Survey
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Reality and Perceptual Gaps in Expressive Swarm Robotics
2026-11-04 17:56:05Ali Imran, Abdalwhab Bakheet Mohammed Abdalwhab, Rafael Gomes Braga, H\'el\`ene Duval, Audrey Rochette, Vivek Shankar Varadharajan, Yann Bouteiller, Jean Mazerolle, Giovanni Beltrame, David St-OngeAbstract
Moving robot swarms from simulation into the physical world can be difficult because small discrepancies in hardware, timing and communication can cascade across interacting robots and alter group behaviour. This challenge is known as the reality gap. When swarms operate in human environments, a second challenge emerges: a perceptual gap between what the swarm physically does and what human onlookers actually perceive. This study examines the same decentralised coordination code deployed across three robotic swarms-tabletop, aerial and human-scale mobile manipulators-during live artistic performances. We find that while the underlying algorithms executed reliably on all three platforms, physical embodiment drastically altered visible motion-distorting execution timescales by more than a factor of three and reshaping trajectory geometry. More importantly, audience surveys revealed that human interpretation does not mirror technical success: how observers attribute meaning (perceived purpose) and how they react emotionally (comfort versus threat) depend heavily on physical form. Meaning attribution and emotional responses did not vary together. Our results demonstrate that successfully transferring swarm software to physical hardware is insufficient for real-world deployment. Addressing the reality gap does not guarantee that the resulting collective motion will be readily interpreted by human observers. Swarms destined for human environments must be engineered not only for decentralised stability but also for the expressive physical dynamics through which humans interpret collective motion.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05244
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Dexterous Robotic Hands in the Foundation-Model Era: A Full-Stack Survey of Hardware, Data, Cross-Embodiment Transfer, Learning, and Evaluation
2026-11-04 16:13:29Ji PeiAbstract
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06724
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LifeVal: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Personalized Agentic Consumer Tasks
2026-11-04 15:55:20Jenny Yang, Elizabeth Proehl, Anjan Bharadwaj, Emily Fan, Charlotte Cole, James Kim, Noam Brown, Phoebe Thacker, Amelia Glaese, Tejal PatwardhanAbstract
We introduce LifeVal, a benchmark evaluating AI model performance on personalized agentic consumer tasks. LifeVal covers the most valuable life tasks that a personalized digital superassistant could automate, representing over 1.7 trillion US dollars in annual willingness-to-pay across 148 consumer task categories (e.g., managing finances, moving apartments, searching for a job, finding childcare). To construct our activity distribution, we conducted a new survey of willingness-to-pay for a digital superassistant across a demographically representative sample of over 3,800 consumers, cross-referencing our results against the American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025) and the Multinational Time Use Study (Fisher et al., 2025). For the most valuable consumer activities, we recruited task creators to create AI evaluation tasks personalized using real ChatGPT conversations and memories, reference files, and personal context. Task creators had to pass our expertise threshold (including personally completing the task multiple times and seeing the results through in their real lives for over a year) and also write a rubric, ensuring that our evaluation measured the best personalized completion for that task. All tasks had to pass at least three rounds of human quality-control before acceptance into our final evaluation sets.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06687
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Object-independent evaluation of small-data astronomical image classifiers: architecture, representation, and acquisition shortcuts
Abstract
Reported performance in small astronomical image datasets can reflect object reuse, field-of-view differences, acquisition settings, and catalogue-derived properties as well as astronomical morphology. We designed \dataset{} to measure these effects in a four-class task comprising galaxies, globular clusters, nebulae, and open clusters. The dataset contains 370 catalogue-supported physical objects, each represented by three Digitised Sky Survey FITS bands, and uses a group-constrained split of 222 training, 75 validation, and 73 test objects. We compared a custom CNN--Transformer trained from scratch with ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 under an adaptive full-field representation, a common angular field, and two central-region-masked controls, using three fixed seeds. In the one-pass object-independent