arXiv subjects

Gaurav Mittal

Publications and source records attributed to Gaurav Mittal.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ADK Arena: Evaluating Agent Development Kits via LLM-as-a-Developer

The rapid proliferation of Agent Development Kits (ADKs), SDK-level frameworks for building LLM-powered autonomous agents, has outpaced any empirical understanding of how framework choice affects agent performance. We propose \textbf{LLM-as-a-Developer}, a methodology that replaces human developers with an LLM coding agent that learns each framework's API from documentation, writes agent code, and iteratively repairs it through a validate-and-feedback loop until tests pass. By holding the developer constant and varying only the framework, generation effort becomes a quantitative proxy for API usability and the resulting agents provide a controlled measure of framework effectiveness. We implement this in \textbf{ADK Arena}, a fully automated pipeline with per-framework Docker isolation, a three-level validation pipeline, and benchmark adapters for SWE-bench, $\tau^2$-bench, Terminal-Bench, and MCP-Atlas. Evaluating all 51 popular Python ADK frameworks (204 agent--benchmark pairs), we find that: (1)~generation succeeds for 57\% of runs, and its cost varies 5.6$\times$ across frameworks (\$0.6 to \$3.4 per agent), a quantitative proxy for API complexity, though cost alone does not predict success; (2)~no single framework dominates: the best single-benchmark ADK agents resolve up to 80\% of tasks and can even \emph{beat} general-purpose frontier coding agents at a fraction of the cost, yet the median framework resolves only 32\%; (3)~across information-source ablations, genuine framework usage stays within a narrow 28--40\% band (highest with raw source access and still 33\% with no reference material at all), indicating that documentation, source code, and parametric knowledge are largely substitutable rather than any one being a hard bottleneck.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

AgentLens: Revealing The Lucky Pass Problem in SWE-Agent Evaluation

Evaluation of software engineering (SWE) agents is dominated by a binary signal: whether the final patch passes the tests. This outcome-only view treats a principled solution and a chaotic trial-and-error process as equivalent. We show that this equivalence is empirically false. We evaluate 2,614 OpenHands trajectories from eight model backends on 60 SWE-bench Verified tasks. Of these, 47 have enough passing trajectories to construct task-level process references, yielding a 1,815-trajectory evaluation subset. Among passing trajectories in this subset, 10.7% exhibit behavior we call a Lucky Pass: regression cycles, blind retries, missing verification, or temporally disordered exploration, implementation, and verification. We introduce AgentLens, a framework for process-level assessment of SWE-agent trajectories, and define AgentLens-Bench, a dataset of 1,815 trajectories annotated with quality scores, waste signals, divergence points, and 47 task-level Prefix Tree Acceptor (PTA) references. AgentLens builds PTA references by merging multiple passing solutions for the same task, and uses a context-sensitive intent labeler to assign actions to Exploration, Implementation, Verification, or Orchestration based on trajectory history rather than tool identity alone. On AgentLens-Bench, the quality score separates passing trajectories into Lucky, Solid, and Ideal tiers and further decomposes Lucky Passes into five recurring mechanisms. Across the eight model backends, Lucky rates range from 0.5% to 23.2%, and some models move by as many as five rank positions when ranked by quality score instead of pass rate. We plan to release the project repository soon, including AgentLens-Bench artifacts, the AgentLens SDK, and the analysis tooling.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation via Peer Successes and Failures

Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser token-level supervision by training on student-generated trajectories, yet existing methods typically distill each rollout independently and ignore the other attempts sampled for the same prompt. We introduce Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation (MOPD), a peer-conditioned distillation framework that uses the student's local rollout group to construct more informative teacher signals. MOPD conditions the teacher on both successful and failed peer rollouts: successes provide positive evidence for valid reasoning patterns, while failures provide structured negative evidence about plausible mistakes to avoid. We study two peer-context constructions: positive peer imitation and contrastive success-failure conditioning. Experiments on competitive programming, mathematical reasoning, scientific question answering, and tool-use benchmarks show that MOPD consistently improves over standard on-policy baselines. Further teacher-signal analysis shows that mixed success-failure contexts better align teacher scores with verifier rewards, indicating that the gains arise from more faithful, instance-adaptive supervision. These results indicate that effective on-policy distillation should exploit the student's multi-rollout trial-and-error behavior rather than treating rollouts as isolated samples.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Learning Correct Behavior from Examples: Validating Sequential Execution in Autonomous Agents

