Quantitative
-
Whose Transparency is it Anyway? Understanding Generative AI Transparency Needs and Gaps Across Stakeholders
2026-11-03 19:40:36Genevieve Smith, Sahiba Chopra, Natalia Luka, Min Kyung LeeAbstract
Transparency has become a central principle in AI governance, yet there is little agreement about what transparency means, for whom, and in what contexts. Drawing on interpretive flexibility within the Social Construction of Technology, this paper examines how different stakeholders understand and experience transparency in generative AI. This study draws from a global survey of 400 end-users, AI builders, and policymakers, complemented by a structured focus group with end-users, grounding the quantitative findings in qualitative insights from the group most underserved by current transparency practice. We present three key findings. First, all three groups share similar understandings of what transparency means and what it should afford, centered on ensuring accuracy and privacy. Second, gaps between the importance of transparency features and their perceived availability are substantially larger for end-users than builders, revealing how power shapes what gets built and who it serves. Only 28% of end-users report that current transparency practices reflect their needs very well, compared to 53% of builders and 49% of policymakers. Third, transparency is situationally constructed, priorities shift with context and task structure, with role-specific frames activating when context demands them and receding when it does not. We argue that meaningful AI transparency requires moving beyond a one-size-fits-all solution, including current emphases on AI disclosure and static documentation, toward pluralistic transparency infrastructures that reflect the needs of diverse users and stakeholders.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05549
PDF
-
TSFM Meets LLM: Context as Covariates
2026-11-03 19:13:19Hemanth Ram, Sai Shankar Narasimhan, Shubhankar Agarwal, Sandeep ChinchaliAbstract
Textual information is ubiquitous in real-world time series datasets, appearing as news, reports, and annotations that hold key predictive signals not deducible from numerical history alone. Large Language Models (LLMs) interpret text but lack numerical precision, while Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are quantitatively accurate but cannot reason about the effects of text. Moreover, the lack of large-scale paired multimodal datasets limits progress in bridging this gap. In this work, we address this challenge by providing a scalable approach for generating realistic multimodal datasets by annotating real-world time series with LLMs. Building on this, we propose Context as Covariates (CoCo), a forecasting framework in which an LLM distills its textual reasoning into numerically grounded forecast and confidence covariates that guide a TSFM backbone, thereby exploiting the strengths of both LLMs and TSFMs. We align the two models in stages, first fine-tuning the LLM via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a reward tied to covariate-induced improvement in forecasting performance, and then fine-tuning the TSFM on covariates generated by the aligned LLM. Our experiments show that models trained on our synthetic multimodal corpus generalize to real benchmarks spanning finance, economics, weather, traffic, and security. Notably, CoCo with Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 as the LLM and Chronos2 as the TSFM achieves up to 12% MAE improvement over state-of-the-art TSFMs and LLM forecasters, such as GPT-4o. Code, checkpoints, and the evaluation datasets are publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05515
PDF
-
SurgTransfer: Multi-Step Latent Action Modeling for Action Transfer in Surgical World Model
2026-11-03 15:59:37Saurabh Koju, Love Panta, Deepak Thapa, Rudra P. K. Poudel, Prajwal Ghimire, Angus Watson, Yash Raj Shrestha, Prashnna Kumar Gyawali, Binod BhattaraiAbstract
