#01Nov 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.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CV
Coupled Scene Graph Anticipation: When With-Constraint Recall Hides Structural Inconsistency
Zeno Nongmaithem, Anushttha Srivastava, Anshit Sinha and 4 more
Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) predicts object relationships in future video frames. Continuous-time SGA models evolve each subject-object pair with an independent Neural ODE, so relationships sharing an entity cannot influence one another during integration, and nothing prevents mutually exclusive predictions, such as "sitting on" and "standing on", for the same pair. We introduce CoupledSGA, which links such relationships through a Relationship Interaction Graph with graph attention inside the ODE vector field, and adds a Structural Consistency Loss ($\mathcal{L}_{SC}$) based on a matrix of mutually exclusive predicates. Developing CoupledSGA revealed a limitation of the evaluation protocol. With-Constraint evaluation keeps one predicate per group for each subject-object pair, so its R@K and mR@K cannot capture the within-group violations targeted by $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$: we prove they are unchanged whenever each group's winning predicate and its score are held fixed. We further show that the gradient of $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$ depends on predicate scores rather than ground-truth labels: for two-predicate rules it amplifies the ordering the model already holds, and when all scores in a group are equal it suppresses predicates in more exclusion rules more strongly, explaining why the penalty can lower recall while improving consistency. On Action Genome, activating $\mathcal{L}_{SC}$ after two warm-up epochs reduces R@20 from 42.21% to 35.18% while lowering the No-Constraint contradiction rate from 45.92% to 4.07% (matched-budget R@20: 40.48% CoupledSGA vs. 44.78% SceneSayerODE). CoupledSGA is a testbed, not a state-of-the-art claim: With-Constraint recall captures the cost of enforcing structural consistency but not the improvement. We recommend reporting No-Constraint results alongside a contradiction rate for methods that constrain predicate co-activation.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.CL
Ranking Agreement Does Not Reveal Paragraph-Edit Agreement in Two Released Paper Acceptance Predictors
Shaoliang Yang, Jun Wang
A fast acceptance classifier could select revisions for a slower evaluator. We ask whether agreement on existing papers supports that use. We compare a classifier of word and document features with two released text-only acceptance predictors fine-tuned from the same language model with three billion parameters. For 198 papers from the International Conference on Learning Representations, we compare model rankings of the original papers and of paragraph rewrites screened automatically for unchanged facts, claim strength, and attribution. The classifier ranks original papers closely with one predictor and moderately with the other, but shows no detectable agreement with either on which rewrites raise scores. The tests specified in advance used reduced numerical precision. Rounding error dominated the small score responses. We therefore rescored the released weights in full 32-bit precision as a post hoc check; edit agreement remained near zero. At this precision, when each predictor chooses among five rewrites per paper, its average raw score is under two points out of 100 higher than with random choice. The evidence covers presentation rewrites and two open predictors from one family; transfer to costly evaluators remains untested. Revision selectors should therefore be checked against the intended evaluator on the revisions they rank.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.LG
Message-passing graph persistence
Jorge Luiz Franco, Arthur Queiroz Moura, Moacir Ponti and 1 more
Message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs) are limited in expressive power by the one-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman test. Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors that can complement GNN representations, but existing approaches typically compute persistence separately from the representation learning process. In this paper, we introduce Message-Passing Graph Persistence (MGP), a family of topological descriptors that incorporates message passing into graph filtrations. At each filtration step, node embeddings are updated using the current subgraph and associated with persistence events. These embeddings also determine the representatives of connected components during persistence computation. We prove that MGP is invariant under graph isomorphism and that it is strictly more expressive than the PH-based descriptors it extends. We evaluate MGP on an expressivity benchmark and on several graph classification and regression datasets. Experiments show that MGP outperforms other PH-based descriptors on most of these datasets.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.MA
A Framework for Context Enrichment and Selective Robustness in LLM Social Agents
Mattia Greiche, Reihaneh Rabbany, Maximilian Puelma Touzel
Researchers use large language models as agents in social simulations, where agents are prompted with observations and background information intended to shape their actions. Yet LLM agents have been shown to substantially change their behavior under meaning-preserving prompt variations, creating a validation problem for social simulation. One plausible hypothesis is that this brittleness reflects a lack of grounding and can be reduced by enriching the context provided to the agents. Whether richer context improves robustness remains unclear, in part because context richness and robustness are rarely defined in ways that support controlled comparisons. We address the first need with controlled context enrichment, a set of prompt substitution rules that systematically enriches distinct types of context: neutral padding, generic social background, descriptive decision grounding, and normative decision grounding. We address the second by introducing selective robustness as a validation criterion: insensitivity to meaning-preserving prompt variation combined with a directional response to decision-relevant changes in the social world. We demonstrate the framework in a Prisoner's Dilemma-like game, showing how it can be used to identify which forms of context enrichment produce more desirable and robust agent behavior. We find that these forms of enrichment produce distinct behavioral patterns that vary between the two models tested.