#01Jul 20, 2026
cs.CV
Certified Training for Convolutional Perturbations
Benedikt Brückner, Alessio Lomuscio
Vision models have been found to be susceptible to perturbations such as motion blur induced at runtime by a shaking camera. This impedes their deployment in critical applications since phenomena such as slightly blurred vision might lead to failures, for example an object detector missing objects. While methods such as data augmentation or Adversarial Training can improve empirical robustness, they lack formal safety guarantees, making it difficult to identify and mitigate hidden vulnerabilities. We introduce a novel Certified Training approach that leverages an efficient encoding of convolutional perturbations to train provably robust models. Our method significantly outperforms Adversarial Training, achieving, for example, over 80% robust accuracy against motion blur of reasonable intensity on CIFAR10 while maintaining comparable standard accuracy.
#02Jul 20, 2026
cs.LG
Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints
Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski and 5 more
Structure-based drug design (SBDD) leverages the 3D structure of protein targets, often complemented by other spatial constraints, to generate candidate binding molecules. While diffusion models have dominated as a leading paradigm for high-quality 3D molecule generation, LLM-based methods are rapidly emerging in molecular design and have shown competitive performance in pocket-conditioned molecular generation. However, their ability to reason about physics and 3D spatial environments is largely underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyze whether current general-purpose LLMs are capable of navigating complex 3D constraints compared to established baselines such as specialized diffusion models. We consider 3D ligand generation conditioned on protein pockets together with ligand- and interaction-derived spatial constraints, including anchor fragments, pharmacophore points, and mandatory pocket-ligand interactions. To enable this evaluation, we introduce 3D-Fit - a token-efficient benchmarking strategy for assessing LLM performance on multi-conditioned spatial molecule generation. Our findings reveal a clear pattern in LLM spatial capabilities: while they still lag behind state-of-the-art approaches, they are promising and can handle multiple spatial constraints simultaneously, enabling scaling to heterogeneous setups.
#03Jul 20, 2026
cs.AI
Logical Judgments Under Pressure: Diagnosing Syllogistic Stability with Learned Soft Prefixes
Brian K Chen
To test how correct logical judgments respond to learned context, we prepend a soft prefix to an exactly labeled syllogistic reasoning benchmark while keeping the model fixed. Soft prefixes are opaque continuous vectors, so we characterize them through the behavior they induce across controlled variations in logical form and interface. By studying which prefixes succeed and how their effects generalize, we characterize how learned contextual pressure can override correct judgments and expose limits in a model's logical stability. Across Qwen3.6-35B-A3B MoE, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma 4 31B, learned prefixes redirect many correct answers and remain effective across unseen forms and interface changes. In repeated tests with Qwen3.6 MoE and Gemma, they outperform paired random controls in all 16 model--direction--split comparisons by 37 to 99 percentage points. Qwen3.6 MoE flip rates remain between 72% and 90% across wording and prompt changes, while Gemma validity prefixes retain 54% to 56% flip compared with less than 1% for matched random prefixes. Diagnostic tests show that the dominant effect is a broad preference for one answer meaning rather than fixed-symbol forcing or a logical operation that transfers reliably between tasks. The form of this bias differs across models. In both Qwen models, simple score models often predict which judgments will flip but not how far their margins will move, whereas Gemma's overall response is more closely approximated by the same models. These results show that the dominant behavioral effect of successful soft prefixes is a broad answer preference, while the remaining response reveals substantial model-specific differences in logical stability.
#04Jul 20, 2026
cs.RO
Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations
Gaoyue Zhou, Zichen Jeff Cui, Ada Langford and 3 more
Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial detail and the benefits of large-scale visual pre-training. While there exist policies that do operate on dense patch features like large vision-language-action models (VLAs), they tend to be heavy and slow, inheriting the full cost of a billion-parameter vision-language model (VLM) backbone. We close this gap with Patch Policy, a minimal architectural extension that enables transformer-based policies to consume dense pre-trained patch tokens directly without the computational overhead of a full VLM. At its core is a block-causal attention mask that preserves the temporal causality of standard policies while letting the model attend over many patch tokens per observation, alongside other state information. Patch Policy is lightweight, fast, and highly effective. Across four simulated and three real-world environment suites, our method achieves a 40% relative improvement over policies using state-of-the-art global-pooled representations. Furthermore, it surpasses fine-tuned OpenVLA-OFT by 18% while using roughly 0.7% of the parameters. We believe Patch Policy provides a pipeline for the robotics community to readily leverage continuing progress in visual representation learning, without sacrificing the training efficiency or inference speed required for high-frequency, reactive control. Videos can be viewed at https://patch-policy.github.io
#05Jul 20, 2026
math.ST
Unveiling Invariant and Transferable Latent Factors Across Heterogeneous Environments via ATLAS
Yihong Gu, Katherine Liao, Tianxi Cai
This paper considers a multi-environment factor model in which high-dimensional covariates are collected from heterogeneous environments, with auxiliary labels available in a subset of these environments. The joint distribution of the covariates may vary across environments, whereas the latent structure is decomposed into invariant factors with shared loadings and heterogeneous factors with environment-specific loadings. Such a model is motivated by transfer learning and latent factor regression, where one seeks stable low-dimensional representations for both interpretation and robust out-of-sample prediction of the response $Y$. Leveraging the invariance principle, we show that the invariant and heterogeneous factors are disentangled under a minimal structural condition. Based on this, we propose ATLAS, an Auxiliary-label and invariance-guided Transfer via Latent Alignment across heterogeneous environmentS. ATLAS is a unified procedure that leverages the invariance principle to separate aligned invariant and unaligned heterogeneous factors, and further exploits supervision from auxiliary labels to extract prediction-invariant and transferable factors from those unaligned heterogeneous factors. ATLAS yields near-oracle performance for downstream latent factor regression, enables transferable prediction in new environments through the full latent signal when auxiliary labels are available, and reduces to robust invariant-factor-only prediction otherwise. We establish sharp non-asymptotic error bounds for recovering invariant and heterogeneous factors, identifying all the response-invariant factors, and estimating the invariant signal in $Y$.