Surgical world models have the potential to provide intra-operative guidance, accelerate risk-free training and facilitate transfer of expert surgical maneuvers. However, the use of world models for transferring surgical expertise has been largely unexplored. Moreover, recent approaches in this domain have mainly relied on ground truth kinematics actions or expert annotations for specific tasks, limiting their applicability beyond the narrow range of tasks with ground-truth annotations. In contrast, existing works in the natural domain have shown promising results in learning latent actions solely from unlabeled videos and transferring the learned actions across contexts. We observe that this paradigm is short-sighted for the surgical domain, failing to capture the hierarchical and goal-directed structure of surgical procedures. Thus, we propose a novel multi-step action learning framework to learn context-invariant latent actions that are easily transferable across various surgical contexts. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available datasets, SurgToolLoc-2022 and PitVis-2023, verifying our approach with both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation by surgical experts. We have published our code and the implementation details at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05443
PDF
-
LLM-based NPCs in Video Games: A Systematic Mapping Study
2026-11-02 23:03:44Dilan Mian, Jeremy Bradbury, Yann-Ga\"el Gu\'eh\'eneuc, Fabio Petrillo, Cristiano PolitowskiAbstract
For decades, non-player characters (NPCs) have been driven by rule-based systems whose personalities and interactions are scripted before release. Large language models (LLMs) promise NPCs that converse openly, adapt to new situations, and behave in ways developers did not fully author, prompting a wave of research and commercial experimentation. Yet the field lacks a unified picture of what has been built, how well it works, and at what cost. We address this gap with a systematic mapping study of 377 papers from the academic literature, yielding 42 papers analysed against a main research question and ten sub-questions across four thematic axes. We provide the first quantitative characterisation of component adoption, latency, safety coverage, and reproducibility: short-term memory and world-state grounding are near-universal (60% and 69%), whereas long-term memory (31%), reflection (38%), and retrieval-augmented generation (14%) remain rare, and response times span 2.6 to 15 seconds. Finally, we identify six structural barriers to commercial adoption and offer evidence-based recommendations for developers and researchers.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05427
PDF
-
DiabAgent: Toward Agentic Physiological Control
2026-11-02 18:41:02Chengxi Li, Shaoxuan Li, Deyao Hong, Qingle Liu, Yi Huang, Puheng Bian, Minzhi Xu, Lanyue Zhang, Mingze Sun, Xin Li, Calvin Xiao, Shengyuan Wang, Huan-ang Gao, Jiazheng Xu, Kaisen Yang, Hongning WangAbstract
As pretraining scales, medical language models have advanced rapidly in clinical question answering. Their ability to achieve effective physiological control through sustained intervention still lacks systematic quantitative evaluation. Type 1 diabetes provides a concrete setting: impaired insulin secretion creates dependence on exogenous insulin, with dosing continually adjusted using information about meals, exercise, illness, and glucose measurements. We introduce DiabAgent, a research suite for agentic physiological control comprising the Agentic Physiological Control (APC) framework, the DiabetSim simulator, and the SweetBench benchmark. APC controls glucose through medical-device tools, using ongoing observations to infer individual states, accumulate personal experience, and choose treatment actions. We build DiabetSim to simulate different patients, events, and device conditions for scalable virtual testing and training. Using DiabetSim, we construct SweetBench by instantiating 32 scenario designs as 212 glucose-control tasks. With Claude Opus 5.5 and a fixed decision interval of one hour, APC achieves a COGI of 73.5, compared with 71.2 for the open-source closed-loop baseline OpenAPS. Ablations further show that individual adaptation and contextual information improve glucose control. Combining high-frequency rule-based control with lower-frequency agent decisions shows potential for balancing control performance and computational cost. Our work provides a framework, simulator, and evaluation foundation for agents to participate in human physiological control.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03601
PDF
-
Unlocking Criminal Court Decisions: Flexible Information Extraction for Empirical Legal Research
2026-11-02 12:46:53Tom\'a\v{s} Knap, Ivana Kvapil\'ikov\'a, Jan \v{C}ern\'y, Kl\'ara Bendov\'a, Jarom\'ir \v{S}avelka, Vojt\v{e}ch Pour, Jakub Dr\'apalAbstract