test, mean balanced accuracy on the adaptive view was $0.773\pm0.014$, $0.874\pm0.054$, and $0.866\pm0.023$ for the custom model, ResNet-50, and ViT-B/16, respectively. No primary architecture contrast rejected its null after Holm correction; ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 differed by 0.007 balanced-accuracy points (95\% cluster-bootstrap interval $[-0.048,0.062]$). Controls based on acquisition and catalogue metadata reached 0.721--0.735, and central-region-masked adaptive views reached 0.731--0.800. These results demonstrate generalisation to unseen physical objects, but also show that image context, acquisition settings, and catalogue-derived object properties carry substantial class information. In this regime, high accuracy cannot be interpreted as evidence that a classifier learned target morphology, and the comparison does not isolate architecture from pretraining.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06484
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Rohbau3D-Semantics: Dense Semantic and Instance Labels for Point Clouds of Indoor Shell Construction Scenes
2026-11-04 08:59:39Lukas Rauch, Thomas BramlAbstract
We present the Rohbau3D-Semantics dataset, which adds dense semantic and instance-level labels to laser scans of the previously released Rohbau3D domain data from shell construction sites. The dataset comprises 504 point cloud scenes from 14 survey sites, each captured with a terrestrial laser scanner and stored in a scanner-centered local coordinate system. Unlike point clouds sampled from reconstructed meshes or synthetic building models, the data preserve the characteristic properties of real laser scanning, including non-uniform sampling, measurement artifacts, reflections, and fine geometric detail. Combined with manual labels, expert oversight during pointwise annotation, and full-scene review, this yields a high-quality benchmark for semantic scene understanding in complex built environments. The dataset includes 17 class labels of building components and one background class, along with instance annotations for object-level analysis. In addition to the 3D point clouds, the release also provides scripts for deriving geometrically aligned panoramic and cube-map representations of color, LiDAR reflection intensity, depth, surface normals, semantic labels, and instance labels from the 3D arrays. We describe the acquisition pipeline, annotation protocol, quality-control process, and panorama-generation procedure, and provide benchmark splits and baseline experiments for semantic segmentation. By combining precise terrestrial laser scans, dense annotations, and a wide variety of shell-construction scenes, Rohbau3D-Semantics bridges the gap among synthetic indoor datasets, mesh-derived benchmarks, and smaller construction-specific resources. The dataset is intended to support research on 3D scene understanding, construction-site analytics, and multimodal scene analysis in the built environment. Access and download the full dataset via this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06180
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Graph-Mediated Large Language Model Systems in the Agentic Era: Reasoning, Knowledge, Retrieval, Execution, and Coordination
2026-11-04 04:47:38Haihui Liu, Yang Chen, Zice Qiu, Yun Zhang, Jialun Zhong, Wenhua Wang, Yanzeng Li, Tian WangAbstract
Graphs play an increasingly important role in large language model (LLM) systems, supporting structural reasoning, knowledge grounding, retrieval, and memory. As these systems evolve toward the agentic era, graphs also organize execution dependencies and multi-agent communication, linking intermediate observations and retained information to subsequent decisions. However, understanding their contribution requires distinguishing the function of each graph operation, the component responsible for its computation, and the subsequent use of its output. This survey introduces an operation-level role--locus taxonomy for reasoning, knowledge and evidence, retrieval and memory, execution, and coordination. We compare how graph observations and external computations guide decisions, how memory representations and updates support later tasks, and how dependencies constrain execution and information delivery. These comparisons distinguish improvements in local metrics from downstream task performance while retaining the conditions under which results were reported. We then organize benchmarks, comparison designs, process diagnostics, and system costs into an evaluation framework. Finally, we identify open challenges in adaptive computation and stopping, memory maintenance, and dependency-aware recovery. The survey provides a basis for assessing when graph mechanisms are useful and for evaluating their effects across components and stages.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05953
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High-fidelity training-free photovoltaic module mapping from multi-view UAV imagery
