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Two Communities, One Problem: Branch-and-Bound vs. A* for Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling
2026-11-10 18:03:17Izack Cohen, Dominik Kress, Lara Nehrke, Erwin Pesch, Shimrit ShternAbstract
Branch-and-Bound (B&B) and $A^*$ are popular exact search methods originating from Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence, respectively. Although the two methods share fundamental search principles, their different ways of exploring the search space can lead to substantially different computational performance. We investigate these differences using the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as an exemplary problem setting. We first establish the relationships between mixed-integer linear programming, state-action, and timed Petri-net representations. Since B&B and $A^*$ admit numerous algorithmic enhancements, we focus on relatively basic implementations. This allows us to examine the fundamental differences between the methods rather than compare the performance of state-of-the-art solvers. By using the same lower bound and best-first node selection, we isolate the effects of the search mechanisms, particularly the identification of equivalent states reached through different scheduling decision sequences. Experiments on 480 benchmark RCPSP instances show that graph-based $A^*$ substantially outperforms the B&B variants considered. With additional pruning rules, $A^*$ proves optimality for all 480 instances, compared with 445 for best-first B&B under the same time and memory limits. Depth-first B&B uses less memory and can find feasible solutions even when the search does not finish within the time limit. Stronger linear programming relaxations reduce the search space but introduce considerable computational overhead. Our findings highlight the importance of duplicate-state detection and clarify the computational trade-offs between the search approaches. These insights can help researchers select an appropriate method and identify opportunities to incorporate effective mechanisms from one approach into the other.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14426
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Causal Concept Explanations for Deep Neural Models
2026-11-10 17:50:15Josh Rountree, Pulkit Verma, Oswin So, Chuchu Fan, Julie A. ShahAbstract
Concept-based explanations in neural models are important for the development, certification, and adoption of autonomous systems. Yet, interpretability remains correlational. Without methods to guide and quantify causal relationships between explanations, a concept explanation can be provided without being necessary or sufficient for the observed output thereby appearing correct while misleading. We introduce Causal Concept Wrapper Network (CCW-Net), the first use of interventional mediation analysis from fields such as economics, medicine, and epidemiology as a training objective to align causal effects of concept-based explanations with a model's output. We further apply mediation analysis as an evaluation tool to quantify, per concept label combination, how much of any model's output is causally attributable to each concept explanation. As a training objective, CCW-Net shapes a model's concept representations such that they are both necessary and sufficient for the outputs they are credited with and independent of other concepts' contributions. Counterfactual concept representations anchor a set of causal alignment criteria: necessity, sufficiency, and independence. Necessity drives irrelevant concept effects toward zero, sufficiency ensures relevant concept representations fully reconstruct a model's output, and independence enforces the total effect decomposes linearly across concepts. We evaluate CCW-Net across aircraft control, driving, and image classification. CCW-Net provides a step toward concept-based explanations that are not merely interpretable, but quantifiably causal, supporting safer evaluation, certification, and deployment of transparent and trustworthy neural models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14407
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Point-in-Time Encoders for Earnings Calls
Abstract
Text encoders turn earnings calls into vectors for search, for language models that answer from retrieved passages, and for forecasting models. A live retriever can use an encoder trained once on all available text, as finance retrievers are, but a backtest needs an encoder that read no text written after the date of each vector. To address this look-ahead bias, from 412,248 calls we train vintages under four pretraining recipes, with yearly cutoffs from 2010 to 2024, and each vintage reads only text dated on or before its cutoff. We then fine-tune each vintage on the question-answer pairs of the calls themselves. The vintages we train on calls alone, with 33.8M parameters, retrieve answers on held-out calls better than the general retrievers we tested in every test quarter. Their vectors also raise by about half the rank correlation between next-day returns and forecasts built from past returns and firm size. When each vintage continues the previous one, a later vintage retrieves better on earlier quarters than the vintage available at the time, and a point-in-time language model that answers from the passages the later vintage retrieves inherits the gain. The 2024 vintage of our families also forecasts earnings surprises better, although the interval of this gain includes zero on calls that no vintage read. It forecasts returns no better, so point-in-time vintages matter most for retrieval and little for forecasts of returns.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14325