Criminal verdicts contain descriptions of criminal behavior that can support quantitative legal research, but structuring them requires attributes and extraction rules that cannot always be fully specified in advance. We present an LLM-based pipeline that builds a structured dataset through attribute exploration, text span extraction, and value normalization, guided by annotation instructions that legal experts can refine. We evaluate it on two traffic offenses: driving under the influence (DUI) and driving despite a ban (DDB). For DUI, revising the instructions was associated with higher extraction accuracy (from 52% to 70% of correctly extracted values) and higher agreement between human annotators. Repeated runs of the same model agreed with each other more than with the gold annotations, showing that consistent output is not necessarily correct, while disagreement between annotators and between models helped reveal unclear instructions. For DDB, where the instructions defined fixed categories and output formats, agreement was high for most attributes.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03051
PDF
-
When Rewards Depend on the Group, GRPO Plays a Tournament
2026-11-02 02:26:46Junyi Gao, Yu Shi, Pingzhao Hu, Ewen M HarrisonAbstract
Rewards for diversity, coverage and distribution matching make the reward of each sampled response depend on the rest of its group, and they are now routinely optimized with GRPO and RLOO. We prove that in this setting the group-relative baseline changes the objective. The expected update equals each response's own reward gradient plus $\alpha$ times its effect on its groupmates' rewards, with $\alpha=-1/(K-1)$ for groups of size $K$, so GRPO trains every response to beat its groupmates in a zero-sum tournament. It cannot see a pairwise diversity bonus when K=2, sees less than half of it at any K, and often does worse than using no baseline at all. Setting $\alpha=+1$ gives Team-GRPO, an unbiased estimator for any group-dependent reward that works with two samples per prompt and requires no extra model calls for pairwise rewards. The theory predicts training quantitatively. It locates the fixed points of a 9B policy to within 0.02 in $\ell_1$ and predicts how concentrated trained policies become with Pearson r=0.995. On GlobalOpinionQA, GRPO collapses onto the majority answer and ends further from human opinion than the untrained model, while Team-GRPO cuts the error from $0.20$ to $0.08$. On NoveltyBench, Team-GRPO avoids the diversity collapse of GRPO and significantly improves set utility.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02404
PDF
-
ClickSight: An LLM Framework for Interpreting Student Clickstreams Through Learning Strategies
2026-11-01 16:09:26Bahar Radmehr, Lan Tran, Ekaterina Shved, Fatma Bet{\"u}l G{\"u}re\c{s}, Adish Singla, Tanja K{\"a}serAbstract
Digital learning environments produce rich clickstream data that can reveal how students approach learning tasks, yet interpreting these fine-grained traces often requires substantial expert effort. We introduce ClickSight, a framework for interpreting student clickstreams through learning strategies defined in the literature. Given a student clickstream and a predefined set of learning strategies, ClickSight uses a staged LLM-based pipeline to identify strategy-relevant evidence, assess adherence to each strategy, and generate an evidence-grounded interpretation of the student's behavior. We evaluate ClickSight across two learning environments, 365 students, and 12 model backbones using an expert-grounded quality rubric and an LLM judge calibrated with human-expert ratings. Our results show that ClickSight can generate high-quality strategy-based interpretations across different models and environments, with reasoning models performing more consistently than instruction-tuned counterparts. We further find that providing external clickstream-extracted guidance can improve interpretation quality for strategies that require precise quantitative information from the trace. By connecting fine-grained clickstreams with theoretically defined learning strategies and preserving the evidence underlying each judgment, ClickSight provides a flexible approach for studying student behavior in digital learning environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02021
PDF
-
IGDA-ICMH: an Importance Guided Feature and Network Dual Adaptation Framework towards Image Compression for Machine and Human Vision
2026-10-30 15:54:03Yanbo Gao, Xinyu Zhao, Shuai Li, Xun Cai, Mao Ye, Li LiAbstract
