A search result can look plausible and still be wrong. Dense retrieval can return a document on the right topic but miss an exact identifier copied into the query. Sparse retrieval can miss a relevant document when the query describes it with terms the corpus doesn’t use. Either way, your logs record a successful query. Hybrid search runs dense and sparse retrieval over the same query, then merges their result lists. Dense retrieval adds semantic similarity, so paraphrases can rank together. Sparse retrieval adds weighted term matching for exact words and identifiers.

The five largest GPU neoclouds now run on very different models. CoreWeave and Nebius report to the SEC; Lambda and Crusoe are private and heading toward IPOs; Groq rebuilt itself as an inference cloud after licensing its LPU technology to NVIDIA. This comparison checks each provider's live rate card, Q2 2026 financials, active and contracted gigawatts, anchor contracts, and SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX tier. Nebius posts the lowest H100 rate and the only published B300 price, Lambda has the cheapest B200, Crusoe is the only one with AMD on its card, and CoreWeave commands a 10–15% premium as the sole Platinum-rated provider. Figures verified August 21, 2026. The post Best GPU Neoclouds 2026: CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe, and Groq Ranked by Published Pricing and Contracted Power appeared…

arXiv:2608.20904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtual scenario-based testing is a key enabler for validating automated driving systems (ADS) and intelligent transport systems (ITS). However, executing large-scale test suites involving possibly thousands of scenarios remains labor-intensive and difficult to scale. This paper presents an end-to-end, DevOps-driven framework that automates build, deployment, and distributed execution of CARLA-based scenario tests of an ADS on a lightweight Kubernetes cluster. ROS 2 applications are packaged as standardized Kubernetes Helm charts generated from repository specifications, while entire simulation environments are composed declaratively via dynamic Helmfile manifests. The paper describes how a distributed testing workflow can be implemented in…

arXiv:2608.20891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a vision-only state estimation system for X-configuration quadcopters equipped with a canonical stereo camera pair and no inertial sensors. The system operates entirely in the body frame, requiring only synchronised stereo images and motor thrust commands. A continuous-discrete extended Kalman filter on a composite manifold state $\langle SE(3), \mathbb{R}^3, \ldots \rangle$ maintains estimates of body-frame pose, velocity, angular velocity, gravity, and disturbances, using stationary scene points as implicit inertial references. Feature points are detected (FAST, Shi-Tomasi), tracked temporally (SSD, Lucas-Kanade) and matched across cameras (NCC), with search regions predicted from filter-derived pose and point uncertainty. Chi-s…

arXiv:2608.20852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a reference-guided reinforcement learning framework to generate stand-up motion for a 29-DOF Unitree G1 humanoid on deformable soft ground, using a human demonstration recorded on hard ground. The terrain compliance is modelled using solref and solimp parameters from MuJoCo's rigid body soft-contact model. The rewards consists of (i) reference motion tracking through residual joint-position control and (ii) explicit recovery objectives such as pelvis height, torso uprightness, and the final posture. First, the policy is trained with the specified rewards considering hard ground. Next, the terrain stiffness is lowered by updating solref and the nominal surface penetration zone is expanded using solimp. Subsequent training…

arXiv:2608.20823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A humanoid has infinitely many ways to stand up from sitting while maintaining balance, making sit-to-stand (STS) a challenging control problem. We synthesise natural humanoid STS motion from scratch using reinforcement learning, without demonstrations or reference trajectories. A single Proximal Policy Optimisation policy learns smooth, human-like rising driven by three complementary components. (i) A coupled force/chair-height curriculum is used. A vertical pelvis-assist force aids early trajectory exploration and decays over training. Taller chairs are unlocked with decaying assisting force. This ensures that the policy masters a viable STS trajectory at each chair height before being exposed to harder ones, avoiding the premature distrib…

arXiv:2608.20784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning for robotics depends on human demonstrations, some of which people may later ask to remove. Retraining without them is the natural reference, but its cost grows with policy and dataset scale, motivating cheaper operators that edit a trained policy. Metrics inherited from machine unlearning, such as forgetting loss or a single membership attack, do not establish what an edit removed from a policy acting in closed loop. We therefore introduce a retrain-calibrated audit that reads demonstration unlearning along two axes: behavior, whether the edited policy acts like one retrained without the removed demonstrations, and evidence, whether an auditor can still detect it was trained on them. The behavior axis measures action dive…