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Semantic Chains: From Reachable Facts to Justified Answers
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How can the facts that justify an answer be found from a question and presented as a sequence of connected statements? This paper models a context as a graph of logical facts and takes as given which expressions represent each fact. A parent fact can express a relation among its subfacts, and a preserving edge allows the content of a subfact to be recovered within a full representation of its parent. Suppose a root fact justifies the full answer and a path of preserving edges leads from that root to a fact that designates an object shared by the question and the answer. Under the conditions of the model, a search starting from the objects in the question reaches the root and covers every fact in the selected expansion. The root then admits a text that forms a single link connecting the question to the full answer and justifying it. For chains with several links, the paper gives a complete enumeration of candidate orders within the stated class and specifies when the link texts jointly preserve the justification and support every transition.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14252
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Dyship: Leveraging Acoustic Features For Speaker Relationship Classification From Dyadic Conversations
2026-11-10 15:53:43Kieran Sturges, Thomas Thebaud, Yaohan Guan, Najim DehakAbstract
We introduce DyShip, a framework for classifying speaker familiarity and kinship from dyadic conversations in the Seamless Interaction corpus. We compare five speech representations: spectrograms, MFCCs, self-supervised WavLM representations, x-vectors, and estimated articulatory movements. Spectral features perform best for familiarity classification, reaching an accuracy of 87.81%, while WavLM achieves the highest kinship accuracy of 85.17%. X-vectors and articulatory features yield weaker results on familiarity classifiaction, but shine for kinship classification, with an AUC of 0.909 for x-vectors. Most classifiers exceed previously reported human and audio language model scores on the same dataset. These findings highlight the potential of conventional acoustic features for relationship inference and motivate further investigation of the conversational cues captured by different representations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14241
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DailyWildfireCAN: A Dataset and Benchmark for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction in Canada
2026-11-10 15:29:13Mahacine Ettahri, Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo, Daniel Aloise, Ga\'etan Marceau CaronAbstract
Wildfires represent a critical ecological and socio-economic challenge in Canada, where vast boreal forests and a warming climate have amplified the frequency and severity of extreme fire seasons. Predicting next-day wildfire spread can support fire management, but requires capturing complex interactions among weather, fuels, and terrain. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach to learning these relationships from heterogeneous environmental data, yet its development and evaluation depend on representative datasets. Existing deep learning research on wildfire spread relies predominantly on US-focused datasets, leaving Canadian fire environments underrepresented. To address this gap, we present DailyWildfireCAN, a multi-modal, multi-temporal dataset and benchmark for predicting next-day wildfire spread across Canada. The dataset tracks continuous fire progression over multi-day events at a high spatial and temporal resolution of 90-m and 24-hour, respectively. This resolution preserves fine-scale information relevant to fire-edge geometry, local fuel variations, and terrain effects, supporting research toward improved daily wildfire spread forecasting. DailyWildfireCAN covers 2,440 wildfire events across eight fire seasons 2017-2024 and integrates 33 features across diverse modalities, including topography, meteorology, land cover, vegetation and forest structure, human influence indices, and satellite imagery. We establish a comprehensive benchmark comparing mono-temporal and multi-temporal prediction models, accompanied by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing robustness across wildfire characteristics, geographic regions, and temporal conditions, spatial prediction quality, and sensitivity to reference label variations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14207