With the surge of machine vision applications, image compression for both machine and human vision (ICMH) has become an important research area. Existing studies mainly focus on task-specific adaptation or multi-task joint optimization, yet they often overlook the unequal contributions of different features and network layers to downstream machine vision tasks. To address this issue, we first quantitatively investigate the impact of different feature and network layers on machine vision performance, providing a principled understanding of their importance. Based on this analysis, an Importance Guided feature and network Dual Adaptation (IGDA) framework is developed for ICMH. It adopts implicit neural representation as the basic architecture and designs an efficient adaptation structure with both feature and network weight adaptation. An Importance-Guided Network Adaptation (IGNA) module is developed with a low-rank adaptation strategy to selectively adjust key network layers according to their importance in different tasks. An Importance-Guided Feature Adaptation (IGFA) module is developed with a low-rank and Kronecker product-based transform to explore the non-local property of the features in order to reduce the number of adaptation parameters. Extensive experiments on representative machine vision tasks, including image classification and object detection, demonstrate that our IGDA-ICMH framework achieves significantly better performance than the existing implicit neural representation-based methods for ICMH.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41924
PDF
-
Integrating Low-Thrust Transfer Dynamics into POMDP Planning for On-Orbit Servicing
2026-10-30 14:55:29Susmitha Patnala (LGI), Vincent Mousseau (MICS), Adam Abdin (LGI)Abstract
Recent developments in both high-thrust (HT) and low-thrust (LT) propulsion technologies broaden design options for on-orbit servicing (OOS) missions. However, incorporating LT transfers into OOS mission planning requires accounting for the trade-off between prescribed transfer duration and propellant consumption. Multi-servicing, multi-transfer OOS mission planning is inherently sequential and requires adaptive planning tools that account for propulsion-dependent transfer durations and mass-dependent propellant consumption. Thus, transfer dynamics must be integrated into mission planning and scheduling to increase flexibility and adaptability. In addition, the planning is often done with imperfect information about the system's state and stochastic service demands. This paper focuses on modeling orbital transfers, particularly LT transfers, within a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework for OOS mission planning. To enable offline policy computation, the transfer model must provide explicit state transitions and rewards for all admissible actions. The state space is therefore augmented with the servicing vehicle's remaining propellant to enable consistent mass updates. HT transfers are modeled using a precomputed transfer matrix that maps each transfer to the time of flight and propellant consumed. LT transfers are represented using an analytical GEO phasing model with prescribed transfer-duration alternatives. For each alternative, the model calculates propellant consumption and maneuver feasibility as functions of the required phase change and the current servicing-vehicle mass. The proposed modeling approach is evaluated on simplified OOS planning scenarios using circular phasing with HT and LT propulsion. The resulting POMDPs are solved using the Successive Approximations of the Reachable Space under Optimal Policies (SARSOP) algorithm, and the policies obtained under HT and LT are compared. This comparison provides a quantitative assessment of the feasibility and operational impact of LT options, particularly regarding the potential role of advanced electric propulsion in future servicing architectures.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41839
PDF
-
Multi-Test Nation Bias Benchmarking of LLMs with Explicit Unbiased Baselines
2026-10-30 09:41:05Jonghyeon Choi, Yeonjun Choi, Beakcheol JangAbstract
While prior work has highlighted that systematic nation-level bias in large language models (LLMs) can pose operational risks for international relations (IR) applications, many existing evaluations still lack a clearly specified unbiased reference (ground truth), limiting fully quantitative and cross-setting measurement. Using an expanded corpus of 722 official UN Security Council (UNSC) records, we measure nation-level bias with five complementary tests, thereby extending prior approaches to cover a broader set of bias expression channels: opinion ranking (WOW), association sorting (AK+-), vote simulation (PVS), opposition attribution (F-Oppose), and framing (Headliner). To enable grounded bias evaluation, we explicitly define an unbiased status for each test; in particular, for