Proposal
Momentum
4 papers in the last four weeks, with none the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.
Latest papers 23
The cross-entropy method (CEM) uses world-model scores to select action sequences and fit the distribution sampled in its next iteration. A scoring error can therefore change both the present decision and the candidates considered later. We evaluate these two roles separately. Four types of predictive model generate CEM traces, and every model rescores every saved candidate pool. Executing the same candidates in the environment provides a reference elite set and proposal update. Across twelve independently trained task-seed units on Walker and Cheetah, the pre-specified proposal distance falls from the first to the final CEM iteration in every unit. Proposal widths contract and fitted means separate relative to the remaining search width. Pairwise ranking agreement stays near chance on Walker and declines on Cheetah; elite-set agreement does not improve. This comparison shows greater variation between scorers than between pool sources on Cheetah; Walker has variation in both and in their pairings. We use the original six units to select Random nonlinear for a one-update intervention, without inspecting intervention outcomes. Replacing its first model-ranked update with an environment-ranked update lowers final realised selected-sequence cost in those six units and in six further units held out from the selection.
Marking Contour Tones in Yorùbá: A Typographic and Computational Proposal
Yorùbá is a tonal language in which contour tones pose persistent orthographic challenges. These are especially notable for personal names and lexical items whose conventional spellings avoid vowel lengthening that would otherwise provide a host syllable for the second tone. A particular concern is a class of names in which the conventional spelling does not just omit tonal information but inverts the meaning of said name, sometimes asserting the opposite of what the name intends. This paper describes the problem, illustrates the inadequacy of current solutions, and proposes the adoption of the caron and circumflex marks. These are symbols with precedent in Yorùbá phonological scholarship since Olmsted (1951), used as orthographic conventions on single vowels to encode rising and falling contour tones, making them accessible for the first time through standard keyboard input and computational text processing. The proposal is supported by an implementation in the WriteYoruba keyboard and the TTSYoruba speech synthesizer, whose architecture and listener evaluation are reported separately (Tubosun et al., 2026).
PGL-3D: Towards Progressive Geometric Learning for 3D Visual Query Localization
3D Visual Query Localization (3DVQL) retrieves the latest contiguous occurrence of a queried object in an RGB--point-cloud sequence and predicts a 9-DoF cuboid for every response frame. The query is captured independently of the search sequence, so its annotated pose may differ from how the object appears in the search frames. The benchmark baseline predicts cuboids after feature modeling, leaving their geometry unused for subsequent feature refinement. We investigate whether complete intermediate cuboids can improve query and proposal representations before final decoding. We introduce Progressive Geometric Learning for 3DVQL (PGL-3D), a predict--select--refine--re-predict framework that uses intermediate cuboids to guide the aggregation of search evidence and update query and proposal representations. A shared head first predicts a complete cuboid for every proposal. Query--Tube--Memory (QTM) then selects reference observations by combining proposal association, cuboid quality, frame response, and target absence, since association confidence alone establishes neither target presence nor geometric accuracy. The center, size, and orientation of each selected cuboid define soft pooling weights over query-conditioned proposal features. The pooled memory updates the query and proposal representations, and the head re-predicts from the updated features. A training-only objective, ST-D9O, supervises cuboid geometry at every stage by adding boundary, signed-distance, and soft-overlap terms to parameter regression. PGL-3D achieves a mean stAP of on 3DVQL, compared with reported for LaF. Ablations support the benefits of geometry-guided feature updates, while stage-wise analyses show improved cuboid accuracy. Replacing the geometry objective in our PROT3D reproduction with ST-D9O improves mAO on GSOT3D from to . Our code and models will be released.
