#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
AtlasULP: Domain-aware Universal Link Prediction via Relation Atlas
Yujing Liu, Yixin Liu, Yu Zheng and 4 more
Link prediction (LP) is a widely applied task in graph learning. Conventional LP approaches typically follow a dataset-specific paradigm, requiring independent training for each graph and incurring high computational and maintenance costs in large-scale applications. Motivated by these limitations, recent work explores Universal Link Prediction (ULP), aiming to enable training-free inference on arbitrary unseen graphs. However, existing methods primarily rely on subgraph sampling strategies to construct universal representations, which are unable to capture higher-order information due to the exponential growth of higher-order neighborhoods. As a result, they often under-perform on graphs where long-range signals are essential, such as biological networks. Moreover, their prediction models are typically domain-agnostic and lack the ability to adapt to different graph domains, leading to limited generalization. To address these challenges, we propose an Atlas-based Universal Link Prediction framework (AtlasULP), which introduces the relation atlas to capture structural associations between node pairs from both global and local perspectives, enabling a comprehensive characterization of connectivity signals across diverse graph domains. Building upon this representation, we develop a domain-guided prompting ULP model, which generates domain-aware prompt tokens from contextual structures and performs prompt-guided in-context prediction for adaptive link inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AtlasULP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse graph domains.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
IMUDINO: Self-distilled Foundation Model for Inertial Sensing
Zhoutong Ye, Chengwen Zhang, Zixuan Wang and 9 more
We present IMUDINO, the first foundation model (FM) for inertial sensing to achieve competitive performance across diverse sensing tasks including human activity recognition (HAR), health, motion capture, and odometry. Prior inertial FMs often focus on one subfield of inertial sensing and sometimes underperform state-of-the-art supervised methods (e.g., in HAR), making their scope considerably narrower than FMs for vision and natural language. Moreover, they often require fixed input length and sampling rate, and generalize poorly to unseen sensor locations. To build a general-purpose foundation model for inertial sensing, we adapt the DINO self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm to inertial data through a set of semantics-preserving motion transformations that simulate variations in motion pattern and sensor setup. For model architecture, we use a plain transformer encoder with frequency-aware positional encoding that natively supports varying input length and sampling rate. This simple setup proved remarkably effective for learning global and dense features generalizable across users, sensor setups, tasks, and, in the case of robot odometry, embodiments. We hope IMUDINO can serve as a backbone for inertial sensing and kickstart the development of general-purpose inertial FMs.
#03Nov 5, 2026
stat.ME
Changepoint localization via nested exchangeability tests: from point estimates to confidence intervals
Rohan Hore, Aaditya Ramdas
We study distribution-free uncertainty quantification for a changepoint estimate in an offline setting. We observe a sequence with a single changepoint and are given an estimate of its location. The pre- and post-change segments are independent and each consists of i.i.d. (or, more generally, exchangeable) observations from arbitrary and unknown distributions. We introduce Changepoint LOcalization via Nested Exchangeability testing (CLONE), a novel method for constructing distribution-free confidence intervals around that estimate by testing exchangeability in nested windows centered at the reference estimate. Under these assumptions, CLONE provides finite-sample coverage for any black-box reference estimator. Using a geometrically shrinking radius grid, CLONE requires only $O(log n)$ permutation tests. We characterize optimal scores for the framework and provide practical recommendations that result in sharp confidence intervals. Under mild assumptions, CLONE confidence intervals have asymptotically vanishing normalized length. Simulations and experiments on image and text data support our theoretical findings.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
MessyNav: Zero-Shot Navigation via Manipulation in Messy Environments
Kenneth Llontop, Cherie Ho, Dylan Zhou and 4 more
Real-world environments are messy, with paths often blocked by everyday objects like chairs and toys, requiring robots to perform interactive navigation by manipulating obstacles to clear a path. Existing methods rely on extensive simulation-based learning or per-scene instructions specifying which objects to avoid or manipulate. They struggle to generalize across novel objects, diverse environments, and varied contexts such as a cart of fragile glassware that should be avoided while an empty one can be pushed. We formalize this problem as open-world interactive navigation and present MessyNav, a zero-shot framework based on vision-language models (VLMs). At its core, MessyNav performs explicit VLM-based affordance reasoning before task planning to decide whether to swipe, pick up, or avoid an object and produce a high-level plan. Evaluated on a mobile manipulator across real-world indoor and outdoor environments, MessyNav improves success rate by 27 percentage points (pp) over the strongest baseline in real-robot trials and achieves statistically significant gains in a larger-scale offline evaluation, without task-specific training.
#05Nov 5, 2026
eess.SY
Truncated backpropagation through time induces a two-sided gradient turnpike property
Julian D. Schiller, Matthias A. Müller
Truncated backpropagation through time reduces the computational burden of training recurrent models by restricting gradient computations to shorter temporal contexts. This induces two distinct boundary effects: missing past information perturbs the forward state evolution, while truncating the backward recursion omits future information. This motivates decoupling the interval over which gradient contributions are averaged for the parameter update from the surrounding temporal context over which they are computed. Under exponential decay of the state-transition Jacobians and mild regularity conditions, this leads to a two-sided gradient turnpike property: the error between truncated- and full-context gradient contributions decays exponentially with the distance from both context boundaries. We derive bounds for the averaged update gradient, yielding guarantees on gradient alignment and approximate full-context stationarity; under unbiased interval sampling and a Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, these further imply a bound on the resulting optimality gap. Numerical experiments on the Wiener-Hammerstein benchmark illustrate the role of past and future context and the trade-off between predictive performance and computational cost.