As autonomous agents become increasingly sophisticated, validating their sequential behavior presents a significant challenge. Traditional testing approaches require manual specification, exact sequence matching, or thousands of training examples. We present a novel algorithm that automatically learns correct behavior from just 2-10 passing execution traces and validates new executions against this learned model. Our approach combines dominator analysis from compiler theory with multimodal large language model-powered semantic understanding to identify essential states and handle non-deterministic behavior. The system constructs a generalized ground truth model using Prefix Tree Acceptors, merges traces through multi-tiered equivalence detection, and validates new executions via topological subsequence matching. In controlled experiments, our system achieved high accuracy in detecting product bugs and false successes using only 3 training traces. This approach provides explainable validation results with coverage metrics and works across diverse domains including UI testing, code generation, and robotic processes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PrecisionCUA: Iterative Visual Refinement for Pixel-Precise Cursor Grounding in Code Editors

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) fundamentally rely on graphical user interface (GUI) grounding to translate language instructions into executable screen actions, but editing-level grounding in dense coding interfaces (such as VS Code and Cursor), where sub-pixel accuracy is required to interact with dense IDE elements, remains underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on single-shot coordinate prediction, which lacks a mechanism for error correction and often fails in high-density interfaces. In this technical report, we conduct an empirical study of pixel-precise cursor localization in coding environments. Instead of a single-step execution, our agent engages in an iterative refinement process, utilizing visual feedback from previous attempts to reach the target element. This closed-loop grounding mechanism allows the agent to self-correct displacement errors and adapt to dynamic UI changes. We evaluate our approach across Claude, Qwen, and GPT on a suite of complex coding benchmarks, demonstrating that multi-turn refinement significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-shot models in both click precision and overall task success rate. Our results suggest that iterative visual reasoning is a critical component for the next generation of reliable software engineering agents. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/precision-cua-bench/tree/main.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PISCES: Annotation-free Text-to-Video Post-Training via Optimal Transport-Aligned Rewards

Text-to-video (T2V) generation aims to synthesize videos with high visual quality and temporal consistency that are semantically aligned with input text. Reward-based post-training has emerged as a promising direction to improve the quality and semantic alignment of generated videos. However, recent methods either rely on large-scale human preference annotations or operate on misaligned embeddings from pre-trained vision-language models, leading to limited scalability or suboptimal supervision. We present $\texttt{PISCES}$, an annotation-free post-training algorithm that addresses these limitations via a novel Dual Optimal Transport (OT)-aligned Rewards module. To align reward signals with human judgment, $\texttt{PISCES}$ uses OT to bridge text and video embeddings at both distributional and discrete token levels, enabling reward supervision to fulfill two objectives: (i) a Distributional OT-aligned Quality Reward that captures overall visual quality and temporal coherence; and (ii) a Discrete Token-level OT-aligned Semantic Reward that enforces semantic, spatio-temporal correspondence between text and video tokens. To our knowledge, $\texttt{PISCES}$ is the first to improve annotation-free reward supervision in generative post-training through the lens of OT. Experiments on both short- and long-video generation show that $\texttt{PISCES}$ outperforms both annotation-based and annotation-free methods on VBench across Quality and Semantic scores, with human preference studies further validating its effectiveness. We show that the Dual OT-aligned Rewards module is compatible with multiple optimization paradigms, including direct backpropagation and reinforcement learning fine-tuning. Project page: https://roar-ai.github.io/pisces

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Tracking-Guided 4D Generation: Foundation-Tracker Motion Priors for 3D Model Animation

