#01Nov 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.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.LG
TimeSeek: Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Pretraining for Generalized Time Series Analytics
Peng Chen, Yihang Wang, Zhongwen Rao and 6 more
Time series analytics has been widely applied across various domains. While existing time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated promising results, they still face two major challenges: 1) Most TSFMs mainly rely on stacking Transformer layers to increase parameter size, lacking the ability to adaptively model complex time series patterns from multi-domain data. 2) Current TSFMs are primarily pre-trained for specific tasks, e.g., forecasting or anomaly detection, and a few models support multiple tasks, but they fail to fully leverage task specificity and commonality, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose TimeSeek, a novel generalized time series analytics model that adaptively models time series patterns from multi-domain data and unifies multiple tasks in pre-training. Conceptually, TimeSeek is guided by selective information sharing under domain and task heterogeneity. From the perspective of multi-domain data, we propose a Multi-Domain Feature Extractor that adaptively captures temporal dependencies and channel correlations based on domain-specific characteristics, including progressive multi-scale modeling and adaptive slot channel modeling. From the perspective of the diversity of tasks, we propose multi-task collaborative training, which leverages task specificity and task commonality through task customization and cross-task training, effectively unifying multiple tasks in pre-training and better adapting to diverse downstream scenarios. After pre-training on large-scale time series data, TimeSeek achieves state-of-the-art performance in forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification tasks across both few-shot learning and zero-shot situations, together with favorable inference efficiency.
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.AI
Re-Search: Dissecting LLM Ideation Through a Two-Player Questioning Game
Muhan Gao, Hangxiao Zhu, Xinqi Su and 3 more
Research ideation is iterative: researchers refine their ideas step by step based on feedback. Yet existing evaluations obscure this search process, making it difficult to understand how LLMs explore the space of research ideas and what limits their progress. We introduce Re-Search, which adapts the format of Twenty Questions to research ideation: given only the research problem of a published paper, a model must rediscover the paper's core idea by asking yes-or-no questions. Built from 200 ICML 2026 papers, Re-Search tracks how a model's idea evolves as it asks questions and receives binary oracle feedback, isolating ideation from execution. Across six recent LLMs, nearly all progress happens within the first 30 of 100 questions, which largely decide how the game ends; after that, most models plateau. Through controlled interventions on the candidate questions and the hypothesis space, we find that the bottleneck is generation, not judgment: models recognize a good idea or a good question when one is offered, but often cannot produce it on their own. We further analyze the ideation traces and find that models fail by either over-exploiting one direction or over-exploring too many. These findings point to concrete design principles for autoresearch systems: since models can judge candidates they cannot produce, enriching the search with externally sourced ideas and questions may be more effective than improving any single model's generation ability.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Medical Image Segmentation: Foundation Model Adaptation versus Task-Specific Training
Emre Kutlusan, Yongmin Li
Foundation models pretrained on large natural-image collections are increasingly adapted for medical image segmentation, in the expectation that they will replace models trained for each task. Most comparisons, however, use data from the training distribution and a single task-specific baseline whose configuration is rarely justified, and therefore provide limited evidence of performance at new clinical sites. It also remains unclear how much of a foundation model must be adapted, and what determines this. We adapted a foundation model, DINOv2, with strategies ranging from tuning only its bias terms to full fine-tuning, and compared it with U-Nets and ResU-Nets trained from scratch. Experiments covered colonoscopy, breast ultrasound and dermoscopy, with testing on held-out data from the training source and on independent datasets from other institutions. The adapted foundation model generalised better on every external dataset. Within the training distribution, the task-specific models remained competitive when training data were abundant, and delineated boundaries more precisely, while the foundation model more often missed small lesions. Only a small fraction of the foundation model required adaptation, and the capacity needed was determined by the imaging domain rather than by the adaptation method. A widely used polyp test set was also found to duplicate images from another benchmark. Foundation-model adaptation is therefore warranted where models must work across sites, with capacity selected on the target domain.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.LG
Emergent Biological Capabilities in a Foundation Model for Molecular Interactions
Adi Mashiach
Foundation models trained on large unlabeled corpora develop emergent capabilities, tasks that go beyond the training objective. We extend this paradigm to multimodal biology with Bonbon, a foundation model for molecular interactions trained on approximately 3.2 trillion tokens of paired protein-ligand sequences. From a single representation space, Bonbon exhibits three zero-shot emergent capabilities at hierarchical levels of resolution: functional (mechanism of action), residue (binding site localization, including orthosteric/allosteric discrimination), and bond (covalent versus non-covalent engagement). All three capabilities generalize to out-of-distribution complexes. Bonbon was trained on protein-ligand sequences alone, without any task-specific supervision and without structural coordinates. We conducted controlled scaling experiments across six model scales from 42M to 1.6B parameters; every capability evaluated shows a sharp jump at the largest scale on continuous metrics, even as pretraining loss decreases smoothly. This demonstrates that loss-based scaling laws alone are insufficient to predict when zero-shot emergent capabilities become available. The capabilities reported here emerge after training at a 1:2,000 parameter-to-token ratio to accommodate the sparsity of paired biological interaction data. The same frozen representations achieve state-of-the-art binding and affinity prediction at five orders of magnitude greater speed than co-folding methods. In prospective wet-lab validation across nine disease targets spanning seven protein families, Bonbon achieves a 61.5% dose-response hit rate on de novo compounds, yielding structurally novel molecules not previously reported to inhibit these proteins, including for out-of-distribution targets.