#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.LG
Pyrite: Building and Benchmarking Protein-Ligand Pose Ranking Agents
Megha Srivastava, Michael H. Lim, Allison M. Keys and 2 more
Predicting how a ligand binds to its target is central to small-molecule drug discovery. Modern cofolding models can generate diverse candidate poses, but reliably ranking these candidates remains challenging. We introduce Pyrite, a pairwise pose-ranking benchmark comprising 1,500 pose pairs across diverse protein-ligand complexes. Expert chemists equipped with 3D visualization tools and physics-based scores perform near chance, highlighting the difficulty of interpreting available chemical signals. To investigate automated ranking, we introduce PyriteRep, a structured representation of molecular geometry, protein-ligand interactions, and physicochemical scores, and develop two LLM-based agents: PyriteReasoner, which directly compares poses through text-based reasoning, and PyriteFeaturizer, which generates executable code to construct features for logistic regression, optionally incorporating features derived from LLM subcalls. These agents achieve up to 67% and 74% accuracy, respectively, exceeding observed expert performance. LLM-guided feature discovery generally outperforms direct reasoning, while Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) improves open-weight models, enabling them to match or surpass closed-source frontier models in our evaluations. These results establish Pyrite as a challenging test of pose-ranking ability and highlight LLM-guided feature discovery as a promising approach to interpret and combine the outputs of computational chemistry tools.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
A Lightweight Differentiable Method for Real-Time Skin Rendering and Digitization
Mario Marquez-Balduque, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Jorge Lopez-Moreno
Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Measuring Robustness and Efficiency in a Connectome-Constrained Fly Visual System Model: Linking an Adversarial and a Perceptual Illusion
Alexandre Garcia-Duran, Alejandro Rodriguez-Garcia, Manuel Molano-Mazón and 3 more
Biological visual systems compute reliably under tight metabolic and wiring constraints, whereas artificial vision systems consume far more energy and can be sensitive to adversarial perturbations. Whether networks with brain-like wiring are more robust at lower computational cost is unclear. We address this by benchmarking a task-optimized, continuous-time recurrent neural network of the fly visual system constrained by its synaptic connectome (FlyNet) against artificial neural networks. We compare it against CNNs, RAFT, and continuous-time recurrent neural networks without detailed connectome constraints (sCTRNN, CTRNN) on a collision-detection task within a differentiable 3D rendering pipeline. FlyNet is adversarially vulnerable but, relative to its compute, more robust to common video corruptions than RAFT, while using up to five orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs. The CTRNNs remain more robust than FlyNet across almost all tested perturbations, suggesting that connectome constraints benefit efficiency, through their low edge count, over robustness. Recurrence improves robustness to white-box attacks in RAFT and temporal context improves robustness to common corruptions. FlyNet's position and velocity representations degrade under adversarial textures but recover under counterfactual textures that restore correct classification while staying equally far from training, ruling out unfamiliar textures as the cause of failure. The reverse-phi illusion similarly disrupts these representations and inverts the same low-level motion statistic as the adversarial textures. Optimizing this input statistic alone, without access to the network, suffices to induce classification failure, attributing both perturbations to the same circuit vulnerability. Connectome-constrained models can thus surface adversarial failure mechanisms as testable hypotheses about biological perceptual vulnerabilities.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.CL
When does text encoding matter for language modeling?
Eugene Jang, Catherine Arnett, Terra Blevins
UTF-8's role as the de facto encoding standard in language models introduces cross-lingual inequities due to its variable-length design. However, the effect that this encoding choice has on model performance remains largely unexamined. In this work, we investigate how text encoding impacts the performance of byte-level language models, comparing UTF-8 with a wide range of other encoding strategies, including other Unicode-based approaches, language-specific encodings, and our own customized encodings. To facilitate our analysis, we propose Aether: a hybrid encoding scheme that uses script-specific encodings for our target setting while maintaining full Unicode coverage through UTF-8 fallbacks, using this framework to model four orthographically diverse languages. Surprisingly, we find that while languages with information-dense characters (Chinese, Korean) significantly benefit from compressive encodings, languages whose characters carry less information individually (Georgian, Tamil) are largely insensitive to encoding choice. In light of these findings, we argue that text encoding should be a language-specific design decision, rather than a universal default.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
C$^2$-Routing: Complementary Cropping and Compression for Efficient Vision-Language Inference
Guorui Lu, Qinyu Chen
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.