Generating dynamic 4D objects from sparse inputs is difficult because it demands joint preservation of appearance and motion coherence across views and time while suppressing artifacts and temporal drift. We hypothesize that the view discrepancy arises from supervision limited to pixel- or latent-space video-diffusion losses, which lack explicitly temporally aware, feature-level tracking guidance. We present \emph{Track4DGen}, a two-stage framework that couples a multi-view video diffusion model with a foundation point tracker and a hybrid 4D Gaussian Splatting (4D-GS) reconstructor. The central idea is to explicitly inject tracker-derived motion priors into intermediate feature representations for both multi-view video generation and 4D-GS. In Stage One, we enforce dense, feature-level point correspondences inside the diffusion generator, producing temporally consistent features that curb appearance drift and enhance cross-view coherence. In Stage Two, we reconstruct a dynamic 4D-GS using a hybrid motion encoding that concatenates co-located diffusion features (carrying Stage-One tracking priors) with Hex-plane features, and augment them with 4D Spherical Harmonics for higher-fidelity dynamics modeling. \emph{Track4DGen} surpasses baselines on both multi-view video generation and 4D generation benchmarks, yielding temporally stable, text-editable 4D assets. Lastly, we curate \emph{Sketchfab28}, a high-quality dataset for benchmarking object-centric 4D generation and fostering future research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Scenes as Tokens: Multi-Scale Normal Distributions Transform Tokenizer for General 3D Vision-Language Understanding

Recent advances in 3D vision-language models (VLMs) highlight a strong potential for 3D scene understanding and reasoning. However, effectively tokenizing 3D scenes into holistic scene tokens, and leveraging these tokens across diverse 3D understanding tasks, remain highly challenging. We present NDTokenizer3D, a generalist 3D VLM that performs a wide range of 3D scene understanding tasks while naturally supporting human interactions, thereby bridging language-level reasoning with 3D spatial understanding. The core of our approach is a novel three-stage scene tokenization pipeline built upon a Multi-Scale Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) representation, paired with a Multi-Scale NDT Decoder (MSDec). Specifically, NDTokenizer3D first constructs a multi-scale NDT representation from raw high-resolution point clouds, preserving both global context and fine-grained geometric details. Next, the MSDec progressively fuses cross-scale NDT features, producing holistic scene tokens consumable by LLM endpoints. Beyond tokenization, MSDec is repurposed as a general interface for human-interactive prompting (points, boxes, masks) and segmentation-mask decoding, unifying diverse 3D scene understanding tasks within a single architecture. With this compact and unified design, NDTokenizer3D offers a fine-grained, general-purpose 3D VLM, achieving remarkable improvements in 3D Referring Segmentation, 3D Visual Question Answering, and 3D Dense Captioning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Agentic AI Systems in Electrical Power Systems Engineering: Current State-of-the-Art and Challenges

Agentic AI systems have recently emerged as a critical and transformative approach in artificial intelligence, offering capabilities that extend far beyond traditional AI agents and contemporary generative AI models. This rapid evolution necessitates a clear conceptual and taxonomical understanding to differentiate this new paradigm. Our paper addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive review that establishes a precise definition and taxonomy for "agentic AI," with the aim of distinguishing it from previous AI paradigms. The concepts are gradually introduced, starting with a highlight of its diverse applications across the broader field of engineering. The paper then presents four detailed, state-of-the-art use case applications specifically within electrical engineering. These case studies demonstrate practical impact, ranging from an advanced agentic framework for streamlining complex power system studies and benchmarking to a novel system developed for survival analysis of dynamic pricing strategies in battery swapping stations. Finally, to ensure robust deployment, the paper provides detailed failure mode investigations. From these findings, we derive actionable recommendations for the design and implementation of safe, reliable, and accountable agentic AI systems, offering a critical resource for researchers and practitioners.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Analogy between Learning With Error Problem and Ill-Posed Inverse Problems

In this work, we unveil an analogy between well-known lattice based learning with error problem and ill-posed inverse problems. We show that LWE problem is a structured inverse problem. Further, we propose a symmetric encryption scheme based on ill-posed problems and thoroughly discuss its security. Finally, we propose a public key encryption scheme based on our symmetric encryption scheme and CRYSTALS-Kyber KEM (key encapsulation mechanism) and discuss its security.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Sig-DEG for Distillation: Making Diffusion Models Faster and Lighter

Diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results in generative modelling but remain computationally intensive at inference time, often requiring thousands of discretization steps. To this end, we propose Sig-DEG (Signature-based Differential Equation Generator), a novel generator for distilling pre-trained diffusion models, which can universally approximate the backward diffusion process at a coarse temporal resolution. Inspired by high-order approximations of stochastic differential equations (SDEs), Sig-DEG leverages partial signatures to efficiently summarize Brownian motion over sub-intervals and adopts a recurrent structure to enable accurate global approximation of the SDE solution. Distillation is formulated as a supervised learning task, where Sig-DEG is trained to match the outputs of a fine-resolution diffusion model on a coarse time grid. During inference, Sig-DEG enables fast generation, as the partial signature terms can be simulated exactly without requiring fine-grained Brownian paths. Experiments demonstrate that Sig-DEG achieves competitive generation quality while reducing the number of inference steps by an order of magnitude. Our results highlight the effectiveness of signature-based approximations for efficient generative modeling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

On the convergence of iterative regularization method assisted by the graph Laplacian with early stopping

We present a data-assisted iterative regularization method for solving ill-posed inverse problems. The proposed approach, termed \texttt{IRMGL+$\Psi$}, integrates classical iterative techniques with a data-driven regularization term realized through an iteratively updated graph Laplacian. Our method commences by computing a preliminary solution using any suitable reconstruction method, which then serves as the basis for constructing the initial graph Laplacian. The solution is subsequently refined through an iterative process, where the graph Laplacian is simultaneously recalibrated at each step to effectively capture the evolving structure of the solution. A key innovation of this work lies in the formulation of this iterative scheme and the rigorous justification of the classical discrepancy principle as a reliable early stopping criterion specifically tailored to the proposed method. Under standard assumptions, we establish stability and convergence results for the scheme when the discrepancy principle is applied. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method through numerical experiments utilizing four distinct initial reconstructors $\Psi$: the adjoint operator (Adj), filtered back projection (FBP), total variation (TV) denoising, and standard Tikhonov regularization (Tik). It is observed that \texttt{IRMGL+Adj} demonstrates a distinct advantage over the other initializers, producing a robust and stable approximate solution directly from a basic initial reconstruction.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

DeCafNet: Delegate and Conquer for Efficient Temporal Grounding in Long Videos

Long Video Temporal Grounding (LVTG) aims at identifying specific moments within lengthy videos based on user-provided text queries for effective content retrieval. The approach taken by existing methods of dividing video into clips and processing each clip via a full-scale expert encoder is challenging to scale due to prohibitive computational costs of processing a large number of clips in long videos. To address this issue, we introduce DeCafNet, an approach employing ``delegate-and-conquer'' strategy to achieve computation efficiency without sacrificing grounding performance. DeCafNet introduces a sidekick encoder that performs dense feature extraction over all video clips in a resource-efficient manner, while generating a saliency map to identify the most relevant clips for full processing by the expert encoder. To effectively leverage features from sidekick and expert encoders that exist at different temporal resolutions, we introduce DeCaf-Grounder, which unifies and refines them via query-aware temporal aggregation and multi-scale temporal refinement for accurate grounding. Experiments on two LTVG benchmark datasets demonstrate that DeCafNet reduces computation by up to 47\% while still outperforming existing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art for LTVG in terms of both efficiency and performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZijiaLewisLu/CVPR2025-DeCafNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Hummingbird: High Fidelity Image Generation via Multimodal Context Alignment

While diffusion models are powerful in generating high-quality, diverse synthetic data for object-centric tasks, existing methods struggle with scene-aware tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Reasoning, where it is critical to preserve scene attributes in generated images consistent with a multimodal context, i.e. a reference image with accompanying text guidance query. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{Hummingbird}$, the first diffusion-based image generator which, given a multimodal context, generates highly diverse images w.r.t. the reference image while ensuring high fidelity by accurately preserving scene attributes, such as object interactions and spatial relationships from the text guidance. Hummingbird employs a novel Multimodal Context Evaluator that simultaneously optimizes our formulated Global Semantic and Fine-grained Consistency Rewards to ensure generated images preserve the scene attributes of reference images in relation to the text guidance while maintaining diversity. As the first model to address the task of maintaining both diversity and fidelity given a multimodal context, we introduce a new benchmark formulation incorporating MME Perception and Bongard HOI datasets. Benchmark experiments show Hummingbird outperforms all existing methods by achieving superior fidelity while maintaining diversity, validating Hummingbird's potential as a robust multimodal context-aligned image generator in complex visual tasks. Project page: https://roar-ai.github.io/hummingbird

