#01Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
Thought-deciphering via hierarchical EEG-to-text alignment
Xiaopeng Mao, Morten Mørup, Xin Xu and 2 more
Communication is important for our well-being, but it can be impaired by disabilities, such as locked-in syndrome (LIS), cerebral palsy (CP), and dysarthria. Non-invasive brain-to-text brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising solution by providing an alternative communication pathway for people with communication disabilities. However, most recent breakthroughs have relied on large, cumbersome, and costly neuroimaging modalities, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Numerous studies have attempted decoding using the lighter and cheaper electroencephalography (EEG), but the results remain inferior compared to the other modalities. More importantly, we do not understand how these modalities are related to text at the letter, word, sentence, and higher semantic levels. Many prior studies have focused on decoding below the sentence level because it is considerably easier to design an experiment around phonemes, letters, and words. However, during communication, sentences play a much more important role than words and letters. This is because sentences carry information at such a high level that they can be understood even if some words and letters are missing. However, within sentence-level decoding, sentence classification is not as well investigated as sentence generation, making it difficult to decide whether a sentence should be retrieved or generated in the context of EEG-to-text decoding. This paper strives to investigate sentence-level EEG-to-text classification via a novel hierarchical alignment framework, where the main goal is to retrieve a read sentence using its context and EEG as inputs.
#02Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
ST-GFM: Spectral-Temporal Graph Forecasting with Measured Perturbation Bounds and Masked Spectral Reconstruction
Aashish Bohra, Vivek Vijay
Graph forecasters for sensor networks are trained in one regime and deployed in others, where sensor coupling and signal frequency content both change. We split this spectral shift into an operator channel and a frequency channel, each with a dimensionless measure. ST-GFM (Spectral-Temporal Graph Forecasting Model) filters every input step with Chebyshev and bidirectional diffusion filters on one learned, non-symmetric operator and alternates them with per-node temporal attention. For the operator channel we prove Frobenius-norm perturbation bounds for both graph branches, show that the Chebyshev bound is attained to first order, and compute its constant from the trained weights and the measured operator norm: 17.9 on METR-LA and 21.5 on PEMS-BAY. Under random edge dropout the trained layer moves by 2.0% to 3.1% of this bound. Masked Spectral Reconstruction (MSR), a self-supervised loss active in the first 40 epochs, matches the log power spectrum of the encoder output to that of the input. For small log-spectral residuals on unclamped bins it is proportional to an Itakura-Saito divergence to leading order. Removing it raises the 60-minute MAE by 0.30 on METR-LA, close to the 0.33 lost when all three self-supervised losses go. Under one shared evaluation pipeline, the 60-minute MAE of ST-GFM is 3.5% below a retrained STAEformer on METR-LA and 13.0% below it on PEMS-BAY. Its 60-minute MAE is 3.0980.017 on METR-LA (five seeds) and 1.5760.006 on PEMS-BAY (three seeds), the lowest PEMS-BAY MAE among twelve published baselines.
#03Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
Variational Functional Neural Networks (vfNN)
Chinmay Katke, C. Nadir Kaplan
We present a variational functional neural network (vfNN) algorithm that optimizes physically motivated continuum functionals in integral form (e.g., Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, or free energy) to find the states of a system. That way, vfNN bypasses solving the equations of motion (a.k.a. the Euler-Lagrange equations), which are in the form of differential equations. To this end, our approach is fundamentally different from conventional physics-informed neural networks (PINN) that solve differential equations by minimizing a phenomenological loss function involving higher order derivatives and ad hoc weight factors. In contrast, vfNN merely evaluates lower order derivatives of the generating functional and replaces the weight factors with rigorous physical scales. This also fundamentally changes the loss landscape, and the desired solutions may become unstable. For this emergent nonconvex optimization problem, we develop a quasi-Newton optimization algorithm with simulated annealing that converges to the solutions of the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equations of the functional regardless of their stability properties. Our simulations using vfNN give accurate results for benchmark systems governed by linear or nonlinear ordinary differential equations.
#04Nov 2, 2026
cs.RO
D&A: Decoupling Description and Assessment Enables VLMs as Zero-Shot Robotic Reward Models
Marius Memmel, Shawn Yin, Urvi Rutia and 9 more
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold promise for zero-shot video task-progress estimation in robot learning, yet existing frameworks frequently suffer from confirmation bias, hallucinating progress in failed executions due to implicit success assumptions or relative temporal ranking designs. Naive prompting of frontier models collapses into a binary success detector that fails to capture nuanced, non-linear progress and failures. While post-training approaches can mitigate this through explicit training, they demand expensive real-world robotics data and require computationally intensive post-training for every individual base model. To resolve these limitations, we introduce D&A (Describe & Assess): our approach decouples progress estimation into an objective, task-grounded textual description of scene dynamics followed by an assessment phase using explicit rubrics. By compelling the VLM to synthesize an explicit, text-based definition of absolute success before scoring, the framework anchors evaluations to an external, global criterion rather than the video's internal timeline. Empirical results demonstrate that our method calibrates zero-shot estimates and mitigates confirmation bias, providing fine-grained, partial progress metrics that accurately penalize failed executions while correctly interpolating successful runs. Being purely prompt-based, D&A generalizes across tasks, embodiments, and benchmarks---matching or surpassing post-trained reward models---and its reward estimates enable efficient downstream reinforcement learning.
#05Nov 2, 2026
cs.AI
WebHarbor: Docking Real Websites for Evolving GUI Agent Environments
Zhaoyang Wang, Qianhui Wu, Boyu Gou and 54 more
GUI web agents require realistic and interactive environments that remain stable during both evaluation and training. Live website evaluation suffers from changing content, access restrictions, and limited coverage of authenticated workflows, while existing synthetic environments for training often lack functional depth and visual fidelity. We propose WebHarbor, a suite of 153 executable and dockerized website environments that faithfully reconstruct the visual interfaces, content, and functional workflows of real-world web services under deterministic control. We build WebHarbor through task-driven human-agent collaboration, where environments evolve as new tasks expand their functional scope, coding agents implement the required changes, and human contributors audit visual fidelity, functional correctness, and task validity. The resulting suite comprises 3,518 tasks spanning multi-step and post-authentication workflows, where existing works often fail to cover. Beyond reliable evaluation, WebHarbor provides high-fidelity synthetic web environments for cost-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate that a Qwen 4B-level GUI agent trained with RL in WebHarbor generalizes to unseen tasks and performs competitively with leading open-source GUI web agents across four benchmarks. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/WebHarbor.