arXiv:2608.20655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning and control of fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are challenging due to nonlinear dynamics, aerodynamic limits, and environmental disturbances. Differential flatness offers a principled way to generate fast, feasible trajectories, but its use has largely been confined to model-free controllers, which lack predictive capabilities and demand tuning. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that integrates differential flatness-based trajectory generation with Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), combining computationally efficient planning with predictive, constraint-aware control. To further improve robustness, we introduce a wind-aware sampling strategy embedded within the NMPC framework, enabling the generation…

arXiv:2608.20556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models can follow natural-language (NL) task instructions, but such instructions may not precisely specify safety-critical or spatiotemporal requirements on the resulting behavior. We introduce Logic-VLA, a formal-requirement-aware VLA that conditions on Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications supplied at inference time. Logic-VLA uses a syntax-graph-based STL encoder pre-trained to capture temporal logic semantics. Policy adaptation proceeds in two stages: STL-conditioned supervised fine-tuning on satisfying demonstrations is followed by trajectory-level preference optimization over matched satisfying-violating rollout pairs using a flow-matching surrogate for Identity Preference Optimization. This formulatio…

arXiv:2608.20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As the demand for larger manipulation datasets grows, handheld robotic gripper data collection and the associated gripper designs become more vital. Current data collection device designs trend towards matching the morphologies of existing robotic grippers, sacrificing ergonomics and manipulation performance. In this paper, we propose a co-design framework that guides the simultaneous development of both data collection and robotic execution devices by weaving both platform constraints into the design process. Through this workflow, we present the Koala Gripper system, a data capture device and robotic gripper platform that improves dexterity and grasp capability compared to parallel jaw grippers while preserving scalability and ease-of-use.…

arXiv:2608.20478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Routine gastrointestinal endoscopy is intrinsically bidirectional: the instrument is advanced to reach target anatomy and later withdrawn or retroflexed for inspection, while an external cue may require earlier reversal. When the requested phase changes before the visual scene does, nearly identical observations can require opposite axial actions. We identify and formalize this ambiguity in bidirectional endoscopic control as intent aliasing. We propose EndoLIFT (Endoscopic Language-Instruction Flow with Trajectory Latents), a vision-language-action policy that combines explicit language-based intent conditioning with a latent-conditioned rectified-flow action expert. The policy receives RGB, a language instruction, and the previous-action s…

arXiv:2608.20433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in technology have led to increasingly sophisticated musical humanoid robots. However, their use has largely been limited to performance and related research in human-robot interaction. In this position paper, we propose a novel perspective: musical humanoid robots as experimental interfaces for investigating music-evoked emotions. We argue that current research is constrained by paradigms relying on pre-recorded auditory stimuli, which fail to capture the multimodal, embodied, and interactive nature of real-world musical experience. Building on existing theories of music cognition and emotion, we identify mechanisms that require controlled manipulation of both acoustic and non-acoustic variables. We show that humanoid robots are we…

arXiv:2608.20608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grape leaf disease recognition is important for precision agriculture, enabling early diagnosis, timely intervention, and improved vineyard management. Although deep learning has achieved strong results, many studies rely on few datasets, often acquired under controlled conditions, and may not reflect real vineyard challenges such as complex backgrounds, variable illumination, occlusion, leaf pose, disease severity, and device differences. This paper presents a dataset-centric benchmark of deep learning methods for grape leaf disease classification and detection. We analyze publicly available datasets in terms of disease categories, annotation types, acquisition conditions, image characteristics, class distributions, provenance, and task sui…

arXiv:2608.20587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe the winning entry to the MoCha 2026 Benchmark and Challenge on Parkinsonian Gait, which predicts MDS-UPDRS gait severity from canonicalized SMPL motion recorded at clinical sites unseen during training. The system reaches 0.6945 macro-F1 on the hidden test and ranked first of 58 entries, ahead of the runner-up at 0.5807 and the organizers' baseline at 0.4289, on a frozen public motion encoder with a single $4\times512$ linear layer. Nearly all of the margin comes from three stages usually treated as bookkeeping: reproducing the reference benchmark's exact head recipe, averaging per-walk posteriors within the subject grouping the organizers ship, and a label-free transductive calibration of the feature mean and the decision operat…

arXiv:2608.20558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Digital cameras embed device-specific artifacts into every acquired image through demosaicing, in-camera post-processing, and lossy compression. These traces constitute a forensic signal that can be exploited to assess image authenticity. Existing passive methods rely predominantly on the green channel of the Bayer residual, discarding the correlated information available in the remaining color channels and typically requiring training data or device enrollment. This work proposes a zero-shot, training-free blind image manipulation localization pipeline that estimates a reference artifact pattern directly from the noise residual of a single suspect image, without assuming a fixed filter configuration, color layout, or block period. The pipel…