2026-11-04 04:03:53WenHao Duan, Qi Chen, Penglei Zhang, Ruizhe Deng, Zhiling Guo, Haoran Zhang, Yuntian ChenAbstract
High-fidelity photovoltaic (PV) module mapping requires complete instance recovery and accurate delineation. Vision foundation models offer zero-shot segmentation, but converting incomplete and inconsistent predictions across views into a complete, geometrically accurate map of individual modules remains challenging. We propose the Multi-View PV Module Mapper (MV-PVMapper), a training-free framework coupling vision foundation models with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry. First, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) generates candidates from original images using text prompts. Their contours are then transferred into object space through per-module slope correction to limit distortion from surface-model noise, and verified against representative module dimensions to guide cross-view instance selection. Finally, accepted instances return to all covering images as box prompts for SAM~3, supplementing text prompts with spatial cues for iterative segmentation, verification and fusion. On five-direction surveys of three operational rooftop PV plants at approximately 1 cm nadir ground sampling distance, two feedback iterations recover 7,710 of 7,711 reference modules with no false positives at an intersection-over-union (IoU) matching threshold of 0.5. Macro-averaged area precision and recall reach 99.00 % and 98.52 %, respectively. Averaged across sites, the aggregated Jaccard index reaches 97.55 %, compared with 60.73 % and 41.24 % for orthomosaic segmentation and multi-view pixel-voting baselines, respectively; average precision at the stricter IoU threshold of 0.95 reaches 95.67 %. Ablation studies show that module-size constraints are critical for instance separation, while slope correction and feedback to all covering views improve boundary accuracy. These results are achieved without task-specific image annotation or segmentation-model weight updates.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05131
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Does Your Trial Simulator Know What the Drug Does? An Intervention-Blind Test of Interventional Validity on 7,207 Registered Trials
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Patient world models are increasingly proposed as simulators of clinical trials, and recent surveys rank their capabilities on a ladder from temporal prediction to counterfactual rollouts. Position on that ladder is currently assigned by reading papers rather than by measurement. We turn the counterfactual rung into a measured quantity. From 30,119 completed phase 2/3 trials with results posted to this http URL we construct 9,996 audited within-trial contrasts from 7,207 trials, and we score a simulator on how much of its accuracy depends on knowing which intervention was tested. The instrument is an intervention-blind reference: the same model, trained on the same trials, with every intervention-identifying field withheld. Interventional skill is the error the full model removes relative to that reference. On a temporal split (878 test contrasts from 655 trials) a registry-trained gradient-boosting simulator removes a fifth of the error of a trivial baseline, but its interventional skill is -0.12 (95% CI -0.21 to -0.05): withholding the intervention makes it better, and no alternative featurisation, stratum, temporal cut or same-molecule retrieval yields an interval above zero. A frontier language model reading only the registered protocol has interventional skill 0.20 [0.08, 0.31]; smaller and open-weight models sit at the limit of detection. Perturbation tests show the large model uses the intervention as such: swapping the arms reverses the sign of its prediction in 86% of contrasts. The blind reference is itself not drug-blind (a language model recovers the withheld drug class 45% of the time from the blind prompt), so interventional skill is a conservative lower bound. A reliability layer shows that ranking by predicted error lowers it but that calibrated error control does not transfer under temporal shift. Benchmark, code, prompts and per-call model outputs are released.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05907
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Unsupervised Neural Operators for Rotating Relativistic Stars: High-Fidelity Equation of State Inference and Pulsar Spin Evolution at Scale