WOW and AK+- where ground truth is difficult to specify, we propose an action-based pseudo unbiased status derived from observable voting behavior to construct a quantifiable baseline. Benchmarking 4 LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Llama 3.3-70B, Mistral-22B-Small, and Qwen3-30B) across the five permanent members of the UNSC, we find a test-agnostic macro-pattern: relative to the reference baselines defined for each test, model outputs lean toward the opposition (red) side for China and Russia and toward the supportive (blue) side for the U.K., the U.S., and France. These results underscore the need to audit IR-facing LLM deployments with grounded, multi-test benchmarks tied to explicit reference points.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41486
PDF
-
MEMIG: Self-evolving Memory Construction for Antibody Optimization
2026-10-30 04:39:18Yunhui Jang, Zach Wang, Jai Doshi, Kangway Chuang, Sidney Lisanza, Taylor JorenAbstract
Memory has become central to self-evolving LLM agents, which store and retrieve experience from past rollouts to guide future decisions. Existing systems represent this experience as free-form natural language and maintain it by rewriting, which fits tasks whose experience is narratable. However, in scientific discovery and optimization, experience is often a quantity measured by an oracle under a specific context. Rewriting it as text leaves no index for where a record should be, replaces a measurement with a description, and cannot express how interventions interact. To address this, we argue that agent memory for biomolecule optimization should instead be indexable, quantitative, and structured, and we introduce MEMIG. This memory construction framework realizes these three properties. In detail, MEMIG addresses each insight with a domain-grounded identifier and accumulates the quantitative effect measured by a property oracle, so that updates remain local and retrieval becomes an exact lookup. Next, MEMIG connects insights whose interventions are applied together and measures their epistasis by decomposing each evaluated set. Our results show that MEMIG improves performance in most settings across in silico antibody optimization tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41245
PDF
-
FARMS: A Verifiable Foundation for Automated Computational Science
Abstract
Automated computational science could accelerate discovery by selecting, adapting and developing numerical methods. This prospect requires mathematical knowledge that AI systems can interpret and reuse with explicit guarantees. Here we present FARMS, a faithful and efficient foundation that transforms computational mathematics into AI-ready computing knowledge. FARMS connects formal statements to source context, algorithmic meaning and quantitative guarantees through source preparation, reusable representations and semantic review. Across 171 targets in randomized numerical linear algebra and numerical partial differential equations, 157 were accepted by the pipeline, with mean estimated costs of US \$0.85-2.29 per target across sources. Lean-checked implications from explicit source premises connect selected statements to computational skills, illustrated by a heat-flow solve and wave-response compression. FARMS therefore supports an affordable, reusable knowledge foundation for trustworthy automated computational science.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40560
PDF
-
EPC-RawDC: Equivariant Physics Constrained 3D Diffusion with Raw Data Consistency for CBCT to CT Image Synthesis
2026-10-29 13:42:56Alzahra Altalib, Chunhui Li, Alessandro PerelliAbstract
Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is widely used for image guided and adaptive radiotherapy, but scatter, noise, reconstruction artifacts, and inaccurate Hounsfield units limit its quantitative use. Recent diffusion approaches for CBCT to CT synthesis remain largely image driven, with limited use of the underlying acquisition physics. We propose EPC-RawDC, a conditional 3D latent diffusion framework that combines volumetric generative modeling with two complementary constraints derived from the same scanner specific CBCT forward model. First, geometry equivariant projection constraint exploits the rotational equivariance of the CBCT forward operator by supervising the synthesized CT through correspondingly transformed reference projections. Second, raw data consistency uses noisy projection measurements of the individual acquisition as scan specific supervision during training. The framework was evaluated on two