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Representational Atoms in Neural Networks
2026-11-10 14:56:23Chenhui Hu, Pengfei Cao, Kang Liu, Jun ZhaoAbstract
Understanding the internal representations of neural networks and characterizing their relationship with human conceptual structure are two critical questions for elucidating model mechanisms. The former reveals how learned knowledge is organized in internal representations, whereas the latter provides a basis for interpreting these representations through human conceptual structure. Here, we formally define fundamental representational units (FRUs) and establish two evaluation criteria: fidelity and stability. We further prove that threshold-activated sparse autoencoders (TSAEs) can identify FRUs with high fidelity and stability under appropriate conditions, and validate this result through large-scale experiments. Further analyses reveal that FRUs with higher stability exhibit greater monosemanticity and can be composed across layers to recover semantic organization corresponding to human conceptual structure. These results provide a unified framework for defining, evaluating and identifying FRUs in neural networks, and establish a foundation for characterizing the relationship between neural network representations and human conceptual structure.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14168
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DexSeed: Expanding Human Hand-Object Interactions into Robot Demonstrations for Dexterous Policy Learning
2026-11-10 13:52:18Huaijin Pi, Zehong Shen, Yong Wang, Kechun Xu, Changpeng Wang, Dingkun Wei, Xueyang Wang, Wenjia Wang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Taku KomuraAbstract
We study how to generate diverse, physically executable robot demonstrations for dexterous vision-language-action (VLA) learning. Existing demonstration-generation methods typically rely on costly teleoperated examples. Meanwhile, human hand--object datasets provide a reusable source, but existing transfer methods mainly reproduce given interactions. Turning these interactions into VLA training data further requires coverage of different objects and manipulation locations, together with executable arm and finger actions, and visual observations. To achieve this, we present DexSeed, a framework for low-cost generation of dexterous robot data from human hand--object interactions. Our key idea is to expand human sequences while preserving their grasps and realizing the resulting motions under arm-tracking dynamics in physics simulation. Specifically, we organize source sequences by grasp mode with shared language descriptions. InteractionMesh-based retargeting and arm trajectory augmentation adapt these sequences to the robot hand, different object geometries, and pick-and-place locations while preserving local hand--object relationships. An RL finger-control policy produces executable rollouts, while the arm tracks precomputed trajectories. Rendered observations and recorded actions from successful rollouts are paired with grasp descriptions to fine-tune a VLA. Experiments show improved contact fidelity in retargeting and more reliable whole-arm execution than the evaluated baselines. Simulation evaluation and real-world deployment further demonstrate that a VLA fine-tuned solely on the generated demonstrations can execute language-specified grasps. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14092
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Sable: A Small-Field Sumcheck Argument for Bit-Exact Inference of Large Language Models
2026-11-10 13:47:29Tomer SolbergAbstract
We present Sable, an argument system and single-GPU prover for the statement that a committed, integer-quantized transformer produced a given token sequence from a given prompt, bit for bit. Sable fixes an integer function F_O with no floating-point step, in which every rounding, normalization, softmax and sampling decision is determined by its inputs, and proves it with a constraint system whose relations provably never wrap modulo the 31-bit KoalaBear prime. The proof batches zerochecks and LogUp-GKR lookups into one sumcheck per domain, and commits to every witness tensor and weight in one multilinear commitment built from Reed-Solomon codes, BLAKE3 Merkle trees and a mixed-length BaseFold opening. The prover streams the model layer by layer on one GPU. On one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, Sable proves all 64 layers of Qwen2.5-32B in 92.5 s for 4,096 tokens and 398 s for 16,384 tokens, and covers Qwen3-32B and the mixture-of-experts Qwen3-30B-A3B (4,096 tokens in 121.8 and 84.7 s). A proof costs 41 to 50 times the serving time, or 6.4 cents per 4,096-token request at public GPU prices, and 40 to 64 times less time per parameter and token than zkLLM. On WikiText-2, F_O's greedy token matches the BF16 model's at 86.3% of positions; on Qwen3, F_O is within 1.6 points of BF16 on MMLU and 1.7 points on GSM8K. A verifier with a compiled core checks a proof on one CPU core in 19 to 56 s. In the random-oracle model, the interactive proof has round-by-round soundness error 2^-103. The proof is not zero-knowledge, so the system targets open-weight models. Code: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14083
