Generating parametric CAD models requires accurate geometry and stable feature dependencies. Existing methods face challenges in selecting geometric references, interpreting sketch-plane local coordinates, and establishing sketch constraints to projected external geometry. We present Vision2CAD, a visual agent harness that combines vision-language model (VLM) reasoning with deterministic CAD kernel operations. An ID-based interface supports explicit geometry selection, a local-coordinate bridge converts view coordinates into sketch coordinates, and projected-edge localization supports external sketch constraints. These mechanisms establish feature dependencies within the supported modeling operations and constraint types. We also introduce the Geometry Explicit Reference Dataset (GERD), which aligned commands, geometry states and IDs at every modeling step. On GERD-EVL and a DeepCAD test subset, Vision2CAD improves mIoU by 11.1\% and 5.6\% and reduces Chamfer distance by 17.3\% and 41.8\%, respectively. Parameter-editing experiments and ablation studies further proved the preservation of parametric dependencies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22688
Large language models are usually interpreted through concepts that humans already possess: truthfulness, refusal, deception, personality, harmfulness, and related categories. This paper asks whether models may also represent and use distinctions for which no adequate human concept exists. We call such internal structures xeno-representations, and their study xeno-interpretability. We distinguish the human-interpretable semantic space from the xeno-semantic space: the region of model-native representations for which no adequate human conceptual counterpart is available. We show that the space of possible internal distinctions in an LLM is substantially larger than the space available through finite human descriptions. We then separate experimental identification from semantic interpretation: an internal representation may be reproducibly located, geometrically characterized, causally manipulated, and linked to downstream behaviour even when its semantic content cannot be adequately expressed in human terms. On this basis, we sketch an empirical programme to identify xeno-representations. We finally examine the implications for AI safety and multi-agent systems, where model-native representations may propagate and stabilize across interacting agents while remaining only partially visible through human-readable communication. Xeno-interpretability therefore shifts the aim of interpretability from finding human concepts inside models toward discovering and characterizing the representational structures that are native to the models themselves and might affect their behaviour in unpredictable ways.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20408
Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated in realistic desktop environments, but existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of professional engineering workflows whose outputs are persistent, structured artifacts. Mechanical computer-aided design (CAD) is a particularly demanding setting: an agent must manipulate geometry and constraints over long interaction horizons while producing a native project whose dimensions, construction structure, and downstream engineering state remain valid. We introduce \textbf{CADWorld}, a benchmark for long-horizon computer use in FreeCAD. CADWorld contains 200 tasks spanning 11 mechanical-CAD workflow categories, including sketching, part modeling, assembly, CAM, FEM, measurement, mesh processing, and technical drawing. Agents operate through screenshots and GUI actions, while success is determined by task-specific executable checks over saved FreeCAD artifacts and auxiliary outputs, covering geometric properties, parametric structure, constraints, manufacturing state, and simulation results. Across seven current agents on the full benchmark, the strongest agent achieves 17.5\% success, compared with an 87.0\% expert reference pass. We find that weaker agents often fail before producing a valid artifact, whereas stronger agents increasingly fail on structural, geometric, and construction-process requirements. CADWorld therefore exposes a gap between general GUI competence and reliable execution of persistent, verifiable engineering workflows. Project accessible at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16251
While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett's work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is "yes", then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15407
Zero-shot vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE) increasingly places foundation vision-language models (VLMs) inside the navigation loop. Existing systems commonly request cardinal outputs such as waypoints, pixels, headings, progress values, or absolute arrival decisions, coupling a generative response to geometric magnitude or an irreversible commitment. We study a complementary model-robot interface: the VLM compares controller-constructed alternatives, while geometry, thresholds, action magnitude, and execution remain on the physical side. We instantiate this idea in C2Nav, a training-free framework with three coordinated faculties. Seeing performs ordinal Gaze Election over physically vetted candidate views; Remembering maintains a compact route sketch and compares adjacent instruction-leg hypotheses; and Arriving combines a hesitation ladder, look-back comparison, and revocable walk-back for reliable stopping. On the public OpenNav R2R-CE 100 protocol, C2Nav with Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct obtains 41.0% OSR, 31.0% SR, and 16.7% SPL, while the same interface with the standard GPT-5.5 model reaches 54.0% OSR, 44.0% SR, and 29.0% SPL. Whole-faculty ablations reduce SR to 14.0% without Seeing, 25.0% without Remembering, and 29.0% without Arriving. Matched role inversions that replace only the comparative answer form with cardinal/absolute questions reduce SR to 12.0%, 28.0%, and 21.0% in the spatial, transition, and terminal slots, respectively. The results indicate that a constrained decision interface and stronger VLM reasoning are complementary rather than interchangeable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15142