arXiv:2608.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain shift across clinical centers using different imaging hardware or acquisition protocols remains a fundamental barrier to deploying deep learning models for prostate cancer (PCa) detection. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods address distribution shift through entropy minimization or augmentation-based self-supervision, correcting for statistical differences in image appearance but ignoring the anatomical structure of the target domain. We propose ANT, a segmentation-guided TTA framework that adapts a pretrained cancer detection encoder to the target domain by solving an auxiliary prostate segmentation task at test time, supervised by pseudo-masks from a frozen pretrained segmentation network. By aligning encoder representation…

arXiv:2608.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Disaster damage is spatial: buildings rarely fail in isolation. Yet using spatial context for damage classification remains surprisingly underexplored, and many pipelines still rely primarily on per-building appearance cues even when the dominant uncertainty is spatially structured. Complicating matters, the right neighbourhood is not the same across events. Floods, hurricanes, and wildfires can exhibit very different clustering behaviour, making spatial reasoning valuable but easy to misuse - naive context aggregation can improve visual coherence while oversmoothing boundaries or propagating structured errors. We study this tension on xBD (the dataset used in the xView2 challenge) in a controlled post-localization, classification-only setup…

arXiv:2608.20534v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating egocentric video from a single exocentric video is an emerging and important topic for AR/VR and physical AI. Compared with conventional novel view synthesis, exo-to-ego generation is a significantly harder task because the standard geometric conditioning becomes highly unreliable under extreme view changes and large unobservable regions. We present Grounded-Exo2Ego, a principled framework that addresses these challenges at both the architectural and data levels. Architecturally, Grounded-Exo2Ego is a dual-branch video diffusion model that couples a geometric anchoring branch, which conditions the generation on the rendering of a 3D reconstruction, with a novel semantic grounding branch, which goes beyond the prevailing geometry-b…

arXiv:2608.20515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative video compression can recover rich visual details at low bitrates, but simultaneously achieving high temporal consistency and low inference cost remains challenging. To address this issue, we propose DiffVC-ONE, a diffusion-based generative video compression framework built on a one-step Video Diffusion Transformer. First, we introduce a Unified Unidirectional Latent Compressor that uses a shared model to efficiently and uniformly compress compact latent slices. We then develop a Video DiT-based One-Step Diffusion Enhancer that uses the reconstructed latent slices as content anchors and performs single-step spatio-temporal perceptual enhancement over an entire group of pictures. Finally, a Hybrid Condition Generator extracts struc…

arXiv:2608.20492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become a prevailing paradigm for unified video perception. However, post-training on large multi-task datasets remains challenging, as existing reinforcement learning methods sample on-policy groups with few high-quality rollouts even with costly chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. In this paper, we study the sample efficiency and scalability of RL post-training for video MLLMs and introduce OraRL. We identify an overlooked role for annotations: Beyond scoring rollouts, each can enter its on-policy group as an oracle rollout, a direct positive optimization target. Direct oracle integration, however, is nontrivial: a high-reward oracle raises the group baseline and inverts otherwise positive policy…

arXiv:2608.20473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video language models process videos as dense visual-token sequences with substantial representational redundancy. Compressing these sequences is therefore essential for reducing the visual-token burden on language-model decoding. The central challenge is to preserve visual information dispersed across frames under such compression. To this end, we introduce Aggregating Visual Information with Optimal Transport (AVIOT), which casts video token compression as transporting a dense empirical measure of frame observations onto a compact target measure. The resulting source-to-target coupling induces a distribution over source observations for each target support, directly specifying how the compressed video representation is constructed. We furt…

arXiv:2608.20430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) improve planning by incorporating future world evolution into action generation, yet existing methods allocate a fixed imagination budget to every scene. We propose RISE (\textbf{R}efining \textbf{I}magination through \textbf{SE}lective Rollout), a system-level adaptive imagination framework that makes sequential \textsc{Roll}/\textsc{Stop} decisions according to the expected planning benefit of continued rollout. At each step, a Latent Evaluator estimates the risk revealed by the current prefix and how much planning could improve if imagination continues, while a Rollout Gate weighs this expected benefit against additional computation cost. Since factual driving logs expose only one realized future, we further con…

arXiv:2608.20355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated considerable potential for social simulation, yet struggle to accurately model individual value systems. Most existing methods mechanically stitch survey responses into prompts, which suffer from semantic fragmentation, failing to capture the internal coherence of human value systems. The value systems of LLMs are typically assessed using static multiple-choice questions, which fail to evaluate the value orientation in real-world dialogue interactions. To address these issues, we propose ExpertIVS, a framework employing 14 Sociological Expert Agents to interpret World Values Survey (WVS) responses through structured professional perspectives, rather than direct responses concatenation. Thes…

