#01Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
Graded convolutional networks: scale invariance without the scale and robustness to unknown blur
Tanush Shaska
The Gaussian jet of an image is a graded vector space: a dilation by $λ$ multiplies derivatives of order $k$ by $λ^{-k}$. Local graded convolutions are exactly homogeneous differential operators, and a local feature is dilation-invariant if and only if it factors through the scale-normalized jet or, without the scale, through the retraction onto the weighted sphere of the grading. Under unknown Gaussian blur the retraction changes only by a change of scale, whereas the scale-normalized jet acquires a grading factor that no radial normalization removes. At the zero jet the retraction separates image families that radial normalizations and continuous classifiers cannot. Networks built on the retraction are universal for invariant features. On MNIST such a network keeps 88.4% accuracy under a two-pixel blur, against 66.2% for the same network on scale-normalized derivatives; in Lindeberg's Gaussian derivative network the retraction raises accuracy at that blur from 91.5% to 95.1%.
#02Nov 6, 2026
cs.LG
On the (non-)closedness of the set of ReLU networks
Eloi Martinet, Leon Bungert
We prove that the set $\mathcal{N}_N$ of ReLU networks with one hidden layer and at most $N\in\mathbb N$ neurons is weakly closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$, for a bounded connected open set $Ω\subset\mathbb R^d$. Consequently, every coercive, weakly lower semicontinuous energy on this space attains its minimum over $\mathcal{N}_N$. This covers the Deep Ritz method with convex integrands, Sobolev training and Lipschitz learning. Moreover, as the weight decay parameter tends to zero, minimizers of the regularized problem converge, up to subsequences, to minimizers with minimal parameter norm. We also prove that the set of ReLU networks with two hidden layers of bounded widths is not closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$ or in $C(\overlineΩ)$. This disproves a conjecture of Petersen, Raslan and Voigtlaender.
#03Nov 6, 2026
cs.SE
When Instruction Files Go Stale: Documentation Debt and Hidden Cost in Coding Agents
Tural Mehtiyev, Biruk Tadesse, Lawrence Arkoh and 1 more
LLM-based coding agents such as Claude Code are guided by repository instruction files (also called context files or agent configuration files) like AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, which are read in every agent session. As any documentation artifact, these files can fall behind the code and become stale (e.g., a test folder moves, but the file still points to the old one). In technical debt terms, such a stale instruction is documentation debt, and its interest is the cost it adds to every later agent session. Evaluations that check only task success can miss this cost, and the stale file can persist. In this study, we ask what leads agents to act on a stale instruction, how it affects their behavior and at what cost, and how they recover. We study three real-world stale instructions from active open-source repositories in depth, each a different kind of guidance: a test command, a code location, and a procedure for adding a component. Agents fix 22 maintenance tasks under three versions of each instruction (left stale, corrected to the current path, and removed), with the code and the task held fixed, and we analyze 732 trajectories of two models at the level of individual tool calls. We find that agents follow stale guidance when it is relevant to their tasks, sometimes even when correct information is available elsewhere. On the stale test command, Claude Sonnet 5.5 needed about two extra tool calls per run, a third more than with the corrected command; in the other cases, we could not detect a difference. Although agents generally recovered from the immediate failures, none repaired the underlying instruction file. Correcting the instructions eliminated operations on obsolete paths, while removing them prevented most. Our findings show that task success alone can hide the costs of documentation debt, highlighting the need to evaluate agent behavior beyond final outcomes.
#04Nov 6, 2026
cs.AI
Flow-Guided Target-Space Alignment via Path Consistency
Ruizhi Yuan, Zeqiu Yu, Wei Gao and 3 more
Many multimodal alignment problems require mapping a source modality into a fixed space defined by a target modality, where the target space is not merely an intermediate embedding but is used directly for downstream analysis. In this setting, successful alignment should preserve both the global structure of the target distribution and the instance-level correspondence observed in paired source--target training data. Existing objectives typically address only part of this goal: contrastive losses encourage relative similarity, distribution-matching losses improve marginal agreement, and pointwise regression fits each source sample to its paired target without explicitly modeling target-space path geometry. We propose FlowAlign, a flow-guided target-space alignment method that repurposes conditional flow matching as a training-time alignment signal rather than an inference-time transport model. FlowAlign uses the learned flow field to guide the alignment of source-side representations with the fixed target space, encouraging them to preserve paired correspondence while remaining compatible with the global target-space structure. We further provide theoretical analysis showing how FlowAlign helps improve paired correspondence by controlling endpoint accuracy and capturing local target-space geometry. Experiments on synthetic data, paired single-cell multiome benchmarks, and image--text alignment demonstrate that FlowAlign improves instance level correspondence while preserving target-space structure across different modality settings.
#05Nov 6, 2026
cs.AI
Knowing When to Intervene: Causal Evaluation of AI Agents
Ayush Sawarni, Wenqian Xing, Tijana Zrnic and 2 more
Current evaluations of agentic AI systems primarily rely on benchmarks. However, the static nature of benchmarks makes them uninformative about the value of auditing interventions at deployment time. For reliable deployment, we often need to determine within an agent's trajectory whether or not to intervene, e.g., by verifying the agent's current output or steering it toward different behavior, using either human review or more costly models or time-consuming agentic supervision. The value of such interventions is fundamentally a causal inference question, asking whether the causal effect of such an intervention is beneficial for the final outcome. Estimating this causal effect is particularly challenging due to the dynamic nature of the problem: the impact of an intervention depends on the current context and environment, as well as the agent's future behavior. We develop the first methodologically grounded framework for evaluating the causal effects of randomized interventions within agent trajectories. By leveraging a relatively small dataset of agent trajectories collected under randomized interventions such as verification or screening, we can estimate the dynamic causal effect of a rich class of (contextual) intervention policies. The structural parameters that we estimate can also be used to construct safety leaderboards that capture the risk of various agentic actions, which can be used by practitioners for audit prioritization. Applying our methods to tau-bench Retail, ToolSandbox, and ImpossibleBench, we find that intervention effects vary substantially across agent actions and states. More broadly, our work suggests a rich research agenda at the intersection of causal inference and agentic evaluation, which we believe is essential for the reliable and safe deployment of AI agents in the real world.