This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14803
Language-model agents are increasingly deployed through diverse harnesses that differ in system prompts, tool schemas, control loops, and trajectory formats. The same model can perform unevenly across these interfaces, making robustness to harness variation an important objective. A natural approach is to train a shared policy through multiple harnesses, but doing so introduces a scheduling problem: each training step should favor a harness that currently provides a useful learning signal while also producing an update that benefits the other harnesses. We develop HarnessBandit, an online scheduler that selects one harness per optimizer step. After a group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) update, it observes learnability -- the mean absolute advantage on the batch -- and transferability -- the cosine between a low-dimensional gradient sketch of the current harness and exponential moving averages of the remaining harnesses. The two signals are fused after pooled sliding-window min-max normalization and sampled with a visit-dependent bonus and an explicit exploration floor. We train Qwen3.5-2B across six harnesses on ClawGym and evaluate on PinchBench (held-out tasks, in-distribution OpenClaw) and ClawEval (held-out tasks and harness). HarnessBandit improves over mixed-batch multi-harness training on both benchmarks, while training diagnostics indicate that learnability and transferability provide distinct, evolving signals.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13739
Robot swarms are increasingly used in applications where accessible interaction with non-expert users is desirable. This paper investigates freehand sketching as an end-user programming interface for specifying robot swarm geometries. Users communicate spatial intent through a drawing, while the swarm autonomously extracts target formation points, constructs a rigid formation graph, assigns robots to formation nodes, and executes distributed formation control with a guarantee against unintended reflected formations. The resulting sketch-to-swarm framework is evaluated through a human study examining the usability of freehand formation specification. Twenty participants generated $42$ geometric shapes, and the interface achieved a mean System Usability Scale score of $84.25$, which conventionally indicates high perceived usability. The results support freehand sketching as an intuitive interaction abstraction for human-swarm collaboration without requiring robotics or programming expertise.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11078
Synthetic data has become a promising way to scale model training beyond limited human-generated data but it may also induce strong model collapse (Dohmatob et al., 2024), where any fixed fraction of synthetic data prevents model performance from improving under data scaling, leaving a non-vanishing excess risk floor. In this paper, we study how synthetic data affects the generalization of one-pass SGD in high-dimensional linear regression with model shift. We establish finite-sample risk bounds for mixed and two-stage training, separating standard bias and variance from source-mismatch effects, namely fluctuation and persistent drift under mixing and filtered initialization bias under two-stage. These bounds reveal a sharp contrast: mixed training induces strong model collapse, while two-stage training avoids the floor by using synthetic data only in the first stage, showing that collapse is not inevitable under a simple data curriculum. Under a random sketch model, we further obtain scaling laws for both protocols, with tight results for mixed training in the optimization-saturated regime. These laws show that larger models may amplify synthetic-induced degradation under mixing, and quantify how high-quality synthetic pretraining may reduce bias in two-stage training. Finally, we establish an exact finite-sample necessary-and-sufficient condition for two-stage training to strictly outperform real-only training under the same real-data budget and identical real-stage updates. Overall, our results highlight that synthetic data is neither inherently harmful nor beneficial; its effect depends critically on both its quality and the training protocol used to incorporate it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09572
