#01Aug 7, 2026
cs.AI
SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent
Mingxuan Zheng, Yujin Zhou, Chuxue Cao and 6 more
LLM agents increasingly adapt to recurring tasks by accumulating procedural knowledge in skills. These skills are lightweight, reusable textual artifacts that are loaded into the agent's context without weight updates. Recent methods refine skills through iterative task execution, failure diagnosis, and trajectory-guided text-space updates. However, existing frameworks lack explicit diagnosis--outcome feedback and treat deletion as a generic edit operation rather than a dedicated mechanism for consolidating accumulated knowledge. We introduce SkillProx, a proximal-gradient-inspired forward--backward framework that couples closed-loop diagnostic evolution with utility-aware proximal refinement. Motivated by a composite objective balancing task loss and skill complexity, the forward stage re-executes diagnosis-driven edits on the same task batch, rolls back regressions, and feeds measured outcomes into subsequent diagnoses. The backward stage decomposes the resulting skill into auditable knowledge units, estimates their contributions using a frozen leave-one-out utility audit, and applies validation-gated consolidation, demotion, or removal. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks across multiple backbone LLMs show that SkillProx improves average accuracy by 3.0 percentage points over the strongest gradient-based baseline. Component ablations demonstrate the complementary effects of closed-loop diagnosis and proximal refinement.
#02Aug 7, 2026
cs.LG
Omni-modal decomposition autoencoders learn full-stack wearable disentangled representations
Ioannis Ziogas, Ensieh Khazaei, Bilal Taha and 4 more
Learning disentangled representations is a key requirement for developing versatile, general-purpose, and sustainable models in multi-modal wearable computing. However, existing approaches do not operate as full-stack wearable processors, i.e., they do not simultaneously address task-specific classification performance, disentangled and interpretable representation learning, fusion, and generative modeling of highly heterogeneous multi-modal time series. To address this gap, we introduce Omni-modal Variational Decomposition Autoencoders (OmniDecVAEs), a framework that efficiently learns multi-purpose representations in a unified and scalable manner from arbitrarily many modalities. OmniDecVAEs extend DecVAEs by learning modality-conditioned time-frequency latent subspaces through a multi-view self-supervised decomposition loss and a shared asymmetric autoencoder (AE) architecture. Results on a challenging omni-modal human activity recognition (HAR) setting with up to thirty modalities, demonstrate the ability of OmniDecVAEs to learn full-stack wearable representations. When compared to transformer-based and VAE-based methods, OmniDecVAEs full-stack disentangled representation properties lead to accuracy improvements of 1.01% and 6.75% in activity and identity recognition, respectively. Furthermore, OmniDecVAEs synthesize realistic omni-modal time-frequency data that manifest with enhanced reconstructions (mean absolute error improves by 76.84%) and distributional similarity between real and synthetic data (maximum mean discrepancy improves by 13.85%). Our results highlight OmniDecVAEs potential as a lightweight model suitable for intelligent edge wearables and clinical healthcare, unifying processing requirements and abilities in a single model, through its enhanced representational capacity, modality-invariant spatial complexity (4.1M parameters), and real-time latency.
#03Aug 7, 2026
cs.AI
CoBa: Cost-Effective Test-Time Scaling via Compute-Balanced Routing
Yan Zhou, Yue Ouyang, Kaiyang Zheng and 1 more
Test-time scaling is often implemented by spending more compute along one axis: sampling more solutions, extending a chain of thought, or applying a stronger evaluator. Under a fixed inference budget, these choices compete. This paper formulates test-time reasoning as a compute-allocation problem in which a system must decide whether the next unit of compute should be spent on generation, verification, or stopping. We introduce CoBa, a compute-balanced routing policy that first obtains a small set of candidates, applies cheap verification broadly, and routes uncertain or high-value candidates to stronger verification. On 3,129 example-generator evaluations spanning MATH-500, AIME 2024/2025, AMC 2023, and procedural symbolic reasoning, CoBa-Routed-Strong reaches 85.13% macro accuracy, statistically matching a self-evaluation weighted-voting proxy at 85.20% while using 49.1% fewer parameter-weighted tokens. It also matches best-of-16 majority voting within 0.01 macro-accuracy points while using 58.9% fewer parameter-weighted tokens; paired tests retain a small best-of-16 edge at substantially higher cost. Paired bootstrap tests show significant gains over single-sample decoding, while the remaining gap to the pool oracle exposes headroom for sharper routing. For local reasoning systems, test-time scaling becomes a question of where the next computation is most valuable.
