning in Specialized Domains

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35687v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in high-level reasoning and task planning for robots. However, specialized domains remain a challenge for VLMs' image interpretation and grounding abilities. We introduce TrySee, a modular closed-loop robot task planning pipeline integrating general-purpose VLM reasoning with domain-specific perception and established robotics components. The system consists of an inherently reactive cyclic planning pipeline, augmented with domain-specific modular vision preprocessing, to provide online grounding. Finally, a dynamic preprocessing selection mechanism contributes to the scalability of the pipeline. The system requires neither VLM fine-tuning nor end-to-end demonstrations and adapts through replaceable perception modules and motion planning. The approach is evaluated on planning tasks across 5 widely different domains, including a real-world robot disassembly task. The field tests in a brownfield environment demonstrate the approach's practicality in integrating VLM planning into specialized robotic systems with limited domain-specific training data.
Elias Hofele, Thomas Trapp, David Timmermann, Tristan Schnell, Georg Heppner, Arne Roennau

Adapting LLM-SC to Living Sacred Heritage: Domain-Specific Extraction, Semantic Networks and Human Evaluation on Pashupatinath Temple Reviews

2 días 19 horas ago
arXiv:2610.35685v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) pipelines can turn visitor reviews into structured data, but generic schemes may miss rituals, sacred spaces, cultural restrictions and emotionally mixed experiences at living sacred heritage sites. We adapted the LLM-Social Computing (LLM-SC) framework to Pashupatinath Temple, Nepal, by specifying a 12-type entity taxonomy (four original LLM-SC types plus eight sacred-heritage types), four relation types and nine aspect-sentiment dimensions in a GPT-4o extraction prompt, which was applied to a fixed random sample of 2,500 English-language Tripadvisor reviews from a processed corpus of 3,939. The exports contain 11,286 entity, 6,232 aspect-sentiment and 5,590 relation records, covering 2,485, 2,487 and 2,433 reviews, respectively; the eight added sacred-heritage types account for 64.8% of entity records. Against an adjudicated two-annotator reference for 200 reviews, exact normalized surface-and-type matching gave provisional entity scores of 41.0% precision, 21.8% recall and 28.4% micro-F1. Aspect-presence F1 was 53.6% and end-to-end aspect-plus-polarity F1 was 42.6%. Human adjudication supported 153 of 194 first-listed relation candidates (one per review; 78.9%), a candidate-level rate that does not estimate relation recall or whole-graph precision. The contribution is a culturally grounded, domain-specific adaptation with component-wise human evaluation and explicit reproducibility and generalization limitations.
Hari Sitaula, Manish Sakhakarmy, Pujan Pant, Sagar Newpane