#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.DC
ZeroRAG: Adaptive Semantic Peer Routing for Decentralized Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Petru Neague, Quinten Stokkink, Martijn de Vos and 4 more
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a standard approach to enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) outputs by retrieving documents relevant to a query and supplying them in the LLM prompt. Today's RAG systems collect, index, and serve these documents from centralized stores. In practice, however, documents are owned by organizations, devices, and individuals who cannot or will not surrender custody of them to a central party, e.g., because of privacy, copyright or regulatory compliance. Existing modern decentralized retrieval techniques either reintroduce a coordinating authority, or rely on a global data structure that requires continuous network-wide coordination (e.g., DHTs). We present ZeroRAG, a decentralized routing layer for document retrieval in RAG that performs semantic query routing across an overlay of peers with- out global data structures or centralized orchestration. Documents remain with the peers that own them, and each peer keeps only lightweight local state: a bounded set of neighbor advertisements and a cache of recently routed queries. Using these, ZeroRAG steers each query through a best-first walk that progressively rewires the overlay toward semantically relevant neighbors, so recall improves over time as the network self-organizes. We evaluate ZeroRAG using three real-world workloads and two decentralized baselines. We find that ZeroRAG outperforms baselines in terms of recall and required network messages, approaches the recall and LLM answer accuracy of a centralized document store, self-heals after catastrophic peer failures, and scales to 100 000 peers.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Deformable Contact-Aware 3D Object Placement
Songhe Wang, David Miller, Charles A. Kamhoua
Current language-guided 3D object placement typically predicts a rigid 6-DoF pose, ignoring the physical reality that indoor placements are dictated by contact. Consequently, predicted poses often float, interpenetrate supports, or fail to deform soft surfaces. We propose Deformable Contact-Aware Placement (DCAP), a framework that reframes placement as a drop-to-equilibrium process. Rather than predicting a static pose, DCAP constructs a semantic release state that specifies the drop location, object scale, and deformable components, allowing a coupled rigid-deformable simulator to settle the object under gravity and friction. This explicitly separates semantic intent from physical realization. Evaluated on a benchmark of 2,063 prompt-asset-scene cases, DCAP significantly outperforms static baselines. On standard placements, it improves VLM Physics & Naturalness by 21.2 points and human preference by 26.5 points over the strongest raw rigid baseline, while reducing mean penetration depth by 72.3%. Compared to simulated rollout baselines, DCAP reduces residual speed by 72.1%. Ultimately, our results prove that physically accurate 3D placement requires modeling semantic intent and physical realization as strictly separate processes.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Flux as a Codec: Zero-Shot Lossy Compression with Flux
Fuma Kimishima, Jinjia Zhou
We propose FluxC, a zero-shot codec that uses Flux as a compression prior. Although DiffC has shown that pretrained diffusion models can serve as zero-shot codecs, we ask how the choice of coding path and reconstruction method affects rate--distortion--perception behavior. We analyze FluxC along three axes: coding cost and bit allocation, reconstruction method, and low rate distortion. At matched signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we show that the path choice does not affect the ideal information rate, but changes how bits are allocated across time steps. For reconstruction, we compare ancestral sampling, one-step ODE reconstruction, and many-step ODE reconstruction. Our analysis shows that ODE-based reconstruction can achieve lower distortion than ancestral sampling, especially in the low rate regime. Experiments on Gaussian sources and natural images support this prediction. Moreover, FluxC performs competitively with, and in some cases outperforms, recent neural image compression methods, suggesting that Flux can serve as a principled zero-shot codec.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.CL
Compression Through a Context Lens: Evaluating Adaptation, Quantization, and Distillation in Arabic Legal LLMs
Md. Rafiul Biswas, George Mikros, Wajdi Zaghouani
Model compression can facilitate the deployment of large language models in resource-constrained legal settings, but its effects on domain-specific performance may depend on the evaluation protocol. We investigate this issue using ArabLegalEval, a Saudi Arabic legal benchmark, under both with-context and no-context evaluation. The former provides supporting legal passages, while the latter assesses performance without external context. Removing the context produces accuracy gaps of up to 27 percentage points for the base model. We examine three stages: domain adaptation, quantization, and knowledge distillation across FANAR-9B, JAIS-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B. Four-bit quantization reduces model memory by 64-71%, with changes in no-context MCQ accuracy ranging from -3.2 to +1.6 percentage points. Distillation produces more variable results, with accuracy generally declining as student size decreases. A Qwen2.5-7B student distilled from FANAR achieves 76.6% no-context accuracy, compared with 77.2% for its teacher. Our findings suggest that no-context evaluation provides a useful complement to context-supported testing when assessing the effects of adaptation and compression on Arabic legal language models.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Bri3D: Bridging the Object-Scene Gap in Single-Image 3D Generation via Scene-Anchor
Hongye Hou, Shuai Zhang, Hongjie Li and 4 more
Generating compositional 3D scenes from a single image requires recovering detailed object geometry and coherent spatial arrangements. Existing object-to-scene methods, including SAM3D and MIDI, extend object generation through image-context reasoning or inter-instance modeling. Coordinating objects remains challenging with limited scene-level supervision. Directly extending object-centric generators to entire scenes can degrade geometry and fail to preserve instance scale, orientation, and pose. We propose Bri3D, a framework bridging scene-level structural reasoning and object-level generative priors through instance-aware voxel scene anchors. Bri3D predicts a color-coded scene scaffold encoding coarse object geometry and spatial arrangements. Each instance is extracted as a scene anchor and refined into a pose-preserving, prior-compatible voxel support, enabling a frozen object generator to synthesize detailed textured geometry in the anchor-defined spatial reference. This coarse-to-fine design separates scene organization from object-scale detail synthesis, focusing scene-level training on spatial organization and anchor refinement while reusing pretrained object priors. Experiments demonstrate improvements in scene layout, object geometry, visual quality, and generalization. Bri3D predicts scene layouts efficiently; full scene generation is faster than SceneGen and SAM3D.