independent clinical cohorts with distinct scanner geometries and projection sources. For JUST, the physics constraints used measured clinical raw CBCT projections acquired with an Elekta system, whereas for SynthRAD2025 the projection data were simulated from the reference CT using a Varian geometry with Poisson photon statistics. EPC-RawDC achieved an SSIM of 0.97 in both cohorts and improved PSNR over DDPM by 2.66 dB on SynthRAD2025 and 2.10 dB on JUST, while reducing mean MAE by 20.3% and 19.0%, respectively. On SynthRAD2025, projection consistency and equivariant errors were reduced by 55.0% and 41.4% relative to DDPM. These results demonstrate that combining a volumetric diffusion prior with scanner geometry and scan specific projection measurements improves quantitative CBCT to CT synthesis across both simulated and measured projection domains. Code available after publication at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40046
PDF
-
Learning Calibrated Confidence for Multi-Agent Collaboration
2026-10-29 12:30:00Chenxiao Fan, Chongming Gao, Gangyi Zhang, Yaxin Gong, Leyang Shen, Jiakai Wang, Dong Wang, Yang Liu, Haoyan Liu, Xinting Hu, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan HeAbstract
Complex information seeking on the Web often requires collecting evidence from multiple documents and reasoning across them, as in multi-hop question answering. Multi-agent systems address such tasks by dividing work among specialized agents, where upstream agents produce intermediate answers and supporting evidence that downstream agents build upon. However, upstream answers vary in correctness, and most systems provide no quantitative signal about it, leaving the downstream agent to judge whether to trust or verify what it receives based solely on the textual evidence. In this paper, we propose MASCAL. Each agent learns to produce a correctness probability for its answer by jointly optimizing task performance and confidence calibration in reinforcement learning; the upstream agent passes this probability at handoff, giving the downstream agent a quantitative basis for its decisions, and the final answer also carries a calibrated probability, quantifying the reliability of the system output. To guide the downstream agent in using this signal during training, we introduce confidence-aware weighting, which increases the learning weight at positions responsive to the upstream probability, so that the agent learns more from decisions where it actively uses the signal. Across three collaboration architectures spanning Web retrieval and reasoning tasks, MASCAL improves task accuracy and calibration quality for both agents, and generalizes to deeper collaboration chains and different model scales. Intervention analysis confirms that upstream confidence affects downstream decision behavior, and the learned final confidence supports selective answering and targeted rechecking.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39927
PDF
-
Reasoning or Pattern Exploitation? Mechanistic Insights from RL-Trained Language Models
2026-10-29 02:09:38Aishik Nagar, Cheston TanAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly described as acquiring "reasoning" skills after reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, whether these gains reflect genuine reasoning or more superficial adaptations remains underexplored. In this work, we probe LLMs trained in a finite and exhaustively analyzable logical domain, namely Tic-Tac-Toe, and trace how internal representations evolve across reinforcement learning (RL) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Quantitatively, RL yields high accuracy and robustness across prompt variations, suggesting the emergence of game reasoning. Mechanistic interpretability, however, paints a different picture: features extracted with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) reveal that models primarily adapt to rely more heavily on information already explicit in the prompt, such as whose turn it is, game progression and board occupancy. In comparison, high-level concepts like board symmetries and strategic forks remain weakly represented, raising concerns that reasoning benchmarks overestimate model abilities. This suggests that RL-driven "reasoning" may conflate task-specific adaptations to input information with reasoning ability. We provide, for the first time: (i) a systematic interpretability pipeline tracing representation dynamics across RL training in small-scale LLMs; (ii) an extension of SAE-based feature discovery to hypothesis-driven testing in a finite logical domain; and (iii) an interpretability-based demonstration that RL post-training neither adds nor removes concept information but reorganizes which features dominate the representation, with causal interventions locating the decision downstream of it, in the late-layer state.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39182
