ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

AstroMemBench: A Benchmark for Memory Systems in Embodied Spacecraft Agents

You Wu, Guhong Zhang, Hongwei Li and 2 more

Long-term spacecraft autonomy requires embodied agents to use operational history under communication delays, time-critical operations, environmental uncertainty, complex physical interactions, power and computational constraints, and safety and reliability requirements. We introduce AstroMemBench and a Scenario-Challenge-Capability design method that maps these requirements to executable memory tests. The benchmark covers 16 memory subchallenges through 140 templates and 2240 instances across nine tasks in planetary surface operations, on-orbit servicing, and deep-space exploration. A deterministic environment scores actions for task completion, state changes, safety, and resource use. Ablations under nine conditions show that the benchmark is sensitive to how accurately agents recover and use historical information and to differences in memory-system design. Main experiments compare six configurations. Mem0, Chain-of-Memory, LightMem, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improve same-session mean scores over native Pi Agent, with no clear advantage of the three memory systems over RAG. After a session restart, Mem0 outperforms RAG by 12.25 points. Benefits favor instruction retention and result reuse over ongoing state tracking and energy reservation. AstroMemBench supports the design, development, and selection of memory systems for embodied spacecraft agents. AstroMemBench 1.0 and its evaluation code are publicly available: https://github.com/flyingView/AstroMemBench-v1.

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

Safety as a Budget: Calibrating the Control Channel of Constrained GRPO for Vision-Language Models

Bo Han

Reinforcement learning can teach vision-language models (VLMs) to decline harmful image-text requests, but how safe the result becomes is set indirectly, through reward weights found by trial runs. Stating safety as budgets on the rate of harmful assistance and the rate of over-refusal, enforced by Lagrange multipliers inside GRPO with an off-the-shelf scorer as the cost, is the natural fix, and it fails twice. The multiplier compares the scorer's mean with the budget, and scorers built for ranking get the mean wrong: a fixed-point analysis shows that the mean bias, not the budget, then decides whether the multiplier settles, saturates or switches off. And standard GRPO standardizes the penalized reward within each group, which cancels the multiplier before it reaches the gradient. Two-channel constrained GRPO repairs both: the base reward keeps the raw score for the within-group comparison, the penalty and the constraint estimate pass through a monotone map fitted on judge-labeled training responses, and the advantage keeps the multiplier. On a Qwen3-VL-2B policy with a training-free readout of an open 4B model as the scorer, held-out harm on 1,037 adversarial prompts falls from 8.9% under standard GRPO to 4.8%, lower in every seed, where the uncalibrated budget gives 7.6%; over-refusal stays at most 2% on 400 benign queries and MMBench is unchanged. The gain is largest where the intent sits in the image (10.1% -> 5.1%) and grows on the unseen HADES benchmark (28.9% -> 12.8%). Order-preserving distortions of the scores reproduce each predicted controller state in every seed, and the results hold under a map fitted on another judge's labels, an image-reading judge and a human audit.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.NE

Similarity-Guided Optimization Strategies for Approximate Network Symmetry Detection

David Hartman, Jaroslav Hlinka, Dominik Klepl and 2 more

Symmetry in complex networks is a structural property with broad implications for network function, dynamics, and robustness. While classical approaches rely on exact automorphisms and thus remain highly sensitive to small perturbations, recent work of Liu has introduced approximate formulations that relax the strict invariance condition and recast symmetry detection as an optimization problem over permutations. We investigate how node-level similarity information can be used to bias the search toward structurally plausible vertex correspondences, with network centralities serving as one interpretable instance. Building on this perspective, we adapt simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution and the quadratic symmetry approximator to this problem, add similarity guidance to each, and introduce Bilinear Approximate Symmetry Inference (BASIN), which learns a soft assignment matrix via bilinear embeddings. Using a unified evaluation pipeline, we compare their guided and unguided variants, BASIN and a random baseline on four synthetic graph families, structural brain connectomes, and three empirical networks with known automorphism groups. Node-similarity guidance is decisive where a planted orbit exists that the unguided search misses, and algorithm-dependent elsewhere, on synthetic and empirical networks alike. Overall, tabu search achieves the strongest performance; its guided variant (SGTS) has the lowest median score among the guided variants in all 44 synthetic conditions, while BASIN is the better of the continuous relaxations on rewired lateral graphs. The effect of node-similarity guidance is therefore regime-dependent rather than uniformly positive.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

When Expert Disagreement Hurts: Prestige and Selectivity in LLM Decision Revision

Yupeng Tang, Mingfeng Lin

When language models revise a decision after another agent disagrees, neither reversal counts nor final accuracy shows whether they are fixing mistakes or abandoning correct answers. We introduce a controlled two-pass audit that holds the question, the evidence, and the model's initial answer fixed and varies only the revision context: neutral reflection, anonymous disagreement, or disagreement attributed to a domain expert. For binary decisions the accounting is exact: revision raises accuracy only if it is selective enough, reversing wrong answers more than $a/(1-a)$ times as often as correct ones, where $a$ is initial accuracy (nine times at 90%). Across five models and 1,989 evidence-grounded decisions in medicine, science, and law, no model clears this bar under expert disagreement, and accuracy falls by up to 16.1 points. The expert label, a prestige cue, adds reversals for four of the five models, yet its effect on accuracy ranges from a 5.2-point loss to a 2.4-point gain, so reversal counts are a poor proxy for harm. With identical arguments from both sources, the label still raises reversal for three proprietary models and in a pooled analysis of four newer models. Models also respond to stated source reliability. Revision pipelines should therefore be evaluated with paired, conditional metrics, per model and protocol.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

DySR-GNN: Dynamic Sensor-Relationship Graph Neural Network for Root Cause Analysis in Automotive HiL Multivariate Time Series

Hamza Ouarrad, Mohammad Abboush, Andreas Rausch

Root-cause analysis in automotive Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) systems is challenging because faults can propagate across multiple interacting signals, making the most abnormal sensor different from the actual fault origin. This work proposes DySR-GNN, a Dynamic Sensor-Relationship Graph Neural Network for supervised multi-label root-cause identification in multivariate HiL time series. The approach jointly extracts temporal patterns within individual sensor signals and structural relationships across sensors. Each sensor is processed by a shared temporal encoder and combined with a trainable sensor-identity representation, from which a sparse relationship graph is reconstructed independently for every input window. This window-specific structure provides an explicit representation of the sensor relationships used for graph message passing and direct root-location prediction. Under a recording-disjoint evaluation protocol, the proposed model outperforms CNN--LSTM, Static GCN, Static GAT, and context-based variants, achieving a recording-level Macro-F1 of 0.9524, MCC of 0.9302, and strict exact-match accuracy of 0.8519. Analysis of the learned graphs reveals both persistent and state-dependent relationships among sensor variables. The results demonstrate that extracting adaptive relational structure alongside temporal representations can improve multi-label root-cause identification in complex automotive cyber--physical systems.