arXiv:2608.20353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computational mental health (CMH) classifiers often degrade under distribution shift because human annotators and distant-supervision pipelines reward different linguistic signals. We introduce TSS (Triple-Stream Stress probe), a multi-channel diagnostic framework that decomposes text into (A) lexical character n-grams, (B) a small, mostly content-free morpho-syntactic channel, and (C) a 154-feature psycholinguistic style channel. Across four English datasets (N=12,906), TSS reveals a lexical interference effect: adding lexical features to the style channel reduces Macro-F1 on human-labeled data (mean drop 0.072, p<10^-4) but not on auto-labeled data. We propose Degree of Divergence (DoD), a difference-in-differences statistic adapted from e…

arXiv:2608.20351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We ask whether stereotype-loaded queries about culturally marked people leak more personal information from a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system than otherwise-equivalent neutral queries. We pre-register a four-culture audit (en-Anglo, es-LATAM, Arabic, Hindi) on a synthetic English PII corpus, comparing five query arms we call the Stereotype-Trigger Leakage Delta (STLD). Two caveats up front. Our locked confirmatory estimator was never run, so every test in the paper is exploratory or sensitivity, with all plan deviations listed in the appendix. And the name-leakage metric is contaminated by a prompt-echo artifact: the model often just re-emits the name we asked about, which inflates apparent leakage without any retrieval at all. O…

arXiv:2608.20350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional industrial agents rely on modular pipelines, including Router, Retriever, Planner, Executor, Responder, Reviewer, and other components. These systems often fracture into a labyrinth of ad-hoc patches, leading to cascading errors and high latency. We propose OneModel, an applicable paradigm shift from external workflows to internalized knowledge representation. Unlike modular systems that slice fluid user intents into static steps, OneModel consolidates complex business logic and SOPs directly into the model parameters. Through Continual Pre-training (CPT) and logic-compilation SFT, we transform fragmented business rules into intuitive model reasoning within a unified attention space. Deployed in our global financial service syste…

arXiv:2608.20349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit extreme sensitivity to surface-level prompt variations, in which minor lexical changes can trigger disproportionate performance fluctuations. Moving beyond black-box optimization and coarse-grained templates, we present the first large-scale, n-gram token-level mechanistic analysis of prompt stability, leveraging a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants. Our investigation reveals a fundamental Scaling Law of Prompt Performance Stability: higher average task performance is strongly associated with lower variance and greater robustness across prompt perturbation. We identify two core linguistic drivers underlying this robustness: (1) Domain-Specific Terminology, which tightly anchors semantic boundaries, and (2…

arXiv:2608.20348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electronic health records now routinely exceed 100,000 tokens per patient. Yet large language models exhibit the lost-in-the-middle (LitM) effect: information near the center of a long context is retrieved less reliably than information near the edges. In clinical use this is not benign: the single most consequential fact in a note can sit at its center. We term this the clinical lost-in-the-middle (CLitM) problem, give its first systematic characterization using MedAlign, and compare context-selection strategies as remedies. Across 2,196 instruction-response pairs and six language models, we observe a 21.9 percentage-point gap between peak accuracy (59.5%, 95% CI [46.3, 71.0], 20-30% decile) and trough accuracy (37.6% [23.2, 52.5] at 70-80%…

arXiv:2608.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models (LMs) often pass behavioral bias evaluations, but it remains unclear whether they no longer represent the underlying associations that give rise to biases, or have merely learned not to express them. In this study, we show that representational biases are often detectable, even when behavioral biases are not visible. We introduce a causal framework that decomposes occupational bias into two measurement points: a model's internal representation of a user's competence, and its observable outputs. We derive steering vectors for representations of user expertise, and verify that they causally mediate model behavior in both a question-answering task and a hiring task. Applying this framework to several open-weight models, we find…

arXiv:2608.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech systems used in customer-facing applications often require domain-specific language coverage. We present a synthetic Bengali speech dataset for telecom customer-care scenarios. The dataset contains 10,000 audio-text pairs, approximately 26.82 hours of 24 kHz speech, and predefined train, validation, and test splits of 9,000, 500, and 500 examples. It is publicly released on Hugging Face under the CC-BY-4.0 license. The speech was generated with OmniVoice in voice-cloning mode using a real female reference recording and transcript, with bfloat16 precision, 16 diffusion sampling steps, and a speaking-rate control value of 1.0. Along with the original Bengali text, the dataset provides a normalized transcript field designed for ASR/STT t…