RINI: Seeing the Prior Is Not Enough
A research proposal can describe an established mechanism correctly while claiming to introduce it. We study whether providing the earlier paper corrects such contribution claims. Three controlled experiments compare proposals generated with a contribution-bearing prior and a same-topic control. Providing the prior yields no clear aggregate reduction in unsupported novelty. Human analysis of 175 interpretable exposed proposals finds that 137 recognize the prior's relevance, but 61 correctly attribute the established contribution. Of 71 proposed remaining distinctions, 37 are covered by the same prior. We introduce Research Idea Novelty Inspection (RINI), which audits contribution claims against evidence, checks the remaining distinction, and applies local revisions. Five human annotators evaluate 1,080 original-revision pairs across three methods. On the same 240 originals judged to require correction, successful repair is 11.7% for Self-Revision, 39.1% for Retrieve-and-Revise, and 72.2% for RINI, with research tasks weighted equally. The improvement over same-evidence direct revision is 33.0 percentage points. The revised proposals retain their research questions and technical methods. These results motivate explicit contribution attribution when using literature to generate and revise research proposals.
Propose, Verify, Commit: Evidence-Grounded Memory for Long-Horizon Multi-Actor Conversations
Long-horizon conversational memory is especially challenging in multi-actor settings, where relevant evidence is distributed across participants and contexts and previously established information may later be revised. We introduce EGMEMORY, which formulates long-horizon multi-actor memory as a searchable state machine that separates persistent message-level evidence from an explicit active state. At write time, adaptive state resolution and an evidence-grounded propose-verify-commit protocol govern how this state evolves. At read time, adaptive evidence navigation iteratively resolves the state and supporting evidence required for a query, using conversational structure to narrow the search space and lexical-semantic relevance to rank candidates. The system operates through prompting and tool use without memory-specific policy training. EGMEMORY achieves 68.2% on GroupMemBench and 77.9% on EverMemBench, outperforming the strongest evaluated baselines by 22.7 and 21.4 percentage points, respectively. It further reaches 73.6% on the dyadic LoCoMo benchmark, demonstrating generalization beyond multi-actor conversations. We will release the codebase upon formal publication.
A Proposal for an Agentic AI Architecture to Support Multi-Domain Decision-Making in the Brazilian Armed Forces
The growing complexity of multi-domain operational environments (land, aerospace, naval, cyber, and electromagnetic spectrum) has increased the volume and velocity of data reaching command-and-control (C2) centers, straining the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) decision cycle. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems currently employed in defense are, in general, reactive and isolated tools that still rely heavily on human operators to integrate information, assess scenarios, and formulate courses of action. This paper proposes a conceptual Agentic AI architecture for AI systems that can plan, access data sources, execute tools, and act autonomously and audibly, aimed at supporting decision-making across the three Brazilian Armed Forces (Navy, Army, and Air Force). Four application fronts are discussed (decision support, situational analysis, feasibility studies, and countermeasure suggestion), as well as the data and sensor access requirements and the security and permission safeguards necessary for responsible employment across administrative, strategic, operational, and tactical contexts.
Metamorphic Testing for Clinical ML Models: A Framework Proposal and Pilot Study
Machine learning models for clinical prediction tasks, such as in-hospital mortality and sepsis onset, routinely achieve high AUROC scores. However, AUROC measures ranking performance rather than clinical sensibility. A model may rank patients correctly overall while predicting a lower mortality risk when a patient's SOFA score worsens, contradicting established medical knowledge. This paper proposes applying metamorphic testing (MT) to clinical machine learning models to evaluate behavioral correctness without requiring ground-truth labels for individual predictions. We design a catalog of 12 candidate metamorphic relations (MRs) for three ICU prediction tasks using the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets, with each MR grounded in an authoritative clinical guideline. We further propose a five-layer validation strategy to ensure that MRs are clinically sound before deployment. As a feasibility study, we evaluate the approach on the UCI Heart Disease dataset. Although the three clinical models achieve strong predictive performance (AUROC = 0.849-0.900), they exhibit MT violation rates ranging from 27% to 87% across five pilot MRs. An injected-fault experiment further shows that a sign-negation error in a blood pressure feature remains undetected by AUROC but increases the MT violation rate by 31-67 percentage points. These findings suggest that metamorphic testing provides a valuable complement to conventional performance metrics for assessing the behavioral correctness of clinical prediction models.