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Observed populations of rotating neutron stars~(NSs) with millisecond-order periods are powerful probes of fundamental physics. Mass-radius measurements inform poorly constrained properties of degenerate nuclear matter, whereas high-fidelity population synthesis connects unknowns in NS formation and binary evolution to large radio-timing surveys. However, repeated structure calculations are prohibitive due to the computational cost of solving the highly coupled partial differential equations of axisymmetric general relativistic hydrostatic equilibrium that govern rotating NS interiors. Non-rotating calculations or approximate rotational corrections can bias equation of state inference and limit the fidelity of population synthesis in tracing the evolutionary history of progenitors and propagating equation of state uncertainties. In this \textit{Letter}, we develop physics-informed neural operators that can solve the axisymmetric problem with high accuracy and negligible computational cost. \textit{Our solvers are trained in a fully unsupervised setting, with the training objective informed solely by the partial differential equations, and achieve a $10^3\times$ speed-up with negligible accuracy loss}. These solvers enable scalable EoS inference that self-consistently accounts for rotation and repeated stellar-structure calculations during binary evolution, making spin predictions that account for rotational structure and EoS uncertainties computationally accessible to population synthesis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05790
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Pairing Expert Critique with LLM-Driven Refinement: An Iterative Approach for Curating Quality AI Evaluation Datasets
Abstract
Evaluating and improving domain-specific LLM responses requires high-quality reference data and rubrics, yet expert authoring is slow and expensive, and synthetic datasets may fail to capture practitioner preferences unless they are grounded in expert judgment. We present SME-C (Subject Matter Expert Critique), a human-AI workflow that captures expertise through lightweight critiques of candidate responses and complements it with LLM-driven analysis and refinement to iteratively curate response datasets and evaluation rubrics. We validate SME-C in the domain of financial business briefs, collecting 3,853 critiques from 411 finance professionals on 520 queries across two survey rounds. We evaluate two LLM-driven refinement strategies: one guided by the experts' written critiques and one that infers critique solely from their preference votes. In a blind validation survey with 100 additional professionals, we found that both strategies significantly improved quality over the experts' top-ranked baseline responses. The gains were concentrated among weaker original responses, and the two strategies excelled in different ways: critique-based refinement produced more domain-grounded improvements, whereas vote-based refinement was more effective at identifying and removing irrelevant content. The resulting rubrics and refined dataset support reproducible offline evaluation and benchmarking of LLMs, suggesting that structured expert critique is a viable alternative to expert authoring for building high-quality, domain-specific evaluation resources more quickly, at scale, and at lower cost.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05749
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Decision Models as Scalable Economic Surrogates that Capture Human Variation
2026-11-03 19:47:00Maxime Saxena, Fabio Caccioli, R. Maria del Rio-ChanonaAbstract
Decision Models (DMs), a new class of AI models, give fast responses and return a probability distribution over a fixed set of options. These properties make them candidate human surrogates in economic simulations and surveys, a role increasingly filled by Large Language Models (LLMs), which are costly at scale and under-represent the variation in human behaviour. We present a first evaluation of DMs as human surrogates in economics, comparing 10 DMs with 8 LLMs in three economic settings: a household spending survey on consumption, several classic economic games and a labour-market field experiment. Frontier DMs, those that score highest on general decision-making benchmarks, reproduce the variation in human responses more closely than LLMs in all three settings. They capture the modal human response as well as LLMs in the spending survey, but less well in the economic games. Frontier DMs are also roughly ten times faster than the fastest LLM and can be over a hundred times cheaper. Together, these results suggest that DMs capture the heterogeneity of human behaviour better than LLMs and make large-scale economic simulations more feasible.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05553
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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.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05549
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How Green Is Your Manifesto? Scoring Environmental Positions in the 2024 EU Elections with an LLM Panel
Abstract
