#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
From Pixels to Actions - Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies
Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Penghao Wu and 14 more
Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths. This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it. More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation. Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control. Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cond-mat.mtrl-sci
Thermally Conditioned Time-Series Forecasting of Grain Growth in Polycrystalline Materials
Eliane Younes, Elie Hachem, Marc Bernacki
Grain growth during heat treatment strongly affects the microstructure of polycrystalline materials and, consequently, their mechanical properties. Although numerical methods such as front-tracking or front-capturing simulations can accurately describe grain growth, their high computational cost limits their use for long or non-isothermal thermal cycles. In previous work, grain growth was successfully predicted under isothermal conditions by treating grain size distributions as time series and forecasting their evolution using recurrent neural networks, allowing complete grain growth trajectories to be generated in seconds rather than through costly PDE-based simulations. In the present work, this forecasting framework is reformulated to handle non-isothermal conditions by explicitly incorporating thermal information into the model architecture. Grain size distributions are encoded using a convolutional neural network, thermal descriptors are embedded through a dedicated multilayer perceptron, and temporal evolution is predicted using a recurrent network. Instantaneous temperature and thermal rate are provided at each time step, allowing the model to adapt its predictions to changing thermal conditions. The framework is trained and evaluated on datasets generated from validated front-tracking simulations across a wide range of non-isothermal thermal paths. The results show that the thermally conditioned model accurately reproduces grain growth dynamics under complex thermal histories, achieving, in k-fold cross-validation over all simulations, mean relative errors of 2.99% (one-hour cycles) and 4.51% (four-hour cycles) with coefficients of determination exceeding 0.99, and mean relative errors between 1.91% and 14.66% on ten simulations following four unseen thermal histories of increasing complexity.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.LG
Adaptive Multi Mode: Budget-Aware Routing of Optimizers By Online Landscape Probes
Benjamin Jacob Bodner
The best classical optimizer for a continuous black-box problem depends on its budget and landscape. Existing routers decide from the dimension and budget, past improvement or features fitted to one benchmark, and few test an optimizer's implicit assumptions online. AMM (Adaptive Multi Mode) routes a known budget among quasi-Newton, trust-region, coordinate, multistart and evolution-strategy optimization engines with online probes of curvature, plateaus, separability, kinks, basins and fractal structure. Each probe has a default, a dimension-by-budget validity range and a cost charged to the budget. In its pre-registered development loop on bbob, 32 of 36 predictions held over the last 16 confirmations. AMM was then tested once on held-out bbob instances 101-110 (D=2-40, 10*D-1000*D) against up to seven competitors. It has the highest target share in 382 of 600 function-dimension-budget cells (236 outright, 146 tied) and, by a descriptive posterior rule, is credibly behind in 35, mostly at 10*D and 30*D. At every budget it also leads the controls built from its own engines (the best engine alone, the best engine per dimension and budget, and a greedy schedule), narrowly at 10*D and 30*D, and nevergrad's NgIohTuned. In pre-registered runs its lead over IPOP-CMA-ES holds under affine and box transformations, on box-constrained bbob and, pooled, on rotated f2-f4, but rotating the separable f3 and f4 removes most of the lead there. On held-out MA-BBOB its final share at 2000*D is level with IPOP-CMA-ES's and its anytime area lower. We published AMM as an open-source Python package (pip install amm-optimizer; https://github.com/BjBodner/amm-optimizer).
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
CounterFactual Retrieval for Evidence-Aware Individual Animal Identification
Ankit K. Upadhyay, Aleksandr Algasov, Ekaterina Nepovinnykh and 5 more
Automated identification of individual animals is moving from small curated studies toward shared benchmarks and reusable foundation models. This progress is useful, but current evaluation leaves the evidence behind a match unresolved, i.e., high retrieval accuracy does not show whether a model used animal features or identity-correlated shortcuts. We address this with Counterfactual Foreground Retrieval (CFR), an evidence-aware evaluation protocol. CFR evaluates the same query-gallery task under different views: full image, foreground-only, and shortcut-only. The full-image measures standard retrieval performance; the foreground-only measures foreground-supported retrieval; and shortcut-only view measure how much identity signal is recoverable from background, or silhouette. This turns a retrieval score into an evidence profile: how well the model performs on the original images, how much of that performance remains when only the animal is visible, and how much identity signal remains recoverable when the animal is removed. We release around 0.5M masks for 34 datasets and code for mask generation and CFR evaluation.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.AI
CompressionBench: How can your coding agents compress LLMs?
Xinrui Zhong, Zhifeng Li, Zhiming Wang and 6 more
Recursive self-improvement requires AI systems to improve the models and infrastructure used by subsequent systems. LLM compression offers a concrete efficiency objective: retain a pretrained model's behavior within a smaller model storage budget. We study whether coding agents can carry out this step autonomously. We formulate compression as a terminal task in which an agent receives a source checkpoint, storage limit, inference environment, and time budget, then constructs compressed weights and executable inference code. The agent controls its algorithm and experiments; perplexity feedback guides search, and independent verification checks the final model. Across six agents and six model--size settings, 29 of 36 submissions pass verification. Selecting the lowest-perplexity agent design per task yields an average 3.4% perplexity increase over BF16 and 77.33% downstream accuracy, compared with 79.56% for BF16. Recorded experiments reveal how agents achieve these outcomes and where improvement breaks down. Agents lower PPL in 21 of 24 revisions at nearly fixed storage; complete-model feedback reverses 17 of 79 prior local rankings; and generation and inference tests expose failures that likelihood alone misses. The results identify representation design, experimental judgment, and capability validation as central to agent-driven model compression, a measurable component of efficiency-oriented self-improvement.