Propose and Attend: Training-free MLLM Grounding Confidence via Multi-Token Localized Attention
Multimodal large language models can emit localized predictions, bounding boxes for objects and temporal windows for video and audio events, but they hallucinate these regions prolifically. The model's own token log-probabilities are nearly uninformative: they conflate grounding quality with input ambiguity, and coordinate tokens become near-deterministic once the model commits. We propose Multi-Token Localized Attention (MTLA): a training-free, post-hoc score that measures how strongly a prediction's tokens attend to the region they claim. Prior attention-based detectors, which sum attention over the entire input modality and read a single response token, are weaker special cases; we show that summing only within the claimed region and aggregating across all prediction tokens recovers a stronger grounding signal. The same recipe applies almost trivially to other modalities and tasks: object detection in images and temporal localization in video and audio. Across multiple MLLM families and three modalities, MTLA improves hallucination AUROC by +7 to +38 over the best prior training-free baseline. Used as a confidence score for re-ranking, it nearly doubles the zero-shot COCO detection AP of an open-source 8B generalist (from 20.4 to 37.0), narrowing the gap to supervised detectors without any task-specific training.
Generative Model Proposal based Particle Filtering for Data Assimilation
Data assimilation models state dynamics conditioned on sequential observations, and has wide-ranging scientific applications. In the filtering setting, the goal is to model the posterior over the current state given all observations so far. Classical solutions typically make simplifying distributional or functional assumptions, e.g., linear-Gaussian systems, which can be inaccurate in many scenarios. In principle, particle filters (PFs) remove these assumptions, yet often collapse in high dimensions. Recent generative approaches learn conditional state transitions, but without principled Bayesian updates they do not recover the correct filtering posterior and can accumulate error over long horizons. In this work, we introduce Flow Proposal Particle Filters (FPPF), which learn a conditional generative model based proposal approximating the variance-minimizing optimal proposal for particle propagation. Conditioning on observations steers particles toward high-likelihood regions before weighting, reducing weight variance and delaying degeneracy. Since our proposal admits tractable likelihood evaluation, FPPF computes accurate importance weights and retains a Bayesian update step. We further extend FPPF to high-dimensional problems through localization strategies, adressing another standard PF failure mode. Extensive experiments on a variety of dynamical systems show that FPPF outperforms statistical baselines and other generative methods in non-linear, non-Gaussian, and high-dimensional regimes.
Towards a foundational model for recognising diastematic Gregorian notation
Optical recognition of Gregorian notation has recently been attempted with end-to-end methods, with four datasets introduced. However, each of these datasets is in a different encoding. We design a common encoding based on the S-GABC proposal, convert all four datasets to this common encoding, and train a shared end-to-end foundational model for diastematic Gregorian notation that establishes a new state of the art across all four datasets.
Research Entity Extraction and Topic Detection from UKRI Grant Proposals
This paper presents preliminary findings from a UKRI-funded Metascience project comparing three LLM-based approaches, GPT-4o, Mistral, and a bespoke algorithm, DSIT-Taxonomies, for extracting and classifying research entities from funding proposals. Our project "Tracking Stars and Unicorns" aims to identify early signals of emerging research areas to inform public investment. Our methodology employed a three-stage pipeline, leveraging Mistral for primary entity extraction and mapping against the OpenAlex Topics taxonomy. We evaluated our approach across 42 proposals' abstracts from different areas and observed that Mistral and GPT-4o produce comparable, high-quality entity sets with significant semantic overlap, outperforming the fragmented DSIT-Taxonomies approach. Crucially, the Mistral-based approach achieved superior topic classification accuracy (90.5%) compared to the full DSIT-Taxonomies pipeline (71.4%). We conclude that Mistral offers a high-performance, operationally efficient, and secure solution for large-scale analysis of sensitive grant data.