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Where Do Vision-Language Models Get Left and Right? Position-Code Counterfactuals in Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL and InternVL3
2026-11-10 13:25:38Enhao Cui, Junzhi Yang, Yaoshun Lin, Yuhan Feng, Zijian ChenAbstract
A vision-language model may take left-right direction from the orientation of image content within patches, its vision transformer's (ViT) position code, or token positions and order in its language model (LLM). Ablations show the ViT code is necessary; we test sufficiency by mirroring only a position code. In Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen3-VL-4B and InternVL3-2B, mirroring ViT width positions reproduces the flipped-image answer on 84.3-93.2% of CV-Bench left-right questions (Qwen2.5-VL-3B: 87.5%, partly a left fallback). With two options, this also counts disruption; a half-grid shift flips most answers too. With the ViT code intact, LLM-side id and token-order mirrors change few left-right answers in all three series (a weak id test in Qwen2.5-VL). In Qwen2.5-VL-7B the effect sits in the global-attention ViT blocks, mostly the last. On What'sUp, flipping content and token order, not the position code, keeps more on/under than left-right answers at the flipped-image answer. Post hoc analyses qualify these results. On CV-Bench items with located objects, random permutations flip 18.9-31.0 points more answers when reversing the objects' order than when keeping it. On What'sUp, in Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL, the share of the left-right changes made by random permutations that land on the mirror relation is mostly below chance. Counted as returns to the original answer, the What'sUp contrast of support with left-right relations is clear only in InternVL3-2B. Most remaining errors give the same relation whichever object is asked about, suggesting that repair may target relation binding, object localization or use of the reference object.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14060
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Controlled Knowledge Engineering for Taxonomy Induction with Tool-Grounded LLM Agents and Runtime-Adaptive Policies
2026-11-10 12:04:54Jonas Limniatis, Bennet Schaarmann, Georg Reuber, Robert StahlbockAbstract
Taxonomies are structured knowledge representations that support semantic search, recommendation, product catalog organization, and retrieval-augmented generation. Their automated construction from a fixed set of candidate entities requires more than plausible text generation: the resulting hierarchy must be complete, structurally valid, and semantically coherent. Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising for this task, but iterative free-form generation remains vulnerable to omitted or hallucinated entities, invalid hierarchical relations, and inconsistent organizational principles. We introduce TIGA (Taxonomy Induction with Tool-Grounded Agents), a knowledge-engineering architecture that formulates taxonomy induction as an iterative decision process over an explicit state and constrained action space. TIGA combines executable taxonomy-editing tools, an memory that records tool calls, rationales, and outcomes, and a runtime-adaptive organizational policy that the agent revises during inference. An optional global reviewer evaluates the constructed taxonomy against the candidate set and the active policy. We evaluate TIGA on four benchmark taxonomies using two LLM backbones and compare it with single-shot and iterative prompting-based baselines. TIGA achieves the strongest structural-quality results in most evaluated configurations, but does not dominate on every precision measure. The gains are accompanied by substantially higher token consumption, API-call volume, and inference time. Ablation results show consistent benefits from the policy and interaction-memory components, whereas the effect of global review depends on the dataset and the available revision budget. These findings characterize tool grounding and runtime policy adaptation as promising but costly mechanisms for improving the controlled construction of structured knowledge representations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13966
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TreeAgent: Structure-Aware Memory Agent for Processing Long Hierarchical Data
2026-11-10 11:33:05Wei Gu, Weiwei Qi, Jiajun Tang, Tianhang Zheng, Bo Chen, Zhibo Zhang, Jinfei Liu, Kui RenAbstract