Locating political parties on environmental and climate policy is central to the study of party competition, yet the established instruments, expert surveys and the hand coding of manifestos, are costly, periodic, and slow to extend to new documents. We ask whether a panel of large language models can serve as a cheaper and reproducible alternative. Treating each manifesto as a set of sentences, three models from independent providers score every sentence on two dimensions, environmental protection and climate change, separating a party's position on an issue from the salience it gives it, and the judgments are averaged to the manifesto level. Agreement across the models is retained as a built-in reliability signal. We apply the panel to 41 manifestos from the 2024 European Parliament election, covering Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the European party families, and validate it against the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey for the 25 parties with a like-for-like expert benchmark, using the other manifestos as diagnostic cases. The panel recovers the expert ordering of parties with strong rank agreement on both dimensions, while reading them as systematically greener than experts do, a gap we interpret as the distance between manifesto promise and governing record. Inter-model disagreement modestly flags where the instrument errs, and position and salience prove related for environmental protection but independent for climate change. The result is a transparent, low-cost, and multilingual instrument that complements rather than replaces expert and hand-coded approaches; the prompt, code, and manifesto-level results are released openly.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02033
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Imputation of Public Opinion Data with Large Language Models
2026-10-30 16:50:36Tobias Holtdirk, Georg Ahnert, Joseph W Sakshaug, Anna-Carolina HaenschAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are widely evaluated as simulators of survey responses, yet applied survey research mostly faces item nonresponse. Imputation fills in those missing values to restore the overall structure of a partially observed dataset and has its own well-defined evaluation criteria, which differ fundamentally from prediction accuracy. We present the first evaluation of LLM imputation against proper multiple-imputation metrics and statistical baselines on more than 5 million imputed responses from four public opinion surveys under various missingness mechanisms. We evaluate in-context learning (ICL) for this task by investigating 84 ICL configurations and comparing the best-performing configurations on six open-weight LLMs. The strongest ICL approach improves on zero-shot persona prompting but remains, at best, competitive with statistical baselines (MICE PMM, TabPFN). ICL approaches are sensitive to survey topics and consume 2-3 orders of magnitude more compute. Moreover, prediction metrics commonly used in LLM survey simulation (macro-F1, TVD) do not reliably track imputation quality. Our findings highlight the importance of fit-for-purpose evaluation for LLM imputation, where established multiple imputation remains the better default.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09351
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Whose Values, Which Contexts, and What Signals? Grounding Cultural Value Alignment with Re3Culture
2026-10-30 14:24:09Jing Yao, Hyunjin Hwang, Weihua Zheng, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Jia Wang Peh, Dylan Raharja, JinYeong Bak, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Rui Cao, Yuki Arase, Jacki O'Neill, Zhicheng Dou, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Furu WeiAbstract
Cultural value alignment requires not only model optimization but also a well-specified target grounded in real-human evidence. Yet how such targets should be grounded in human data remains largely unexplored, raising three fundamental questions: (1) whose values should be represented? (2) where should cultural values be observed? and (3) what signals reveal underlying values? We investigate these questions through Re3Culture, a large-scale dataset linking (i) Representative communities: 700+ human participants across four cultures recruited through cultural-affiliation screening and demographic-aware sampling; (ii) Realistic scenario: culturally sensitive scenarios selected by community members, e.g., family and kinship; and (iii) Revealed value signals: 1,400+ value surveys, 20,000+ topic-grounded behavioral principles and explicit value priorities with responses for 6,000+ situated questions. Our analysis shows why these choices matter for defining the target, with three implications. First, estimating cultural values requires both community affiliation and broad internal coverage. Substituting other cultures or restricting subgroup coverage shifts value estimates. LLM simulations also disproportionately reflect particular subgroups. Second, values must be observed in concrete, community-guided situations. Abstract questionnaire profiles weakly recover situated priorities, and communities differ in which scenarios they identify as culturally value-revealing. Third, value priorities should be elicited explicitly, not learned from response preferences or bottom-line answers alone. Preferences conflate value agreement with other response-level qualities, and similar answers can be derived from different value priorities. By addressing these requirements, Re3Culture provides the first human-grounded resource that explicitly informs target definition for cultural value alignment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41793