Where Does Texture Evidence Live in SAM? Features, Proposal Masks, and Texture Segmentation
Texture segmentation stresses foundation segmentation because meaningful regions are defined by material or repeated appearance rather than object identity. Segment Anything Models (SAMs) often fail by default on such texture-defined partitions, but this failure is ambiguous: the texture evidence may be absent, missing from the proposal bank, or present but selected or assembled incorrectly by an object-centric readout. We ask what texture-relevant evidence is already preserved in frozen SAM before adaptation. We study two frozen evidence spaces: multiscale features, probed with a minimal clustering readout, and the automatic proposal bank, treated as evidence for a supervised consolidation readout. SAM is frozen throughout; we do not fine-tune the backbone or retrain the proposal generator. Across RWTD, STLD, an ADE20K-selected refined-crop complement, and a ControlNet-stitched PTD bridge archive, frozen SAM is not a texture segmenter by default, but its failures are not simple texture blindness. Coarse frozen features preserve texture organization, and proposal banks often contain texture-aligned masks or fragments. Natural scenes more often require assembly and commitment over fragments, while cleaner synthetic cases more often reduce to selecting an already coherent proposal. Default mask failure should therefore be decomposed into representation evidence, proposal-bank support, readout mismatch, and commitment failure.
Mitigating Bias in Locally Constrained Decoding via Tractable Proposals
Generations from large language models often fail to conform to desired constraints such as JSON schema. Existing locally constrained decoding (LCD) approaches enforce constraints by myopically masking out next tokens, resulting in biased sampling and degradation in performance. Recent work uses sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods to mitigate such biases, but designing effective proposal distributions or potential functions remains a key challenge. In this work, we propose a generic approach to construct proposals and potentials for SMC sampling from . First, we show that constraints specified as finite automata can be tensorized for efficient execution on GPUs, which we use to construct globally constrained decoding (GCD) proposals. In addition, leveraging the fact that tensorized finite automata share the same circuit structure as hidden Markov models, we circuit-multiply them to obtain the probabilistic GCD (P-GCD) proposals encoding both logical and probabilistic information about the target distributions. We evaluate (P-)GCD on the tasks of function calling, keyword-based generation, and SQL generation. Experiments show that under the same SMC sampling setup, compared to LCD proposals, (P-)GCD converges faster to the target distribution with significantly fewer particles.
Machine learning applied to emerald gemstone grading: framework proposal and creation of a public dataset
The grading of gemstones is currently a manual procedure performed by gemologists. A popular approach uses reference stones, where those are visually inspected by specialists that decide which one of the available reference stone is the most similar to the inspected stone. This procedure is very subjective as different specialists may end up with different grading choices. This work proposes a complete framework that entails the image acquisition and goes up to the final stone categorization. The proposal is able to automate the entire process apart from including the stone in the created chamber for the image acquisition. It discards the subjective decisions made by specialists. This is the first work to propose a machine learning approach coupled with image processing techniques for emerald grading. The proposed framework achieves 98% of accuracy (correctly categorized stones), outperforming a deep learning approach. Furthermore, we also create and publish the used dataset that contains 192 images of emerald stones along with their extracted and pre-processed features.
DualMem: Bypassing the Objectness Bottleneck for Calibrated Unknown-Stream Filtering in Open-World Object Detection
Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires detectors to localize known classes while identifying unknown objects for future incremental learning. We find that the unknown prediction streams of strong OWOD detectors are heavily polluted: on M-OWODB, across PROB, OW-DETR, and HypOW, future-task positive unknowns make up less than 10% of unknown predictions, whereas background false positives account for 46-71%. We show that this is not a missing-information problem, but an information bottleneck at the objectness head. On PROB Task 1, a linear probe on the 256-D decoder query achieves an AUROC of 0.908 for positive-versus-negative unknown discrimination, but the final one-dimensional objectness scalar drops to 0.642. A frozen SigLIP feature, without access to the detector, independently recovers much of this proposal-level separability at the filtering stage (AUROC = 0.871). Motivated by this finding, we propose DualMem, a calibrated post-hoc filter that assumes a small image-disjoint annotated calibration split of held-out future-task objects and performs a non-parametric likelihood ratio test in frozen SigLIP feature space. DualMem uses a k-nearest-neighbor positive memory to protect future-task objects and a negative memory to suppress background-like proposals. Its decision threshold is chosen by Neyman-Pearson calibration, giving users an explicit trade-off between false-unknown suppression and novel recall. Across PROB, OW-DETR, and HypOW on M-OWODB Task 1, DualMem reduces background-type false unknown proposals per image by 44.9%-66.3%, with a mean reduction of 56.6%. On PROB Task 1, it more than doubles the reduction achieved by a natural K-means prototype baseline, while leaving known-class mAP unchanged because known detections bypass the filter.