Practical Web applications increasingly require agents to interpret long conversations or documents. For inputs exceeding the context windows of large language models (LLMs), memory agents process segments sequentially and retain past information in bounded memory. However, they typically divide inputs into flat token segments without preserving structure or hierarchy, causing three limitations for structured data such as API responses or HTML documents. First, fixed-length segmentation can split fields of the same record, breaking their relationships. Second, segments lack hierarchical information, obscuring their structural context and positions. Third, successive memory updates may discard details of earlier sibling records needed for reasoning on later segments. To address these limitations, we propose TreeAgent, a structure-aware agent that uses the input hierarchy to guide both segment-wise context processing and access to past information. Specifically, TreeAgent constructs segments from complete subtrees and groups of adjacent sibling subtrees to preserve local structural relationships. We provide theoretical guarantees on segment counts to guide token budget selection toward matching the segment count of fixed-length segmentation. We further attach structural paths to the segments for the agent to identify their ancestors and hierarchical positions. We also introduce residual memory links from the segments of low-level children to the segments of high-level parents, enabling direct information flows beyond successive memory updates. We evaluate TreeAgent with four representative memory agents on eight retrieval and aggregation tasks. The inputs are derived from real-world application data in JSON, HTML, YAML, and JavaScript and range from 8K to 1M tokens. TreeAgent improves the average score across the four datasets for all four agents, with 3.61% performance gain on average.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13946
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SegDis: Foreground Segmentation Followed by Type Discrimination for Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection
2026-11-10 11:26:14Dingning Luo, Shuo Dou, Tong Jiang, Zhenhua Duan, Jiachen Zhu, Xianfeng LiAbstract
Salient and camouflaged object detection (SOD and COD) both recover foreground support, yet most joint methods output only a binary mask and therefore cannot distinguish the type. USC12K distinguishes the two types, but its baseline USCNet still binds foreground existence to the type within a single normalization, so the failure source cannot be attributed. Our cross-task study shows that foreground localization transfers between SOD and COD, whereas type discrimination does not: a COD-only model recovers foreground on SOD images but its type judgement follows the training distribution rather than the foreground-background relation, so the two decisions require separate mechanisms. SegDis factorizes the output into an explicit foreground probability and a conditional type probability given foreground: FLR provides high-quality task-agnostic support, and RTA refines the SOD/COD assignment from the foreground-background relation without a task identifier. Because support is explicit, each ground-truth foreground pixel is classified as correct-type, type-swapped, or missed, so foreground-recovery and type-assignment errors are diagnosed separately. With PVT-v2-B2, SegDis attains 68.98% FG-mIoU and 78.35% mIoU on USC12K at about one-eighth of USCNet's parameters; CSCS is 5.75.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11378
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Are Causal Neuron Circuits Unique and Transferable?
Abstract
Interpretability demonstrations often show that intervening on a group of neurons changes a model's answer. A recent example removes an 18-neuron group in Qwen3-32B and the model answers "Simba" instead of "Scar" to a two-hop Lion King riddle. Such a demonstration establishes that the group matters, but not how much of it is necessary, whether other groups could do the same, or whether the effect carries over to other inputs. We ask: when intervening on a group of neurons changes a model's answer, how much of that group is actually necessary? For every selected group we measure all 4,096 subsets of 12 MLP neurons. On a two-alternative capital task (Qwen3-0.6B), zero-ablating 12 selected neurons lowers the answer margin by 27% while random neurons barely change it, yet replacing the same neurons with their values from other questions also barely changes it: their activations are nearly constant across questions, and we find no evidence that they carry question-specific content. On two-hop relation chains, patching 12 neurons with activations from the first-hop question shifts the answer to the bridge entity (from Scar to Simba): the greedy answer starts with the bridge in 9/11 chains for Qwen3-1.7B, 9/11 for Llama-3.2-1B and 8/10 for Gemma-3-1B; random neurons never do. The full group is rarely necessary: a few neurons often suffice, and in many chains disjoint subsets each flip the answer on their own, in an exploratory analysis most often when the model is less confident. Group effects transfer to rephrasings of the same chain but are much weaker on other tested chains. We study neuron-level causal interventions and alternative subsets; we do not recover the full connectivity of circuits.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13885