PDF
-
Tactus: Tactile & Pose Sensing Glove for Natural Dexterity Data Collection
2026-10-29 00:10:55Li Guan, Rachael Granberry, Sahar Aseeri, Sahar Rostami, Taylor Niehues, Sai Dhanooshi Marri, Mia Huang, Dingtian Zhang, Ziyi Kou, Jason Pursel, Eric Whitmire, Vatsal Mehta, Ashish Deshpande, Tristan Trutna, Reed Belcher, Emelia Black, Julian Blake, Roger Boldu, Sean Bonaventure, Einar Boyovich, Jordan Brennan, Elizabeth Casillas, David Christensen, Tyler Christensen, Nicholas Colonnese, Stuart Dealey, Gaige DeHaven, Katie Doran, Chris Doughty, Robert Drury, Silvia Espino, Gabriel Geyne, Beth Goodrich, Kyra Gould, Joe Grisso, Susana Guerrero, Andrew Gwozdziowski, Monica Ha, Ehsan Hajiesmaili, Kate Healy, Rose Hope, Michael Hurst, Claire Ikemiya, Daisy Isibor, Rick James, Yashasvi Joginapally, Samuel Johnson, Tyler Jorgensen, Kristy Jost, Ben Kamath, Slava Karulin, Alexander Keener, Woo Kim, Alison Krauskopf, Ankit Kumar, Joshua Lang, Lizzy Li, Cameron Lynch, Daniel Ma, Hector Martinon, Christina Matos, Keagan McCurdy, Lee Mincey, Stuart Nezlek, Tiffany Nguyen, James O'Hara, Jason Osborne, Jacky Pai, Roham Pardakhtim, David Perek, Alexandre Poulin, Nick Raines, Salwa Rasheed, Leah Resneck, Kevin Rhodes, Ergys Ristani, Douglas Roberts, Anik Sarker, Harrison Scarborough, Jonas Schmidtler, Brian Shieh, Benjamin Shuman, Garrett Simard, Forrest Smith, Udara Somarathna, Eliot Sosin, Jonathan Stewart, Kristine Strom, Adam Swett, Hal Talbot-Mantooth, Julia Tanner, Sai Sharan Thirunagari, Curtis Torrey, Simge Uzun, Eileen Wachs, Rylan Wasson, Henry Wei, Jesse White, Beau Woodbyrne, Antonio Woods, Noah Young, Chandler Yount, Joseph Zhang, Sean KellerAbstract
Collecting naturalistic human manipulation demonstrations with accurate contact force and hand pose is essential for robot dexterous manipulation policy and foundational world model learning - yet no existing wearable platform provides both calibrated fingertip force sensing and occlusion-resilient hand tracking in a form factor that preserves natural manipulation behavior. We present Tactus, a textile-integrated sensing glove that co-optimizes three design pillars: (1) a thin, conformal 3D-knit form factor (1.5 mm fingertip stackup) designed to minimize interference with natural manipulation, (2) strategically placed capacitive tactile sensors at manipulation-relevant regions informed by empirical contact studies, and (3) IMU-fused pose tracking that maintains accuracy through the hand-object occlusions where manipulation data is most valuable. Tactus includes a documented calibration pipeline for cross-glove consistency and per-session calibration for subject-dependent correction. To enable objective comparison, we introduce standardized benchmarking protocols for tactile force regression and hand pose estimation, and apply them to Tactus and two commercially available tactile gloves - to our knowledge the first quantitative cross-platform evaluation of this kind. Tactus resolves a minimum detectable force of 0.59 N at 95% confidence, 1.6 - 2.7x lower than the commercial baselines, and with 0.87 cross-participant consistency, while our pose tracking sustains 11.0 mm fingertip keypoint relative error during manipulation, when occlusion is heaviest. We show that these combined signals support object property estimation, slip detection, and representative recording of hand-object interaction - yielding demonstration data with the fidelity required for contact-aware manipulation policies and world models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39076
PDF
-
Accelerating Nonlinear MPC by Behavior Cloning with Separated Timescales: Application to Nuclear Reactor Load-Following
2026-10-28 09:15:18Perceval Beja-Battais (CB), Alain Grosset{\^e}te (CB), Nicolas Vayatis (CB)Abstract