Mixture of Complementary Agents for Robust LLM Ensemble
Multi-AI collaboration, such as ensembling or debating large language models (LLMs), is a promising paradigm for aggregating information and boosting performance. A foundational step in these pipelines is to feed the responses of several proposer LLMs into a summarizer LLM, which synthesizes a better answer. However, choosing which proposers to include is non-trivial. Existing approaches primarily focus either on accuracy (picking the strongest models) or diversity (ensuring variety), and often overlook the interactions among proposers and with the summarizer. We reframe proposer selection as a combinatorial selection problem akin to feature selection, where the value of an LLM lies in its complementarity with others. However, directly applying standard feature-selection algorithms is impractical in the LLM setting due to prohibitive time complexity. Motivated by this limitation, we explore an extensive range of computationally feasible, greedy-style selection algorithms that assess complementarity using a small labeled set. Our experiments validate complementarity as a guiding principle for proposer selection and identify methods that achieve the best performance-cost trade-offs in practice.
A Faceted Proposal for Transparent Attribution of AI-Assisted Text Production
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly integrated into writing processes, challenging traditional notions of authorship, responsibility, and intellectual contribution. Current disclosure practices usually indicate whether AI was used, but rarely explain how it was used, where it intervened, or how its output was reviewed. This paper proposes a faceted model for representing AI-assisted text production at the levels of documents, chapters, sections, and paragraphs. The proposal introduces a core model based on Form, Generation, and Evaluation, and an extended model that adds Intent, Control, and Traceability. The model is positioned as a minimal operational baseline with extensibility toward higher-fidelity representations. A worked example based on the production of this article demonstrates applicability.
Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding
Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding requires mapping natural language instructions to precise pixel coordinates. However, due to visually homogeneous elements and dense layouts, models typically grasp semantic intent yet struggle with achieving precise localization. While scaling sampling attempts (Pass@k) reveals potential gains, static self-consistency strategies derived from geometric clustering often yield limited improvements, as the model's predictions tend to be spatially dispersed. In this paper, we propose replacing static consistency strategies with a learnable selection mechanism that selects the optimal target by critiquing its own proposals rendered on the screenshot. Given the significant disparity between the model's grounding and critiquing capabilities, we propose a co-evolving Propose-then-Critic framework. To jointly optimize these, we introduce a maturity-aware adaptive co-evolutionary reinforcement learning paradigm. This approach dynamically balances the training objectives of proposer and critic, where the diversity of the proposer's outputs enhances critic robustness, while the critic's maturing discrimination capability conversely unlocks the proposer's potential for extensive spatial exploration, fostering the mutual reinforcement and co-evolution of both capabilities, thereby ensuring generalizability to adapt to diverse and complex interface layouts. Extensive experiments over 6 benchmarks show that our method significantly enhances both grounding accuracy and critic reliability.
Refute-or-Promote: An Adversarial Stage-Gated Multi-Agent Review Methodology for High-Precision LLM-Assisted Defect Discovery
LLM-assisted defect discovery has a precision crisis: plausible-but-wrong reports overwhelm maintainers and degrade credibility for real findings. We present Refute-or-Promote, an inference-time reliability pattern combining Stratified Context Hunting (SCH) for candidate generation, adversarial kill mandates, context asymmetry, and a Cross-Model Critic (CMC). Adversarial agents attempt to disprove candidates at each promotion gate; cold-start reviewers are intended to reduce anchoring cascades; cross-family review can catch correlated blind spots that same-family review misses. Over a 31-day campaign across 7 targets (security libraries, the ISO C++ standard, major compilers), the pipeline killed roughly 79% of 171 candidates before advancing to disclosure (retrospective aggregate); on a consolidated-protocol subset (lcms2, wolfSSL; n=30), the prospective kill rate was 83%. Outcomes: 4 CVEs (3 public, 1 embargoed); LWG 4549 accepted to the C++ working paper; 5 merged C++ editorial PRs; 3 compiler conformance bugs; 8 merged security-related fixes without CVE; an RFC 9000 errata filed under committee review; and 1+ FIPS 140-3 normative compliance issues under coordinated disclosure -- all evaluated by external acceptance, not benchmarks. The most instructive failure: ten dedicated reviewers unanimously endorsed a non-existent Bleichenbacher padding oracle in OpenSSL's CMS module; it was killed only by a single empirical test, motivating the mandatory empirical gate. No vulnerability was discovered autonomously; the contribution is external structure that filters LLM agents' persistent false positives. As a preliminary transfer test beyond defect discovery, a simplified cross-family critique variant also solved five previously unsolved SymPy instances on SWE-bench Verified and one SWE-rebench hard task.