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Mechanistic Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks: Methods, Frameworks, and Perspectives
2026-11-10 10:29:14Lorenzo Cirillo, Irene Amerini, Andrea CavallaroAbstract
Deep neural networks underpin fundamental tasks in a wide range of signal domains, such as image, audio, and language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are notably difficult to interpret. Internal activations are structured signals transformed across layers that may encode a multitude of interdependent relationships, as individual neurons frequently represent multiple underlying concepts. Mechanistic interpretability aims to uncover the internal mechanisms of neural networks by identifying components whose activations are causally responsible for specific behaviors. In such a context, this article provides an overview of advances in mechanistic interpretability for the analysis of causal inference in deep neural networks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13868
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Oscillatory Processing Units as a computing substrate for biomimetic intelligence
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Biological intelligence emerges from neural activity that connects sensation, memory and action. Synaptic plasticity, neuronal assemblies and oscillations provide principles for biomimetic computing, but translating them into reusable operations requires a defined computational unit. We introduce Oscillatory Processing Units (OPUs), groups of synthetic neurons sharing a rhythm. Their directed interactions transform incoming activity and prior receiving state into an Oscillatory Occupancy Space (OOS), which becomes available to subsequent computation. We show that source--receiver conditions and oscillatory organization shape these transformations, including their geometry, persistence and historical accessibility. An Atlas of measured relationships supports prospective composition with predicted response classes. Configured circuits perform logical and numerical operations, express associative recall and generate closed-loop decisions with fixed synaptic weights. OPUs and OOS establish a computing substrate for biomimetic intelligence in which experience remains part of the state through which new input becomes action.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13840
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CASCADE: Constraint-Aware SCAffolded DEcomposition for Logical Anomaly Detection
2026-11-10 09:46:23Jinchan Kim, Jinhee Im, Hyunsouk ChoAbstract
Logical Anomaly Detection (LAD) requires verifying whether all category-specific constraints, such as object counts, pairing relations, and measurement ranges, are satisfied by a query image given only a few normal references. Recent LAD methods based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) formulate this as checklist verification, decomposing the decision into independent textual checks. This decomposition, however, is text-only. Every item still reads the same unmodified query image, so the LVLM must extract different forms of visual evidence from one raw image. We identify this text-image mismatch as a constraint-specific perception gap, the source of two failure modes: instance conflation for binding constraints and scale drift for calibration constraints. To diagnose whether these failures stem from insufficient reasoning or insufficient perception, we compare textual reasoning guides and visual perception guides in a training-free setting. Our analysis shows that reasoning over the same image provides little benefit, whereas adapting the visual input to each constraint substantially improves verification accuracy. Based on this finding, we propose CASCADE, a training-free framework that extends checklist decomposition using constraint-specific visual scaffolds. We further introduce CASCADE++, which adapts these scaffolds at the object level by deriving their configurations from the constraint structure and reference distribution. Across MVTec-LOCO and VID-AD, CASCADE++ surpasses the full-shot state of the art by 3.9 AUROC points with only three references, and improves over the strongest VID-AD baseline by 11.4, transferring across multiple LVLM backbones without any training.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13820
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Relaxing Cross-Modal Correspondence for Multimodal Remote Sensing Pretraining
2026-11-10 09:38:55Xianping Ma, Yu Zhang, Mingzhe Jiang, Wanxin Xie, Qing Zhu, Nan Xu, Xiaokang Zhang, Yuanxin YeAbstract