Modeling long-term user behavior is central to sequential recommendation and billion-scale industrial recommender systems, yet production ranking models operate under strict latency, memory, communication, and training-throughput constraints. At the 100K scale, the challenge extends beyond attention complexity: raw sequence features must be stored, transferred, and repeatedly processed during training and online serving. Existing approaches based on history truncation, multi-stage behavior retrieval, compressed lifelong histories, or train-short/infer-long extrapolation either weaken end-to-end optimization or retain substantial length-dependent cost. We present SequenceO1, an end-to-end framework for ultra-long user behavior sequence modeling, deployed at full traffic on Douyin with histories of up to 100K interactions. SequenceO1 follows a compress-then-reason design. Its Sketch Attention (SA) uses learnable prototypes and prototype-wise normalization to compress the raw history into a fixed-size, target-agnostic user representation. Target-conditioned Stacked Target-to-History Cross Attention (STCA) then models complementary time scales: a recent 10K suffix for short-term interests and the compact sketch for long-term preferences. To make training and inference practical, SequenceO1 combines low-rank user representation caching, multi-request user-level batching, pipeline lift, and a fused FlashSA kernel to amortize feature storage, communication, and computation across targets, training instances, and consecutive requests. Production experiments show consistent offline and online gains, while the compact cached sketch retains most of the benefit of directly scaling end-to-end sequence ranking to 100K. These results provide a practical model-system approach to efficient attention, sequence compression, and scalable long-sequence and long-context recommendation systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08443
Natural-language Computer-Aided Design (CAD) code generation aims to turn design intent into executable and editable parametric programs. Large language models (LLMs) make this goal increasingly practical, but useful systems must preserve the construction process behind the rendered geometry. Existing benchmarks and methods mostly focus on how closely the generated CAD model matches the reference geometry, often using metrics such as Intersection over Union (IoU). Such metrics can miss errors in part decomposition, construction hierarchy, Boolean operations, sketch structure, and geometric relations. This gap calls for a representation that makes design intent explicit and lets a system check generated code against that intent. We propose CIT-CAD, a framework that infers a Constraint Intent Tree (CIT) from the input description to represent the intended entities, hierarchy, operations, and relations. The tree has two roles: it guides CAD code generation and defines expected constraints for verification. The framework extracts actual constraints from the generated program, compares them with the expected constraints, and uses mismatches to localize and repair design violations. Experiments show that the framework improves CAD generation performance, with larger gains on more complex multi-entity designs. By turning design intent into an explicit and checkable object, this work is the first attempt to move text-to-CAD generation beyond rendered-geometry matching toward construction-aware synthesis, verification, and repair.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07434
Large language models are now trained and evaluated under a diverse set of paradigms: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), few-shot in-context learning (ICL), KL-regularized RLHF/RLVR, on-policy distillation (OPD), and test-time reasoning with search and chain-of-thought. These methods are often discussed as fundamentally different, and recent empirical results--such as the mixed impact of few-shot prompting on RL-tuned reasoning models--can appear puzzling. This note develops a Bayesian perspective that puts these procedures on the same footing. At the core is a two-step template: (i) construct a (generalized) Bayes or Gibbs posterior q* over outputs or actions given a context, using a prior/reference model and a utility signal (log-likelihood, reward, or advantage); and (ii) approximate q* by a forward-KL projection onto a parametric family, either in-weights (SFT/RL) or in-context (ICL). Part I formalizes few-shot ICL and SFT as amortized and-weights projections onto the Bayes posterior predictive. Parts II-IV show that KL-regularized RLHF/RLVR, reward-weighted SFT, reward-weighted ICL (RW-ICL), and advantage-weighted SFT (AWSFT) are all instances of forward-KL projection onto posteriors induced by rewards or advantages. We disentangle where these equivalences hold (objectives and first-order updates) and where they do not (source and granularity of the learning signal). Part V sketches implications for modern reasoning pipelines: RLHF/RLVR recipes as "posterior design + projection", why cold-start or supervised warm-up is practically unavoidable for importance-weighted KL projections, and DeepSeek-R1 and o1-style reasoning models as combining test-time Bayesian search with training-time KL amortization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05111
Multimodal Sewing pattern generation aims to infer executable sewing patterns from design cues such as sketches and textual descriptions. As an interpretable and simulation-compatible representation, sewing patterns are particularly valuable for digital garment creation. However, existing methods often model garment specifications as flat long sequences, which entangles garment structure with detailed parameters and leads to redundant components, inaccurate local details, and poor simulation compatibility. In this paper, we present GarmentWeaver, a schema-aware framework for multimodal Sewing pattern generation. GarmentWeaver constructs compact hierarchical targets by activating garment-relevant structural branches and predicts executable Sewing patterns in a structured manner. Specifically, we introduce a schema-aware target construction strategy, build the generator on top of a pretrained vision-language model for multimodal garment understanding, and impose feasibility-aware regularization to encourage structurally valid and simulation-compatible outputs. Extensive experiments show that GarmentWeaver produces more accurate and more executable sewing patterns than strong baselines, while also yielding better simulation results. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of schema-aware structured generation for reliable multimodal Sewing pattern prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30550