A proposal for PU classification under Non-SCAR using clustering and logistic model
The present study aims to investigate a cluster cleaning algorithm that is both computationally simple and capable of solving the PU classification when the SCAR condition is unsatisfied. A secondary objective of this study is to determine the robustness of the LassoJoint method to perturbations of the SCAR condition. In the first step of our algorithm, we obtain cleaning labels from 2-means clustering. Subsequently, we perform logistic regression on the cleaned data, assigning positive labels from the cleaning algorithm with additional true positive observations. The remaining observations are assigned the negative label. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by comparing 11 real data sets from machine learning repositories and a synthetic set. The findings obtained from this study demonstrate the efficacy of the clustering algorithm in scenarios where the SCAR condition is violated and further underscore the moderate robustness of the LassoJoint algorithm in this context.
Prompt Sensitivity in Vision-Language Grounding: How Small Changes in Wording Affect Object Detection
Vision-language models enable open-vocabulary object grounding through natural language queries, under the implicit assumption that semantically equivalent descriptions yield consistent outputs. We examine this assumption using a controlled pipeline combining DETR for object proposals with CLIP for language-conditioned selection on 263 COCO val2017 images. We find that overlapping prompts such as "a person," "a human," and "a pedestrian" frequently select different instances, with mean instability of 2.11 distinct selections across six prompts. PCA analysis shows this variability is structured and directional, not random. Prompt ensembling does not improve quality and often shifts selections toward generic regions. We further show that text embedding proximity explains only 34% of grounding disagreement (r = -0.58), confirming that instability arises from the argmax selection mechanism rather than text-level distances alone.
Council Mode: A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Consensus Framework for Reducing LLM Hallucination and Bias
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities but often suffer from factual inaccuracies (hallucinations) and systematic biases. These issues, sometimes amplified in specific architectures like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) which motivate our work, pose risks for reliable deployment. To address these challenges, we propose the Council Mode, a multi-agent consensus framework. Our approach dispatches queries to multiple heterogeneous frontier LLMs in parallel and synthesizes their outputs using a dedicated consensus model. The pipeline consists of three phases: an intelligent triage for query complexity, parallel generation across diverse models, and a structured synthesis that identifies agreement, disagreement, and unique findings. In our evaluation, conducted under controlled no-web settings, the Council Mode achieved a 41.7% relative reduction in hallucination rates on a 1,200-sample HaluEval subset and a 7.5-point improvement on TruthfulQA compared to the top-performing individual model. On our curated MDR-500 multi-domain reasoning benchmark, the Council Mode achieved a Quality Score of 95.4%, representing a 9.2-point improvement over the best individual model. The framework also exhibited lower measured bias variance under our rubric-based evaluation protocol. We provide a cost-effectiveness analysis showing that the framework incurs a 4.2x token-cost overhead, making it most suitable for accuracy-prioritized applications where the cost of errors exceeds the added inference cost. These findings suggest that structured multi-agent consensus is a promising direction for enhancing the reliability and factual grounding of LLM-generated content.
Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency
Many fear that future artificial agents will resist shutdown. I present an idea - the POST-Agents Proposal - for ensuring that doesn't happen. I propose that we train agents to satisfy Preferences Only Between Same-Length Trajectories (POST). I then prove that POST - together with other conditions - implies Neutrality+: the agent maximizes expected utility, ignoring the probability distribution over trajectory-lengths. I argue that Neutrality+ keeps agents shutdownable and allows them to be useful.