Behavior Cloning (BC) of expert controllers for multiscale dynamical systems is challenging: state variables evolving at widely separated timescales induce highly nonlinear couplings that a shared latent space may fail to adequately represent, degrading closed-loop generalization. We propose Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning (SRLBC), an architecture designed to leverage the physical knowledge of multiscale systems in which slow state variables, fast (stiff) state variables, and predictable exogenous inputs evolve at different timescales. On 500 long-horizon roll-outs of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) load-following benchmark -a high-dimensional, stiff industrial system with challenging safety constraints -and across 20 training seeds, separated embeddings systematically outperform shared embedding baselines on cumulative cost, imitation accuracy and constraint satisfaction. The resulting standalone policies approach NMPC closed-loop performance at a computational cost 15 times lower on average. Since standalone policies still leave a few percent of trajectories infeasible, we embed the learned policies in a safety-augmented approximate NMPC framework, in which the optimizer is only called when the predicted input sequence is not certified as safe. This yields controllers still 6.8 times faster than the NMPC controller on average, with a feasibility (i.e., constraint satisfaction) of at least 99.8% for all architectures, SRLBC retaining the lowest closed-loop cost. Under distribution shift, standalone BC policies degrade sharply: SRLBC degrades the least, and once safety-augmented, it retains a feasibility above 98% with the lowest closed-loop cost. Beyond the quantitative results, Jacobian-based sensitivity analysis shows that the resulting controller relies on a sparse and less redundant set of latent features, each attributable to a single group of physical variables, and aligned with the physical timescale decomposition of the system.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38496
PDF
-
Assessing Language Models for Scientific Applications: Inertial Confinement Fusion as a Use Case
2026-10-27 22:21:10P. B. Radha, D. D. Meyerhofer, M. Bhattarai, B. Cheng, L. Diaz, C. L. Rousculp, A. G. Seaton, G. Gupta, P. Gurumurthy, V. Gutta, A. Jhunjhunwala, A. Vem, P. Cook, G. RoweAbstract
Advancing language models for specialized scientific applications requires evaluations of scientific fluency, physical reasoning, and quantitative analyses. Using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) as a test case, we have developed an expert-curated benchmark of 250 questions spanning qualitative reasoning, numerical calculation, symbolic derivation, and equation formulation. Responses have been evaluated using deterministic numerical and symbolic checks together with language-model judges. We compared a variety of out-of-the-box closed-source and open-source large language models with Prospero, a model specialized through combined domain-adaptive pretraining and supervised fine-tuning for ICF. We also conducted initial retrieval-assisted evaluations. Prospero improved its aggregate score by 10.7 percentage points over its base model, with gains across all question types. Frontier models achieved the highest aggregate scores, but critical physics errors persisted, particularly in numerical calculations. We note that domain-specific performance can improve through specialization, but benchmark gains alone do not establish scientific reliability. Retrieval improved performance for a smaller model but yielded no statistically significant improvement for a frontier model. Two scientific stress tests further illustrate useful capabilities and the need for expert assessment of physical assumptions and model validity. Based on these findings, we recommend evaluating existing domain capabilities and retrieval benefits before committing to substantial additional specialization.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38024
PDF
-
Algorithmic Bias from the Perspectives of Healthcare Professionals
Abstract
This paper focuses on algorithmic bias of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in healthcare information systems. Based on the quantitative data and qualitative comments from a survey and interviews with healthcare professionals, who have different job roles (e.g., clinical vs. administrative), this study provides findings about the relationships between algorithmic bias, perceived fairness, and the intended acceptance and adoption of ML algorithms and algorithm generated outcomes. The results suggest that the opinions of healthcare professionals toward the causes of algorithmic bias, the criteria of algorithm assessment, the perceived fairness, and bias mitigation approaches may vary depending on their job roles, perspectives, tasks, and the algorithm characteristics. More research is needed to investigate algorithmic bias to ensure fairness and equality in healthcare.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38006
PDF