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Hanke-Raus heuristic rule for iteratively regularized stochastic gradient descent

Over the past decade, stochastic algorithms have emerged as scalable and efficient tools for solving large-scale ill-posed inverse problems by randomly selecting subsets of equations at each iteration. However, due to the ill-posedness and measurement noise, these methods often suffer from oscillations and semi-convergence behavior, posing challenges in achieving stable and accurate reconstructions. This study proposes a novel variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) approach, the iteratively regularized stochastic gradient descent (IRSGD) to address nonlinear ill-posed problems in Hilbert spaces. Under standard assumptions, we demonstrate that the mean square iteration error of the method tends to zero for exact data. In the presence of noisy data, we first propose a heuristic parameter choice rule (HPCR) and then apply the IRSGD method in combination with HPCR. Precisely, HPCR selects the regularization parameter without requiring any a-priori information of the noise level. We show that the method terminatesinfinitelymanystepsincaseofnoisydataandhasregularizingfeatures. Finally, some numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the practical efficacy of the method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

LoSA: Long-Short-range Adapter for Scaling End-to-End Temporal Action Localization

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) involves localizing and classifying action snippets in an untrimmed video. The emergence of large video foundation models has led RGB-only video backbones to outperform previous methods needing both RGB and optical flow modalities. Leveraging these large models is often limited to training only the TAL head due to the prohibitively large GPU memory required to adapt the video backbone for TAL. To overcome this limitation, we introduce LoSA, the first memory-and-parameter-efficient backbone adapter designed specifically for TAL to handle untrimmed videos. LoSA specializes for TAL by introducing Long-Short-range Adapters that adapt the intermediate layers of the video backbone over different temporal ranges. These adapters run parallel to the video backbone to significantly reduce memory footprint. LoSA also includes Long-Short-range Gated Fusion that strategically combines the output of these adapters from the video backbone layers to enhance the video features provided to the TAL head. Experiments show that LoSA significantly outperforms all existing methods on standard TAL benchmarks, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-v1.3, by scaling end-to-end backbone adaptation to billion-parameter-plus models like VideoMAEv2~(ViT-g) and leveraging them beyond head-only transfer learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Stochastic Data-Driven Bouligand Landweber Method for Solving Non-smooth Inverse Problems

In this study, we present and analyze a novel variant of the stochastic gradient descent method, referred as Stochastic data-driven Bouligand Landweber iteration tailored for addressing the system of non-smooth ill-posed inverse problems. Our method incorporates the utilization of training data, using a bounded linear operator, which guides the iterative procedure. At each iteration step, the method randomly chooses one equation from the nonlinear system with data-driven term. When dealing with the precise or exact data, it has been established that mean square iteration error converges to zero. However, when confronted with the noisy data, we employ our approach in conjunction with a predefined stopping criterion, which we refer to as an \textit{a-priori} stopping rule. We provide a comprehensive theoretical foundation, establishing convergence and stability for this scheme within the realm of infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. These theoretical underpinnings are further bolstered by discussing an example that fulfills assumptions of the paper.

math.FA↗

arXiv2023

Rule By Example: Harnessing Logical Rules for Explainable Hate Speech Detection

Classic approaches to content moderation typically apply a rule-based heuristic approach to flag content. While rules are easily customizable and intuitive for humans to interpret, they are inherently fragile and lack the flexibility or robustness needed to moderate the vast amount of undesirable content found online today. Recent advances in deep learning have demonstrated the promise of using highly effective deep neural models to overcome these challenges. However, despite the improved performance, these data-driven models lack transparency and explainability, often leading to mistrust from everyday users and a lack of adoption by many platforms. In this paper, we present Rule By Example (RBE): a novel exemplar-based contrastive learning approach for learning from logical rules for the task of textual content moderation. RBE is capable of providing rule-grounded predictions, allowing for more explainable and customizable predictions compared to typical deep learning-based approaches. We demonstrate that our approach is capable of learning rich rule embedding representations using only a few data examples. Experimental results on 3 popular hate speech classification datasets show that RBE is able to outperform state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers as well as the use of rules in both supervised and unsupervised settings while providing explainable model predictions via rule-grounding.

cs.CL↗