#04Aug 7, 2026
physics.med-ph
Measurements Automatically Extracted from Zero Echo Time MRI Using Deep Learning Image Segmentation and Geometric Modeling Agree with Expert Manual Readings
Jack Consolini, Eric A. Bogner, Meghan Sahr and 3 more
Computed tomography (CT) remains the reference for 3D osseous morphometry in femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) but requires ionizing radiation and manual measurement. Zero echo time (ZTE) MRI visualizes cortical bone and yields FAI angles that agree with CT, but automated angle extraction remains limited. We developed and validated automated FAI angle computation from ZTE MRI and assessed agreement with expert manual measurements in a cross-sectional study (level of evidence, 3). Pelvic ZTE MRI was acquired in 73 participants (mean age 36.8 +/- 18.5 years; 51 women, 22 men), yielding 135 hips. nnU-Net was trained on 100 manually curated hips to segment the femur, pelvis, and three osseous landmarks. Custom geometric algorithms computed alpha, femoral neck-shaft, Tonnis, coronal and sagittal center-edge, and acetabular version angles from inferred segmentations. Measurements on 35 test hips were compared with the mean of two radiologists' manual measures using intraclass correlation (ICC) and Bland-Altman analysis. Dice exceeded 0.96 for bone and ranged from 0.65 to 0.83 for landmarks. Median landmark error was 0.38 mm (femoral head), 0.82 mm (lateral acetabulum), and <2.5 mm (medial acetabulum, greater trochanter). Interrater ICC was excellent for acetabular version, coronal center-edge, and Tonnis (>=0.82) but poor for alpha and femoral neck-shaft. Model versus rater-mean agreement was excellent for acetabular version, coronal center-edge, and Tonnis (0.92-0.96), good for mid-acetabular sagittal center-edge (0.74), and fair for alpha (0.45) and femoral neck-shaft (0.55). Model Bland-Altman limits of agreement were narrower than interrater limits for most angles. Fully automated morphometric assessment from ZTE MRI is feasible and performs comparably to expert readers for most coverage and version angles.
#05Aug 7, 2026
cs.CL
An Exploratory Evaluation of LLM-Assisted Rewriting of Moderate-Complexity Financial Sentences for DisCoCat-Based Sentiment Analysis
Brian Llinas, Nikos Chrisochoides
Quantum natural language processing (QNLP) provides a grammar-aware framework for text modeling, and Distributional Compositional Categorical (DisCoCat) is one of its theoretically grounded formulations. Prior work on financial sentiment analysis has identified practical limitations of DisCoCat, including parser sensitivity, high simulation cost, and difficulty handling longer sentences. We study an LLM-assisted preprocessing workflow that uses controlled rewriting to compress, simplify, or decompose moderate-complexity financial sentiment sentences into parser-compatible, circuit-efficient variants while preserving sentiment-bearing meaning. We compare prompting strategies, language models, and filtering configurations with the low-complexity-only DisCoCat baseline of Stein et al. At the circuit level, the strongest compression variants reduce average qubit and gate counts by more than 70 percent relative to the raw moderate-complexity subset. Across repeated training runs, GPT-4.1-mini with Prompt B achieves the highest observed mean accuracy, $0.550 \pm 0.035$, compared with $0.521 \pm 0.050$ for the baseline. Larger training splits do not necessarily improve downstream performance; across evaluated configurations, training-split size has a moderately negative association with accuracy (Pearson $r=-0.446$). These results provide exploratory evidence that LLM-assisted rewriting can make some moderate-complexity inputs usable within the evaluated DisCoCat configuration, while highlighting prompt design, filtering, and circuit-aware preprocessing as considerations for more scalable QNLP-based financial sentiment analysis.