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From Fragmentation to Fusion: A Survey and Roadmap for Omnimodal Embeddings
2026-10-30 14:07:34Ziyin Zhang, Yuyu Guo, Ying Zhang, Siqiao Xue, Zihan Liao, Jin Qin, Wenjie Yang, Siyuan Yang, Shijie Li, Cheng Chen, Hao Wu, Zhaoyang Zhu, Ruipeng Li, Zhaokun Jiang, Lei Lei, Rui Wang, Hang Yu, Rui WangAbstract
Embedding models underpin virtually every modern AI system, from search engines to recommendation systems. Despite shared mathematical foundations, research on embedding models remains fragmented by modality: the communities develop largely in isolation, seldom exchanging insights. We argue that this fragmentation obscures a deeper convergence. Driven by contrastive learning, Transformer architectures, and a granularity shift, embedding research across modalities is converging toward a common set of principles, even as modality-specific challenges remain underexplored. To reason across this convergence without conflating it, we propose a framework of three progressively harder capabilities: coverage, comparability, and compositionality. Three paths toward unification satisfy these in turn: transformation broadens coverage, alignment enables comparability, and joint embedding, the terminus we advocate, aims at compositionality. This position paper traces the resulting evolution, providing the first unified, cross-cutting treatment of omnimodal embedding research.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00172
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When the Past Shapes Action: Understanding Embodied Memory
2026-10-30 12:52:37Siqi Li, Ziyi Bai, Xinrun Xu, Tinglei Huang, B\"orje F. KarlssonAbstract
Recent advances in generative foundation models have expanded the capabilities of embodied AI, enabling increasingly general navigation, manipulation, and long-horizon task execution. However, effective interaction with dynamic environments requires more than only strong perception and reasoning: agents must act with partial knowledge and retain, retrieve, and update information from past observations, actions, and experiences. This survey examines embodied memory as a mechanism for preserving decision-relevant information beyond the current observation. We organize existing approaches along two complementary dimensions: six fundamental memory requirements, spanning world-state persistence, task progress, belief maintenance, and experiential learning; and eight architectural categories, including recurrent states, fast weights, visual and symbolic representations, spatial memory, and experience-based systems. We analyze their capabilities and limitations, and examine how existing benchmarks evaluate memory-dependent behavior, distinguishing genuine use of historical information from general task performance. Finally, we identify open challenges in selecting relevant experiences, maintaining consistent beliefs in changing environments, and consolidating knowledge across episodes. Our analysis provides a framework for understanding memory as an essential component of reliable, adaptive, and lifelong-horizon embodied intelligence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41688
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A prospective randomized study of patient-centered AI for clinical visit preparation
2026-10-30 08:39:59Xincheng Tan, Matthew Thompson, Xiang Ji, Angelica Willis, Will Vaughan, Roma Ruparel, Michael A. Sanchez, Sean Chang, Joseph Xu, Bhavna Daryani, Preeti Singh, Pinal Bavishi, Kejia Chen, Fan Zhang, Priya Gupta, Ernest Lim, Christina Chen, Bob Lou, Dimitrios Antos, Zach Wasson, Ray Luo, Fadi Yousif, Florence Thng, Mark Malhotra, Joseph Breda, Daniel McDuff, Kavi Goel, Katherine Chou, Dale R. Webster, Avinatan Hassidim, Yossi Matias, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Yun Liu, Mike Schaekermann, Quang Duong, Jackie M. BarrAbstract
Patients often arrive at brief, time-constrained clinical visits unsure of what to expect or ask, and millions of adults now turn to general-purpose AI chatbots to prepare beforehand. Yet whether conversational AI improves visit readiness remains unclear. We designed a large language model (LLM)-based visit preparation agent to guide patients before an appointment by gathering clinical context, setting visit expectations, providing relevant health information, building a prioritized list of questions for their clinician, and generating a summary. In a prospective consented randomized study in the Google Health app, 802 U.S. adults held 866 health-related conversations with the visit preparation agent (standard or concise variant) or a minimally prompted control chatbot built on the same LLM. The visit preparation agent significantly outperformed the control across blinded clinician evaluations and patient self-reports. In clinician