Manga visual question answering requires models to answer questions over panel-based visual narratives, where relevant evidence is distributed across ordered panels, embedded text, recurring characters, and implicit event transitions. This structure makes passive page encoding insufficient, as the model must identify which panels to inspect, what clues to retain, and when the accumulated evidence is sufficient for answering. We propose ManGo (Manga Active Narrative Grounding Optimization), an unsupervised framework for active manga visual question answering. ManGo introduces Active Narrative Sketching (ANS), which iteratively selects panels, extracts concise grounded clues, and decides when to stop, forming a compact question-directed evidence sketch before answer generation. To optimize this behavior without human-annotated answers or rationale paths, ManGo samples multiple ANS rollouts and applies group-relative training with two rewards: answer preference from listwise self-ranking and path consistency from stable ordered panel trajectories. The combined reward is optimized with group-relative policy training, encouraging the model to improve both final answers and the panel-level evidence paths that support them. Experiments on standard manga understanding benchmarks show that ManGo achieves state-of-the-art performance across different settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29865
Reliable semantic representations derived from city-scale 3D models are increasingly important for urban analysis, infrastructure monitoring, autonomous systems, and heritage conservation. However, urban scenes of large spatial extent captured through aerial surveying differ substantially from the indoor, object-level, and self-driving LiDAR data used to pretrain most 3D self-supervised models. We introduce Polis, to our knowledge the first application of Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) as an objective for a native point cloud encoder, and evaluate it through a frozen-feature benchmark spanning fourteen city- and building-scale corpora. Polis combines geometrically matched cosine invariance, SIGReg, and VICReg-style anti-collapse terms with a 12.8k-scene outdoor pretraining mixture and gravity-preserving spatial view sampling. Controlled ablations show that this objective outperforms student--teacher architecture alternatives, as well as Polis versions without anti-collapse terms, on the same representative outdoor corpus. On three pretraining-disjoint city datasets, Polis reaches $23.8\%$ mean mIoU versus $16.3\%$ for the next-best encoder under high-capacity frozen probing, and $17.3\%$ versus $16.1\%$ at a matched point and voxel budget. The same city-scale lead holds on datasets whose training sets were seen in pretraining. On localized terrestrial captures with fine-grained facade and streetscape labels, the ranking reverses. Our results show that distributionally-regularized joint embedding architectures can be successful on challenging city-scale 3D scenes, and that transfer improves when self-supervision is designed for the capture geometry and spatial context of this domain while also revealing the limits of this specialization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29426
Early-stage product design retrieval often requires more than category recognition: designers may need reference examples that match both a short semantic intent and a rough structural cue. Existing product-image resources and generic image--text retrieval benchmarks rarely separate category retrieval from within-category structural fit. We present Sketch2Inspire, built from a curated subset of Amazon Berkeley Objects with aligned text queries, edge-based sketch-proxy queries, and fused text--sketch queries. The resource separates broad category-level retrieval from structure-sensitive within-category retrieval and includes a human-graded reference protocol for calibration. We evaluate a lightweight reference system based on pretrained CLIP-family encoders, comparing text-only retrieval, sketch-only retrieval, weighted late fusion, and text-first reranking without updating model weights. Under broad relevance, late fusion obtains the highest score (nDCG = 0.9962). Under automatic structure-sensitive relevance, late fusion again obtains the highest score (nDCG = 0.7015), exceeding text-only retrieval (nDCG = 0.5912). In the human-graded results, late fusion obtains the highest nDCG@10 (0.9133), while text-only retrieval ranks second (0.9030). These results show that the retrieval gain from multimodal input depends on how relevance is defined. Sketch2Inspire therefore provides a diagnostic resource for evaluating modality contribution and supports the development of structure-aware product-retrieval protocols with independent human annotation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29364