Multimodal remote sensing pretraining commonly relies on exact instance-level correspondence across modalities, implicitly treating strictly paired observations as a prerequisite for learning transferable representations. In this work, we revisit this assumption by relaxing cross-modal correspondence from the instance level to the semantic level. We introduce Semantic Pairing (SemPair), a pairing-relaxed pretraining strategy that replaces exact instance pairs with class-consistent cross-instance pairs. To characterize the effect of correspondence relaxation, we formulate a latent-factor model that separates cross-modal dependence into shared semantic structure and instance-specific correlation, showing that SemPair preserves the former while marginalizing instance-specific cross-modal correlations in expectation. We further introduce Mixed Pairing (MixPair) as a controlled interpolation between semantic and exact pairing to study correspondence granularity along a continuous spectrum. Extensive experiments consistently show that SemPair achieves transfer performance comparable to exact pairing (ExaPair), while MixPair reveals a non-monotonic relationship between downstream transfer and the instance-pairing ratio. These results demonstrate that exact instance correspondence is not a prerequisite for effective multimodal remote sensing pretraining and establish cross-modal correspondence granularity as an important design dimension for transferable multimodal representation learning. More broadly, this finding suggests a practical route toward scaling multimodal pretraining with reduced dependence on costly instance-aligned data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13807
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MAGAR: Multimodal Agents for GUI-Based 3D Mechanical Assembly and Minimal Rework
2026-11-10 09:01:56Jingxuan Wei, Jiahao Fu, Fuqiang Wang, Xiaoming Wu, Yuwen Liu, Kaiwen Wei, Ming Yang, Junnan ZhuAbstract
A GUI command can be correct at the interface level yet still produce an incorrect assembly. An agent must identify the relevant components, respect their structural relationships, and determine which parts should move during recovery. We introduce MAGAR-Bench, a benchmark of 4,000 multimodal samples from 26 assembly families that separates Assembly Decision, Atomic Action, and Minimal Rework. For rework, the objective counts distinct moved parts within the validated recovery candidate set for each state, rather than the number of actions. We also introduce MAGAR, a selective correction framework built on a frozen policy obtained by supervised fine-tuning. Its key design matches correction granularity to output dependencies. Structured candidates revise assembly fields and rework scope, while complete action candidates keep native GUI primitives coupled with their parameters. A learned selector retains the original prediction unless a candidate passes a task-specific intervention threshold. On recorded states from held-out assembly families, MAGAR improves Overall, the task-balanced aggregate, from 37.50 to 41.39, with gains on all three tasks. Across 209 interventions, 70 correct an error and 22 introduce one. These results support task-specific correction while highlighting the remaining tradeoff between fixing errors and preserving reliable predictions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02472
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Exploring Synchrony for Communication in Modular Neural Networks
2026-11-10 09:00:23Nikolas Willems, Qiyang Sun, Bj\"{o}rn W. SchullerAbstract
One motivation for modular neural networks is to divide computation across components that learn distinct, reusable functions, which could then be recombined to support compositional generalisation. In practice, modular structure alone does not guarantee that such roles develop, and unrestricted communication between modules can undermine any specialisation that does emerge. This raises the question of how modular communication should be organised. The problem can be viewed as an analogue of the perceptual binding problem, where synchrony has been proposed as a mechanism for coordinating distributed representations. We introduce SyncNet, a modular architecture that separates module content from a dynamical phase state: learnt Kuramoto dynamics evolve the phases, while phase alignment determines communication through a shared channel. We evaluate SyncNet on Sort-of-CLEVR for relational reasoning and on SQOOP for systematic generalisation, where lower pair variety demands more recombination at test time. SyncNet gives the best held-out accuracy of the models compared at the three lowest pair varieties, by 5.1 percentage points at the hardest, and is competitive on Sort-of-CLEVR though below the strongest attention baselines. Test-time overrides show that performance depends on phases that evolve: fixed phases cost as much as no addressing at all, and permuting which module holds which region is nearly as damaging. A content-addressed variant trained from scratch nonetheless matches it, so the benefit appears to come from the modular decomposition rather than synchrony itself.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13759
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