reviews of completed sessions (n = 272), the agent achieved a 16.6% higher rate of comprehensive preparation (67.2% vs. 50.6%; P < 0.05) and an 8.5% higher rate of alignment with patients' health context (98.9% vs. 90.4%; P < 0.01), while maintaining high medical safety and appropriateness across all study arms. Patient post-surveys (n = 460) showed 16.8% higher visit preparedness (73.8% vs. 57.0%; P < 0.01), 14.3% higher confidence in knowing what to ask (81.4% vs. 67.1%; P < 0.01), and 12.0% higher overall satisfaction (74.0% vs. 62.0%; P < 0.05). Clinician and participant metrics were not significantly correlated, indicating that expert review and patient self-assessment capture complementary dimensions of patient-facing AI. These findings suggest that LLM chatbots can safely help patients prepare for clinical visits, with greater benefit when following a structured workflow, and motivate future studies on in-visit communication and clinical outcomes.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41437
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TSFLab: A Self-Improving Agent-Agnostic Workbench for Time Series Forecasting Research
2026-10-29 19:22:33ChengAo Shen, Yanjun Zhao, Haoxin Liu, Bonnie Chen, Miles Ma, Dongjin Song, Hanghang Tong, Qingsong Wen, Jingrui He, Jingchao NiAbstract
As publications and products on time series forecasting (TSF) proliferate, researchers face a growing burden of analyzing existing work. First, not all publications release code. For instance, only about 20% of arXiv TSF papers have a code link in the surveyed period. Second, released code also requires manual maintenance. Thus, TSF researchers must constantly adapt or implement existing works. However, independent implementations can differ in experimental settings and are difficult to maintain. We therefore propose to use AI agents for benchmarking TSF research and even supporting autoresearch, e.g., developing new TSF models. Yet directly applying existing coding agents, such as Claude Code and Codex, is suboptimal: prohibitive costs, limited scalability to large research projects (e.g., benchmarking), and lack of self-maintenance. To address these challenges, we propose TSFLab, a self-improving agent-agnostic "workbench" that equips compatible coding agents with shared resources and tools for low-cost TSF research and continuous maintenance of research resources. Our experiments cover reproduction, benchmarking, and new method development. In reproduction and benchmarking, TSFLab improves task completion by 20-163% and cuts fresh tokens per completed task by 11-66% across baselines. A pilot study of agent-driven method development also shows improved forecasting accuracy via TSFLab, with 32.8-73.6% fewer fresh tokens and 9.2-68.8% less development time than the other settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40901
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Rebuilding a Field's Open-Problem Catalog from the Literature: A Two-Layer Knowledge Graph, and Why Status Must Stay Proposed
2026-10-29 09:01:47Madhulatha Mandarapu, Sandeep KunkunuruAbstract
A research field records its open problems in surveys, keynotes and community reports. Those are prose, written every few years, and nobody can ask them who works on a problem now or whether it was settled last year. We argue the problems should be data, and we build the system that makes them so: a hand-curated problem layer carried in unchanged, under an evidence layer rebuilt from a bibliographic index, joined by typed, provenance-carrying links in one graph database and queryable from one language. A language model does four jobs -- per-paper extraction, catalog grounding, per-paper status verdict, and idea generation -- each constrained to a candidate set so out-of-set answers are refused rather than stored. We report a study on two curated catalogs, database research (1,053 problems) and AI research (1,000 problems), each with a prior catalog-only graph. The rebuilt graph answers every question the catalog-only graph answered -- 47 of 47 on databases, 34 of 35 on AI -- plus questions the catalog-only graph refused: recent workers, untouched problems, methods tried, and outside papers bearing on a problem (336 problems, 770 works on databases). The capability we most wanted does not survive its own audit. Of 41 solves and refutes verdicts hand-checked against the papers, 9 are correct, 30 partly correct and 2 wrong; no refutes verdict (0 of 34) disproves an open problem, and only 1 of 7 solves closes the central question. We report that failure in full and draw the design conclusion: a status change must be proposed with its evidence and never applied, making the human reviewer part of the architecture. We close with the data-engineering problems this raises: entity resolution across curated and harvested layers, verifying model status claims, freshness under source quotas, and evaluation without ground truth.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39641
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