Computer-aided design is central to industrial manufacturing, and much of a designer's daily work consists of editing existing models from multimodal requests involving speech, sketches, and model interaction. Existing neural CAD approaches focus predominantly on unconditional or text-conditioned generation. The neuralCAD-Edit approach formalizes expert multimodal editing requests, but its iterative baseline refines a complete CAD program across attempts, executing each attempt from the original model in a stateless CAD environment. Every attempt must therefore reconstruct the entire edit from scratch, so partially correct progress is discarded rather than accumulated, and the model can neither inspect the geometry it has just produced nor selectively revert a single faulty operation. We present AgenticCADedit, which turns editing into a sequence of small, verifiable actions on a persistent CAD state instead of a single regenerated program. Rather than emitting one complete program, it applies incremental code steps that each commit to the session, inspects the resulting faces and edges, renders highlighted selections to verify that the intended region was addressed, and reverts individual operations when it was not. Subsequent actions therefore build on the geometry produced by earlier ones. Our approach improves on all metrics for all three evaluated LLMs (open-weight: qwen3.6-27b, gemma4-31b; proprietary: gpt-5.6-luna), with the largest gains for the weakest baseline model, qwen3.6-27b, whose validity rises from 51.0% to 94.8% and acceptance from 1.6% to 12.0%. A token-cost analysis with gpt-5.6-luna further shows $66.7$% fewer output tokens than neuralCAD-Edit, while $94.8$% of input tokens are served from the prompt cache.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29621
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) for world modeling typically employ fixed-size Vision Transformer encoders that are over-provisioned for simple tasks and under-provisioned for complex ones, with significant redundancy across attention heads. We propose Successive Capacity Growth (SCG), a method that starts from a minimal encoder (1 head, 2 layers, 283K parameters) and grows incrementally in width (adding attention heads for low-level semantic capacity) or depth (adding transformer blocks for higher-order semantic abstraction), driven by a task-agnostic test-and-verify mechanism that exploits function-preserving expansion to safely trial architectural changes and roll back if they do not improve prediction loss. The Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) ensures that all learned semantic dimensions remain statistically independent and aligned with the predictive objective, preventing collapse even as the architecture grows. On a 60-dimensional multi-object dynamics task, SCG naturally triggers depth expansion, improving prediction loss by 20.3% over the fixed small baseline with 56 times greater parameter efficiency than scaling to the fixed large model; on a 2D navigation task, a single width expansion yields even an 23% improvement over the fixed large model. Across all three tested environments of increasing complexity, the adaptive encoder matches or exceeds the fixed small baseline, with zero false-positive expansions and bit-exact function preservation (ratio = 1.0, absolute difference = 0.0). The take-away is that JEPA world model encoders need not be pre-allocated at maximum capacity - they can grow successively as the task demands, achieving significant compute and data efficiency while maintaining representation quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27367
Self-supervised representation learning for 4D point cloud videos is challenging because annotations are costly and reconstruction-based pretraining can overemphasize low-level geometric details. We propose a JEPA-style framework that learns from unlabeled spatiotemporal point clouds through latent point-tube prediction. Instead of reconstructing raw coordinates, the model masks spatiotemporal regions and predicts their target representations from visible context representations in feature space. To stabilize latent prediction, we incorporate Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization, which encourages non-collapsed embeddings without relying on explicit reconstruction targets. This formulation aims to capture both spatial structure and temporal dynamics while keeping the pretraining objective aligned with downstream semantic recognition. Experiments on action and gesture recognition benchmarks show that the learned representations improve downstream fine-tuning, limited-label learning, and cross-dataset transfer. These results suggest that JEPA-style latent prediction is a promising alternative to reconstruction-centered pretraining for 4D point cloud videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24093
This data article describes a multimodal collection of scanned examination answers paired with expert-designed Outcome-Based Education (OBE) grading metadata. The collection contains 485 answer submissions from 415 consenting students at four academic institutions. Eight faculty contributors supplied examination materials covering nine subjects and 12 distinct question templates. Each answer-level item links a scanned PDF to a randomized identifier, subject label, question, model answer, criterion definitions, performance-level descriptions, criterion marks, and a total mark. The 12 rubrics contain 47 criteria in total. The scans retain realistic academic content, including handwriting, printed text, equations, tables, code, figures, sketches, and diagrams. CamScanner, Adobe Scan, and conventional scanners contributed variation in illumination, contrast, orientation, compression, and resolution. Diverse handwriting, crossed-out work, revised calculations, and inserted corrections add further visual variability for robustness and generalization studies. Preparation involved heterogeneous-source consolidation, label and text standardization, score validation, identifier randomization, filename randomization, and JSON-to-PDF integrity checks. An answer-level audit confirmed 485 unique identifiers, 485 unique PDF filenames, agreement between each total mark and its criterion-mark sum, and scores within the applicable rubric maximum. The data can support rubric-aware automated evaluation, multimodal document understanding, criterion-level feedback, score prediction, and privacy-aware OBE assessment research. Access is restricted to research use and is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22346